Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  Once more there were huge crowds; the authorities estimated them at half a million. Once more there was Sheikh Abdullah, and, also, the Dalai Lama, two unofficial mourners, thus symbolising the incongruities of the world in which Nehru had played out his life. Once more there were priests, as well as detachments of the armed forces, and the old Hindu cults as well as British Army rituals. The procession had six miles to go to Sangam. On the way it went into the grounds of the home where Nehru had spent his childhood and much of his adult life; the urns were placed under a long-lived gulmohar tree near the house and flowers were thrown on them. After a pause of about an hour the procession set off again. When it got to Sangam the urns were taken out into the river and the grandsons emptied the ashes into the waters. A helicopter showered petals over the scene, cannons were fired, Vedic mantras were chanted, buglers sounded ‘The Last Post’, and the Jat Regiment band played ‘Abide with Me’.

  So ends the long, winding, battle-strewn, course of Samson Agonistes:

  Samson hath quit himself

  Like Samson, and heroically hath

  Finished a life heroic.

  * His true name is Lal Bahadur, ‘Shastri’ (which can mean a caste name but does not in this case) being tacked on after he got his diploma at an educational institute, the Kashi Vidyapeeth. To call him ‘Mr Shastri’ is thus the same as calling a man Mr BA or Mr Dip.Educ. But it is unlikely that the correct usage will now prevail any more than it will in the case of the French word expertise now irrevocably established as jargon; the less so as, like most Indians, he has no surname.

  * Ananda Bazar Patrika, June 3, 1964.

  ** Jugantar, June 3, 1964.

  * April 13, 1964. On May 13, 1964 the Patriot, Krishna Menon’s paper, wanted Sheikh Abdullah arrested again.

  ** Cf. criticism, e.g. in Ananda Bazar Patrika, May 19, 1964.

  * Cf. Sir R. Pillai’s letter in the Statesman, June 5, 1964. He witnessed the will.

  Annotations

  1. Lord Wavell (1883–1950) was viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947.

  2. Clement Richard Attlee (1883–1967) was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. Attlee’s Labour Party was committed to decolonisation, and particularly to the freedom of India. In March 1947, he sent Lord Mountbatten as viceroy of India to negotiate Indian independence.

  3. August 16, 1946 was selected as Direct Action Day by the Muslim League for Muslims throughout the subcontinent to ‘suspend all business’ in support for the creation of Pakistan. The government’s assurance that the military and the police would be restrained led to a day of communal rioting. It was to be the most bloody communal riots in the history of British India. Official estimates put the casualties at 4,000 dead and 100,000 injured in the riot.

  4. Nehru’s residence was Teen Murti Bhavan. It was originally known as Flagstaff House and was the residence of the commander-in-chief of the British forces in India.

  5. Madhaviah Krishnan (1912–96) was a pioneering Indian wildlife photographer, writer and naturalist.

  6. Hindustani Theatre was a theatre company set up in Delhi by Qudsia Zaidi. Habib Tanvir was among its distinguished members.

  7. Dwight David Eisenhower was the thirty-fourth president of the United States (1953–61). He came to India in 1959, the first American president to visit independent India.

  8. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–71) served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and then as prime minister from 1958. He visited India twice—in 1955 and 1960.

  9. Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, accompanied by his wife, Princess Michiko, came on a nine-day goodwill visit to India in 1960. Akihito is the current emperor of Japan.

  10. Chou En-lai (1898–1976) was premier of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 until his death in January 1976, and China’s foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. He visited India in 1956 and 1960.

  11. Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) was the second president of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. He visited India in 1960.

  12. U Nu (1907–95), otherwise known as Thakin Nu, was the first prime minister of Burma. He came to India in 1953.

  13. Louis Stephen St Laurent (1882–1973) was the prime minister of Canada from 1948 to 1957.

  14. John George Diefenbaker (1895–1979) was the prime minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963. He visited India in 1958.

  15. Robert Gordon Menzies (1894–1978) was Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. He held the office twice, from 1939 to 1941 and from 1949 to 1966.

  16. Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72) was the president of Ghana and its predecessor state, the Gold Coast, from 1952 to 1966. He visited India in 1961.

  17. General Sir John Lionel Kotelawala (1897–1980) was prime minister of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from 1953 to 1956.

  18. Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike (1916–2000) was prime minister of Ceylon and Sri Lanka three times: 1960–65, 1970–77 and 1994–2000.

  19. Brigadier Henry Cecil John Hunt, Baron Hunt (1910–98) was a British army officer who is best known as the leader of the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest.

  20. Chaudhry Mohamed Ali (1905–80) was the prime minister of Pakistan from 1955 to 1956. He visited India in 1955.

  21. Maulana Azad was a leader of the Indian independence movement and the first minister of education in the country. He died on February 22, 1958.

  22. James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) was twice prime minister of the United Kingdom, first in 1924 and then from 1929 to 1931.

  23. British Preventive Detention concerns imprisonment without justification, with the prisoner not told the grounds for the arrest. When adopted by the Government of India for tackling a communist insurgency in the late 1940s, it was condemned as a ‘colonial act’.

