Nehru

by Shashi Tharoor

  The contrast between his responses to Egypt and to Hungary have often been cited in the West as evidence of Nehruvian hypocrisy, of a moralism that stood somewhere to the left of morality. True, Jawaharlal was instinctively biased against any hint of colonialism, and he was slow to see the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in similar terms. But his prime ministership was replete with instances of intervention against non-Western tyranny. He protested against the writer Boris Pasternak’s detention in the Soviet Union; succeeded in obtaining the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas’s release from solitary confinement (though he failed to persuade Tito to free Djilas altogether); and spoke up for jailed democrats in Nepal even at the cost of relations with that vital neighbor’s monarch. Despite a foreign policy that many saw as tilted against the West (a part of the world he associated more with imperialism than with freedom), Nehru remained a friend to liberty everywhere.

  On the whole, India’s international standing in the 1950s was Nehru’s principal vindication. The thoughtful Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik, president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1958, paid tribute to five elements of Nehru’s leadership of India that bear quoting here: “the adoption and cultivation of representative government through free and democratic institutions; the serious and responsible grappling with the immense social and economic problems of the nation; the retention and cementing of the unity of the Republic through the great leadership that has been displayed; the leading international role that India has played, especially at the United Nations; and the bringing of questions of principle (such as equality, freedom, nondiscrimination, human rights, humanity, peace) to bear upon political questions.” The force of example, the nobility of aspiration, and the articulation of India’s interests as those of a humanistic universalism, all served to give Nehru’s India stature and prestige. India did not speak in terms of nation-state rivalry or patriotic chauvinism; under Nehru it sought an altogether loftier place on the world stage. For all its flaws, this credibility was not easily achieved. In the early years of freedom, for instance, the Soviets scoffed at the idea that India was genuinely independent. Nehru’s statements and actions dispelled their skepticism.

  Jawaharlal’s first decade in office as prime minister of India was crowned by the award to him in 1955 by President Rajendra Prasad of the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna. The “Light of Asia” was now officially the “Jewel of India.” There is a photograph of him at the ceremony, in his white achkan (formal long coat) with a red rose in the buttonhole, almost boyishly slim, smiling bashfully as the president and an aide-de-camp pin the decoration on him. He was sixty-six and in his pomp, a colossus on the national and international stages.

  That first decade of power ended on a dramatic note of triumph. His dominance of the country was once again confirmed in the general elections of 1957, when the Congress Party was returned to office in an overwhelming victory — and with an increased majority in Parliament: 75 percent of the seats in the House and 65 percent in the state legislatures.

  There was almost nowhere left to go but down.

  8 Ashoka was a pacifist Buddhist monarch of the third century B.C.

  9

  “Free Myself from this Daily Burden”:

  1957–1964

  In April 29, 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru announced his wish to resign. He did so in a public statement to the Congress parliamentary party, in which he pleaded fatigue and staleness. “The work of a prime minister,” he said, “allows no respite, it is continuous and unceasing. … There is little time for quiet thinking. I feel now that I must … free myself from this daily burden and think of myself as an individual citizen of India and not as prime minister.” He was not quite halfway between sixty-eight and sixty-nine; he had been head of the government for almost a dozen of those years, but he was as fit and vigorous as many half his age, practicing yoga daily and working late into the night. Had his offer been accepted, it would have set a democratic precedent around the developing world, none of whose first independence leaders had ever resigned voluntarily, nor would until the 1970s. The Congress parliamentary party, though, refused to entertain the thought; taken aback by the statement, they held an emergency meeting to urge Nehru to stay on. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev wrote expressing their hope that Jawaharlal would not leave. In the end, he settled for a long holiday in his beloved mountains instead, where he climbed with all the ardor of his youth until stopped by his doctors at 13,600 feet.

  His daughter, Indira, accompanied him on the holiday. Through the 1950s she had been his official hostess and constant companion, to the detriment of her marriage. When she moved into the prime ministerial residence, Teen Murti House, to assume a full-time role by her father’s side, her husband stayed away. Feroze Gandhi was a Congress member of Parliament, with something of a reputation for brashly taking on his own party’s government. But he was loudly resentful of his wife’s decision to support her father rather than her husband, and though the two never formally separated, their marriage was reduced to a shell, their old love desiccated into ritual. In 1958 Feroze suffered a stroke, and in September 1960 he died of a heart attack. Indira became physically ill upon hearing the news. But if Jawaharlal ever reproached himself for having deprived his daughter of the consolations of a normal married life — something he himself had hardly enjoyed — he never made it known.

  Some critics, mostly with the benefit of hindsight, have suggested that Nehru was grooming his daughter to succeed him. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a thought crossed his mind. Of course, being his official hostess provided Indira with a unique political education at close quarters, and she soon revealed a taste for affairs of state, both domestic and international. But Jawaharlal took no steps to promote her as a possible successor; he did not appoint her to his cabinet, despite public calls from partymen for him to do so, and she rates as an also-ran in Welles Hangen’s famous speculative 1963 book, After Nehru, Who? The worst that can be said is that Nehru did not object when others in the Congress Party pushed his daughter into politics, at first as organizer of the party’s women’s wing in 1953 and most notably when they elected her president of the Congress Party nationally for 1959. She proved a fierce and partisan official, leading the Congress into the streets against the elected Communist government in the state of Kerala and pressuring the government of India to dismiss the state authorities for failing to maintain law and order. But she did not seek (and Jawaharlal did not encourage) reelection.

