India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  16

  Peace in Our Time

  Here we are having a grudging time, both with the weather and the problems which are arising; Kashmir, in particular, is giving us a severe headache.

  VALLABHBHAI PATEL to G. D. BIRLA, May 1949

  I

  APART FROM THE SEVERAL thousand Indian soldiers dead or injured, the casualties of the China war included the chief of army staff, General P. N. Thapar (who resigned, citing ill health), the failed strategic thinker Lieutenant General B. M. Kaul (who was retired prematurely) and the defence minister, V. K. Krishna Menon (who was sacked). A greater casualty still was the reputation of Jawaharlal Nehru. The border war was Nehru’s most consequential failure in fifteen years as prime minister. The inability to bring about radical land reform affected the rural poor; the dismissal of the Kerala communists angered many people in that state; other sections likewise had their own grievances against the government. But the failure to protect the nation’s territory was a different matter altogether. The humiliation that resulted was felt, as military defeats invariably are, by the nation as a whole.

  Krishna Menon and the army brass had been sacrificed, yet the prime minister knew that deep down he was ultimately responsible for the disaster, in a general sense, as the head of government, and in a very specific sense, as one who had guided and determined India’s attitudes and policies towards China.

  Those attitudes and policies now had to be rethought. Nehru could at last see what Vallabhbhai Patel had sensed long ago: that communism in China was merely a more bellicose form of nationalism. The border war provoked a reluctant tilt towards the United States, who had come forth with arms while Soviet Russia stayed neutral. A key player in this shift was the American ambassador in New Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith. A Harvard economics professor who was sceptical of the free market, a scholar of art history, a noted bon vivant and wit, Galbraith was, to Indian eyes, a very untypical American indeed. (In fact, he was by birth Canadian.) Things were changing, back in Washington, where a new young president, John F. Kennedy, was seeking to reverse the American government’s image as uncaring at home and arrogant abroad. It was these winds of liberalism that carried Galbraith along to India.

  From the time he took charge in April 1961, the ambassador got on famously with Nehru. They discussed art and music and literature; this, on the Indian’s part, a welcome diversion from the daily grind but on the American’s a shrewd softening-up of a mind long prejudiced against his country. In March 1962 the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, arrived for a trip through India, where she saw the Taj Mahal and Rajput forts and had extended conversations with the prime minister.

  Nehru was charmed by Mrs Kennedy’s beauty, as he had been by her envoy’s brains. But the thaw would not have become a tilt had it not been for the war with China. On 9 November, after the first wave of attacks, Galbraith was called in to meet the prime minister. He found him ‘deathly tired and I thought a little beaten’. (Earlier in the day, Nehru had made a speech in Parliament which was ‘a good deal less than Churchillian’.) A request was made for arms from America. This came at a cost that could never be measured in money alone. For, as Galbraith wrote to President Kennedy, all his life Nehru had

  sought to avoid being dependent upon the United States and the United Kingdom – most of his personal reluctance to ask (or thank) for aid has been based on this pride . . . Now nothing is so important to him, more personally than politically, than to maintain the semblance of this independence. His age no longer allows of readjustment. To a point we can, I feel, be generous on this.1

  By late November the arms began arriving, carried in planes that also contained soldiers in uniform. As an American journalist wrote, this meant the ‘collapse of his [Nehru’s] non-alignment policy’; to many those dark blue uniforms carried ‘a special meaning’, contained in one single word: ‘failure’.2 For the American ambassador, however, those uniforms spelt the word ‘opportunity’. This might be the beginnings of an entente to contain a communist power potentially more threatening than Soviet Russia itself. As Galbraith wrote to President Kennedy,

  the Chinese are not quarreling with the Soviets over some academic points of doctrine. They are, one must assume, serious about their revolution. The natural area of expansion is in their part of the world. The only Asian country which really stands in their way is India and pari passu the only Western country that is assuming responsibility is the United States. It seems obvious to me [that] there should be some understanding between the two countries. We should expect to make use of India’s political position, geographical position, political power and manpower or anyhow ask.3