  24. Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–53) was the founder of the Jan Sangh, forerunner to the BJP. Mookerjee was firmly against Nehru’s pact with Pakistan to establish minority commissions and guarantee minority rights in both countries, and later disagreed with him on Kashmir.

  25. Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah (1905–82) was the prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir soon after its controversial provisional accession to India in 1947. He was dismissed and jailed by the Indian government in 1953, after demanding that India grant Kashmiris the autonomy that had been promised to them. Sheikh Abdullah was released in 1964 after spending eleven years in prison.

  26. Jivatram Bhagwandas Kripalani (1888–1982) was the president of the Indian National Congress during the transfer of power in 1947. He left the Congress and became one of the founders of the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party. This party subsequently merged with the Socialist Party of India to form the Praja Socialist Party. Kripalani remained in opposition to the Congress for the rest of his life.

  27. General Kodandera Subayya Thimayya (1926–65) assumed charge of the Indian Army as the fourth Chief of Army Staff, in 1957. He briefly resigned his post in 1959 over a dispute with V. K. Krishna Menon, then minister for defence, but Nehru refused to accept it.

  28. Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon (1897–1974) was a close political associate of Nehru’s. After India gained independence in 1947, Menon was appointed high commissioner to the United Kingdom, a post in which he remained until 1952. He was a controversial minister of defence from 1957 to 1962. However, after India’s staggering defeat in the Sino-Indian war of 1962, he resigned from office for the country’s apparent lack of military preparedness.

  29. The White Australia policy is used to describe the legislation that intentionally restricted non-white immigration to Australia from 1901 to 1973. The policy was dismantled in stages by successive governments after the end of the World War II, with the increase in first non-British and later non-white immigration.

  30. Refers to Daniel François Malan (1874–1959), the prime minister of South Africa from 1948 to 1954, and Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister (see previous annotation).

  31. Howard Florey (1898–1968) was a pharmacologist who shared
the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for his role in the extraction of penicillin.

  32. Sir Marcus Oliphant (1901–2000) was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played an important role in the development of nuclear fusion, and later of the atomic bomb.

  33. Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) was a Welsh Labour politician and a socialist.

  34. Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) was the US vice-president from 1960 to 1963. After Kennedy’s assassination, he became the thirty-sixth president of the United States, from 1963 to 1969.

  35. David Lloyd George (1863–1945) was the British prime minister from 1916 to 1922.

  36. Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945(?)) was a legendary leader of the independence movement. He was president of the Indian National Congress in 1938–39 but resigned from the party following differences with Gandhi. He later founded and led the Indian National Army and is believed to have died in an air crash in 1945.

  37. Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950), popularly known as Sardar Patel, was an important figure in the independence movement. After 1947, he became the country’s first home minister and deputy prime minister. Sardar Patel is best known for his masterly integration of the 565 semi-autonomous princely states and colonial provinces into the Republic of India.

  38. Emperor Farrukhsiyar was the Mughal emperor from 1713 to 1719.

  39. Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (1875–1949) was an eminent jurist and leader of the Indian Liberal Party. He was knighted in 1922.

  40. Munshi Mubarak Ali was Motilal Nehru’s chief household retainer.

  41. Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948. Nehru was devastated and made a famous speech on the radio that night that began, ‘The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere.’

  42. British politician and diplomat.

  43. Prinicipal adviser to the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin.

  44. Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was a French writer and a lifelong pacifist. He wrote Mahatma Gandhi in 1924 which contributed to the Indian leader’s international reputation. The two men met in 1931.

  45. Ernst Toller was a German intellectual Jew, who played a crucial role during the Spartacist revolt in the years 1918 to 1920.

  46. We Nehrus by Krishna Hutheesingh, Nehru’s youngest sister, was published in 1967.

  47. Sudetenland referred to the western regions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. Hitler, together with his Sudeten German allies, demanded incorporation of the region into Germany.

  48. Syed Mahmud (1879–1971) was general secretary of the All India Congress in 1923 (with Nehru) and again in 1929. After independence he joined the Ministry of External Affairs.

  49. Aruna Asaf Ali (1909–96), born Aruna Ganguli, was a well-known figure in the independence movement. She is remembered for hoisting the Congress flag at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay during the Quit India movement in 1942. She was an ardent socialist and a member of the Congress Socialist Party, a caucus within the Congress Party. Disillusioned with the progress of the Congress on socialism she joined the newly formed Socialist Party in 1948.

  50. Two senior ministers in Nehru’s cabinets who left because of the Kamaraj Plan (see below).

  51. K. Kamaraj, a senior leader of the Indian National Congress, proposed that many senior Congress leaders should resign from their posts and devote all their energy to the revitalisation of the Congress in 1963. The plan had the support of Nehru.

  52. In August 1958, the World Bank organised the Aid-to-India Consortium, consisting of the World Bank group and thirteen countries: Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. The consortium was formed to discuss aid to India.

  53. Sukarno (1901–70) was the first president of Indonesia and a fervent anti-colonialist with an uncertain commitment to democracy.

