Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  * Cf. Sir Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit. The author, quondam Fellow of All Souls and a member of the ICS, spent 30 years in India, leaving in 1961. His Strangers in India, 1944, is acutely observant and shows where the British raj was lacking. Also see Michael Edwardes, The Last Years of British India, dedicated ‘to the men, women and children murdered in the fields and streets of India who though they did not fight for their country’s freedom paid for it with their lives’.

  * The Mahalanobis committee report on distribution of income was symptomatic of the malaise in the planning. The committee, consisting of three senior civil servants and five economists under the chairmanship of the Central Statistical Institute, was appointed in 1960 with the motive to produce data showing an increase in wealth. It took three and a half years to produce a few uncoordinated trifles, and some figures which disproved any appreciable rise in income throughout the nation but proved that the middle groups were worse off, as also the agricultural workers. Some of the worst sycophants and talkers connected with the plans were on the committee.

  * Cf. reactions to the poverty from Western literary visitors, e.g. John Wain in Encounter, 1961, or V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad novelist, in An Area of Darkness. He comes from a family which is UP Brahmin by origin. Not long after I arrived in Delhi I once had occasion to go unexpectedly to the chancery about midnight. I discovered that the gardener, who had no other dwelling, was sleeping in the library and with him were two still poorer relations or friends one of whom, having no blanket, was wrapped up in the big Australian flag which we flew in the daytime.

  * When statistics are cited in this book they are meant to show trends not to state facts precisely. Even in the most highly organised countries statistics on income, the national product, price movements, foreign trade, etc., are subject to wide margins of error. Cf. Oskar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations, Princeton, 1964.

  * Quoted by Rajagopalachari in Swarajya, August 1961.

  * Like most ambassadors in Delhi, anxious to save Nehru from touring nationals who could have no claim on his time, such as minor politicians and academics and even teenagers winning some commercial travel raffle or other, I have declined their request to ask Nehru for an interview for them only to discover later that they had gone to his office or house and had somehow got in to see him. His senior officials, waiting for hours, or even days, to see him, complained bitterly of this practice of his.

  * Press, January 22, 1961.

  ** Cf. his statement of August 27, 1961, on ‘the overwhelming number of engagements’ he had to fulfil, leaving him hardly any time for solid work. ‘My work, many people seem to think, should be full of laying foundation stones, opening buildings, attending celebrations and so on. VIPs who come here take a lot of time. I have to attend banquets and lunches and civic receptions. All this hardly leaves any time for solid work.’ He added that he was becoming reluctant to accept any engagements. This reluctance did not triumph!

  * Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography, 1959, p. 615.

  * Again and again in Parliament and in the press in India it was complained that India’s case was not sufficiently explained abroad and that more emphasis on ‘public relations’ should be given. The truth is that there has been far too much ‘public relations’ paper being sent out from Indian embassies. Few recipients took it seriously. The India News brought out by the Indian High Commission in London, ten or so pages of loaded news, was an example. India, of course, was not alone in this erroneous approach; it is common today.

  * A selection is available in Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September ’54–April’61 and Nehru’s Speeches, 1949–53, Government, of India, Publications Division.

  * According to one of the Indian doctors attending Jinnah in the latter part of his fatal illness Jinnah said that the creation of Pakistan was a mistake and that rather than create it the better course would have been to delay independence.

  * Security Council Off Records, 5th February-2nd March, p. 30. Also see Shiva Rao’s articles on Sir B. Rau.

  * A brief statement of Krishna Menon’s thesis will be found in his article, ‘What is at Stake?’, Seminar, June 1964. His statements in the UN require several days to read.

  * February 15, 1964.

  ** Cf. the writings of the veteran correspondent and ex-MP, Shiva Rao, e.g. in The Hindu, May 29, 1963, as well as various statements by Rajagopalachari and J.P. Narayan.

  * One member, Dr Korbel, wrote a book on it. A fair-minded book on the origins of the Kashmir question is Lord Birdwood’s.