  II

  In response to the Indian request, President Kennedy sanctioned the supply of a million rounds for machine guns, 40,000 land mines and 100,000 mortar rounds.4 This fell far short of the Grand Alliance that his ambassador was recommending; yet it was far in excess of what other Americans thought New Delhi deserved. A bitter opponent of arms supply to India was Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, the long-serving chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. A crusty old reactionary – doughtily opposed to desegregation and the like – Russell had previously termed India an ‘unreliable friend’ and called Nehru a ‘demagogue and a hypocrite’. Now he told the Associated Press that he was ‘against giving India any of our modern weapons for the principal reason that we would be just giving them to the Chinese Communists’. The Indians, said the senator, had ‘put on a disgraceful exhibition in permitting themselves to be driven out of what should have been impregnable strongholds in the border mountains. They seem incapable of fighting and if we supply them with weapons they will just fall into the hands of the Communists’. While he was at present opposed to giving ‘one dime of weapons to India’, Russell said he might have a rethink if India’s old rulers, the British, were prepared to ‘take over the matter of re-organizing and re-training their military forces’.5

  Russell’s remarks were widely reported in the United States as well as in India. The storm of correspondence that it generated is a unique prism through which one can view US–India relations. One would expect the two countries to have been allies, if only because both were large and culturally diverse democracies. However, their relations had been clouded by suspicion on both sides – suspicion of India’s non-alignment on one side, and of American military aid to Pakistan on the other. It did not help that these were both preachy peoples, whose foreign policy and diplomacy were invariably accompanied by an unctuous self-righteousness. Where democratic ideals sought to bring the two countries closer together, pride and patriotism pulled them further apart.

  Thus, while Kennedy and Galbraith might have deplored Senator Russell’s stand, he received much support from across Middle America. A correspondent from Wichita, Kansas, thanked the senator for warning that it was ‘very dangerous for the US to make a doormat of itself to a country whose leaders have shown little interest or support to the US except to take our money and aid and then vilify us at every turn’. A lady from Loomis, California, agreed that ‘nothing should be sent to that pro-Communist hypocrite and political actor Nehru and his Communist ministers’. A man from Plantation, Florida, thought that India’s troubles were ‘of their own consequences and making’; namely, the ‘Neutralist Policy’ which they followed even while ‘the Communists have swallowed millions of people’ the world over. An 85-year-old Democrat from South San Gabriel endorsed Russell’s ‘objection to this country saddling its taxpayers with the upkeep of four hundred million ignorant, starving people of India, whose leaders including Nehru and others are strikingly procommunist and hostile to our form of government . . . Nehru’s so-called neutralism . . . should teach this nation to let India stew in its own superstitious and ignorant juices.’

  From his compatriots, Senator Russell received dozens of letters of congratulation, but only one of dissent. This was written by a Fulbright scholar based in Madras, who said it was time to undo the American policy of armi
ng Pakistan while denying aid to India. India, said the scholar, was a ‘popular democracy’, whereas Pakistan was a military dictatorship which ‘exists as a political entity solely on its emotional antagonism to India’. Besides, it was not true that the Indian troops had simply fled. They had fought hard in parts, and had they been better armed, could have held their own. Now, ‘India is seeing to the recruitment of more troops; I should think that it would be in our best interests to see that they are properly armed.’

  There were also letters by Indians to the senator, these naturally angry and hurt. A correspondent from Bombay agreed that Nehru ‘used foggy thinking with regard to the Chinese intentions’, but refused to accept Russell’s insinuation that ‘courage and defiance [were] a monopoly of white skins’ alone. The Indian jawan matched the American GI in grit as well as guts, as manifest in his heroism in the crucial battles of the two world wars. But this time the ‘War machinery was just not good enough (thanks to Mr Menon). Our boys did without the luxury of air cover, automatic rifles, ear muffs, K-Rations and Bob Hope to cheer them up on the frigid front lines.’

