Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  In another state adjoining Delhi important persons in its government and in the local Congress Party were involved in large-scale smuggling across the Pakistan–Rajasthan border. The Bakshi regime in Kashmir was another example of misuse of office and it lasted longest of all. There were some other states with Congress governments which also carried corruption far. And there were some ministers in Nehru’s own cabinets who could not have survived a proper investigation.

  That is to say, Nehru found himself with a degree of power which has rarely been precedented, yet in practice he made relatively little use of it. Why? Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru’s rival in the pre-war Congress, and the founder of the wartime Indian National Army under the protection of the Japanese, thought, according to an intimate of his whom I knew, that Nehru did not have the makings of a ruler.

  It is unlikely that a man would have held the place Nehru held for thirty years or more in the Congress Party, which included dozens of men of outstanding ability and ruthless ambition, without having the makings of a ruler. Leaving aside the fact that Bose was in temperament, and perhaps in intention, a Fascist dictator while Nehru was the opposite, Nehru had to an enviable degree some of the qualities of the ruler. He was practical and flexible. He had drive. He had courage. He had a flair for politics. He had a contempt for inefficiency and weakness in governing. In the 1930s he once wrote and published anonymously a criticism of himself in which he spoke of his ‘overwhelming passion to get things done’ and that this passion predisposed him against the slowness of democratic processes and therefore towards dictatorship. He had, too, that something which belongs to the born commander of men—the capacity to charm and to enthuse combined with a capacity for keeping men at a distance. This involves amongst other things keeping one’s own counsel and keeping men in some way or other in fear of one, even if it is only the fear of verbal lashes.

  Yet with all these and other great gifts Nehru does seem to have lacked something required in ruling.

  The lack was more than just not delegating authority enough though this did lead to some inefficiency as well as to too little in the way of collective government. It was more, too, than misjudging men. It is hard to believe that in a country producing so much and such varied talent as India does Nehru had no alternative than to people his cabinets with such a ballast of nonentities as he did; and that he should repeat, and greatly multiply, Smut’s mistake in not breeding up a group of young and tested potential successors. There were, too, some strange cases of divulging confidences asked for, for instance about the misconduct of this or that person, and his not seeing that he was letting down the informant.

  Was the root of the trouble that Nehru was imperious but not ruthless? He used the iron against himself rather than against colleagues or subordinates or the ruled? Lord Attlee, whose obituary article on Nehru* contained a series of penetrating observations on him, said that Nehru ‘understood power and he understood poetry but what he didn’t see was where one began and the other left off’.

  Somebody has said that a man cannot be a good prime minister unless he is a good butcher—to slaughter ministers and others as required. Nehru, on the contrary, dismissed or demoted ministers and others who were evident failures or liabilities with the utmost reluctance, and only as the last inescapable resort.

  But the butcher thesis must not be carried too far in Nehru’s case. It is misleading to make out that he was more gentle, or had more of the feminine in him, than was the case. He had a tough side, as was well known to those who worked for or close to him, and as was shown clearly on his face at times. The butcher thesis, too, does insufficient justice to Nehru’s deliberate repulsion from anything savouring of dictatorship. Dictatorship was utterly abhorrent to him. I recall Rajkumari Amrit Kaur,106 for ten years in his cabinet and one of his few social equals and without fear of him, once going to him to get him to intervene over some matter. He refused. ‘What you are asking me,’ he said, ‘is that I be a dictator. You have come to the wrong person….’

  Nehru, for all his intellectual self-confidence, and for all his imperiousness, had a strange reluctance to impose his will on others. He would argue with them, lecture them, ridicule them; but he would rarely command them. For ruling men, for mastering and directing their wills, there is often no alternative to ruthlessness. The ruler rules.

  That commanding men went against the grain was due largely, I think, to his tendency to see both sides of a question. He had not the comfort of the simple-minded who see only what is, or seems to be, just in front of their noses any more than he had the impulses of the bullying power-wielder. It was this awareness of there being two (or more) sides to a question which led to his indecision. He had an indecision over and above the wish to avoid the hard clear-cut decisions which are normally uncongenial to the Hindu temperament. He tried to avoid committing himself; he wobbled on the fence (as at certain points in the Hindi versus English debate); he would make statements which were categorical, even fierce, but were then cancelled out, or which could be interpreted in several ways or which could not be interpreted at all. Again and again he stood hesitating on the brink of a decision until some firmer or coarser or more reckless person edged or pushed him into the plunge. That is to say, the complexity of his mind too often—not always—prevented him from that oversimplifying, that reducing issues to black and white, which is common to the authentic men of action, such as Churchill or even Gandhi.

