Domestic issues continued to press in upon him — a Naga tribal insurgency in the northeast, Master Tara Singh’s demands for a Sikh-majority state in the Punjab, anti-Hindi agitation in Madras (where the avowedly secessionist Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party was gaining ground in its attacks on north Indian domination). Nehru dealt with these through a combination of shrewdness (postponing the proposed adoption of Hindi as the official national language until 1965), democracy (insisting that the Sikhs could flourish in free India without needing a Sikh-majority state, while backing a tough Sikh Congressman, Pratap Singh Kairon, as chief minister of Punjab), and repression (turning the army on the Nagas). All three came into play over Kashmir, where he explored every hope of a settlement, only to be thwarted each time. Just before his death he released Sheikh Abdullah from jail and sent him to Pakistan to negotiate a new accommodation. (It was at a press conference in Muzaffarabad that the Sheikh learned the news of Jawaharlal’s passing; he wept openly at the loss of his former comrade-in-arms, who had sadly become his jailer.)
Jawaharlal — the man who had in his younger days been known to leap off the stage and physically attack hecklers in his audience — became an Olympian presence at public meetings around the country. Nehru made magnificent speeches, usually without notes, but he was not a great orator. The British statesman Lord Pethick-Lawrence described Jawaharlal’s style as prime minister:
Unlike a European or American orator he does not commence on a bold or emphatic note or end with a carefully prepared rhetorical peroration. His voice begins quietly; almost imperceptibly, like a piece of Indian music, it rises to a height of passionate pleading and fades away at the end into silence. And his listeners are greatly moved alike by his sincerity and his restraint.
Sometimes they were not; even an admirer, the industrialist S. P. Jain, conceded that “occasionally his speeches are rambling, sometimes trite, sometimes reflective and unrelated to the immediate subject of the debate.” But “it is the personality of the man rather than his oratory that holds attention.” And through the strength of his personality Jawaharlal held the country together and nurtured its democracy. But his sense of mass public opinion became increasingly suspect: as one historian put it, “Nehru addressed the Indian masses as a democrat, but the Indian masses revered him as a demigod. … In his last years he had no means of feeling the pulse of the people he wanted to serve. The masses were either mute or would throw him their acclaim at crowded meetings.”
Nor could Jawaharlal prevent the growth of the corruption which his own statist policies facilitated. The image of the self-sacrificing Congressmen in homespun gave way to that of the professional politicians the educated middle classes came to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and unaccountable) riches by manipulating governmental favors. With licenses and quotas for every business activity, petty politicians grew rich by profiting from the power to permit. In 1959, in a birthday tribute, no less, Jawaharlal’s sister Krishna (Betty) wrote sadly: “Nehru the Prime Minister no longer remembers or adheres to the ideals or dreams that Jawahar the Rebel had. … [H]e can no longer arouse his people as he did in years gone by, for he has allowed himself to be surrounded by those who are known to be opportunists and the entire Government machinery, corrupt and heavy with intrigue, rules the land with no hope of an honest hearing from any quarter.” A sympathetic biographer, Frank Moraes, wrote that “in India today there is no one to restrain or guide Nehru. He is Caesar, and from Caesar one can appeal only to Caesar.”
The stench of corruption reached Jawaharlal’s own circles three times in the later years of his rule: when his finance minister, T. T. Krishnamachari, was obliged to resign in 1958 over improprieties in a life insurance scandal (it was Feroze Gandhi’s muckraking that brought about Krishnamachari’s downfall); when his friend Jayanti Dharma Teja, whom Nehru had helped set up a major shipping line, defaulted on loans and skipped the country; and when Jawaharlal’s own private secretary since 1946, M. O. Mathai, who was accused both of spying for the CIA and of accumulating an ill-gotten fortune, was forced to resign in 1959. In none of these cases was there the slightest suggestion that Jawaharlal had profited personally in any way from the actions of his associates, but they again confirmed that Nehru’s loyalty exceeded his judgment. (And in dozens of other cases where corruption was not an issue, he picked unsuitable aides and persisted in his support for them well after their ineptitude had been revealed.) By the late 1950s he was widely considered a poor judge of men, and not merely by his critics. An admirer and former cabinet colleague, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, put it bluntly:
He is not a good judge of character and is therefore easily deceived. He is not averse to flattery and there is a conceit in him which makes him at once intolerant of criticism and may even warp his better judgment. His very loyalty to friends blinds him to their faults. For this very reason he is not ruthless enough as a leader and his leadership is weakened thereby.
