India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  Nehru had an unusual capacity – unusual among politicians, at any rate – to view both sides of the question. He could see the imperfections of the process even while being committed to it. However, by the time the final results were in, and the Congress had emerged as the unchallenged party of rule, the doubts in Nehru’s own mind had disappeared. ‘My respect for the so-called illiterate voter,’ he said, ‘has gone up. Whatever doubts I might have had about adult suffrage in India have been removed completely.’53

  The election itself also comprehensively set to rest the doubts of the new American ambassador to India, Chester Bowles. This representative of the world’s richest democracy assumed his post in Delhi in the autumn of 1951. He confessed that he was ‘appalled at the prospect of a poll of 200 million eligible voters, most of whom were illiterate villagers’. He ‘feared a fiasco’, even (as the Madras Mail put it), ‘the biggest farce ever staged in the name of democracy anywhere in the world’. But a trip through the country during polling changed his mind. Once, he had thought that poor countries needed a period of rule by a benevolent dictator as preparation for democracy. But the sight of many parties contesting freely, and of Untouchables and Brahmins standing in the same line, persuaded him otherwise. He no longer thought literacy was a test of intelligence, no longer believed that Asia needed a ‘series of Ataturks’ before they would be ready for democracy. Summing up his report on the election, Bowles wrote: ‘In Asia, as in America, I know no grander vision than this, government by the consent of the governed.’54

  A visiting Turkish journalist focused on the content of the election rather than its form. He admired Nehru’s decision not to follow other Asian countries in taking ‘the line of least resistance’ by developing ‘a dictatorship with centralisation of power and intolerance of dissent and criticism’. The prime minister had ‘wisely kept away from such temptations’. Yet the ‘main credit’, according to the Turkish writer, ‘goes to the nation itself; 176,000,000 Indians were left all alone with their conscience in face of the polling box. It was direct and secret voting. They had their choice between theocracy, chauvinism, communal separatism and isolationism on the one side; secularism, national unity, stability, moderation and friendly intercourse with the rest of the world on the other. They showed their maturity in choosing moderation and progress and disapproving of reaction and unrest.’ So impressed was this observer that he took a delegation of his countrymen to meet Sukumar Sen. The chief election commissioner showed them samples of ballot boxes, ballot papers and symbols, as well as the plan of a polling station, so that they could work to resume the interrupted progress of democracy in their own country.55

  In one sense the Turkish journalist was right. There were indeed 176 million heroes; or, at least 107 million – those among the eligible who actually took the trouble to vote. Still, some heroes were more special than others. As the respected Lucknow sociologist D. P. Mukerji pointed out, ‘great credit is due to those who are in charge of this stupendous first experiment in Indian history. Bureaucracy has certainly proved its worth by honestly discharging the duties imposed on it by a honest prime minister.’56

  The juxtaposition is important, and also ironical. For there was a time when Nehru had little but scorn for the bureaucracy. As he put it in his autobiography, ‘few things are more striking today in India than the progressive deterioration, moral and intellectual, of the higher services, more especially the Indian Civil Services. This is most in evidence in the superior officials, but it runs like a thread throughout the services.’57 This was written in 1935, when the objects of his derision had the power to put him and his like in jail. And yet, fifteen years later, Nehru was obliged to place the polls in the hands of men he would once have dismissed as imperialist stooges.

  In this respect, the 1952 election was a script jointly authored by historical forces for so long opposed to one another: British colonialism and Indian nationalism. Between them these forces had given this new nation what could be fairly described as a jump-start to democracy.

  8

  Home and the World

  Pandit Nehru is at his best when he is not pinned down to matters of detail.

