Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  Prison life had come hard to a man of Nehru’s active nature. During his earlier imprisonments his nerves had been affected. But, being Nehru, he disciplined himself by a regime of physical exercise, mental control, and hard study. Syed Mahmud,48 an old friend and associate of Nehru and his family, has told me how Nehru shepherded his fellow prisoners, nursed them, cooked for them, taught them to fend for themselves, and kept their spirits up.*

  It is to his years in prison that we owe his three main books, An Autobiography, Glimpses of World History (1939), and The Discovery of India (1946). He had already written India and the World, The Unity of India, Soviet Russia, and Eighteen Months in India, some of them written partly in prison. In addition, he wrote many letters, examples of which can be seen in A Bunch of Old Letters (1958).

  Nehru’s writings illustrate a cerebral life, and a power of self-discipline, altogether out of the ordinary. Words by the million bubbled up out of his fullness of mind and spirit. Had he never been prime minister of India he would have been famous as the author of the Autobiography and the autobiographical parts of The Discovery of India.

  An Autobiography, at least with some excisions here and there, is likely to be read for generations. It is a mixed, unevenly written, and occasionally irritating book; but it is honest and alive and has dimension. Like Nehru himself. It provokes the same variety of reactions in the reader which personal contact with Nehru was apt to provoke; but in both cases favourable reactions usually predominate. There are, for instance, the characteristic touches of truism and anticlimax, strange in a man who could both think and, at his best, write so well; for he wrote (and spoke) better English than most of us born to the language. There are, moreover, the lapses from objectivity, even from common sense. At times, too, there is more liveliness than depth. Nehru’s writing lacks the hammer power habitual to Gandhi’s or to Rajagopalachari’s writing. There is the occasional pointless censoriousness over trifles; not much humour; and a characteristic mingling of personal frankness with personal elusiveness. What the book is especially coloured by is its motivation, namely, to get the British out of India, which was the consuming purpose of Nehru’s purposeful life. This leads him to set forth history which is distorted and occasionally false. Did he really believe that it was the British who, on the principle of divide and rule, started, or fomented, Hindu against Muslim and Muslim against Hindu? Or that India was either united or independent before the British came? Or that the British did more harm than good? At times he gets near to hate. And always he is the revolutionary, the extremist, and therefore against the gradualism which the British were offering, and which some Indians were favouring, and against a negotiated settlement.

  He is haunted, too, by shame of Indians as well as by love for them. He must have seen something of that India which is revealed in the courts—for nothing reveals a country, be it India or Russia or America or France, more truthfully than the cases which come up in the courts—the India of violence, of perjury, of bottomless intrigue. In particular, he is haunted, and shamed, by the poverty of India rather than haunted by compassion for the poor. Here is a difference from Gandhi: The Autobiography, in fact, owes as much to Harrow, Cambridge, and the Inner Temple as to India—to the outlook he imbibed in England and Europe as well as to his reactions against England and Europe. A torn troubled spirit.

  It paints a portrait, warts and all, of an unusual man and, in the main, of an attractive man, often an unusually attractive man. Three hundred years earlier John Milton was given at Cambridge the sobriquet ‘the Lady’ because of his purity of life and motive. If we can use this old-fashioned word, ‘purity’, in our advanced times, something of the same quality is apparent in Nehru—never sensual and never unclean. Nehru in his Autobiography, as in his life, displays wholesomeness and truthfulness, including the hard truthfulness about himself, as far as he, a man capable of self-criticism, saw it. In addition he displays generally detachment, generally sanity, generally fair play, and always loyalty, resilience, courage, and dedication to his cause. Wealth, comfort, wordly prospects, family life, were all sacrificed to his cause. And furious though his nationalism could become it was usually humanised by, and often subordinate to, internationalism. What he was mostly aiming at was to give Indians both more backbone and less poverty. He wanted to see them walking with their heads up—just as the young men at Harrow and Cambridge did half a century ago. (Those young men lived in a world which knew servants and which did not know an education system dominated by examinations and state scholarships or a social system which absorbed over a third of the national income in taxes.) Moreover, he is divided in himself; as divided about the English as he is about the Indians. The real storms for him were, as he said, the storms that raged within him. This self-contradictoriness can be an awkward quality to the possessor, and was awkward to Nehru the political leader; but it is the quality of the full man: the man who knows that there is more than one side. It is the quality which made him appreciate, even when impatient with, the non-political and internationalist Tagore. Nehru shows, too, the untenability of the proposition that ‘Never the twain shall meet’; he shows in himself that the best in East and West can be synthesised.

  The Discovery of India carries the story of Nehru’s life a decade further, and contains a good deal of Nehru’s reflections on life in general and on India in particular. Its tone is more nationalistic: perhaps a reflection of the long prison sentence. He was also at pains to show that the world is bigger than Europe—a lesson much needed then by Europeans. He had expounded this lesson in Glimpses of World History, which is Asia centred and to some extent a reaction against Europe. Some of its facts have been questioned but the book has Nehru’s inimitable quality. It also shows Nehru as the teacher, the Brahmin. It is in the form of a series of letters and lessons to his daughter.

