Nehru needed no reminding of the transience of human life and the nearness of death to every man. He always claimed to have no time for astrologers: they were now forecasting a year of malignancy. The number of people counting with Nehru who were removed by death that winter and spring must have sharpened his awareness of how short was time and how much remained to be done. President Kennedy had been struck down in November. In February Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a member of the Christian branch of the Kapurthala princely family, died suddenly with a heart attack. She had returned to India from her studies in England at the same time as Nehru, over fifty years ago, and she had spent many years near to him, first in Gandhi’s ashrams and then for ten years as a minister in his cabinet. Next V.T. Krishnamachari118 died. He had headed the Planning Commission during its first ten formative years, and so had been closely associated with some of Nehru’s dearest projects. Then followed the deaths of Verrier Elwin.119 who had been close to Nehru in policies for dealing with the NEFA peoples, and of Harishwar Dayal, the brilliant and reliable ambassador to Nepal and the leading Indian expert on Tibet and the Himalayan border states. Finally, Dr Baliga dropped dead in London. He was the leading surgeon in India and for years had been a wealthy and disinterested supporter of Krishna Menon as well as a tireless seeker after good relations between India and the communist states. Nehru respected him and when he heard of his death, a few days before his own, said that a good man had gone, ‘a good man devoted to good causes … a patriot of great merit and accomplishment’.
A time of troubles. The China border affair was still unresolved; so too was the rebellion of the Nagas, now in its tenth year; so too the reconciliation in Goa, where bomb explosions had just occurred. Outside India overseas Indians, with the ending of British rule in one colony after another, were being threatened with apartheid or mass expulsions. Inside India prices were rising, food shortages were so great as to be causing riots, the machinery of government from top to bottom was creaking, and, worst of all, communal passion was rising. Would India remain a secular state? The massacres of Muslims in March had roused little condemnation or revulsion amongst the bulk of Indians. The bad relations with Pakistan, now particularly bad because of the new inflammability in Kashmir, stimulated recklessness amongst the Hindu extremists as well as irritating the Indian public in general. Nehru decided that his former policy on Kashmir would have to be reconsidered. In April, against opposition, he had Sheikh Abdullah released. A little later he decided to see Ayub.
Nor could Nehru, who for years had resisted all pressures either to indicate the dauphin or to appoint a deputy prime minister, avoid any longer choosing what was in effect his deputy. His choice fell on Lal Bahadur Shastri.* He had been a member of Nehru’s cabinets since 1952 and before then had played some minor roles in Nehru’s home state. He was hardly known to the public and was not much known outside the inner political circle. In recent years Nehru had been using him for confidential work, such as in Kerala at the one end and Kashmir at the other, and was said to value his judgement and his honesty. But as Nehru’s deputy would stand rather more than a fair chance of becoming his successor the choice of Lal Bahadur Shastri caused surprise in some quarters.
