Nehru
A Contemporary’s Estimate
Walter Crocker
With a foreword by
Ramachandra Guha
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2009
Copyright © Estate of Walter Crocker
Foreword © Ramachandra Guha 2008
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EPUB ISBN 9788184002133
To the memory of my father and mother,
pioneers and the children and grandchildren of
pioneers of South Australia
Contents
Foreword by Ramachandra Guha
Introduction
1. Watching Nehru
2. Nehru’s Personal Background
3. Prime Minister of India
4. The Man
5. Building and Destroying
6. The Last Journey
Annotations
Index
Foreword
Ramachandra Guha
I
The relationship between Australia and India has usually been viewed through the lens of cricket. Don Bradman and Keith Miller were heroes to a generation of Indians predisposed to admire all those who got the better—wherever and in whichever way—of the British. More recently, Australians have warmed to the batsmanship Down Under of those two little masters, Gundappa Viswanath and Sachin Tendulkar.
An Indian who saw Australia as an essentially sporting nation was Jawaharlal Nehru. Between 1947 and 1964 Nehru served as prime minister of India and concurrently, as foreign minister. Among the high commissioners he sent to Canberra, two were polo-playing generals, K.M. Cariappa and S.M. Shrinagesh. A third was a cricketer, Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji. All were good men; none, however, were unduly endowed with acumen, political or otherwise.
Where the cricketing relations between the two countries are intense and increasingly rivalrous, the political relations between them have been insubstantial. Still, there are at least two Australians whose connections to India deserve to be better known. One is Richard G Casey, the first—and last—Australian to hold high office under the British Raj. Casey served as governor of the Bengal Presidency between 1944 and 1946, a time of famine and civil war, and acquitted himself honourably. Although a loyal servant of the Raj, he was broad-minded enough to befriend Mahatma Gandhi. When, in the 1950s, Casey became Australia’s foreign minister, he sent as high commissioner to Delhi a man of uncommon intelligence named Walter Crocker. Crocker spent nearly eight years in the job, these spaced out in two separate terms.
Richard Casey’s name has not entirely disappeared from the historical record. However, that of Walter Crocker has. This is a pity, for he was a civil servant and diplomat who found time to write several very good books. The best of these was on India’s longest-serving and most controversial prime minister. Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate was first published in 1966 but was, until now, long and lamentably out of print.
II
Walter Crocker was raised in rural South Australia, the descendant of English farmers who had come out in the 1840s. At the age of fourteen he was sent to boarding school, following which he joined the University of Adelaide. His first trip out of South Australia was to Oxford, where he took a second degree at Balliol College.
On graduating from Oxford, Crocker worked for the League of Nations and as a colonial administrator in Nigeria before joining the diplomatic service. He served in a dozen countries—a chapter of his book Australian Ambassador is entitled ‘Three Thousand Cocktail Parties for My Country and Other Aspects of the Diplomat’s Life’. In between assignments, he was the first ever Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University.
Crocker first lived in India as an army officer during the World War II. He returned in the 1950s, as High Commissioner in New Delhi. India, he would write, ‘throws up some remarkable men…Gandhi, Rajagopalachari, Jaya Prakash Narain, Nehru and many others make a resplendent roll call’. On the other hand, as he recalled, ‘I was cheated repeatedly, contributed to more bogus charities and was taken in by more bogus medical certificates, and was importuned, not seldom by highly-placed persons, to get positions in British universities and hospitals or to misuse my diplomatic immunities so as to bring in illegally scents and other luxuries through the Indian customs, up to carrying on a campaign to get the Nobel Prize, more often than I can remember.’
Most of Crocker’s time in New Delhi was spent studying Jawaharlal Nehru. The Indian prime minister, he later remarked, ‘was so fascinating as by himself to make my India assignment fascinating’. Nehru, in turn, had a high opinion of the Australian diplomat; as he wrote in a letter to a cabinet colleague: ‘Crocker is a good man with clever ideas, unlike the Government he serves.’
When Nehru died, on May 27, Crocker was Australia’s ambassador to the Netherlands. As he noted in his diary that night, ‘not much else [was] in my mind for the rest of the day. My Indian friends and associations, who meant so much for me for the last 12 years, are struck down, one by one. Last week it was [the diplomat] Harish[war] Dayal. Not long before that it was [the civil servant and planner] Sir V.T. [Krishnamachari], and then [the historian K.M.] Panikkar. And a couple of months or so ago it was [the Gandhian] Amrit [Kaur]. Now the beacon light itself has gone out.’*
A few months later, Crocker began his book about the Indian prime minister and the long years of his tenure. He drew upon years of keen observation, of watching Nehru at work in his office, in parliament, and on the road. Crocker had also talked to Nehru’s colleagues and to his political rivals, and of course to many ordinary Indians.
In the autumn of 1965 Crocker sent a draft of his book to Penderel Moon, a distinguished scholar and former Indian Civil Service official who had himself written several books on modern India. A copy was also posted to Stanley Unwin in London, who had published Crocker’s previous works. Moon praised the author for having ‘drawn such a vivid picture of the man and, I would say, a fair and correct one’. However, he asked for some changes in the sections dealing with China.