  Probably Nehru’s reluctance to command was also connected with the Brahmin in him. It is difficult in the climate of our time to make clear what this caste means, this sense of utter race purity, so exalted that wealth or poverty is irrelevant, and this membership in a small ancient unadulterated group to whom the truth has been given, and the hereditary right to expound the truth. It is for those who receive the exposition to carry it out. Brave man though he was Nehru thus had more of the teacher than the ruler in him. How much a teacher he was is shown in amusing things such as his letters to his younger sister.* Hence his arrogance of mind coexisting awkwardly with some humility as a commander. He was sure that he could do his own thinking. He did not mind picking up from others a phrase or two, for instance Panikkar’s phrase that the Sino-Indian frontier is ‘now a live frontier’, or the fashionable economic jargon about ‘the take-off’; but he felt no need to pick brains. Even critics did not bother him greatly. It was his Kashmiri Brahminism, too, which had something to do with his habit of not coming to the point directly, of not revealing his mind, of putting up a smokescreen of rambling but purposeful verbiage. The Brahmins have existed as a tight community, biologically, psychologically, and socially, for several thousand years. Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Wells existed only yesterday; and Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple have been in existence for only a few centuries.

  His Brahminism, moreover, might also have predisposed him to certain delusions. He was deluded by certain individuals, but above all he was deluded by the very thing which gave him his strength and his confidence—the crowd and his immense prestige with it. Religion may or may not be the opiate of the people but the people were the opiate of Nehru. Those adoring applauding millions little understood what Nehru was designing, but, worse, Nehru, more and more insulated, had the illusion that he knew and was in contact with the people of India.

  The truth on the contrary was that he was alone—alone on a high bleak peak, largely unsheltered against the ceaseless winds of self-seeking, sycophancy, and tale-bearing.

  Human beings in general find living alone with secrets intolerable. They need to share the burden with others. This is particularly true of those with the burden of rule, for an inescapable part of that burden is the carrying and the keeping of secrets. Moreover, those carrying the burden of rule need to check with others the reasoning leading them to this or that decision. Most rulers or leaders have therefore relied on some person or persons. Gladstone and F. D. Roosevelt relied on their wives; some, like Mussolini, on a mistress; some, like Hitler, on an
inner gang. Nehru had this need, and all the more so because of his alienation from much that is most characteristic of Mother India; yet—and in this he was like Salazar; a fateful paradigm—he also liked going alone. He could carry the secrets to an unusual degree without going to someone to unburden himself. He had no wife. He had his daughter whom he could and did trust though it is doubtful if he unburdened himself to her entirely on affairs of state, at least before his last years. In the old days he went to his father or to Gandhi when he needed to unburden himself, or to get advice. These two men were never replaced. Up until the mid-1950s he was going for some political counsel to Kidwai and to Maulana Azad; he had had many years of close political association with these two Congress Muslim leaders. After their death there was no political figure left from the front rank of the independence struggle except Rajagopalachari. All the rest had died off. Men like Pant were in the second rank; and the rest all owed their position to Nehru. His relations with his cabinet and with political colleagues in the party and in the states were purely political and largely routine. Merely from the political point of view Nehru was a solitary by the middle of the 1950s.

  Krishna Menon

  It was Nehru’s aloneness combined with his reluctance to be ruthless which gave Krishna Menon the special place he came to occupy from the middle of the 1950s.

  Krishna Menon’s position puzzled foreigners when it did not appal them. Indians were almost as mystified as Americans, and not less disapproving. The foreigners had seen Krishna Menon in London where he had spent a picturesque quinquennium as high commissioner, or at the UN in New York, where, with the aid of certain American newspapers, he had made himself the biggest bogeyman living outside of Russia, with everything for the role of a Dulles Bad Man except a beard and a fur cap and a Russian accent. At UN meetings even to cool and hardened diplomats and journalists, he seemed eccentric when not needlessly provocative, and at times he seemed mischievous and untruthful; a man born for intrigue and discord.

  When Krishna Menon returned to India in 1954 he was less known amongst his compatriots than he was in London or New York. He had been out of India for nearly thirty years. He spoke no Hindi, indeed no Indian language except his maternal Malayalam; gossips said that he had forgotten to speak that properly. In any case Malayalam is spoken in only the extreme south. I remember a lunch party in Nehru’s garden in 1954 when two or three elders of the cabinet snubbed him offensively, and, again, how at a Congress meeting in central India others tried to put him in his place. For months Maulana Azad stood out against Nehru’s wish to get him into the government.