Pitt is to Addington
What London is to Paddington
This is what the wits were saying a century and a half earlier when the great Pitt gave place to Addington. In some quarters the choice caused concern as well as surprise. Lal Bahadur Shastri in any case would be an anticlimax after Nehru. So small in size and voice, so frail in health, and so withdrawn in manner, was the new deputy that Nehru himself, according to reports, used to say that you didn’t know if he was in the room or not. On the other hand there were others who greeted the appointment with relief because he was a man whose pace and preferences were nearer to the Indian average and who made no one feel uncomfortable. The yearning for mediocrity and parochialism was not unrepresented in this sense of relief. It became clearer when Lal Bahadur Shastri became prime minister. One paper then wrote: ‘He is much closer to the common man than his predecessor.’* Another paper wrote: ‘He has not got the Cambridge accent but he is not the poorer for it … he is not decked with red roses, restless and impatient, but plain, collected, and sweet-tempered … A child of the soil, he is as far from Cambridge as he is near to the village mud-houses of India.’**
A time of troubles. In April Nehru received the Santhanam Report on Corruption.120 The Das Report121 on the Kairon regime in the Punjab was not quite ready but he knew the general tenor of its findings. In April, seeking, as always, for better relations with Nepal, a difficult neighbour, he journeyed to the Nepal border to have talks with the king. And in April, having got Abdullah released, he made a speech to Parliament on Indo-Pakistan relations. There was no other way for India and Pakistan to live, he said, except in peace. ‘The Pakistanis are a decent folk, but when you excite the people with religious slogans nobody remains decent; they become brutal, be it Hindu or Muslim.’ Referring to the massacres in Orissa and Bihar he went on: ‘It was scandalous in the extreme that anybody should do what our people have done there. We Indians should not become self-righteous… We Indians think that every evil is being done by Pakistan and China and that we are completely free from wrongdoing.’ As for intrusions over the Indo-Pakistan border, ‘the big difference is that our intrusions do not give rise to questions in our Parliament whereas the Pakistan intrusions do’. This brave and moving speech provoked interjections but Nehru, maimed in body though he was, insisted on his points.*
In May he continued discussions over Kashmir. In mid-May he went to Bombay for a Congress Party meeting and, little to the taste of his audience,** he stressed the gravity of anti-Muslim feeling in India and the urgency of the need for a new approach to the great questions of Pakistan, Kashmir, and China. Sheikh Abdullah, now free again, was making statements to the effect that Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947 was not irrevocable and that the people of Kashmir had not yet come to a decision. He exasperated Indian public opinion still more by hinting that the best solution would be an independent Kashmir guaranteed jointly by India and Pakistan. On China, Nehru repeated his offer of talks; his offer was couched in reasonable terms.
Back in Delhi from the Bombay meeting he gave some time to the president of Sudan, who was in India on a state visit. He also saw the Dalai Lama. On May 18 he gave a TV interview for America. On May 22 he held a press conference. It was then, in reply to a journalist who asked about his successor, that he said that he had made no arrangements and that his end was some time off yet. During these days he also attended celebrations of the Shakespeare quarter-centenary. On Saturday, May 23, he held long talks with Sheikh Abdullah, who had come to Delhi to see him; back in Nehru’s house again after the eleven years in jail. Late in the afternoon Nehru flew in a helicopter to Dehra Dun for the weekend. While he was there he worked on papers. He also saw an old family friend and Congress Party colleague, Sri Prakasa, who was also an old and loyal associate of Mrs Annie Besant, and since independence had spent about ten years as governor first of Madras and then of Bombay; a man of elevated and lovable character. The helicopter brought Nehru back to Delhi on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 26. He spent a normal evening at home. In the course of it he asked Lal Bahadur Shastri, half jokingly, half seriously, to order some new achkans (Indian formal clothing) for the Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. He had decided to take him to London with him and he was looking forward to the conference. He retired to his study in the usual way, finished working on some papers, and went to bed about eleven. His own circle was as confident as the public that Nehru’s recovery was assured.
Next morning, Wednesday, May 27, he woke about five. He complained of pains in the abdomen. Considerate as usual, he refused to allow his daughter to call a doctor; he thought the pain would pass and he need not wake up a doctor. But the pain increased, and shortly afterwards he collapsed. Doctors were called; but he never regained consciousness. It was evident th
at the aorta artery had burst. One of the surgeons wanted to make an emergency operation as the one last chance. Mrs Gandhi consented, but the cabinet group, like some of the too numerous doctors consulted, fearing to take responsibility, insisted on telephoning one of the prime minister’s sisters a thousand miles away. She asked them to wait until she got to Delhi. He was dead by 2 pm; she did not get there until a couple of hours after that. Blood transfusions had been tried, though with some difficulty because of Nehru’s belonging to a rare blood-group. Mrs Gandhi gave her blood. After his death it was rumoured that he died at about nine o’clock and that the news had been concealed for political reasons until two o’clock; but according to one of the doctors in attendance this rumour is untrue. He was six months short of seventy five.