  The Autobiography was published twenty eight years ago and The Discovery of India eighteen years ago. The facts of the last eighteen years, during which Nehru changed from the role of agitator to the role of ruler, and India went through such experiences as the grant of independence, the Partition, the migrations and the massacres of the refugees, Gandhi’s assassination, and Nehru’s long prime ministership, have yet to be added. Nehru died before he could add any more.

  An account of any man is incomplete if it leaves out his immediate family circle, and more particularly the womenfolk in it. Nehru was a lonely man but he was far from a solitary or an unsocial one; and, in any case, whether it was to his taste or not, members of his immediate family circle had too much liveliness to stay quietly in the background. I know something of the temperament of the various persons concerned but as they are still living I will not discuss them. I will limit myself to saying, firstly, that in the Nehrus in general there is an individualistic clever energetic strain which would not always be restful and is apt to become quarrelsome; and that some members of the wide family group were not above exploiting the quasi-royal name of Nehru, or of exploiting the innocence of Jawaharlal himself; but, secondly, in his daughter, Indira, who was his hostess and housekeeper throughout his prime ministership, he could always count on disinterestedness, devotion and good breeding. In Mrs Pandit he had a sister who had political sensibility and knowledge of the world as well as the family good looks.

  * Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 1. Jagir was a sort of fief.

  * I was told suicide by persons who knew the Nehru family in Allahabad, but others say he was drowned accidentally. Cf. Pothan Joseph in Swarajya, April 4, 1964, p. 10.

  * Discovery of India, pp. 25–30.

  * Jones, A Diary with Letters, p. 177.

  ** Rafiq Zakaria, op. cit., p. 17.

  * References will be found in A Bunch of Old Letters, p. 300 et seq. I was concerned with an anti-Franco group in Catalonia at the time; an Indian friend doing medical work for one of the International Brigades and au fait with the visit tells me that it was at the request of Nehru that Gandhi wrote to Negrin.

  * Some account
of Syed Mahmud during his student days in England will be found in W.S. Blunt’s Diaries.

  CHAPTER 3

  Prime Minister of India

  In 1946 Nehru became head of government with the title of vice-president of the Executive Council. Next year, with the departure of Jinnah and his men, Nehru became prime minister of India. That was in August 1947. He was fity eight at the time.

  It is unusual for agitators to be saddled with the responsibility of running a government at this age, after a lifetime of agitation. It is still more unusual for agitators to survive the responsibility for long. Nehru was head of government for eighteen years without interruption, a performance exceeded in very few parliamentary regimes.

  So long an unbroken term would be remarkable if it had taken place in an established state, and of normal size, and with nothing much happening. Nehru’s prime ministership was in a state containing over 350 million people who grew in this period to nearly 500 million, a revolutionary change in itself; and it carried through a series of revolutionary changes of its own devising. Moreover, this was done under the shadow of war, both inside and outside India. During the ten years I was observing India, on the spot or from the outside, there was scarcely a fortnight without a crisis of some sort to worry the cabinet.

  Nehru did not begin his new career auspiciously. Shortly after he took office one of the more pessimistic predictions of British officials came true: the Indian subcontinent did not hold together. The majority of the Muslims broke away and founded the state of Pakistan. The breakaway involved a transfer of population, largely in the form of a wild stampeding of terrified Hindus into India and of terrified Muslims into Pakistan, totalling between 15 and 20 million.* And it involved massacres, of an unknown number but running into hundreds of thousands, on a scale of butchery, on both sides, which were bound to have left Nehru with broken hopes about the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and with shaken confidence in his old speeches on the theme of the British-made artificiality of Hindu–Muslim communalism. This breakaway of Pakistan, moreover, did not solve the Muslim problem for India because about 50 million Muslims remained, or were stranded, in India. Some millions of Hindus remained, or were stranded, in Pakistan.

  In addition to having to settle millions of refugees, Nehru and the successive governments he headed had to deal with the creation of the Republic of India (during the first three years of its independence India was a British dominion); with integrating over 600 princely states into the republic; a feat engineered by Patel which was comparable with Bismarck’s integration of Germany or Cavour’s integration of Italy; with working out a constitution, including, in particular, with seeing that the republic was made a secular, not a Hindu, state; with organising and carrying out general elections covering 150 to 210 million voters, in 1952, in 1957, and in 1962; another remarkable feat, as the elections were both efficient and fair; with drawing and redrawing the boundaries of the states; with working out plans for economic development; with working out social legislation, often bitterly resisted, dealing with women’s rights, children’s protection, education, outcastes, and the non-Hindu tribes; with coping with crop failures and famine; with coping with the population explosion; and, finally, with working out and executing a foreign policy.

