Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  He was thus in an ironical situation from the beginning. The irony, the inconsistencies, the dilemmas, remained with him throughout life. His long prime ministership was stamped with the irony of inescapable inconsistencies. All men exercising power are confronted with dilemmas; all revolutionaries whose revolution has succeeded in unseating the previous rulers, and who are thus called upon to rule, are confronted with special dilemmas; but Nehru was confronted with dilemmas over and above these. His lot was permanent dilemma, and his fate was to be always trying to fight his way out of it.

  Thus he needed power to give Indians what are now called human rights as against the status society of Hindus, and to bring to them technological changes for alleviating their hunger and suffering. But to get this power he must have the Congress Party as the ruling party. That meant conniving at an ever-rising degree of politician boss-ism and corruption, and in some places the reverse of democracy. It also meant keeping, indeed greatly extending, the Preventive Detention—that is to say, imprisonment without trial—which he had damned so passionately in the days of the British raj, and which chimed ill with the parliamentary democracy he wanted. So, too, the other inconsistencies, such as insisting on complete independence from foreign commitments yet making the plans dependent upon foreign aid; hankering after communist aims but insisting on liberal humanism; or attacking European colonialism in Africa while acquiescing in Indian colonialism in Nagaland. The supreme irony was that most of Nehru’s values were nearer to the British, whose raj he had been bent on destroying, than to the Indians whose subjection to the raj he wept over. I have emphasised the Hindu and the Brahmin in him. But no less emphasis is required on the European, on the Englishman, in him.

  Haunted with dilemmas in this way the strain on the spirit must have been nearly insupportable at times. It says much for his inner strength that he supported the strain. But he found no way out of his dilemmas.

  India was finding a way out for him; a way he could not care for. The Indian spirit, good and less good, quietly reasserted itself; those of Nehru’s ideas which were too alien to take root in the ancient Indian soil will wither away.

  Construction and Reconstruction

  Perhaps only another prime minister or ruler, knowing the realities of government from the inside and from the top, could pronounce a complete judgement on Nehru’s rule. Yet it is probable that when the dust has settled Nehru’s achievements as ruler will be scaled down. Scaling down is a common fate for statesmen no less than for writers. It happened with Roosevelt; it will probably happen with Churchill and de Gaulle. The scaling down might be on India as much as on Nehru; or if there is not a scaling down of India there will probably be some demystification of it. India without Nehru will lose some of the panache it affected under him. In the words of Alberto Moravia, the Italian novelist (who visited India and was much taken with Nehru), with Nehru’s death India enters a prose epoch.

  How much is India a better, or indeed a different, place because Nehru lived? It is for the future historians, with more facts at their disposal and with more knowledge of the real currents of the era, to decide. It will be enough here to recapitulate his main achievements.

  Indian unity he inherited. He cherished it and fostered it but he did not create it. The apparatus of government—the civil service and administration, the defence services, the lawcourts, the communications network of roads, railways, telegraph, and wireless—he also inherited. The constitution adopted in 1951 was itself an adaptation of the British Government of India Act of 1935. Inside India Nehru’s most important contribution was on atmosphere and attitudes, more particularly against certain old prejudices and superstitions and for social justice and the scientific approach. These took concrete form: firstly in changing the legal status of women and of the outcastes; secondly in the setting up and the maintaining of the secular state; and thirdly in the planned moves towards an industrialised and partly socialist economy. As regards foreign relations, Nehru’s contribution was firstly the policy of non-alignment and secondly the acquiring for India a world presence. As regards peace, he made, though many have contested the point, a contribution, especially in Dulles’ years. He was not free of faults, as over Kashmir or Goa; but as regards India’s neighbours, Burma, Ceylon, Nepal, all of them guilty of much provocation, and at times of injustice, to India, Nehru was self-restrained and generous. He contributed to peace, again, by counselling moderation and sanity to the new Afro-Asian states.

  These, though seeming to be not a great deal for nearly eighteen years of power, were solid achievements of construction and reconstruction.

  The Destroyer

  Yet there can be little doubt that by 1963 the people of India as a whole were not better fed or clad, or housed, and were worse, and more corruptly, governed, and subject to a worse situation of law and order, with higher taxes, ever-rising prices, ever-acute foreign exchange difficulties, and more unemployment, than in 1946, the year he became head of government. And as regards foreign relations India’s borders were menaced, she was embarked on an expensive armaments race with her two most important neighbours, Pakistan and China, and her popularity was not great amongst other Asian countries or in Africa.

  India will almost certainly survive in some way or other. She is too old, too rooted, too enduring, not to survive. But the prospects are years of unsettlement. As I write these lines the press of the world is lauding the stability in India which permitted a smooth succession from Nehru to Lal Bahadur Shastri, and its praise is accompanied with much ignorance and misunderstanding. It is true that in comparison with other republics recently gaining independence from a colonial regime India is a going concern as a democracy and as a modern state, and she is fairly stable for the time being. It is true, too, that there would have been unsettlement if Nehru had never lived. And allowance must be made for the relativity of stability and instability. But the prospects are for growing unrest. The chances in favour of disintegration, and of tyranny or oligarchy, are connected with, if not directly due to, destroying too hastily the British raj, which had created India as a single political entity, and which had given it all its institutions of modern governance, including parliamentary democracy.