The news of his death soon spread over Delhi; and from Delhi it spread that afternoon and evening throughout India. Shock and sorrow and foreboding accompanied the news. Normal business stopped. Shops were closed immediately, spontaneously. Even the small sophisticated critical minority in Delhi and Bombay were sobered. That a life of a significance above the average had gone out was also felt throughout the world. In most countries Nehru’s death took priority over all the other news. Tributes began pouring in from all quarters, from the Pope, from kings and presidents and prime ministers, and from innumerable individuals. Several important foreign governments decided at once that they would be represented on a level above the normal at the funeral, though it was to take place next day: the Queen of England and Head of the Commonwealth (who was reported to have arranged to offer Nehru at the forthcoming Prime Ministers’ Conference the Order of Merit) by Lord Mountbatten, Great Britain by the prime minister and the deputy leader of the opposition, the United States by the secretary of state, Japan by her foreign minister, General de Gaulle122 by a favourite minister. President Ayub, surprisingly and uncharacteristically, decided not to go to the funeral. Many humble people not important enough to telegraph or publish their tributes, felt, as did millions of Indians, that the world was somehow the darker for Nehru’s going and that his life had done honour to humanity.
That Wednesday was overcast, the air heavy and tense with the pre-monsoon storm which burst in the afternoon. This is the hottest time of the year in north India. The crowds took no heed of the weather. They began filing past the body as soon as they were allowed. The body had been brought down to the ground floor in the afternoon and Mrs Gandhi, in the Indian way, sat beside it. A vigil party drawn from high-ranking officers of the armed services stood by. Hour after hour the people filed by, many of them weeping. They included both sexes and all ages and from every class and group in Delhi. This went on most of the night, and it continued throughout the next morning, Thursday. The police estimated that half a million had filed by when, in order to make the final preparations for the funeral procession, the gates were shut towards midday on Thursday. People then tried to get over the gates and had to be driven off, which resulted in a stampede: three were trampled to death and others were injured. The funeral was to have taken place at dawn but had been delayed so that Sir Alec Douglas-Home123 and other foreign dignitaries could get there in time for it.
A little before noon an earthquake shook Delhi.
A little later the pall-bearers, men of high rank, removed the body to a gun-carriage, placing it in a tilted position with the head uncovered and the rest draped with the Indian flag. Flowers were spread over the gun-carriage. Hindu priests were in attendance, some chanting mantras; and some Christians were also there, singing Gandhi’s two favourite hymns ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘Rock of Ages’. About 1:20 the procession set off. For fifty years Nehru had been drawing the biggest crowds in India. Now on his last journey he drew the biggest crowd of all. Some said a million, some said 2 million, some said 3 million, watched the passage of his corpse.
The journey lay along the six miles from Nehru’s house to the place on the banks of the Jamuna near where Gandhi’s body had been cremated some sixteen years before; along the roads and streets where Nehru had driven countless times since then; past the secretariat where he had worked such long hours, skirting Parliament House where over the years he had dominated Indian politics, up Rajpath (Kingsway) the same route followed by the Republic Day parades which he had so much enjoyed, down Tilak Marg (Hardinge Avenue), and so under the railway bridge and out to the Ring Road, and on to the banks of the Jamuna. There a brick plinth about 5 feet high and 10 feet square had been built, and the pyre of sandalwood was ready for the body.
The funeral procession was headed by a jeep with the general commanding the Delhi-Rajastan area, with servicemen marching in slow time with arms reversed. Men from each of the services pulled the gun carriage. This was followed by an open car with Mrs Gandhi and her younger son, Sanjay (the elder boy had not been able to get back in time from Cambridge), and then followed a cavalcade of cars containing the chief mourners, Mrs Pandit, Mrs Hutheesingh and some other members of the Nehru family, the pall-bearers, the president, the cabinet, the service chiefs, and foreign dignitaries.