  No man could run a government for so long, or deal with such a range of problems, without incurring criticism. Indians of the highest standing, including those with long and high office in the independence movement, such as Rajagopalachari, President Rajendra Prasad, and Kripalani, deplored Nehru’s policies increasingly in the last five or six years of his prime ministership.The press, for so long so docile, indeed in the first half of his prime ministership so sycophantic, had by the end of the 1950s become more and more critical.

  Internal Affairs

  We will now look at his performance, and we will begin with what he did inside India.

  His first concern was to see that India did not fall apart. To this end he encouraged a nationalism which would make Indians feel that they were Indians instead of feeling that they were Tamils or Punjabis or Dogras or Assamese or Brahmins or Kshatriyas or this or that caste, as they are apt. He gave special consideration to the Muslims so 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.

  His second concern was to modernise India in the way he had long dreamed of—change the status of women and outcastes; industrialisation; socialism; planning; and parliamentary democracy. India, it must be repeated, was still mainly a status society, having little in common with the money-nexus society.

  Nehru, it is said by Indians who have known him well, was a man of voltes-faces: he could change overnight. This seems to be true as regards particulars and perhaps as regards a few big things, such as the policy of dividing India into states according to their languages, a policy which was thought to be dangerous for Indian unity but which he accepted precipitately in 1953. Yet, and this is the point to be emphasised, a comparison of Nehru’s letters and speeches in the 1930s, while he was still an agitator, with what he said and did as prime minister, shows that what is remarkable has been his consistency, above all as regards economic and social policy.

  For Nehru nationalism, as has been seen, was largely a preliminary step to the major step, which was to modernise India, and, especially, to bring in socialism. Nehru’s socialism had been held with such conviction that he would have been a communist were it not for the rigid dogmatism on the one part—his favourite taunt to the communists was that they were old-fashioned and out of date—and the mixture of coercion and violence on the other which go, or which have gone, with the communist’s sort of socialism. For Nehru the end rarely justified the means. A minister in Nehru’s cabinet once said to me, ‘What the Americans’—this was in the days of Dulles when some Americans thought, and one of Dulles’ ambassadors was known to have said, and had no doubt reported to Washington, that Nehru was a crypto-communist—‘What the Americans don’t see is that Nehru is the last of the Liberals.’ How much Nehru was misunderstood about communism was shown in the idiotic rumours current in some quarters in the early 1950s that he was secretly supplying arms to the Chinese communists over the new Indian road into Kashmir. In Nehru’s make-up there was a strong strain of what passed for Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s, but a still stronger strain of nineteenth-century humanistic liberalism which in turn had been influenced by the Christian socialists. It was this strain in him which made him almost excitedly appreciative of the encyclical Pacem in Terris of Pope John XXIII. What fired Nehru was that men and women could be and should be given opportunities for living better lives and, in particular, should be spared avoidable ills. His political ideas, including his version of Marxism, were nearly all derived from English sources. Also, like so many Indians, he shared with the English the pragmatic, instead of the doctrinal, approach. In particular he was too much of the Western humanist ever to reconcile himself to any communist requirement of giving up freedom of thought.

  On the other hand, just as Nehru was never taken in by the dogmas of communists so too he had never been taken in by clichés against communism, such as those which were supreme during the Dulles’ years and were associated with ‘the Free World’, ‘the free men’, ‘monoliths’, and so on. He, like Pope John, rejected the communist system but not communist men. Nor could he ever overlook the fact, which is still overlooked too often in the West, that when poverty is so great that millions of men count themselves fortunate if they get two poor meals a day, the quickest way to achieve economic development is by communism; that is to say, by totalitarian planning and by totalitarian mobilisation of resources. About 100 million men in India are partly if not wholly unemployed, just sitting about in idleness, their massive capital and productive value unutilised. It is also overlooked in the West that in backward societies communism is t
he transmitter of certain important Western values: thus it suppresses polygamy and other aspects of the servile status of women, astrology, beggars, illiteracy, and exploiting priest-craft. Given Nehru’s feelings on these things, as also his feelings on poverty, and given his appreciation for people like Aruna Asaf Ali,49 it says much for the strength of his liberal humanism that he had foregone the temptations of taking the communist’s short cut. Further, it is overlooked in the West that indiscipline can reach the point where communism becomes the counter-revolution.

  In latter years Nehru’s time and energy were taken up more and more with just running the apparatus of government, and less and less with initiating new policies or with testing or developing those already adopted. Few ministers in any government have the intellectual or nervous energy to master the details or to grasp the full operation of their ministry. Nehru had this energy; but more and more his old pioneering drive was lost in the routine job of keeping a very large and complicated machine in action, of keeping his party in control, and of keeping himself in control of his party. He could not do much more than get from one crisis to another. This politician work made ever heavier demands on his time; and it also had a good deal to do with his supporting, or conniving at, ministers who were notoriously corrupt and at times got near to gangsterism.