Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  Like many egalitarians, Nehru himself was authoritarian in temperament. And, like any other ruler, he had to be concerned with harnessing men’s wills, and so with manipulating feelings in order to carry out his purposes. He therefore had to be concerned with men in groups, and so with the impression he was creating on them. He could not afford to wear his heart on his sleeve. He had no doubt made compromises, such as winking at the corruption in the Punjab or in certain of his ministers, believing them necessary for reasons of political expediency. One got the feeling at times that he accepted the thinking common to men concerned with power, and especially in India, that the victors and the rulers are entitled to some booty. But it is certain that he did not take booty himself, or find these booty-taking associates congenial. The fact that a number of his relations, and, still more, Kashmiri Brahmins, were given high office might be due in part to some ineradicable deposit of Indian feeling about family and caste lingering on in Nehru, but it would be due mostly to his belief that they had superior ability. As head of government, Nehru, for so long the agitator, learnt as late as his late fifties what running a government is really like as well as learning what average men are really like. Creighton,102 the saintly historian, who was also an Anglican bishop, learnt so much about his priests in running his diocese that he came to defend the Renaissance popes. Nehru in his later years became gentler and with a touch of melancholy. What were his later thoughts on men? on Indians? on trust and trustworthiness?

  Having quicker wits than most men, Nehru the politician was no doubt subtler, and therefore a more wily politician, than most of his colleagues. His management, and for years, his domination, of the Congress Party showed this side of him again and again. The evidence for his wiliness—some would use a harsher word—is not lacking. The so-called Kamaraj Plan of 1963, and his thwarting President Prasad’s intrigues in 1959,103 are examples. Towards the end he got near on occasions to guile, and his statecraft got near to craftiness. Yet how untainted he was, and how much more there was to him than to most prime ministers!

  In 1961, he was persuaded to open the premises of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute in Calcutta and inaugurate a conference on spiritual life. On reaching the place and seeing how grandiose the premises were, he burst, with Nehruesque headstrong reaction, into the following speech:

  I have always avoided using the word spirituality because of the existence of much bogus spirituality. India is a hungry nation. To talk of spirituality to hungry men does not mean anything… It is no good running away from the daily problems of life in the name of spirituality. I am out of place in this gathering—I am supposed to open this building and inaugurate the conference. I do so.

  He then stalked off.*

  This brings us to his attitude towards religion. The communal—that is, Hindu versus Muslim and Muslim versus Hindu—frenzy in the 1920s and 1930s turned the passive rationalism he had inherited from his father into an active dislike for religion. ‘Not only,’ he wrote in 1924 to a religious Muslim friend, Syed Mahmud,** ‘has it broken our backs but it has stultified and almost killed all originality of thought and mind … this terrible burden … this poison…’ After seeing Hindu–Muslim murderings he had come to feel about religion what many intelligent people in the eighteenth century, after the torturings, burnings and wars of religion in the seventeenth century, had come to feel about it. Thirty-five years later, under questioning from a Marxist-minded Parsee, Nehru spoke of ‘ethical and spiritual solutions’. ‘What you say,’ interjected the questioner, a little disdainfully, ‘raises visions of Mr Nehru in search of God in the evening of his life.’ ‘Yes,’ said Nehru, ‘I have changed. The emphasis on ethical and spiritual solutions is not unconscious … the human mind is hungry for something deeper in terms of moral and spiritual development, without which all the material advance may not be worthwhile… The old Hindu idea that there is a divine essence in the world, that every individual possesses something of it and can develop it appeals to me.’* For some time Nehru had been showing an appreciation for Buddhism. The last occasion I had a talk with him, in 1963, he remarked, ‘I am not irreligious.’ Two days before he died he wrote in a foreword, ‘We must not forget that the essential objective to be aimed at is the quality of the individual and the concept of Dharma underlying it.’** His agnosticism was not only always uncompromisingly honest and stern—fairytales were banned from his daughter’s reading when she was a child—but it belonged to the religious spirit. Hedonism was repulsive to him. Gandhi, whom Nehru never quite got to the bottom of, knew his Nehru: he refused to regard him as a materialist. It may have been more than old age, too, which made Nehru from his late sixties feel more drawn to Gandhi than he did during most of the days when they were alive together, just as he felt drawn to Buddha. ‘Buddha,’ he said, ‘is in us all.’ Whether, seeing how little the Buddha element finds expression in men’s actions, he got more consolation or more sadness from the observation is not known.