But Nehru’s own conduct was exemplary; when in 1957 the city of Allahabad levied a trivial wealth tax on his property there, Nehru insisted it be assessed five times higher.
The task of nation-building remained a vital preoccupation for Jawaharlal. India’s freedom from colonial rule was not complete with the adoption of the republican Constitution on January 26, 1950. France and Portugal still maintained territories on Indian soil. The French negotiated an amicable withdrawal from their comptoirs in 1954, but the Portuguese, under the Salazar dictatorship, insisted their territory of Goa was a full-fledged province of Portugal, and enjoyed the overt support of Britain and the United States for their claim. The international dimension prompted Jawaharlal not to opt for the “police action” that had overrun Hyderabad and Junagadh, but domestic outrage over the continuation of the foreign enclave spilled over into the colony as nonviolent satyagrahis crossed the border in protest and were shot by Portuguese border guards. After more than a decade of vacillation, during which he agonized over Gandhi’s injunctions not to use force even in the pursuit of just ends, Nehru ordered the Army to move at the end of 1961. Goa fell within twenty-six hours; the hopelessly outgunned Portuguese governor surrendered without a fight. India weathered international opprobrium easily enough, though President Kennedy tartly suggested to the Indian ambassador in Washington that India might now consider delivering fewer self-righteous sermons on nonviolence. The victory in Goa gave Jawaharlal a great surge of domestic popularity, which helped carry him and the Congress to another resounding victory in the general elections of 1962. It would be his last.
His final visit to the United States occurred in November 1961, during the presidency of a man who had long admired him, John F. Kennedy. But Nehru was at his worst, moody and sullen at times, didactic and superior at others. The two statesmen failed to hit it off; JFK was later quoted as saying this was the worst state visit he had suffered. Nehru no longer attracted uncritical admiration. His positions, both domestic and international, were seen by many as hypocritical. A satirical view of Nehru’s inconsistencies came in the words of the American poet Ogden Nash, who published a savage piece of doggerel, “The Pandit”:
Just how shall we define a Pandit?
It’s not a panda, nor a bandit.
But rather a Pandora’s box
Of sophistry and paradox.
Though Oxford [sic] gave it a degree
It maintains its neutrality
By quietly hating General Clive
As hard as if he were alive.
On weighty international questions
It’s far more Christian than most Christians;
It’s ever eager, being meek
To turn someone else’s cheek.
Oft has it said all men are brothers,
And set that standard up for others,
Yet as it spoke it gerrymandered
Proclaiming its private Pakistandard.
The neutral pandit walks alone,
It walks impartial to the last, Ready at home to stone a caste.
Abandon I for now the pandit, I fear I do not understand it.
A few months before Goa, in September 1961, Nehru, Nasser, and Tito had met in Belgrade to complete the task they had begun in Brioni five years earlier — the formal creation of the Nonaligned movement. The occasion saw the passage of various resolutions condemning war and calling for nuclear disarmament, of which Nehru was inordinately proud. It was a telling indication of the gulf between his view of the world and the international realities with which he had to deal.
It is sometimes true that one’s greatest failures emerge from one’s greatest passions. Foreign policy was Jawaharlal Nehru’s favorite subject, his area of unchallenged expertise. China had been a source of intense fascination since his youth, a country he frequently sought to visit and for whose leaders he had expressed great admiration ever since his speech at the Anti-Imperialist Congress in Brussels in 1927. Yet it was his failure to manage India’s relationship with China that, more than anything else, blighted his last years of office and contributed to his final decline.