  Economic Weekly, 28 July 1951

  I

  NOT LONG AFTER THE 1952 election the Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri produced an essay on Jawaharlal Nehru for a popular magazine. The writer was by this time moderately well known, but his subject still towered over both him and everybody else. Nehru’s leadership, remarked Chaudhuri, ‘is the most important moral force behind the unity of India’. He was ‘the leader not of a party, but of the people of India taken collectively, the legitimate successor to Gandhiji’. As he saw it,

  Nehru is keeping together the governmental machine and the people, and without this nexus India would probably have been deprived of stable government in these crucial times. He has not only ensured co-operation between the two, but most probably has also prevented actual conflicts, cultural, economic, and political. Not even Mahatmaji’s leadership, had it continued, would have been quite equal to them.

  If, within the country, Nehru is the indispensable link between the governing middle-classes and the sovereign people, he is no less the bond between India and the world. [He serves as] India’s representative to the great Western democracies, and, I must add, their representative to India. The Western nations certainly look upon him as such and expect him to guarantee India’s support for them, which is why they are so upset when Nehru takes an anti-Western or neutral line. They feel they are being let down by one of themselves.1

  Through his long tenure as prime minister, Nehru served simultaneously as foreign minister of the government of India. This was natural, for among the Congress leadership he alone had a genuinely internationalist perspective. Gandhi had been universalist in outlook but had hardly travelled abroad. The other Congress leaders, such as Vallabhbhai Patel, were determinedly inward-looking. Nehru, on the other hand, ‘had always been fascinated by world trends and movements’.2

  Through the inter-war period Nehru remained a close observer of and occasional participant in European debates. In 1927 he visited Soviet Russia, and in the next decade travelled widely over the Continent. In the 1930s he played an active part in mobilizing support for the Republican cause in Spain. He became a pillar of the progressive left, speaking often on public platforms in England and France. His name and fame in this regard were aided by the publication and commercial success of his autobiography, which appeared in London in 1936.3

  Representative of Nehru’s ideas is a speech he delivered on ‘Peace and Empire’ at Friends House, Euston, in July 1938. This began by speaking of ‘fascist aggression’ but went on to see fascism as merely another variant of imperialism. In Britain the tendency was to distinguish between the two. But in Nehru’s mind there was little doubt that those who ‘sought complete freedom for all the subject peoples of the world’ had to oppose both fascism and imperialism.

  The crisis of the times, said Nehru, had promoted a ‘growing solidarity of the various peoples’ and a ‘feeling of international fellowship and comradeship’. His own talk ranged widely around the hot spots of the world. He spoke of Spain, of Abyssinia, of China, of Palestine, and most sensitively, of Africa. The ‘people of Africa deserve our special consideration’, he pointed out, for ‘probably no other people in the world have suffered so much, and have been exploited so much’.4

  In the late summer of 1939 Nehru planned a trip to India’s great Asian neighbour, China. He had been in friendly correspondence with Chiang Kai-shek, for, as he told a colleague, ‘more and more I think of India and China pulling together in the future’. He hoped to go by air to Chungking, spend three weeks travelling in the hinterland and to return home via the Burma Road. Sadly, the war in Europe put paid to the tour.5

  Nehru was jailed for his part in the Quit India movement of 1942. When he was released in July 1945 his energies were devoted to the endgames of empire. But after it became clear that India
would soon be free, his thoughts turned once more to foreign affairs. In a radio broadcast of September 1946 he singled out the United States, the Soviet Union and China as the three countries most relevant to India’s future. The next year he spoke in the Constituent Assembly on how India would be friends with both the US and the USSR, rather than become camp followers of one power ‘in the hope that some crumbs might fall from their table’. As he put it, ‘we lead ourself’.6

  An early articulation of what came to be known as ‘non-alignment’ is contained in a letter written by Nehru to K. P. S. Menon in January 1947, as the latter prepared to take up his assignment as India’s first ambassador to China:

  Our general policy is to avoid entanglement in power politics and not to join any group of powers as against any other group. The two leading groups today are the Russian bloc and the Anglo-American bloc. We must be friendly to both and yet not join either. Both America and Russia are extraordinarily suspicious of each other as well as of other countries. This makes our path difficult and we may well be suspected by each of leaning towards the other. This cannot be helped.7

  Nehru saw Indian independence as part of a wider Asian resurgence. Past centuries might have belonged to Europe, or to the white races in general, but it was now time for non-white and previously subordinated peoples to come into their own.