  Russell’s biliousness was answered in kind by the novelist and scriptwriter Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, one of India’s most prominent fellow-travelling intellectuals. Abbas said that while there was a long history of stupid remarks by Westerners about India, Russell’s interview ‘takes the cake for unwarranted slander and unmitigated mischief’. ‘But surely, Senator Russell’, wrote Abbas, ‘if you are looking for “disgraceful exhibitions” of military debacles, you will find ample material nearer home’ – in Pearl Harbor, in the early reverses in the Korean War, in the Bay of Pigs. He referred the American to General Eisenhower’s praise for the Indian soldier, who had thwarted Rommel at El Alamein and, in other sectors across Europe and Africa, had fought ‘to save Senator Russell and his “free world” from the menace of Hitler’.

  Senator Russell’s remarks brought to the fore the mutual misunderstandings between Indians and Americans as they had been up to 1962 – and beyond. Behind these lay different perceptions of foreign policy and national interest, and also a certain incompatibility of cultures. The two peoples ate, drank, sang, dressed and thought differently. As an admirer in Jacksonville wrote to the Senator: ‘This Nehru, technically Caucasian, politically nothing of the sort . . . How can there be a “meeting of minds” with a man who stands on his head?’ The reference was to Jawaharlal Nehru’s love of yoga, a form of therapy then completely alien to the American way of life.6

  III

  The defeat by China caused the prime minister a certain loss of face in the international arena. It also undermined his position at home. Criticism of his leadership grew more strident. In the summer of 1963 the Congress lost a series of important by-elections, which put into Parliament three opposition stalwarts: Minoo Masani, J. B. Kripalani and Ram Manohar Lohia.

  In June 1963 Nehru held a press conference, his first in many months. The meeting lasted ninety minutes, and was notable for the anger the prime minister directed at the Chinese. He spoke of the ‘dark spate of falsehoods emanating from Peking’, and of their ‘high record in vituperation’. Explaining the war, and India’s defeat therein, Nehru claimed that ‘the Chinese are a military-minded nation, always laying stress on military roads and preparedness . . . Right from the beginning of the present regime there, they have concentrated on the military apparatus being stronger. It is a continuation really of the past civil wars. So, they are normally strong.’7

  Nehru also said that in attacking him personally, the Chinese ‘have something in common with some of our opposition leaders here’. He then added, gratuitously: ‘As for our opposition leaders, they have the habit of combining with anybody and everybody regardless of principle and a time may come when some of them may for the purpose combine with the Chinese’. Soon, the opposition leaders did formally combine among themselves to introduce a ‘no-confidence’ motion in Parliament, an act of daring that would have been inconceivable at any time between August 1947 and November 1962. The Congress had the numbers to easily defeat the vote, but the debate lasted all of four days, during which a series of telling points were made against the prime minister, his party, and his government.8

  The criticisms in and out of Parliament prompted a serious rethink among the Congress leadership. Fifteen years in power had made the party complacent, somewhat out of touch with happenings on the ground – as evidenced in the recent by-election defeats and the growing strength of regional parties like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The chief minister of Madras, K. Kamaraj, was himself most threatened by the DMK; now, to check its rise and stem the rot within, he recommended that senior Congress ministers leave their posts to help rejuvenate the party. Under the ‘Kamaraj Plan’ six chief ministers resigned to work for the party – these included Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed of Kashmir and Kamaraj himself. Six senior Union ministers also resigned – among them Jagjivan Ram, Morarji Desai and Lal Bahadur Shastri.9

  The prime minister stayed in his job. But he was noticeably weakened, in body as well as mind. In September 1963 the Socialist MP H. V. Kamath saw Nehru walking in to take his seat in Parliament: ‘an old man, looking frail and fatigued, with a marked stoop in his gait, coming down the gangway opposite with slow, faltering steps, and clutching the backrests of benches for support as he descended’. Kamath’s mind went back to his own early visions of a man he had once venerated: at a Congress session in Madras, where Nehru stood ‘sprightly, slim and erect’; at his home in Allahabad, where Nehru ‘jumped two steps at a time, with me emulating him, as I followed him upstairs’.10