  Nehru, ever the democrat, confronted the issue of succession directly in a 1961 interview: “I am not trying to start a dynasty. I am not capable of ruling from the grave. How terrible it would be if I, after all I have said about the processes of democratic government, were to attempt to handpick a successor. The best I can do for India is to help our people as a whole to generate new leadership as it may be needed.” But by 1961, despite visible exhaustion, he had given up all thought of retirement. When Norman Cousins asked him about it, Nehru “looked as though nothing would be more unwelcome. … More than ever, we realized that Nehru loved his job and had no thought of leaving it.” Sadly, he had done little to encourage and groom credible alternative leadership.

  But it was never easy to imagine an alternative. Jawaharlal was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy who put in sixteen- or seventeen-hour workdays throughout his life. Punctual and courteous to a fault, a man of regular habits, sustained by a simple diet and daily yogic exercise, he always demanded more of himself than of others. His first Principal Private Secretary, H. V. R. Iengar, recounted how, after an exhausting and dispiriting day touring riot-racked Punjab in August 1947,

  round about midnight, we all dispersed, with another program, equally heavy and tragic, to start at six the next morning. I went to bed exhausted, both physically and in spirit. When, with some difficulty, I got ready early that morning to go to the airport, the P.A. [personal assistant] showed me a pile of letters, telegrams and memoranda which the prime m
inister had dictated after everybody had dispersed. The P.M. had gone to bed at 2 a.m. but was ready at 5:30 to start another day.

  Iengar saw this punishing pace as “a case of the utter triumph of the spirit over the body, of a consuming passion for public work overcoming the normal mechanics of the human frame.”

  The negative side of this capacity lay in Nehru’s obsession with detail — not merely in spending his time on matters unworthy of the attention of a head of government, but on trivialities like a painting improperly hung on a wall, or an untidy room, which would upset him to the point that he could not work if it was not redressed. As prime minister and external affairs minister he obsessed about the details of his files as few other ministers did. “Panditji liked to do much of his civil servants’ work for them,” one diplomat recalled ruefully. “I suppose it gave him vicarious satisfaction to beat them at their own game — noting, drafting, replying to every kind of letter. … His love for the quick disposal of paper also inevitably led to dispensing with a basic rule of the civil servant, the requirement of consulting previous papers on the subject.” Added to this was a tendency to enjoy conversation for its own sake, oblivious to the far greater priorities demanding the prime minister’s attention. One British official assigned to the Defense Ministry in the late 1950s noted that Jawaharlal “liked chatting about the world in general. … When I was with him, he just chatted. It was curious. I was surprised. He chatted.”

  The roots of this may have lain in Jawaharlal’s youth. The domineering Motilal adored and spoiled his son, but may well have instilled in him a tragic flaw for a leader — an instinctive sense that the ultimate responsibility for decision lay elsewhere than in himself. Knowing that his father, and later the Mahatma, were there encouraged in Jawaharlal a tendency to temporize and vacillate, to indulge in reflection and thinking aloud, and yet not commit to a concrete decision. During the nationalist struggle Subhas Bose bitterly reproached Jawaharlal for this. In the later years of his rule this tendency had unfortunate consequences. His close friend Syed Mahmud suggested that Jawaharlal was “not temperamentally made for pursuing decisions to their ultimate execution at the lowest levels.”

  Indira and Jawaharlal presided over an unusual household for a busy prime minister. The official residence overflowed with animals — dogs of assorted breeds (including not a few mongrels), a pair of Himalayan pandas, peacocks and parrots, squirrels and deer, and (until they became too large to keep safely at home) three tiger cubs. Indira’s two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, had the run of the place (sometimes literally on their grandfather’s back). Teen Murti was also constantly full of house guests, including, once a year, Edwina Mountbatten. Friends would drop in for dinner, where the table manners of Cambridge were applied to the cuisine of Allahabad. The gardens of Teen Murti were full every morning with ordinary people who came for an “open house,” where they could petition, talk with, or simply receive a “darshan” (a regal sight) of their prime minister.

  Jawaharlal’s personality was mercurial. He could be utterly charming to total strangers, witty, engaging, and even (in the right mood) frivolous: there are accounts of his dinnertime impersonations of world leaders that had his guests in splits, and he would often oblige casual dinner guests to don one of the foreign national costumes he had been presented with on his travels. Many foreigners who met him in the 1930s and well into the 1950s speak of a captivating figure, with great intellectual breadth, blessed with intelligence and curiosity as well as impeccable manners, who disarmed his interlocutors with his warmth, wit, courtesy, and grace. (Phillips Talbot, who first met him as a visiting student in 1939 and over the next twenty-five years as journalist, scholar, and diplomat, declared more than six decades after that first encounter: “I still find it difficult to be objective about Nehru. He was enormously captivating, warm, intelligent, brilliant; inspiring even when angry.”) The actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin recounted in his autobiography a marvelous story of Nehru in 1953 chattering away animatedly to the movie legend in the back of his car while his driver, to Chaplin’s consternation, careened through Swiss mountain roads at a death-defying seventy miles per hour.