  The Good Man

  Nehru’s physical and intellectual endowments were, like his aesthetic appeal, extraordinary; but what in the final account impressed me most was his goodness.

  If only the good were clever!

  If only the clever were good!

  Nehru was that rare man who is both clever and good. It is hard to be clever. But it is harder still to be good. He was that very rare person, the clever man wielding power who remained good. No wonder Nehru wrote somewhere of the tempests raging around him being nothing to ‘the storms within’ him!

  Syed Mahmud, one of the leaders of the anti-Jinnah Muslims and of Congress, who had known and lived with the Nehru family for years, who had been with Nehru at Cambridge and then with him in prison off and on, and who in recent years disliked some of Nehru’s policies as prime minister, always ended any talk on Nehru with some such phrase as ‘But Jawaharlal is a good man, a pure man. I am still in love with him.’ Syed Mahmud himself, then in his seventies, was also a man of goodness, and his testimony on goodness was worth something.

  Another Indian, this one a south Indian Brahmin and an intellectual, who also had had some difficulties and disappointments with Nehru, would always finish with some such phrase as ‘But Jawaharlal is the truly emancipated man in the sense of your St Paul—he is emancipated from prejudices of caste, religion or money; he is really the man of goodwill’.

  An Indian of my acquaintance who had worked with Nehru off and on in the independence movement but had got separated from him over policy differences, would always praise his quality of ‘never making a fetish of his own prestige’, and of his always being ready to forgive and as far as possible to forget. Like many others, this person used to touch on another quality in Nehru, namely, the lifelong dedication to schooling himself, and to hardening his will, though he regretted that this was at the cost of light-heartedness and geniality. But think of nine years in prison without cracking or without deteriorating!

  Much schooling indeed must have gone into the process of turning Nehru from the spoilt only son, and the shy, withdrawn, highly strung and fastidious young man, into the consummate master of crowds, the man living in the public gaze, and the man who, in the interests of politics, suffered an interminable procession of bores and vulgarians and self-seekers. A Muslim Justice of the Supreme Court, now dead, an Allahabad man who knew the Nehru family well, speaking of Jawaharlal as a young man, would end up ‘He was impossible’. His growth through self-discipline was therefore the more remarkable.

  Great courage had gone into the schooling. Courage in fact was the quality valued above all other qualities by Nehru, as it was by Samuel Johnson; and failure of courage was what he most despised. One of his ministers told me once just after the death of a terrorist who had been involved in throwing the bomb at Lord Hardinge,104 the viceroy, in 1912, that an appeal had been made to Nehru for giving the man a state funeral. He refused angrily; he regarded the man as a coward. The word ‘coward’, which Ayub of Pakistan once, in an uncharacteristic momen
t allowed himself to use against Nehru, foolishly as well as unjustly, damaged the prospects of good relations between the two rulers.

  His personal kindness, and the trouble to which so overcharged a man gave himself, never failed. Some of his too innocent judgements on individuals, as also his allowing unimportant foreign visitors to encroach upon his time, were due to his kindness as much as to the politician in him. His kindness to people of worth who also had humility was without limit. An old Scotch Australian scientist had somehow got interested in Nehru and out of this interest he came to India several times at his own expense. He had little money, lived and travelled cheaply, and never thrust himself forward. In due course Nehru came upon him. Savouring his virtue and his mind Nehru arranged tours for him, put transport at his disposal, and spared nothing for the old man and his wife. His interventions in cases of personal hardship were endless. He naturally received a mail too big for him to read all of it but he insisted on knowing about hardship cases. I know of his helping an obscure Indian Christian girl who wanted to marry a Pakistani and was in difficulties; of his intervening in troubles arising over an attempted marriage between a Muslim and a Hindu; of his paying the house rent or education expenses and giving other aid to various people. In Delhi his own house was often the refuge for people in distress. Out of kindness Nehru invited people to stay in his house who could have no conceivable demands on him or be of any conceivable use or of interest to him. It is hardly known, even in India, that though his government kept Sheikh Abdullah in prison, he arranged payment for the Sheikh’s son to do his studies for medicine in London and that the young man used to spend part of his vacations in Nehru’s house. I once asked an Indian politician, of better social class and education than the average, who had been one of Nehru’s parliamentary private secretaries for some years, what was the main impression Nehru left on him. He replied: ‘Kindness, fatherliness.’ Nehru might have avoided emotional engagement as regards most individuals but he remained kind to most, for above all he had compassion for the human lot. Born rich he died poor.