  Where Indians would not speculate openly about Nehru’s death, Western observers were under no such inhibition. In 1963 the American journalist Wells Hangen published a book with the title After Nehru, Who? This listed eight possible successors, each of whom was allotted a separate chapter. Six were from the Congress Party: Morarji Desai, V. K. Krishna Menon, Y. B. Chavan, Lal Bahadur Shastri, S. K. Patil and the sole female candidate, Indira Gandhi. A seventh possibility was the social worker and sometime socialist revolutionary Jayaprakash Narayan. The last listed was a general – B. M. Kaul.11

  The question now being asked was not just ‘After Nehru, Who?’, but also ‘After Nehru, What?’ Shortly after the publication of Hangen’s book, a reporter from the Sunday Times of London spent several weeks travelling through India. He met the prime minister, to find that ‘old Nehru has gone downhill so fast recently’. The decay of the man mirrored the decay of his country. In contrast to the ‘intensity and unfathomable ambition of a wild young China’, India was a land of ‘indescribable poverty’ and a ‘will-less Government’. What would happen after Nehru passed on? The reporter thought that the battle ‘will lie between the Communists and the new generation of political bandits emerging in the States . . .’. A third contender was the army; thus far, the generals had stayed aloof from politics, but would they ‘stand aside while India collapsed into disorder or was swept into Communism’? Such were the prospects for the future; meanwhile, ‘the free world must grow accustomed to its most populous member being without coherent leadership, swallowing aid and arms without significant effect, a tempting prey to the predatory-minded, an indictment of the free and democratic method of advancement in Afro-Asian eyes, where mature authority is so deeply needed’.12

  Contemporary photographs confirm that Nehru was in physical decline – sunken shoulders, a tired, even doped look on his face, an unfamiliar bulge around his waist. In the first week of September 1963 Indira Gandhi wrote to a friend that her father now had to have weekly readings taken of his blood pressure, weight and urine. ‘The strain, physical, mental and emotional, is tremendous and he is bound to look tired’, wrote Mrs Gandhi. ‘The only medicine that can help is rest and relaxation.’13

  Of which, of course, he got none. He had still to undertake the duties of prime minister and foreign minister, and to contribute his mite to the revival of the Congress. As the single recognizable face
of party and government, Nehru continued to maintain a punishing schedule, going to the four corners of India to address public meetings, open schools and hospitals and speak to party workers. In the month of December 1963, for example, he visited Madras, Madurai, Chandigarh, Calcutta, Bihar and Bombay (twice).14

  One place that the prime minister could have gone to, but chose not to, was Nagaland. For a state of that name had finally come into existence on 1 December 1963. In other circumstances Nehru would have been keen to inaugurate it himself. But the journey to Kohima was long and arduous, and perhaps he also remembered the hostile reception he had got there back in 1953. In the event, the honours were done by the new president of the Republic, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. However, the new chief minister and his fellow ministers were dismissed as ‘traitors’ by the underground, whose writ still ran across large parts of the state.15

  In January 1964 Nehru crossed the country again, to attend the annual meeting of the Congress, held that year in the Orissa capital of Bhubaneshwar. He collapsed on the stage and had to be helped to his feet and rushed back to Delhi. The diagnosis was that he had suffered a mild stroke. As one headline put it: ‘Mr Nehru’s Illness Casts Gloom over Bhubaneshwar Meet’.16

  IV

  The China war had weakened Nehru’s position not just in India or the world, but within the Congress Party itself. The locus of decision-making had now shifted from the prime minister’s home to the Congress Parliamentary Party. Unlike in the past, Nehru could no longer get the party to always do his bidding in matters big and small.17 For instance, he had not welcomed the Kamaraj plan, on the grounds that it would deplete his government of experience and talent.

  After his illness, Nehru was able to persuade the party to return Lal Bahadur Shastri to the Cabinet. Shastri was officially called ‘minister without portfolio’, but in fact functioned as the de facto deputy to the prime minister. The two shared a language, a home state and a history of being in the same jails at around the same time. Nehru trusted and liked Shastri, whose own quiet, understated personality was in such marked contrast to his own.