After signing the Panch Sheel agreement with China in 1954 and helping Chou Enlai emerge into the limelight in Bandung in 1955, Jawaharlal embarked on a starry-eyed phase of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” which seemed willfully blind to the real divergence of interests between the two countries at that time. Bandung marked the beginning of Sino-Pakistani contacts that would soon flower into a vital alliance, for Beijing was more conscious of its geopolitical place in the world than Nehru’s New Delhi was. China’s reestablishment of its authority over Tibet in 1950 brought the People’s Liberation Army to the frontiers of India along a British-demarcated boundary (the McMahon Line) that Beijing had never recognized. This should have prompted a certain amount of realism about national security in New Delhi; but Nehru, anxious to avoid any rupture of the anticolonial solidarity he felt with China, resisted Patel’s demands that India set out a clear (and by implication assertive) position on the border issue. His policy instead became an uneasy amalgam of idealist rhetoric about Sino-Indian relations on the one hand and firm assurances to Parliament that India would hold its border at the Mc- Mahon Line. Nehru did not, however, press Beijing to come to a negotiated agreement on the border, preferring to take at face value a statement by Chou in 1952 that China had no border dispute with India. In April 1954 Nehru formally recognized Tibet as a full-fledged part of China, giving up assorted British-era rights India had acquired there, without seizing the opportunity to obtain a border agreement in return.
Through the mid-1950s, and particularly after Bandung, Jawaharlal seemed to see himself as virtually a patron of China, a position hardly likely to be well received in Beijing. Jawaharlal saw it as India’s duty to sponsor China’s arrival on the world scene and to lead the demand for Beijing to assume its rightful place at the United Nations. An escalating series of disputes and mutual protests over territorial issues were treated in New Delhi as minor misunderstandings that should not be allowed to cloud the larger picture. So self-delusion compounded arrogance. Nehru was also impervious to China’s increasing irritation with what its leaders saw as Indian pretensions to Great Power standing globally and specifically in Asia, a position which by size and strength Beijing viewed as more naturally China’s. By 1959 Beijing openly declared that the Sino-Indian boundary had never been formally delineated and that China had never recognized the McMahon Line drawn by British imperialists. When China cracked down on a Tibetan rebellion that year, New Delhi’s grant of asylum to the fleeing Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers in March 1959 further embittered relations.
But by that point Nehru had given away all of India’s cards. When the shooting started with a series of border incidents later that year, India was found woefully unprepared. Yet Nehru refused to believe China would ever embark on war with India, and did unconscionably little to prepare his forces for one. His defense minister from 1957 on was the leftist ideologue Krishna Menon, a votary of self-reliance who refused to import defense equipment and turned the military factories into production lines for hairpins and pressure-cookers. In 1959 Menon clashed publicly with the army chief, General Thimayya, who had to be persuaded by Nehru to withdraw his resignation after being denounced as pro-West by his own minister. In the next couple of years the warnings from the armed forces about their inability to protect Indian positions without additional resources proliferated, but were largely ignored by Nehru and Menon. As late as August 1961 Jawaharlal told Parliament that India did not believe in war, and would not act “in a huff” but behave with “wisdom and strength,” complacent banalities that revealed neither wisdom nor strength. In November that year, on the basis of a flawed intelligence estimate from another trusted acolyte, the head of the Intelligence Bureau, B. N. Mullick, Nehru instructed the army “to patrol as far forward as possible from our present positions … without getting involved in a clash with the Chinese.” But the patrols moved without adequate logistical support, and the troops were at their most vulnerable just as clashes became inevitable. On September 8, 1962, the Chinese crossed the McMahon Line, claiming self-defense against Indian “aggression,” then stopped. Nehru and Menon persuaded themselves that the incident was only a skirmish, and each traveled on planned visits abroad. But neither seemed to have realized the extent of the Chinese mobilization. On October 20 waves of Chinese troops poured across the border. Fullfledged war had broken out.