  * On the background cf. H.L. Richardson, Tibet and its History; the author, a former member of the Indian Political Service, served in Tibet. A complication as regards Tibet, since 1956 at least, which will not be discussed but should be noted, is that the Dalai Lama himself had come to regard his regime, or much of it, as an anachronism. He no longer believed in his own theocracy. Cf. Lois Lang-Sims, The Presence of Tibet, 1963.I met the Dalai Lama on several occasions.

  * Notes, Memoranda and Letters Exchanged Between the Governments of India and China, vols. i, ii, iii, iv.

  ** Report of Officials of the Governments of India and the People’s Republic of China on the Boundary Question, February 1961. The Chinese produced 245 items of evidence; the Indians 630; a mine of information but not the last word. Cf. Alastair Lamb, The China-India Border, 1964, as regards the MacDonald Line of 1899 but also for some of the essential historical and geographical milieu to the boundary question. See Times Literary Supplement, January 2, 1964, and subsequent numbers for discussion, including letters of Dr Gopal (head of the historical section of the Indian external affairs ministry). Also cf. G.J. Alder, British India’s Northern Frontier 1865–1895, London, 1964.

  * It is not time for revealing the source of this information yet.

  ** Sir G. Bajpai was secretary general, external affairs ministry, until 1952.

  * My Land and People, 1962.

  * The behaviour of the press, not only in India but especially in the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries, during the various Sino-Indian conflicts and especially during and just after the Dalai Lama’s flight, was an eye-opener even to diplomats familiar with the unreliability of much, and the unscrupulousness of some, newspaper reporting. The reporting in certain mass-circulation newspapers in the United Kingdom and the United States was worse than inaccurate: it was often grossly fabricated. One newspaper chartered an aeroplane and poured out money without let. Some of the correspondents concerned purported to have gone to places, and to have had interviews, which were imaginary. They reported not the facts but what their editors or proprietors wanted to foist on the public, or something to glamorise themselves. The reporting by some diplomatic missions in Delhi was not much better. Diplomats come to know of at least some of the reports sent in by their colleagues. Too many of these reports copied the untruthful newspapers, or sent back to their governments what they knew their governments would like to believe.

  * My inaugural address to the Australian National University, The Racial Factor in International Relations, published in 1956, bears on this and connected points.

  * According to Conor Cruise O’Brien, his representative in Katanga, Hammarskjold had in effect falsified reports; To Katanga and Back, p. 67. Hammarskjold’s diaries are revealing of the man.

  ** Nehru did his best to conciliate the Nagas, and to see that the policies—sound British colonial service policies—recommended by Verrier Elwin, to whom he showed great kindness, were carried out. Elwin, son of a bishop of Sierra Leone, and himself once chaplain of Oriel College, Oxford, came to India as a Christian missionary in the 1920s and after a period with Gandhi ended up as a rationalist. He became an Indian citizen, and did valuable anthropological work on the tribal peoples.

  * Encounter, August 1964, p. 5.

  * Cf. Swarajya, December 15, 1961, January 6, 1962.

  * Cf. some of the examples from speeches m
ade by Nehru collected by the Daily Express at this time, e.g.:

  ‘Peaceful coexistence has been the Indian way of life and is as old as India’s thought and culture.’—Speech during Bulganin–Khrushchev visit, December 1955.

  ‘India has given a symbol to its people—the symbol of the Asoka Wheel, which represents peace, morality, and the ancient culture and peaceful ways of this country.’—Speech in Delhi, July 1951.

  ‘To seek to impose a settlement by force is to disregard the rights of nations.’—On Suez, September 1956.

  ‘It is the attitude of regarding one’s own conception as righteous and everything else wrong that leads to conflicts.’—At Red Cross Conference, Delhi, October 1957.

  ‘A very small conflict has the shadow of a big conflict behind it, and a big conflict has the shadow of a world war behind it.’—On Syrian crisis, September 1957.

  ‘The only approach we can make is an approach of tolerance, of avoidance of violence and hatred.’—About Cold War danger, Delhi, October 1957.

  ‘We do not show the clenched fist to anyone. We extend our hand in friendship towards everyone.’—On Kashmir, August 19, 1956.