  Nehru’s close friend Syed Mahmud was immediately struck, upon first meeting Jawaharlal, by his manners, which were those of “an upper-class English gentleman”; but his level of courtesy and consideration was extravagantly Indian. When Mahmud explained his reliance on a traveling servant by saying how much he hated folding and spreading his bedding on the bunk of the train, Jawaharlal took on the chore himself, and continued to make and unmake Mahmud’s bed whenever the two traveled together over a period of decades. The Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah told the story of how, on a winter visit to India, he was about to leave by train for the cold north when

  Nehru unexpectedly arrived at the station looking rather extraordinary in an oversized overcoat. … “I know it is too big for me, but I think it should be just right for you. … Try it on.” I tried it on and it was, as he had said, just right. I put my hands proudly in the pockets and discovered fresh surprises. In one there was a warm wool scarf and in the other a pair of warm gloves.

  This courtesy was not only for VIPs: discovering on a visit to Kashmir that his stenographer’s suitcase had been mislaid and that the poor man was shivering in a thin cotton shirt, the prime minister personally ensured that a sweater and jacket were provided to him. Jawaharlal never forgot a sibling’s birthday, even when in prison. He was also so good with children (who knew him as “Chacha,” or Uncle Nehru) that his birthday began to be celebrated across India, even while he was alive, as Children’s Day.

  Yet the same Jawaharlal could also be imperious and short-tempered. He would often lash out publicly at some unfortunate official who was in no position to defend himself. The Ceylonese leader Solomon Bandaranaike described him as “a delicately nurtured aristocrat with high-strung nerves. … He often uses up his nervous energy and that makes him sometimes short-tempered and irritable.” Bandaranaike recounted with wry amusement lunching with Nehru as an admiring crowd gathered and Jawaharlal erupted, “I just cannot eat in public.” The crowd was dispersed and Bandaranaike mused, “There speaks the sensitive aristocrat.” Nehru was also capable of behaving in a manner so remote and brooding that he seemed to be thinking of anyone but his interlocutor, and (particularly in his later years) retreating into lengthy and impenetrable silences even when receiving visitors. He was not just moody; many felt a barrier existed between him and even those closest to him. He was often described as the loneliest man in India.

  Despite (or perhaps because of) these paradoxical qualities, Jawaharlal enjoyed the attentions of several distinguished women, many of whom, at least if Stanley Wolpert’s speculations are to be believed, may have become his lovers. Through much of the 1950s Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal exchanged annual visits; the French author Catherine Clément has spun an elaborate romance out of these twice-yearly encounters (Edwina staying with him at Teen Murti, Jawaharlal with her at the Mountbatten estate in England, Broadlands). Others suggest that though the opportunity certainly existed, and the two exchanged intimate letters testifying to the intensity of their friendship, there is no proof the relationship was ever consummated. In 1960 Edwina died in Borneo with letters from Jawaharlal scattered about her bed. He was an ardent and prolific correspondent to a number of women: his letters to Padmaja Naidu, Sarojini’s daughter and herself a frequent overnight guest at his house, are perhaps among the most exquisite love letters ever written by an Indian public figure. But the speculation is largely irrelevant: Jawaharlal’s major aphrodisiac, as Talbot put it, was clearly politics.

  Perhaps the most interesting description of Nehru at this time (when he had, so to speak, just crested the peak of his success but not yet begun to sense his own decline) comes from the account of another who combined the burdens of governmental office with the acuity of the writer-philosopher, the Frenchman André Malraux, who called on Jawaharlal in 1958. Nehru had “a Roman face wi
th a slight heaviness about the lower lip which gave his apparently ‘posed’ smile the seductiveness which a suggestion of innocence imparts to a great man,” wrote Malraux. Nehru’s voice and bearing revealed “beneath the patrician intellectual the English gentleman’s ease and self-possession which he had doubtless learned to emulate in his youth. … His hand gestures, once so expansive, were now turned inward toward his body, the fingers almost closed. And … these chilly gestures … gave his authority a charm such as I have never since encountered.” Malraux noted delightfully that Nehru “meant what he said, like the few great statesmen I have met, and like most of the painters.”

  Critics have painted an unedifying picture of a Jawaharlal increasingly out of touch with reality in his last years in office, prone to public expressions of self-doubt, drifting into decisions delayed by his own tendency to see both sides of every question, an intellectual dreamer who gave expression to ideas but not to their implementation. Though much of that is true, it paints a simplistic picture. There were both triumphs and setbacks in his life and work, many challenges successfully surmounted and one crushing defeat.