  A remarkable initiative in this regard was the Asian Relations Conference, held in New Delhi in the last week of March 1947. Twenty-eight countries sent representatives – these included India’s close neighbours (Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon and Nepal), the still colonized nations of Southeast Asia (such as Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam), China and Tibet (the two sent separate delegations), seven Asian ‘republics’ of the Soviet Union and Korea. The Arab League was also represented and there was a Jewish delegation from Palestine. As a Western journalist covering the event recalled, for a week the city of Delhi ‘was filled with the most intricate variety of people, strange in costume and countenance – brocades from South-East Asia, bell-bottoms from the Eastern Soviet Republics, braided hair and quilted robes from Tibet . . . dozens of curious languages and poly-syllabic titles. One way and another, as we kept reminding one another, this multitude represented nearly half the population of the world.’8

  The conference was held in the Purana Qila, a large, somewhat rundown yet still majestic stone structure built by Sher Shah Suri in the sixteenth century. The opening and concluding sessions were open to the public, and attracted large crowds – 20,000, by one estimate. The official language was English but interpreters were provided for the delegates. Speakers spoke on a podium; behind them was mounted a huge map of the continent, with ASIA written atop it in neon lights. The inaugural address was by Nehru. ‘Rising to a great ovation’, he talked of how, ‘after a long period of quiescence’, Asia had ‘suddenly become important in world affairs’. Its countries could ‘no longer be used as pawns by others’.9 However, as the journalist G. H. Jansen recalled, Nehru’s speech ‘was not directly or strongly anti-colonial. “The old imperialisms are fading away”, he said. With an almost contemptuous wave of the hand he did something worse than attack them; he pronounced a valediction.’10

  After Nehru had his say, each participating country, in alphabetical order, sent a speaker to the podium. This took two whole days, after which the meeting broke up into thematic round-tables. There were separate sections on ‘national movements for freedom’; ‘racial problems and inter-Asian migration’; ‘economic development and social services’; ‘cultural problems’; and ‘status of women and women’s movements’.

  The conference concluded with a talk by Mahatma Gandhi. He regretted that the conference had not met in the ‘real India’ of the villages but in the cities that were ‘influenced by the West’. The ‘message of Asia’, insisted Gandhi, was ‘not to be learnt through the Western spectacles or by imitating the atom bomb . . . I want you to go away with the thought that Asia has to conquer the West through love and truth.’11

  Gandhi made his appearance, but this was really Nehru’s show. His admirers saw it as confirmation of his status as the authentic voice of resurgent Asia. His critics were less generous. In its account of the conference, the Muslim League newspaper, Dawn, complained of how ‘skilfully he [Nehru] has worked himself into some sort of all-Asian leadership. That is just what this ambitious Hindu leader had intended – to thrust himself upon the Asian nations as their leader and through his attainment of that prestige and eminence to further the expansionist designs of Indian Hinduism.’12

  II

  Nehru had often been to Europe before Independence. His first trip to the United States, however, took place two years after he had assumed office as prime minister. The US had not loomed large in Nehru’s political imagination. His Glimpses of World History, for example, devotes far less space to it than to China or Russia. And what he says is not always complimentary. The capitalism of the American kind had led to slavery, gangsterism, and massive extremes of wealth and poverty. The American financier J. Pierpont Morgan owned a yacht worth £6 million, yet New York was known as ‘Hunger Town’. Nehru admired Roosevelt’s attempts at regulating the economy, but he was not hopeful that FDR would succeed. For ‘American Big Business is held to be the most powerful vested interest in the modern world, and it is not going to give up its power and privileges merely at the bidding of President Roosevelt’.13