  Nehru dedicated his life to destroying the British raj. So impetuous was his fury to get rid of it that he would accept nothing short of independence at once. For the consequences of this approach, including, if it comes, the disintegration of India, or dictatorship, Nehru must take his share of the blame.

  He must take his share of the blame too for a spirit of violence which the independence movement brought into Indian life. The independence movement was dedicated to the purpose of breaking the British government in India by all means possible (though Gandhi would have added, not quite convincingly, ‘by all means short of violence’, and Nehru, more convincingly, ‘by all means short of terrorism’). The nationalist leaders did have some inhibitions; but in practice they incited violence and anarchy. The students were called away from their classes, efforts were made to subvert the police and the soldiers from their oath of loyalty, various forms of lawlessness were connived at when not encouraged, and, most serious of all, the mob was called in and organised for demonstrations which were almost certainly bound to result in mob violence. It is the less easy to justify this extremism because the British government though myopic at times was generally humane and generally liberal, and because the independence struggle involved the nationalists in little suffering of the gross kind, such as was known in Algeria. This is why Indians like Tagore or Sapru were never reconciled to Gandhi’s so-called nonviolent agitation. The nationalist agitators called in the mob to sabotage the British government; but in doing that they risked destroying the principle of government itself, the principle of authority.

  Some recovery of authority has been made since independence; and Nehru himself, who latterly would have had the mob fired on if need be, has much of the credit for the recovery. But the mystical fabric of authority in Indian soci
ety has been rent, as it has in more than one country today. Full recovery may no longer be possible without totalitarian coercion. Every now and then, for instance in Calcutta and other big cities, in Jubbalpur, in Assam, and in most of India except the south, the mob takes over for a gruesome day or two or three.

  It was on an India so shaken, so unsettled, that Nehru used his years of rule for imposing the plans for an industrialised and socialised society. The plans, though big and costly, were not big enough to effect a structural revolution, or even an appreciable rise in the standard of living; but they were big enough to disturb both the economy and the social life of India. They destroyed, for instance, the class of small and medium-sized landowners. Worse, the plans, and still more the propaganda for them (which followed, moreover, on the nationalist propaganda about a new heaven as soon as the British had gone), and combined with other modernist propaganda, work towards destroying India’s greatest wealth, the contentment of the Indian people. India might have been poor and old-fashioned but its men had a religion which accepted life, the hardest life, uncomplainingly, and which got satisfaction out of simple natural things. It was not to be expected that Nehru would preach the gospel that those who want least are most like the gods, who want nothing. And if there were ever any chance of realising it there was something to be said for all India becoming a Jamshedpur. But he did preach ideas which the more they succeed the more they would turn India into an atomised cash-nexus admass society with the endless pursuit of multiplying wants—TV, radios, cars, mass-produced goods purposely made unfashionable every year, or so, reading fodder of the Digest and glossy magazine kind, and cinema films which are having more revolutionary effects in Indian towns than Marxism or any other ideology—and the more would Indians be turned into the envious, self-centred, bored, whining manhood of the Affluent Society and the Welfare State. Nehru, himself with spartan aristocratic standards, did not will this; but he willed things which unavoidably produced this.

  Rajaji may have been wrong in this or in that particular attack on Nehru’s government, but he was not wrong in his divination that if Nehru succeeded he would destroy something fundamental, and something most valuable, in India. Gandhi, with his opposition to the machine and to centralisation, also sensed that the plans would be along the wrong lines. It is true Gandhi had only fads to offer as regards the greatest problem, population pressure; but his ideas on decentralisation, on village democracy, and on what he called basic education, and on the machine, were as relevant to Indian realities as Nehru’s industrialisation and socialism were only partly relevant. Towards the end Nehru seemed to have doubts at times about whether the direction he had set out on might be as right as he was once sure it was. But it was too late. Nehru destroyed Gandhism as well as the British raj.

  It is unlikely that there will be a place in India again for a ruler like Nehru—the aristocratic liberal humanist. If India is not run by dictators, rightist, or leftist, or militarist, she will be run by politicians, more and more drawn from, or conditioned by, the outcastes and the low castes. For this is the majority, and, thanks to the ballot box, it will be the votes of the majority which will set up and pull down governments; votes won through promising more and more to the needy and the many. Some saviour of the people, an individual or a group, could conceivably carry, in due legal form, a plebiscitary election to abolish elections altogether. The convergence of unemployed, or discontented, neo-literates with industrialisation is a favourable condition for a mass revolution. Food shortages could precipitate it. In abolishing the British raj, and in propagating ideas of equality, so hastily and in the way they did, Nehru and the upper-class Indian nationalists of English education abolished themselves. Nehru destroyed the Nehrus.