Unwin was also pleased with the draft, which he described as ‘so balanced, so obviously fair’. As ‘a portrait of Nehru’, he commented, and ‘as a picture of the times and of the conditions under which he was brought up and later carried such great responsibilities, it is unlikely to be bettered’. The manuscript was then vetted by the Australian foreign ministry, since Crocker was a serving diplomat. Some critical comments on Indian policy with regard to China and Kashmir had to be excised, causing the author to privately grumble that, ‘a rather anemic book is the result…’
III
Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate was published by George Allen and Unwin in January 1966. At the time, Crocker was living in East Africa, as ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia. He was nervous about the book’s reception, particularly among Nehru’s countrymen. While sending a review copy to the East African Standard, he hoped that the editor would ‘not give it to an Indian to review, or if you do, that you give it to a very objective on
e as I, like any other historian of Nehru’s life, have had to make some unfavourable observations on certain Indian policies’.
Within India, of course, Crocker could not prevent Indians from reviewing his book. Some early notices suggest that it was being read less than objectively. A reviewer in the Hindustan Times dismissed it as a ‘blimpish appraisal’. ‘At best it is readable and gossipy’, he commented: ‘At worst, second rate and second hand. On the whole, it is a misleading, superficial, unoriginal, condescending and patronizing book.’ While admitting that the portraits of some of the lesser characters were drawn with ‘considerable feeling and perception’, the reviewer felt that Crocker’s ‘general outlook on India and Indians is depressingly reminiscent of Kipling’.
The accumulation of adjectives was unconvincing; betraying, as it did, the sentiments of a patriot wounded. For Crocker’s book appeared at a time when India, and Indians, were very much on the defensive. The Chinese had humiliated them in 1962. Three years later, a much smaller nation, Pakistan, had fought a war against India on more or less equal terms. Famine stalked the land; caste and communal conflicts were on the rise. In the circumstances, some Indians would, as Crocker surmised, take less than kindly to his criticisms of their government’s policies.
The Statesman of Calcutta, then at the height of its influence, characterised Crocker’s book as ‘important’ but ‘incomplete’. It called the author ‘an earnest Australian’ some of whose ‘generalizations are, to put it mildly, rash’. The book had said some ‘very harsh things’ about Nehru, but, in the paper’s opinion, ‘not always with discernment or even detachment’. Another Calcutta paper, the Amrita Bazar Patrika, took particular umbrage at Crocker’s references to Subhas Chandra Bose as a ‘fascist’. The title of its review captured the paper’s sentiments: ‘Book on Nehru insults memory of Netaji.’ It dismissed the book as ‘a rambling, distorted, subjective (in relation to British attitude to Indian independence struggles) and offensive (in the case of Netaji) piece of writing’.
Other Indians were more generous. A reviewer in the Economic Times said of this ‘thoroughly original’ book that ‘while one may not agree with Mr. Crocker in many things he says, there is no question that he is deeply sincere in making his comments and in any case has given a thoroughly fascinating account of one of the greatest men of the century’. Reviewing the book in the Calcutta journal, Now, Nirad Chaudhuri called it an ‘extraordinarily interesting book,’ written in a style that ‘is cool, neutral, judicial’. Chaudhuri added provocatively that Crocker’s portrait of Nehru and his age constituted a challenge to ‘our besotted national vanity and the screaming hysteria which accompanies it’.
Meanwhile, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) praised the book as ‘a three-dimensional portrait of a very great man, and with a lively, controversial account of the various causes… which engaged his immense energies’. Crocker’s candour, it remarked, would ‘not be appreciated by that small but vocal section of the Indian intelligentsia which, equating spirituality with self-deception, practices the latter without achieving the former. But he deserves the gratitude of every true friend of India and every intelligent admirer of the country’s greatest-but-one leader.’ The author, the TLS concluded, had ‘his own prejudices so well under control that they rarely vitiate his judgement of the man himself, whose very worst “mistakes” could never completely blot out the qualities that his biographer values so highly: integrity, intelligence, sensitivity, and a selfless devotion to the public good as he saw it’.
Crocker also sent his book to Indians he had known or befriended. One copy was posted to the historian Sarvepalli Gopal, who may then have just been beginning to plan his own major work on the life of Nehru; Crocker expressed the ‘hope [that] you won’t find too much to disagree with’. Another copy was sent to Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who had just assumed office as India’s third prime minister. Mrs Gandhi wrote back saying ‘I do not know when I shall have the time to read it as pressure of work is tremendous.’ Gopal did, however, read the book soon after he received it. ‘As you say, there is scope for differences of opinion on many subjects,’ he wrote to Crocker, ‘but your affection and love for Nehru comes out clearly and the book is most vividly written’. (That Gopal did read the book with attention is made clear by the fact that it is cited several times in his own study.)
