Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  He slept about five to six hours a night. In his seventies he took to having a half-hour nap occasionally on Sunday afternoons and in the hottest weather; and for some years he had been dropping off to sleep in aeroplanes. Though using up relatively few hours of the twenty-four in sleep he had a life-saving capacity for putting himself to sleep whenever he wanted to—he either worked out a problem or he put it out of his mind. He had never known insomnia, just as he had never known headaches. In his seventies he sometimes dropped off to sleep for a while at meetings.

  On an average he used to receive in the latter years about 500 letters and 100 telegrams each day; callers from outside (i.e. not his officials), chosen out of 50 or 60 applicants, averaged about seven each day; he made about 25 speeches a month; and he was away from Delhi on official tours about sixty days, or two months, each year. He kept up this pace until his first illness, in 1962; and he had got back to most of it before his stroke hit him early in 1964.

  Anyone associated for some years with government in Delhi became so familiar with Nehru’s capacity for sustained effort that he took it for granted. And Nehru’s example somehow affected his departments of state. You could always tell whether he was in Delhi or not, without asking. There was a spring about the senior officials when Nehru was in town.

  Of the many examples of his capacity for work which could be cited here are two.

  A governor of the Reserve Bank, who was once Nehru’s principal private secretary, recounted one of his experiences.* In August 1947, during the partition troubles, Nehru and his party set out at six one morning. They flew for an hour and then travelled by car and jeep through the scenes of the massacres in the Punjab, where, in addition to the physical strain was the nervous strain of experiencing ‘his hopes, his dreams, his faith in human nature … crashing down’. It was nine at night when they got back to base. Then, after a meal, Nehru held discussions with the Pakistani prime minister until midnight. He then worked on papers, writing or dictating minutes and instructions, until two. He was up again at 5:30. ‘Something like it,’ his principal private secretary wrote, ‘some sixteen to seventeen hours out of twenty-four, has been the practice with him day after day, week after week, month after month, all these thirteen years. The members of his staff, who are all much younger than himself, have never been able to keep pace with him … this extraordinary vitality.’

  Another Indian official who worked closely with him for several years as head of the external affairs ministry told me how after a gruelling four-day official tour of Nepal Nehru slept a little on the plane on the way back to Delhi but as soon as he got to his house he set to work on urgent papers and continued working until four in the morning. After a couple of hours of sleep he was at work again until midday. He then went to the airport to keep an appointment with the Gliding Club to try a new glider. He spent an hour in the air, though it was a day of dust and with the thermometer standing at 110. This informant had already been astonished by Nehru’s performance in Bhutan in 1958 when he trekked on foot tirelessly and outpaced men some twenty years younger than himself.

  For years he took no holiday.

  It is said by those who have lived with him, for instance in prison, that Nehru while not fussy, and never hypochondriacal, always took care of his health. He did not drink alcohol and though he smoked he rationed himself (ten cigarettes a day in latter years), he took exercise regularly, and he ate moderately though well. This care, or prudence, however, was the mere fringe to a physical endowment which, like Churchill’s, amounted to genius. During the years I knew him I can recall only two occasions when he had to take to his bed other than for the kidney ailment in 1962. Both occasions were for a cold and they lasted only a day or two. His physical capacity was paralleled by a will to live every minute of his life—his zest was as great as his vitality. And both zest and vitality were at the command of an unusual will power.

  Mind

  Nehru’s intellectual endowment was also exceptional. It was not better than that of Rajagopalachari, the sharpest mind in Indian public life for many years; and it did not have the originality of Gandhi, for Gandhi had a power of mind to match his power of spirit. And, in general, Nehru was probably clever and wide-ranging and lively rather than profound. But few indeed have been heads of government in our time with such a force, or such a range, of mind. In history he is to be compared in this, as also in his capacity for the written word, and for his sustained physical effort, with Napoleon. Napoleon in office, however, was nearly thirty years younger than Nehru, he ruled for a shorter time, and he suffered little from the lashings of conscience. Once when I took a scientist to Nehru, a biologist and Nobel Prizeman, the latter made a careless statement about some work. Nehru pounced on it, politely, and demolished it. This was typical. Few errors in reasoning escaped him. I have seen and heard a dozen or more prime ministers at Nehru’s table: all but two or three were yokels beside him. If his knowledge lacked solidity, this was normally because he lacked time, though there are those knowing him who insist that it was his nature to skim the surface. For many years his reading had to be done in odd minutes snatched from public cares.

  Nehru began with the advantage of the best formal education possible; and just as he improved on his physical capital so too throughout his life he improved on his intellectual capital, by the study of books and of men. In particular his years in jail were put to use for a rigorous and systematic course of reading and writing; in particular he used them for developing his sense of history.

  An Indian official who for some years was permanent head of a department of which Nehru was the minister used to say that he never ceased to be astonished at how Nehru managed to do real thinking—probing analytical thinking. Nehru’s mind, he would add, was extremely quick. He was struck, too, with Nehru’s power of concentration, with his memory, and with his natural orderliness. As a result his mind could be brought into instant and effective play, like a gun always loaded.