  Nehru, moreover, was not content with his work of destruction in India. Through his passionate aid to the anti-colonialist movements in all places he has some responsibility for the destruction of law and order and for the spread of anarchy in Africa and Asia. Self-government had to come in Africa and Asia; and able and responsible leaders like Kenyatta114 or Kaunda115 are not lacking. But, owing to the manner of decolonisation, there are areas where the prospect is for detribalised slums, and slums which are armed to a dangerous degree or are run by psychopathic bosses whipping up and playing on a manic nationalism. Latin America gained independence about a century and a half ago but still suffers regimes like Trujillo’s116 in Dominica or the madness of government in Haiti.117

  Will the capital achievement of Nehru thus turn out to be destruction? Will Nehru the political figure be seen as mainly a destroyer?

  Or will the historians judge that there was no escape from his essential predicament, or at least from a large part of it?

  Nationalism for instance. He gave the biggest part of his life to fomenting it; yet the great causes he stood for when he was prime minister, such as world government, or the control of the thermonuclear arms race, or coexistence both inside and outside India, were damaged or frustrated by nationalism. Nehru, however, would almost certainly have had no power except for this nationalism. Or, again, industrialisation. Everything Gandhi said against it is true; but probably no ruler of India in the climate of this epoch, least of all a Nehru with his passion for technological progress, could ignore the poverty of Indians or this apparent cure for it; and less than ever now that the population was rising explosively. For the greatest destroyer of all in India is population growth; 12 to 15 million more mouths to feed each year is a bigger revolutionary force than anything brought in by Nehru. Rajaji seems to have had little practical solution to the population problem.*

  Whether a feeling of the intractability of ruling post-independence India influenced him at the moment or not, Rajaji said one day of Nehru, ‘There is not anyone who would do as well in his place.’** And when he learnt of Nehru’s death he wrote:

  Eleven years younger than me, eleven times more important, eleven hundred times more beloved of the nation… I have been fighting Sri Nehru all these ten years over what I consider faults in public policies. But I knew all along that he alone could get them corrected… He is gone leaving me weaker than before in my fight…***

  The Crowning Achievement

  The tasks Nehru set himself were tasks for a giant; some of them the tasks of Sisyphus. No ruler could carry such a burden without faltering. What is remarkable is not that he experienced failures but that he did not collapse and that he did achieve some success.

  And whatever his success or failure, the story of Nehru as ruler will remain of great interest—how a man governed and shaped, or tried to shape, so big and so special a part of the human race in its first two decades of independence. But the man himself is still more interesting than his political history. Nehru might have made misjudgements, even grave misjudgements; he might have been insufficiently in control; he might have destroyed much. But nothing can destroy his distinction. His supreme achievement was to have been Nehru, the fine spirit exercising power, the ruler who remained disinterested and compassionate.

  * Cf. press, especially vernacular, April 28–29. There were exceptions, e.g., Maharastra Times.

  ** Cf. Hindustan Times, May 15; also Indian press, August 15–17, 1964.

  *** Cf. Indian press, August 24. Also see his letter to Statesman August 9, 1964, urging Indians not to be touchy about Commonwealth matters.

  * Information from Shiva Rao, who was present at the Kennedy–Rajaji meeting.

  * Cf. ‘The trend in the mis-governed half-baked democracies in all parts of the world is for elections to disappear and for the military forces to take people by surprise,’ he wrote in Swarajya on May 23, 1964.

  * As late as November 1963 the Illustrated Weekly of India published a profile of this quality though it was a pale reflection of what was common from 1947 to 1960.

  * Cf. his Autobiography, 1925.

  * Asok Mitra, Seminar, November 1963.

  ** Numerous documented examples are available, e.g., ‘Caste and Politics in Akola�
�, Economic Weekly, August 24, 1963.

  * Cf. Swarajya, July 4, 1964.

  ** Monica Felton, Meet Rajaji, p. 62.

  *** Swarajya, June 6, 1964.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Last Journey

  Nehru was not himself when he got back to India from his overseas tour in November 1961. By spring, in 1962, he went down with what the doctors diagnosed as a kidney infection; and for the first time in his life he had to take prolonged treatment and to remain in bed. He made a good recovery during the second half of next year. The doctors warned him that he would have to go at a slower pace. He heeded the warning for a while; but throughout most of 1963 he was back at his old pace. What at this time struck those who knew him was not so much the diminution of his physical strength as the diminution of hope.

  Early in January 1964 he went to Orissa for a Congress Party meeting. It was to have been an important meeting as Nehru wanted a reaffirmation of his socialist policies; but not long after getting there he collapsed with a stroke. At the end of January it was announced officially that he had recovered ‘completely’. He began to make occasional public appearances. On February 10, for instance, he was present at the opening of Parliament. Most of his mental acuity remained though it was failing towards the end of the day. Everyone could see that he was paralysed on one side. He walked slowly, with a dragging gait; he had to speak sitting; and he articulated with difficulty. In April he began to stand up when speaking. He was coming to his office for a few hours each day. Much of the work of a more or less routine nature was left to Lal Bahadur Shastri but Nehru was making the decisions on major matters. That superb body was broken at last, but not the spirit which it housed. He never accepted defeat. Those who wanted to help him or fuss over him were rebuffed. His sense of the dangers crowding in on the India he had tried to build spurred him on to relentless effort. He became convinced that some new and drastic measures could not be delayed.