  Before Nehru’s trip to America in late 1949, an enterprising reporter at Time magazine went through his writings. The exercise revealed that he had ‘simply never given the subject [of America] much thought. As a British university man, he has perhaps looked down snobbishly at American deficiency in culture. As a sentimental socialist, he has ticked off the U.S. as unrivalled in technology but predatory in its capitalism.’14

  Nehru’s feelings were widely shared. Like British aristocrats, the Indian elite tended to think of America and Americans as uncouth and uncultured. Representative are the views of P. P. Kumaramangalam, scion of an illustrious south Indian family. His father, Dr P. Subbaroyan, was a rich landlord and an influential politician – he later served in Nehru’s Cabinet. The son studied at Sandhurst – his siblings in Oxford and Cambridge. These, a brother named Mohan and a sister named Parvathi, went on to become leading lights of the Communist Party of India. This predisposed them to a dislike of America. But in this respect the brother who was an army officer outdid them. After Indian independence he was sent for training to the artillery school at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. From here he wrote to a Madras mentor of how

  This country is not one that I will ever get fond of. I have not got a very high opinion of them. The people that I have to deal with are very kind, hospitable and have been very good to the two of us. But somehow I feel there is a trace of artificiality in that and also it is the result of trying to impress one. They I think are very jealous of the old world and its background and culture and this results in an aggressive inferiority complex. As for their state of morality, there is none. People seem to delight in trying to outwit each other by any means, mainly crooked. The politicians are racketeers and big business has a tight grip on everything in the country. The small country tradesman and the farmer I think have their hands pretty securely tied by the big men. I do hope our country proceeds with caution and doesn’t get entirely under the influence of the [United] States.15

  Americans, for their part, had their own prejudices about India. They admired Gandhi and his struggle for national independence, but their knowledge of the country itself was scant. As Harold Isaac once pointed out, for the postwar American there were really only four kinds of Indians. These were: (1) the fabulous Indians, the maharajas and magicians coupled with equally exotic animals such as tigers and elephants; (2) the mystical Indians, a people who were ‘deep, contemplative, tranquil, profound . . .’; (3) the benighted Indians, who worshipped animals and many-headed gods, living in a country that was even more heathen than China; and (4) the pathetic Indians, plagued by pov
erty and crippled by disease – ‘children with fly-encircled eyes, with swollen stomachs, children dying in the streets, rivers choked with bodies . . .’ Of these images perhaps the last two predominated. It was no accident that the book on the subcontinent best known in America was Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, a book that Gandhi had described as a ‘drain inspector’s report’.16

  Nehru in part shared the prejudices of Indians, and he was sensible of the American ones. But for this first high-level encounter between the youngest and richest democracies he was prepared to put them on hold. In August 1949, as he prepared for his trip, Nehru was uncharacteristically nervous. ‘In what mood shall I address America?’ he asked his sister Vijayalakshmi. ‘How shall I address people etc.? How shall I deal with the Government there and businessmen and others? Which facet of myself should I put before the American public – the Indian or the European . . . I want to be friendly with the Americans but always making it clear what we stand for.’17

  Nehru spent three weeks in America, delivering a speech a day to audiences as diverse as the United States Congress and a congregation in a Chicago chapel. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Columbia University and listened to by a crowd of 10,000 at the University of California at Berkeley. He displayed the common touch, being photographed with a taxi driver in Boston, but also made clear his membership of the aristocracy of the intellect, as in a much-publicized visit to Albert Einstein in Princeton.

  Addressing Congress, Nehru spoke respectfully of the founders of America, but then counterposed to them a great man from his own country. This was Gandhi, whose message of peace and truth had inspired independent India’s foreign policy. The Mahatma, however, ‘was too great for the circumscribed borders of any one country, and the message he gave may help us in considering the wider problems of the world’. For what the world most lacked, said Nehru, was ‘understanding and appreciation of each other among nations and peoples’.