  Nehru’s range of interests extended over science (especially physics and biology), and literature as well as over history and statecraft. He had a fair knowledge of French. He kept up a lively, emphatic, though not always well-informed, interest in natural history and especially in animals; an example of which will be found in his introduction to Gee’s101 book, The Wild Life of India, which he wrote less than three months before he died. The mainspring of his political thinking came from the nineteenth-century English socialists, but it was not fossilised at that point in time. He remained sensitive to the currents of thought throughout his lifetime. The bold pioneering side of his outlook is illustrated by the fact that he made his first aeroplane flight as far back as 1912. When only fifteen he was fired by the achievements of the Wright brothers; in 1969 he went and saw Zeppelin’s airship in Berlin; in 1927 he saw Lindbergh arrive in Paris; and in 1960 I saw him welcoming Gagarin, the Russian astronaut, in Delhi, with a boyish enthusiasm. His mind was avidly curious, and his most lively interest pertained to anything bearing on man’s quest to subdue Nature. That is why he caused the national laboratories—a score or so—to be set up. He had not the time to check their working and was let down by their staffs again and again. Probably of all the research groups he set up only the Atomic Energy Commission, under Bhabha, completely justified itself. It was his intellectual curiosity which saved his speeches from boredom, however unprepared and rambling they might be; and which made him interesting as a companion; for unless preoccupied or exhausted with public cares he was ready to talk about any subject, and what he talked was never banal.

  Nehru’s mind, moreover, was on most subjects an open mind as well as a full mind. He had his prejudices—maharajas, Portugal, moneylenders, certain American ways, Hinduism, the whites in Africa—and he used to get some illusions, such as about cooperative farming or about the progress in community development, or about certain persons; and he could be emphatic on a basis of insufficient knowledge; but in most things he was without dogmatism. Only occasionally did
his cocksureness take on rigidity. This quality was probably connected with his being a Brahmin, the caste to which belongs the custody of truth. His attack on the prime minister of Australia at the UN in 1961 was an example, though there were other factors behind that attack. By nature he was intolerant of opposition; so much so that more than one of his senior collaborators considered him unteachable. At times he seemed the exemplar of Swift’s dictum that the most positive men are the most credulous, for he could be taken in to a strange degree by people which men of far less perception would have seen through. But rigidity or obstinacy or credulousness ordinarily did not last long.

  Nehru’s outbursts of temper were due mostly to impatience, especially to the intellectual impatience natural to a quick mind, though sometimes they were due to strain or to emotion. On the emotional factor a revealing statement was made by him in his speech to the Commonwealth Press Union in Delhi in November 1961 on the conditioning factors in national psychologies and how these result in Indians thinking at two levels—intellectual and emotional. (He made this speech without any preparation, coming to the hall straight from the airport and a flight from Calcutta and preceded by twenty-four gruelling hours there.) This mixture of the emotional and the intellectual explains why one of the driving forces in Nehru’s life was socialism, why his attitude to Europeans could become ambivalent, why he gave himself to India but in some important respects was out of sympathy with Indian ways, and why on occasions he made absurd statements. Some, but by no means all, of those who worked close to Nehru used to say that he did not want yes-men, and that he was prepared to listen to adverse comment even though he might fly into a temper about it. Whether this point can be established or not will depend on evidence still to come. In my own experience nearly all political leaders want yes-men in the last resort; they vary as to how they like the Yes to be said. As for his temper, Nehru’s bark was worse than his bite. But it could be an intimidating bark.

  Though at bottom he remained, as do most socialists, optimistic, though he was committed to certain viewpoints, and though he allowed himself outbursts of impulsiveness, on occasions a headlong impetuosity, Nehru had detachment. In most things he had it to an unusual degree—including about himself. Here again he was not a Brahmin for nothing. Normally he was not involved emotionally in a deep way, or for long. This applied even to the death of those who had been near to him. Some of the officials who had worked closely with him for some years were surprised and hurt to discover on their leaving him that they had meant little to him personally. As one complained to me, they were like discarded coats for which there was no longer a need. Some women also discovered to their surprise that Nehru was not to be impressed. The romantic outlook was, as he himself wrote, foreign to him—though probably not quite as foreign as he believed. He had been apt to see revolutionaries through romantic eyes. His detachment, which grew with the years, was the more remarkable as he was not a cold man. He could weep as well as laugh. Perhaps it began as a defence against his own sensitiveness and his own individualism. With his detachment went an uncommon capacity for abstracting himself from his immediate environment; for instance at a banquet or a concert or a parade, and giving himself to thought. On these occasions, which people sitting next to him did not find flattering, you could almost see his mind working, and the very speed of it.

  The detachment was due in part to his balance. He could lose his balance; but usually he recovered it quickly. As a rule he was not only a man of liberal mind but he was ‘the sensible man’ par excellence; a quality of Nehru’s which Samuel Johnson would have known how to value. The way he, aided by Radhakrishnan, dealt with the novel Lolita, quietly and without censorship, was typical of this side of him. So was his attitude to the press. He believed in the freedom of the press, but he knew that the phrase meant for more than one press proprietor merely the freedom to make profits, without regard to truth or decency.