  Nehru’s temper was a fact. He could be petulant too. He was not always an easy man to work for. His temper was sometimes said to be due to his vanity; rather it was the release required by a highly strung man who was overburdened. When one thinks of the wordiness all around him, and the fussiness, and the ineffectuality, and the begging, and the prevarication, and the corruption, the wonder is that the outbursts were not more frequent. Not that he was without any vanity. No man becomes a Tribune of the People without some vanity. And Nehru’s vanity sometimes led him into demagogy. Yet few public men were less diverted by vanity than Nehru. He had as little of the typical politician’s exhibitionism as he had of his lust for power. He never talked about himself, except under assiduous prodding, and then little and reluctantly; he never advertised himself; he never held the floor; he never put himself forward. In spite of his occasional lapses, the high-pitched and the ecstatic were distasteful to him, and became more and more so with the years; as did all pomposity and pretence. His was the simplicity which only the good can affect or afford. And as for the temper, when he let fly at someone he later, in expiation, heaped attentions on the victim. A Latin American ambassador in my time was charged with looking after the interests of a certain country with which India had broken off relations. A foolish man himself, he had received a foolish instruction from his foreign minister to see Nehru at once, put up such and such fairly unimportant request, and to remind Nehru that he and the foreign minister knew one another. It turned out that Nehru and this foreign minister, with dozens of others, had once been at the same international meeting for a day or two. The ambassador insisted on seeing Nehru, who was busy with serious matters at the time, and on delivering this portentous message. When Nehru, thus interrupted, heard it he flew into a temper. But for weeks afterwards he went out of his way to make up for it to the ambassador. That is why it used to be said in Delhi that it was an advantage to get Nehru into a temper with you.

  But there is no point in lengthening the account of his virtues, such as his innumerable acts of secret benevolence, his loyalty to old friends and to awkward or insignificant persons; his refusal to gossip, or to be petty, or to harbour resentment, or to speak ill of persons except to their face; his generosity, Puritan though he himself was in practice, about human failings; his wholesomeness; his general reliability; and, notwithstanding areas of secretiveness and stratagem, his candour and straightness. When he provoked resentment he usually sought to allay it. Outside of lawful battle he would inflict no wounds. Nehru had less of the common and less of the mean than all but a few men. And he is to be numbered amongst the small band of rulers in history whose power has been matched with pity and mercy. Like Abraham Lincoln, the more Nehru gained in authority the greater his compassion became. I was in India when he was at the height of his popularity and power. I was also there when his popularity sank to its lowest level. He passed both these exacting tests equally well. He wanted power; but he wanted it for a cause, not for himself. The driving force behind most revolutionaries yelping for equality is nothing more than to pull down those above them; they have no objection to being above others. Nehru might have been ignorant or misguided about some matters, and about some persons, but he was always disinterested, always concerned with what he thought would help Indians or mankind. We can be certain that there will be no revelations to make about him of the kind which are often made about celebrities; not even revelations like those of Churchill’s disagreeableness. Nehru’s private face differed scarcely at all from his public face.

  How much a Ruler?

  Yet will the historians, looking at his unusual opportunities of person, of position, and of length of office, conclude that Nehru as a ruler of India did as well as could be expected?

  In his last years, as has been seen, he did little ruling. He largely confined himself to running the machine, to clinging on to certain power points and to concentrating on a few major policy matters. His basis of information became more shallow; often a mere half page or so of potted notes from one of his staff.