It was a rout. The war lasted a month, with only ten days of actual fighting; brave Indian troops, underequipped and understrength, without firewood or adequate tentage, many wearing canvas shoes in the Himalayan snows, and short of ammunition for their antiquated Lee Enfield rifles, were simply overwhelmed. On November 21 China, with its forces seemingly unstoppable, unilaterally declared a cease-fire and then withdrew from much of the territory it had captured, retaining some 2,500 square miles in the western sector. It had, in the words of Liu Shao-chi, taught India a lesson. Nehru’s grand international pretensions had been cut down to size.
A calamitous military defeat was only the most evident of Nehru’s setbacks. His foreign policy lay in a shambles, as the Soviet Union and most of the nonaligned world remained neutral in the conflict and India turned to the United States (itself in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis) for help — including, to the astonishment of Jawaharlal’s ambassador in Washington, his cousin B. K. Nehru, American military aircraft. Nehru’s stature as the leader of the newly liberated colonial peoples and his authority to speak for the “Third World” had been dealt a major blow. But this time Jawaharlal did not offer to resign. The public and Parliament turned on Menon instead; not even the loyal support of Nehru could save him, and on November 7 Menon was forced out of the government. Nehru, let down by those in whom he had placed such trust, betrayed by his own idealism, was a broken man. In April 1963 he suffered the first of a series of serious illnesses that would mark his rapid downward spiral toward death.
And yet one should not overlook the transcendent irony of 1962, the reawakening of an Indian nationalism that Jawaharlal had once incarnated but had since sought to subsume in idealist internationalism. For the first time since that midnight moment of independence, the country rallied together as one: housewives knit sweaters for the soldiers on the Himalayan front and donated their gold jewelry to the servicemen’s fund, moviegoers stood respectfully to attention as the national anthem played in theaters after the film, schoolchildren discovered a sense of patriotism that had nothing to do with overthrowing the English. In the moment of his greatest failure, the preeminent voice of Indian freedom unwittingly gave a new boost to a nationalist resurgence. War, and defeat, destroyed illusions but nurtured resolve, tightening the bonds Nehru had helped put in place to hold his disparate country together.
The eighteen months left to him after the Chinese debacle added little to Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation. In
August 1963, forty opposition members of Parliament sponsored a no-confidence motion against his government. The Congress’s crushing majority meant that it was easily defeated, but a new slogan was heard in the House: “Quit, Nehru, quit!” Three months later, in November 1963, Jawaharlal launched India’s own space program, a moment immortalized in a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson showing a rocket part being carried on the back of a bicycle. Six years earlier Jawaharlal had inaugurated India’s first atomic research reactor. Nuclear power and space technology: there was no limit to his scientific aspirations for India, and yet the country was moored in the bicycle age at least partly because of his unwillingness to open up its economy to the world.
By 1964 the signs of mortality were impossible to ignore. Jawaharlal was visibly ailing; the puffy face, the sunken eyes, the shuffling gait were of a man in irreversible decline. His visits to Parliament were, in the words of a senior opposition member, those of “an old man, looking frail and fatigued … with a marked stoop in his gait … [and] slow, faltering steps, clutching the backrests of benches for support as he descended.” Nehru suffered a cerebral stroke at the annual Congress session in January and missed most of it, but within days was back in New Delhi trying to manage his usual routine. Work was his lifeblood. “If I lie down in bed for even a week,” he declared, “I know I will not get up!” That moment was not long in arriving. A second stroke felled him on May 17, but he resumed his schedule within days. On May 22 he told a press conference, in response to a question about whether he should not settle the question of his successor in his own lifetime: “My life is not coming to an end so soon.” On May 27, 1964 — a date astonishingly foretold five years earlier by one of his ministers’ favorite astrologers, Haveli Ram Joshi — Jawaharlal Nehru passed away in his sleep after a massive aortic rupture. On his bedside table were found, jotted down in his own hand, the immortal lines from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
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