  54. After independence, the government fixed an upper limit to the land that an individual could own to curb the power of large landlords. This limit varied across the states.

  55. Many Marwari businessmen made their fortunes post-independence by buying up British-owned businesses in India. By the late 1950s and 1960s, India saw the rise of powerful Marwari magnates who were to dominate India’s industry for many decades. Crocker’s comment may reflect, in part, social prejudice since the British businessmen and Anglophile Indians whom the Marwaris increasingly supplanted would for him have been more congenial company.

  56. Public Law 480, also known as Food for Peace, is a funding avenue by which US food can be used for overseas aid.

  57. The Damodar Valley Corporation, popularly known as DVC, was the first multi-purpose river valley project of independent India. The DVC initially focused on flood control, irrigation, generation, transmission and distribution of electricity, eco-conservation and afforestation, as well as job creation for the people residing near the areas affected by its projects.

  58. The Four Point speech was the inaugural address of United States President Harry S. Truman. It said that America had a commitment to helping people globally who had survived the World War II.

  59. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier (1887–1965), was a Swiss-born architect, designer, urbanist, writer and also painter who was invited by Nehru to build Chandigarh in the 1950s. His modernist style was much admired by some, but equally disliked by others.

  60. Sucheta Kripalani (1908–74) was the first woman chief minister of an Indian state (UP). She believed that cooperative farms would not succeed in India and that the right of ownership was an important incentive to the farmer.

  61. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (1879–1972) was once Nehru’s comrade in the independence struggle and the last governor general of India. In 1959 he left the Congress to form a party of his own. Known as Swatantra, it attacked the licence-permit raj and Nehru’s socialistic economics.

  62. A reference to the fact that unlike Nehru in India, President Sukarno in Indonesia had no capable colleagues whom he could pass the baton of leadership to.

  63. Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950) was a prominent South African and British Commonwealth statesman, military leader, and philosopher.

  64. N.R. Pillai, M.J. Desai, and the Dayals were all senior officials of the Indian Foreign Service.

  65. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against its Stalinist government. It began as a student demonstration which attracted thousands as it marched through central Budapest to the Parliament building. The Soviet army stepped in and an estimated 2,500 Hungarians died, and 200,000 more fled as refugees. Mass arrests and denunciations continued for months thereafter. Nehru was late in condemning the Soviet invasion attracting the charge of hypocrisy from the West.

  66. The Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), also referred to as the Baghdad Pact, was adopted in 1955 by Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran, as well as the United Kingdom. Its goal was to contain the Soviet Union by having a line of strong states along the USSR’s south-western frontier.

  67. Afro-Asian Brotherhood promoted economic and cultural cooperation between the African and Asian nations. At the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, in 1955, many newly independent nations decided to collectively oppose colonialism or neo-colonialism by the United States, the Soviet Union, or any other ‘imperialistic’ country.

  68. Liaqat Ali Khan (1895–1951) was the first prime minister of Pakistan.

  69. Sir Khawaja Nazimuddin (1894–1964) was the second prime minister of Pakistan.

  70. Malik Ghulam Muhammad (1895–1956) was the governor-general of Pakistan from 1951 until 1955.

  71. Muhammad Ali Bogra (1909–63) was prime minister of Pakistan from 1953 to 1955; Chaudhry Mohamed Ali (1905–80) came after him and was in power from 1955 to 1956.

  72. Muhammad Ayub Khan (1907–74) was the president of Pakistan from 1958 to 1969. He became Pakistan’s fi
rst native commander-in-chief in 1951, and was the youngest full-rank general and self-appointed field marshal in Pakistan’s military history. He was also the first Pakistani military general to seize power through a coup.

  73. The Indo-Pakistan War of 1947, also called the First Kashmir War, was fought between India and Pakistan over Kashmir from 1947 to 1948. The conflict was taken to the UN where the Indian government agreed to hold a plebiscite to determine whether Kashmir should join India or Pakistan.

  74. In 1963–64, a series of Hindu-Muslim clashes in East Pakistan led to a wave of refugees coming into India. These provoked incidents of retaliatory violence against Muslims in some parts of India.

  75. Sheikh Abdullah had been imprisoned for allegedly conspiring with Pakistan against India (a charge never proved).

  76. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed (1907–72) was the prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir for eleven years from 1953 to 1964.

  77. Chiang Kai-shek’s (1887–1975) Kuomintang ruled much of China from 1928 until its retreat to Taiwan in 1949 after defeat by Mao’s Communist Party of China.

  78. K.M. Panikkar (1895–1963) was a scholar, journalist and diplomat. Educated at the University of Oxford, Panikkar read for the Bar at the Middle Temple, London, before returning to India, where he then taught at Aligarh and Calcutta universities. After independence he served as India’s ambassador to China. His many books include Asia and Western Dominance.

  79. After China took control of Tibet in 1950, the Indo-China relationship worsened. In 1954 the two nations drew up the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence or Panch Sheel.

  80. The Bandung Conference was a meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly independent, organised by Egypt, Indonesia, Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Iraq, and Japan, which took place in April 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia, and was coordinated by Ruslan Abdulgani, secretary general of the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.