  It would be out of plumb to judge Nehru on his last few years—years of weariness and disillusionment. His long life must be taken as a whole. Senescence is not to be denied of its toll, even on the strongest frames and nerves. Nehru’s lashing out right and left, as at times during the electioneering of 1961–62, the chopped logic, the unfinished or incoherent sentences, the self-righteousness, were mere minutes towards the end of many years of intense activity, and of an epic life. That there was some disintegration is not surprising. What is surprising is that there was so little of it. Usually the nearer rulers get to supreme power the sooner the disintegration sets in. The last years of Napoleon or Stalin or Mussolini as rulers repeat a familiar pattern of nescience and self-delusion. The wonder about Nehru is that he retained so much balance after so long.

  The question about Nehru’s rule is not how much he disintegrated but how much he was by nature a ruler at all.

  Was he in control? Or, to put the point in another way, was too much which mattered out of control? To take a relatively small but revealing example, why did certain things happen right under his eyes while he was exercising quasi-dictator authority?

  Thus Delhi itself. That incomparable inheritance for the new republic, Old Delhi from the Mughals (who had taste) and New Delhi from the British (who put the genius of Lutyens to splendid use), was a capital with no superior for dignity in the world. In Nehru’s time it grew from less than a million to over 3 million inhabitants and, under his own eyes, huge profits year after year were made by exploiting the need for housing the influx. A rash of jerry-built housing estates spread for mile on mile. Prices rose to indefensible heights. One of the ministers in Delhi, aware of what was happening, and privy to the secret town-planning programme, made a fortune in buying up peasant holdings and then subdividing them for urban development. Nehru made speeches thundering against the slums, but year after
year the slums grew bigger. Or, to take a trifling but indicative instance, the American-type advertisement hoardings along the ten-mile stretch of road from the airport to the city. Nehru deplored and castigated them more than once. But the hoardings remained. Indeed they multiplied.

  Thus, again, to take what was not a trifling matter, the making and selling of spurious drugs. This gross scandal was exposed repeatedly. But nothing was done, although the British had left ample legislative and administrative authority for coping with it. The family of one of Nehru’s ministers was involved in it. Nehru gave much time to the Congo, or other faraway places, or to faraway things like collective farming, but he did little that was effective about more than one largely manageable evil near at hand.

  Thus, yet again, the corruption amongst highly placed colleagues in the party and in the government. Was it really politically unavoidable for him to connive at these malefactors? The prime minister who could override the politicians to the impressive degree of bringing in an outsider like Radhakrishnan, bearing none of the indispensable tattooings, such as a prison record, not even the Gandhi cap, a scholar and a philosopher and a south Indian Brahmin, and imposing him as the first vice-president and the second president of India, was not afraid of the politicians. Yet in the Punjab, the state which adjoins Delhi, a regime flourished for as long as eight years, the last eight years of Nehru’s life, which was vitiated with corruption and abuse of power.* The chief minister, whose power was based on his majority of kept place-men in the Punjab legislature, used, or allowed to be used, the apparatus of the state for enriching his family. They specialised in the opportunities which the issue of licences and permits offered but did well out of a wide range of other interests, including deals in real estate and factories and medicines. The chief minister, with increasing insolence, interfered with the civil service, with the police, and even with the courts. As far back as 1959 there had been a murder case (the Karnal case) which would have ended his political career in a rooted democracy. The textbooks used in the state schools had eulogies of him; and the mass media at the disposal of the government were put to singing his praises. The favourite phrase of this saviour of the people was ‘the common man’. He held forth about his increasing food production or carrying out development plans in a way which paltered with the truth, to say the least. For some years well-informed persons in north India knew what was going on; but Nehru, apparently convinced that the chief minister was indispensable for maintaining political stability in the Punjab, a state admittedly with serious internal troubles (an influential group of Sikhs were agitating for setting up a Sikh state), and of special military importance because it bordered on Pakistan, resisted demands for an enquiry. What unseated the chief minister in the end was his arrogance, not his pillage. And when at length he could no longer live down the revelations and the angry public outcry (though up until a few days before then the press in general had been ambiguous about him) he tried to insist that it would be he who nominated his successor and that his successor must be ‘a man of the masses’; by which he intended one of his accomplices. As for himself, he promised to give himself up to religion and, in particular, to ‘cleaning up the Sikh temples’ (where there is a good deal of wealth).