  And the detachment was due in part to his aloneness. He wrote once, ‘One must journey through life alone; to rely on others is to invite heartbreak.’ What de Gaulle has said, more than once, la solitude est la misère des hommes supérieurs, has particular relevance to Nehru. Hence his reserve, which few, if any, managed to penetrate; and hence his having no real confidants. In his last five years or so he was utterly alone; so alone as to be friendless. His aloneness was, to some extent at least, also Brahminical and rooted in his self-assurance. He felt, for all his Hamlet-like hesitations, that he knew best. A few persons, notably his daughter, and perhaps in some things Lady Mountbatten, had more of his confidence than usual. In latter years Krishna Menon got closest to him in policy for a while, but the relationship with Krishna Menon was de haut en bas and was scarcely a personal relationship. It is possible that one reason why he worked so hard was to escape from loneliness. With the progress of time his aloneness got nearer and nearer to isolation; and towards the end it got near to the isolation which is insulation; encasement in the thick wool covered over him by sycophantic politicians or servile officials, and the drugging plaudits of vast anonymous myth-worshipping crowds. Nehru became insulated from some of the realities of India and Indians and from some of the things going on.

  The insulation was the worse because Nehru could be strangely at fault in judging people. More than one mountebank and not a few crooks did well out of his aberrations of judgement. How could Nehru have made a minister of one of the two women he put in his cabinet? How could he have kept in high office the man to whom he once entrusted parliamentary affairs? Did news of a certain minister’s passing on cabinet secrets to one of the Marwari magnates escape him? Did he not sense the cynical calculations of a certain buccaneering chief minister he took up for a time? And he lacked the succours of a strong sense of humour, or of hobbies. It is impossible to think of him taking up Krishna Menon’s hobby of playing with toy trains.

  Balance could not have come easily for Nehru, given the ardour of his temperament and the intricate responsiveness of his mind and the resulting bouts of indecision—those painful oscillations back and forth between the case for Yes and the case for No, those contradictions and self-contradictions, and the ineradicable ironies of his position. The dualism was illustrated by his attitude to Gandhi—angry contempt for Gandhi’s anti-science and anti-rationalist outlook, yet awe for his moral quality. It was this frequently un-Indian nationalist who wrote of himself in his Autobiography:

  … a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere… Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me, as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways; and behind me lie somewhere in the subconscious, racial memories of a hundred, or whatever the number may be, generations of Brahmans. I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance or my recent acquisitions. They are both part of me and though they help me in both the East and the West, they also create in me a feeling of spiritual loneliness not only in public activities but in life itself. I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But, in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.

  To have completed this self-judgement he should have added that he did achieve a synthesis between India and Europe and that in himself he demonstrated the realities of coexistence. Some of the lack of precision which certain critics of his complained of were due to his synthesising; for precision can be the child of rigidity and the foe of coexistence or catholicity. One observer, Tibor Mende, thought that Nehru’s dualité le troublait et le stimulait à la fois; that he was enlarged by it greatly.* What is to be added is that, for all his oscillations, deep down he was stable; the centre was still and fixed.

  Some of his associates, more particularly some of his old companions, complained that he had lost the capacity for affection, that he had become impersonal, even that he did not appreciate what was done for him. There may be something in this though on examination the complaint often turned out to be that Nehru had not h
ad as much regard for the complainant as the latter thought he should have had, or had not given him this or that job. From questioning old associates it seems unlikely that Nehru ever had much capacity for personal affection or for intimacy. With the years he ceased to have emotional involvement with persons at all, only with causes. He seems to have developed something like a horror of intimacy. This aloofness is one reason why, unlike Gandhi, he evoked respect rather than love in those working with him. His father and Gandhi would be amongst the few for whom he got closest to having personal affection; but, like Ravel the composer, or William Morris—the regrets recorded in Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s Diaries show how William Morris’s indifference struck one gifted observer—Nehru let his life become absorbed so much in other things that personal relations, no less than the small change of existence, meant little to him. So great was his detachment that we can believe him to a large degree when he wrote that even political life touched him only on the surface.

  We can be certain that complaints about ‘loss of idealism’ and being ‘spoilt by power’ are to be treated with scepticism. Too much power for too long did have an effect on Nehru, though not as great as his having too many exhausting responsibilities for too long. He was concerned to stay in office not because he wanted material goods or to boss others, as do most men who seek power, but because without the power of the prime ministership he could not shape India in the form to which he had given his life, or prevent those developments which he reckoned evil for India. There are not many men who have been so little corrupted by power as Nehru. The game of politics no doubt fascinated him; for no game is more fascinating, and it happened to be a game for which Nehru had a flair; but it often disgusted him too, and with the years it sickened him. All along he refused to have anything to do with bickering or intrigue. He fought like a knight.