The immense crowd kept reasonable order until the cortège left Rajpath. They were weeping or chanting or throwing flowers towards the gun carriage or just looking on; but they kept pushing closer and closer to it. By the time the cortège passed down Hardinge Avenue the crowd did what angered Nehru often in his lifetime: in a herd-like mindless stampede it broke through the police cordon. The police, reinforced by police from the neighbouring states, and at certain points by army detachments, were overrun. The gun carriage and the first couple of cars were allowed to proceed on their way but the remaining cars were cut off. Some of the dignitaries followed on foot and were fortunate not to have been crushed to death. The heat too was suffocating. The crowd was not hostile; in general it was reverent; but it was a crowd, and its behaviour conformed with that quality of the mixed up, tears and laughter, reverence and inquisitiveness, considerateness and inconsiderateness, which is characteristic of so much in India. Scores of people fainted or were injured. And so on his last journey was Nehru accompanied by the crowdedness, the disorder, the ineffectiveness of the half-finished, the colour, and the peoples’ goodwill, which had accompanied him in life for the last twenty years.
It was a little after four when the cortège reached the cremation-ground. A helicopter showered rose petals on the gun-carriage as it moved in place. To the sound of muffled drums the body was taken from the gun carriage and placed on the pyre, among the pall-bearers being Bakshi, the ousted ruler of Kashmir. Hindu and Buddhist priests chanted; the sacred water was sprinkled; and a small group, including the vice-president (a Muslim), some cabinet ministers, and Krishna Menon, filed past the body for the last time, placing little pieces of sandalwood on the pyre. Then the flag was replaced with a white silk scarf and more petals were scattered on it. A little after half past four Sanjay lit the pyre and the flames rose briskly. That part of the ceremony came from India. The next part came from England: a volley of small arms was fired three times and twenty-four buglers sounded ‘The Last Post’. While the fire was burning the body to ashes thus was symbolised the inexorability of India and England in Nehru’s life. Before the fire had died down Sheikh Abdullah leapt on the platform and, weeping unrestrainedly, threw flowers on to the flames; thus was symbolised the inextricability of the Muslim world in Nehru’s life and the pathos of the Kashmir affair.
On the following day, Saturday, May 30, at dawn, in the presence of the President and several cabinet ministers as well as of Mrs Gandhi and her two sons (the elder had by this time reached Delhi) and Nehru’s two sisters and other members of the family, the ashes were collected. They were sprinkled with water from the sacred Ganges and with milk and were put into copper urns. Early as it was, the crowd standing by numbered several thousands. Many were chanting the ‘Ram Dhun’.
The urns were taken to Nehru’s house and placed under a tree in his garden. During the days they remained there people filed past, hour after hour.
On June 2 Lal Bahadur Shastri was chosen as prime minister.
A week after the death, on June 3, passages from Nehru’s will were read out over the All India Radio by Mrs Pandit. It had been written ten years earlier, in June 1954.*
The will laid down, amongst other things, ‘with all earnestness’ that no religious ceremonies should be associated with his funeral. ‘To submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hyprocrisy—an attempt to delude ourselves and others’. But he asked that a handful of ashes be thrown over the river Ganges. This, he explained, was not intended to have any religious significance; the Ganges was ‘a symbol of India’s agelong culture and civilisation, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and deep valleys of the Himalayas which I have loved so much and of the vast plains below where my life and work have been cast.’ The remainder of his ashes were to be carried high in an aircraft and ‘scattered over the fields where the peasants of India toil so that they might mingle with the dust of the soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of her…’ The will again referred to ‘the shackles of religion that bind and constrict her and blind her people…’
Much of Nehru is in this will. Here was the man who all his life stood for rationalism; here was the father who had refused to allow Indira when a little girl to hear fairytales. But the poetical strain in him was not without religious overtones. For all Indians in any case the Ganges had a religious significance which was beyond words. From beginning to end the long-drawn funeral ceremonies were to the accompaniment of priests and the old priestly cults. And here too was the English strain once more: the will was written not in Hindi but in English.
On Tuesday, June 9, the final ceremony took place. This was to drop the greater portion of the ashes into the river at Sangam, a sacred place near Allahabad, where the Jamuna flows into the Ganges. A train brought the urns from Delhi and reached Nehru’s home town at daybreak. With them were Mrs Gandhi and her two sons and Nehru’s two sisters and other members of the family, together with members of the central and local state governments. They also brought Kamala’s ashes; Nehru had been keeping them in his room for the twenty eight years since her death.
Nehru Page 20