  ‘War today solves no problems but leaves behind only brutalised humanity and a trail of bitterness and hatred which forms the basis of another war.’—Speech on Gandhi’s teachings, January 1953.

  * Henderson-Brook’s report; some of the contents were released to Parliament by the defence minister in September 1963. No names were mentioned.

  * Some Indians recognised this. Cf. Amlan Dutt, Seminar, No. 51.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Man

  During my years in India I kept a collection of photographs of Nehru taken from the Indian press. The day was infrequent when some newspaper or other did not publish one. The photographs are a revelation of his many sides and many moods. They leave no doubt that in any discussion on him the first question to be disposed of is: Which Nehru are you talking about? Is it the internationalist with hankerings after pacificism? or Nehru the planner of the Goa takeover? or the Nehru who made the moving speech on Gandhi’s assassination? or the Nehru who risked his life when the Hindu mob fell on the Muslims in 1948? or the agnostic Nehru who was drawn to Buddhism? or the revolutionary in a hurry? or Nehru the wily politician? or Nehru the connoisseur of poetry and roses? His variousness was also reflected in the variety of people he was happy to give his time to—scientists, writers, artists, actors, social workers, and certain men of religion, as well as the administrators, politicians and soldiers native to a political leader’s world. There were two men in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; there were more like twenty in Nehru.

  Of at least one thing, then, can we be certain: Nehru was complicated—even more than the average man, who is complicated enough. He was divided within himself as few men could be who at the same time retain overriding purpose and essential balance. It is because of this complexity that one cannot be sure of having penetrated to the core of his motivation in any particular action or policy, let alone to the core of the man himself. There is more than one passage in his life which is still to be explained.

  And we can be certain of another thing. Politics was far from being the whole world of Nehru; which it is of many, if not of most, ruling men.

  Aesthetic

  The dominant impression left on a person meeting Nehru for the first time would be aesthetic—his elegance. He was always well dressed, not foppishly but in good material, cut well, worn well, and usually adorned with a rosebud in his buttonhole; the whole matching his good looks and the grace with which he bore himself. Up until the last year or two, when his health was failing, there was little of the old man about him. He never got slovenly. The elegance was more than just clothes; more even than the good breeding which was an inseparable part of him. At times his face took on an expression which got near to beauty; the kind of expression sometimes seen on the face of Yehudi Menuhin98 (for whom Nehru had regard) or in portraits of Cardinal Newman99 or the young Dickens. The clothes were an expression of an internal elegance—an absence of all coarseness. It was not for nothing that one of his severest animadversions was ‘vulgar’.

  Nehru arrived at Bandung for the first Afro-Asian Conference in 1955 after a long tiring motor journey under an equatorial sun. His entourage arrived dishevelled and weary, as did most of the delegates. Nehru arrived looking as though he had just had a bath after a refreshing sleep. It was the same after his journeyings in hot dusty India. His comeliness stayed with him, whatever his surroundings.

  His body was slight but well shaped and athletic; his features were clear-cut and handsome; his skin, light brown in colouring, was perfect in texture and healthiness; and his eyes, even more than Indian eyes in general, were large and striking. Grace was as natural to him as it is to a leopard.

  His manners were punctilious and his courtesy fine. He was scrupulous in such things as not keeping people waiting, or seeing them to the door. There was, doubtless, some acting; there usually is some acting in civilised living, and, still more, in political leadership. Nehru certainly did some acting on public occasions and before the TV cameras; but never much. The acting was never worse than the pose of Cha Cha (Uncle) Nehru with the children. This was at its worst on his birthday for a few years when sycophants organised groups of children, with flowers and copious photographing, to parade with him. It was out of character; his interest in children was slender. But his acting was on the periphery of his personality. He did not fake. His readiness to grant TV or newspaper interviews sprang in part from the fact that he enjoyed doing what he did so well, but also in part from the fact that he was reluctant to disappoint people who had come to India to see him. Most of the TV and radio interviewers got a rich haul for their pains. And whatever little acting he might have gone in for, it never made him self-conscious. Normally, too, if he was angry he did not conceal it. If not pleased he was apt to project his lower lip. Those familiar with him at once recognised this for what it was, a storm signal.