  Krishna Menon began his colourful life in Malabar, in 1897. He belongs to the Nair caste, that gifted south Indian matriarchal community which includes the clans of Pillai, Panikkar and Menon, and which has been associated with government for generations. His father was a lawyer by profession but by tastes a scholar. The family lived according to the usual standards of the professional middle classes; Krishna Menon does not come from the proletariat. He was an only son but there were several—some say eight—daughters in the family. He remained loyal to his family, for all his long absence, just as in his days of power he remained loyal to Londoners who had known him and had dealt with him in his days of obscurity. He has a capacity for giving and evoking affection; amongst highly talented men, like the surgeon Dr Baliga,107 as well as amongst his nieces. As a boy he was a keen Boy Scout and found his way through the Boy Scout movement to Mrs Annie Besant’s Theosophy Centre at Adyar (near Madras). This early enthusiasm and training might have given him some of the flair for the armed services which he revealed, rather unexpectedly, as defence minister. At Adyar he was noted for his activity and his intelligence but also for his sharpness of tongue and a certain violence in his reactions to persons. Mrs Besant, according to an informant who was there at the time, had to speak to him about these shortcomings. At Adyar, where he trained as a teacher, he became a devotee of J. Krishnamurti, the young man whom Mrs Besant had selected as the predestined New Messiah. It was with help from Mrs Besant that in the mid-1920s Krishna Menon went to England for further studies. By 1928 he had ceased to be a theosophist. As a student at the London School of Economics (where he got a first class; he was also admitted to the Bar) he had, like so many Indians and other Asians, been influenced by Laski.108 He also seems to have had contacts with Saklatvala,109the Parsee communist who was a member of the House of Commons. He soon gave himself to the Indian League, which concentrated on spreading Congress propaganda, and especially amongst Indian students. He remained its secretary and living force from 1927 to 1947. It was during these impoverished days that he formed the habit of living largely on cups of tea–20 or 30 a day—and biscuits. His activity was tireless. He picked up a living in various ways, often by writing. He was the first editor of the Pelican Books series, a pioneering effort much to his credit, and he was an active member of the Labour Party. As a Labour Party man he was a borough councillor for St Pancras from 1934 to 1947; it was he who started the St Pancras Arts Festival. During the war he was noted for his energy as an air raid warden. In 1938–41 he was the selected Labour candidate for Dundee—the seat then held by Dingle Foot as a Liberal—but the selection is said to have been cancelled by Transport House because of Krishna Menon’s communist associations.

  Throughout this period in London he was also acting as Nehru’s personal representative, including being his literary agent. When Nehru became prime minister he chose Krishna Menon, in preference to another, whom Gandhi preferred, as high commissioner to the United Kingdom. When Krishna Menon returned to India in 1954 few foreigners, or Indians, knew that the relationship between Nehru and him was an old one. They soon got to know too much about his faults and too little about his merits to understand why he got so close to Nehru after 1955.

  Krishna Menon had some big faults, such as self-assertiveness; rudeness, at times capricious, at times gratuitous; tenseness; a penchant for the mysterious and the conspiratorial; an arbitrary way with the truth; personal likes and dislikes which upset his balance; an incapacity for teamwork; and what, in public life at least, is worse than wickedness, he had something odd about him, some found it a touch of the fey, some a touch of the twisted, but whatever it was too many found it objectionable.

  Yet his virtues were of a kind which put him on a plane reached by few members of Nehru’s cabinet. Most of Nehru’s ministers, like most of the party caucus, were provincial mediocrities, untravelled, ill-educated, narrow-minded; not a few were lazy; some were cow-worshippers and devotees of ayurvedic medicine and astrology; some were dishonest. Most of them held office because this or that state or language or caste had to be represented in the government. Few of them believed wholeheartedly in Nehru’s policies: some were secretly hostile to them. Nearly all were afraid of him or sycophantic to him. None of these things could be said about Krishna Menon. Moreover, he had a natural appeal for many young people; which other members of the cabinet lacked conspicuously. Whatever could be said against him was soon being said in sections of the Indian press as well as in the foreign press. Such became his reputation that as late as 1964 a well-known London financial journal could refer to V.P. Menon—a respected and competent retired senior civil servant: one of several respected and competent retired senior civil servants with the clan name of Menon—as ‘the great Mr Menon, not the egregious Mr Menon’. This is when ignorance becomes ludicrous.

  The ‘egregious Mr Menon’ alone in the cabinet spoke the same political and social language as Nehru though perhaps with some added Marxist inflections. He had a knowledge of the outside world and of foreign relations approached, but scarcely equalled, by only a couple of other cabinet ministers, and a wide range of reading; and he could be relied upon to put the case whenever required, usually effectively, and to fight for it. His capacity for work, his drive, his spartanism, and his combative courage, were as great as Nehru’s. It was not for nothing that he had spent the war years in London and had made no effort to
dodge those front-line dangers. And he had the ruthlessness which Nehru lacked. More than one sculptor and painter was fascinated with his face and gait. Seen against the world of the powerful Marwari plutocrats as exposed in Judge Vivian Bose’s report,110 or against the world of the average politician, and seen against the background of his long past associations with Nehru and against Nehru’s aloneness, there is little mystery about Nehru’s preference for Krishna Menon as a close political associate.