Crocker also received a long letter of appreciation from Badruddin Tyabji, himself a senior diplomat, and from a famous nationalist family of Bombay. Now India’s ambassador to Japan, Tyabji had worked closely with Nehru in the foreign ministry. On the last day of March 1966, he wrote to his Australian friend, ‘It is remarkable how much you have packed into its slim covers. Each sentence tells, and often stings. I do not of course share your views on several issues; but often to my dismay find it hard to controvert what you say, even though in my heart I feel that your emphasis on particular aspects of it, or lack of it, is wrong, unfair, or mistaken…’
Tyabji (and Gopal) appeared to have disagreed with Crocker mostly on questions of foreign policy, as in India’s attitude to Kashmir and Goa, and its role in the non-aligned movement. In these matters the West accused Nehru of sanctimonious hypocrisy; Nehru (and India) answered back by charging the West with neo-colonialism. ‘On the colour question,’ wrote Tyabji to Crocker, ‘I think you rather underestimate your own feelings; and tend to exaggerate ours. We certainly feel most strongly about it, but I think are more realistic and anxious to do the right thing about it.’
Tyabji ended his letter by saying that, these disagreements notwithstanding, ‘I greatly admire your book; as your writing is so exact, precise and meaningful. Balliol scholarship at its best!’
Crocker would have been nourished by this letter, and even more by the one he received from Tyabji’s cousin, the distinguished jurist A.A.A. Fyzee. ‘I think that it is beyond doubt the finest book on Nehru so far written’, commented Fyzee, adding, ‘I doubt if it can be bettered in my lifetime… You may perhaps be interested to know that at least one Indian, and a Muslim, agrees one hundred per cent with you.’
IV
For this new reissue of Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate, the publishers have deleted an introductory chapter on Indian society and history, as well as a foreword written for the original edition by the historian Arnold Toynbee. A series of annotations have been added, providing information on events and individuals that needed no glossing in Crocker’s day but perhaps do so in ours.
As readers of the book will find, Crocker’s portrait of Nehru is principally political. However, there are some deft personal touches. He speaks of Nehru’s love of nature, his admiration for scholars and scholarship, his ‘exceptional’ intelligence and capacity for hard work, his wit and sense of fun—and, on the other side, of his short temper, his proneness to lecture, and his fondness for vague generalisations.
Crocker admired the man, but did not shirk from pointing out Nehru’s political errors. Despite the changes made by the Australian Foreign Office, this was still, in places, a very critical book. Crocker chastised Nehru for his sentimental attachment to Kashmir, which precluded the possibility of an early settlement with Pakistan; for his grievous underestimation of the Chinese, which resulted in a humiliating military defeat in the high Himalaya; and for his clinging on to the post of prime minister, when Indian democracy might have been better served by a successor having been in place within his life time. But he also had a proper sense of Nehru’s greatness, of his extraordinary achievement in keeping together, and keeping democratic, this large, diverse, and desperately divided country.
To the craft of diplomacy Crocker brought the discipline of the scholar. He was able to place his subject in context, to view him against the longue durée of Indian history, the better to understand how modern democracy departed from the traditions and accretions imposed by that history. These statements, plucked from various points in the book, sum up Nehru the man, and Nehru the politician, better than any other work of sch
olarship I have read:
His first concern was to see that India did not fall apart. To this end he encouraged a nationalism that would make Indians feel that they were Indians instead of feeling that they were Tamils or Punjabis or Dogras or Assamese or Brahmans or Kshatriyas or this or that caste, as they are apt. He gave special consideration to the Muslims as to induce them to feel Indian. For the same reason Christians and other minorities could always be sure of Nehru’s unflinching protection. The ‘Secular State’, that is to say a non-Hindu and all-Indian State, was fundamental to this concern.
The great bulk of the people of India sensed, and they never lost the sense, that Nehru only wanted to help them and wanted nothing for himself; and that he was a ruler who had pity and kindness.
Nehru had conflicts with other [Indian] leaders, such as Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad and Patel, over Socialism; with Subas Chandra Bose over the Fascist approach; and with Jinnah over the status of the Muslims. Nehru’s contests were always over ideas, never over any personal interests of his own, although he waged them without quarter and provoked a good deal of personal enmity.
Nehru might have been ignorant or misguided about some matters, and about some persons, but he was always disinterested, always concerned with what he thought would help Indians or mankind. We can be certain that there will be no revelations to make about him of the kind which are often made about celebrities; not even revelations like those of Churchill’s disagreeableness. Nehru’s private face differed scarcely at all from his public face.
V
Crocker’s style is ironic, detached, and understated, as befits a scholar-diplomat. This makes his praise of Nehru all the more remarkable. But not, however, unmerited. For Nehru’s task was altogether more difficult than that of any other modern politician. Amidst the wreckage of a decaying empire a nation had to be built anew, constructed from a hundred diverse and frequently warring parts. To be sure, Nehru had great helpers—colleagues within the Congress party, such as Vallabhbhai Patel and C. Rajagopalachari, and critics outside to keep him honest, such as J.B. Kripalani and B.R. Ambedkar. But it was Nehru who was in the lead, and Nehru who alone had what we would now call the ‘vision’ thing—the capacity to imagine a modern constitutional democracy into being, in a society riven by orthodoxy and hierarchy, and beset with the complicated baggage of colonialism.
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