  His grace was heightened by his aliveness, his mobility of face, his taking in and responding to everything around him, which gave him, to a degree seen in few men, a flame-like quality. At times, such as when confronting the opposition, there was, for all his sensitiveness, in later years his tormented sensitiveness, something eagle-like about him. And for all his sensitiveness he was never touchy. His charm lost nothing from a whiff of natural hauteur.

  He spoke quietly as a rule. He was not talkative; at times he was taciturn. His speech was in a voice which rose and fell engagingly and was clearly articulated. It was well suited to his conversation, which was usually reasoning as well as reasonable. In later years his voice had an undertone of pathos. He was never loud or trivial or gossipy.

  It was due to his fastidiousness that Nehru found a certain type of American, and certain American ways, uncongenial, though he had an admiration for some Americans and for some aspects of America. After his death his family found amongst his papers some verses he had recently copied in his own handwriting from the American poet Frost. Nor were some Australian characteristics, or figures, to his taste though he had a regard for others. He saw a good deal of Lord Casey.100

  A mixture of distinction and charm was the keynote to Nehru’s presence, be it in parliamentary debate, or around his dining table, or on such banal occasions as presenting prizes or laying foundation stones. He was a master of the art of saying nothing of substance to his interlocutors if need be and yet of leaving them feeling unoffended or even flattered. On occasions he heightened his charm by flashes of wit unexpected in a man often serious to the point of greyness, and on occasions even by funny stories. Once I heard him ask a foreign visitor, who was a little dashed by the Indian practice of eating with one’s fingers, whether he knew what a Shah of Persia had said: the Shah found eating with a fork like making love through an interpreter. (Nehru himself always ate with a knife and fork.) Most people found Nehru captivating. I certainly did. When in his presence I usually
found it necessary to keep jolting myself back into detachment.

  Body

  Nehru would have been an exceptional man if he were judged by his physical endowment alone. In the words of an Indian who worked closely with him during the first twelve years of independence, he was a ‘miracle of health’. His outpouring could have had few parallels in this or in any age.

  During the years I knew him, in his sixties and early seventies, Nehru worked seven days a week. He rose at dawn, or even earlier, took exercise, including yogic asanas, and including for some years the dubious exercise of standing on his head. He sometimes went horse-back riding. He used to be fond of swimming in earlier years. It was only after seventy that the yogic exercises were given up or curtailed. For a time he followed the regime of a Kashmiri master of yoga who came to the house. (Yogic exercises are normally aimed not at muscle development but at harmoniousness and lack of tension.) For a time, too, he had a herbalist attached to his household. But no man was less hypochondriacal than Nehru. Sukarno’s addiction to medicine bottles was foreign to him.

  After bathing he used to prepare his own breakfast, which was frugal, though latterly it was being prepared for him. For years anyone could come to his garden at about 8:30 in the morning and bring grievances, or just talk to, or look at, him for half an hour or so. From then onwards he worked through the day without let except for lunch and dinner—state papers, staff, political and other conferences and committees, interviews, visitors of every conceivable variety, sitting in and running Parliament or cabinet, giving decisions, writing minutes, and letters, and, several times a week, not unoften several times a day, making speeches. The background to this outpouring of energy was never-ending crisis, and therefore never-ending stress. In addition to being prime minister he was foreign minister, chairman of the Planning Commission (which meant minister in charge of the national economy), minister for atomic energy, at times minister for defence, as well as leader of the Congress Party with its governments in sixteen or seventeen states to watch over. Lunch and dinner, especially until the last five or six years, were used as occasions for talking to, or receiving, or showing attention to, people. At 10:00 or 10:30 at night, when he parted from his dinner guests, he would go the office in his house and work until about midnight or 1:00 in the morning. The minutes memoranda and letters he then wrote, tersely and with effect, must add up to hundreds of thousands of words over the years. He usually read for ten to thirty minutes in bed until he dropped off to sleep.