VI
Nehru’s contribution to the building of modern India is immense. He made mistakes, to be sure, but other people in his place would most likely have made bigger ones. As a historian, I am quite clear that India was very fortunate to have him as prime minister for that crucial first decade after Independence. His record was unquestionably better than that of those who succeeded him. It was better than that of those who came to rule the other ex-colonial countries of Asia and Africa. And, so far as one can judge these matters, it was probably better than what might have been if some other Indian, say Patel or Bose, had happened to become prime minister in 1947.
As I have suggested, Indians are not always well placed to appreciate Nehru’s achievements. Indeed, arguably the best single-volume work on Nehru was written by the Australian diplomat, Walter Crocker. His Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate, is a wise, thoughtful and detached book, its objectivity deepened by the fact that the author came from a relatively obscure country without high stakes in the Cold War.
Nehru, writes Crocker, ‘was that rare man who is both clever and good’. In his lifetime it was Nehru’s intelligence that was exaggerated; whereas after his death it has been his decency that has been depreciated. For, he was indeed a profoundly good man. As Crocker put it, ‘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’—pity and mercy for the weak, the unfortunate, the forgotten and the persecuted among humankind. His selflessness was widely recognized: thus ‘the great bulk of the people of India sensed, and they never lost the sense, that Nehru wanted only to help them and wanted nothing for himself . . .’
Nehru’s non-communal, non-parochial orientation was a product of his personal beliefs. It also constituted pragmatic politics. For, as Walter Crocker points out, against the backdrop of civil war, partition, angry refugees and recalcitrant princes, Nehru‘s ‘first concern was to see that India did not fall apart. To this end he encouraged a nationalism that would make Indians feel that they were Indians instead of feeling that they were Tamils or Punjabis or Dogras or Assamese or Brahmans or Kshatriyas or this or that caste, as they are apt. He gave special consideration to the Muslims so as to induce them to feel Indian. For the same reason Christians and other minorities could always be sure of Nehru’s unflinching protection. The “Secular State”, that is to say a non-Hindu and all-Indian State, was fundamental to this concern.’
Crocker shrewdly notes that in promoting adult suffrage, Nehru was acting against the interests of upper-class Brahmins like himself. Writing shortly after his subject’s death, he said that it was ‘unlikely that there will be a place in India again for a ruler like Nehru—the aristocratic liberal humanist’. Crocker predicted that in time, India would ‘be run by politicians, more and more drawn from, or conditioned by, the outcastes and the low castes. For this is the majority, and, thanks to the ballot-box, it will be the votes of the majority which will set up and pull down governments; votes won through promising more and more to the needy and the many.’
Sixty years after universal adult franchise was introduced in India, we can see Crocker’s prediction being fulfilled in good measure. Westernized Brahmins like Jawaharlal Nehru, once so dominant in Indian politics, are now on the margins. The main players are drawn from the lower orders, representing—in varying degrees—the backward castes which constitute the majority of the electorate. And so, as Crocker wrote, ‘in abolishing the British raj, and in propagating ideas of equality . . . Nehru and the upper-class Indian nationalists of English education abolished themselves. Nehru destroyed the Nehrus.’
Walter Crocker’s diaries, which are at the University of Adelaide, contain more revealing insights still. For instance, there remains a keen interest in the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. That they were intimates is not to be doubted—but did the bonds ever move from the merely emotional to the tellingly physical? That one was the prime minister of India and the other the wife of the governor-general of India we know—but was Nehru ever influenced in his policies by the desires and preferences of his friend Edwina?
Despite the column inches devoted to these matters in the press, and the interrogations and speculations on radio and television, we still don’t really know. I do not propose here to provide definitive answers to those questions. But I do wish to supply an interesting and possibly telling sidelight on the Nehru–Edwina friendship, drawing on material from Crocker’s unpublished diaries.
On the 21st of February 1960, Edwina Mountbatten died in her sleep while on a visit to Borneo. Shortly after midday, the news was communicated to Walter Crocker by his friend Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the veteran Gandhian and high-ranking minister in the Union government. That evening the Australian diplomat was due to attend a dinner at Hyderabad House in honour of the historian Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee had already published several volumes of his best-selling survey of the rise and fall of civilizations. He was in Delhi at the invitation of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, who had asked him to deliver the first of what was to become an annual lecture in memory of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. As Crocker wrote in his diary that night, by the time he reached Hyderabad House,
Nehru was there. He must have had strong feelings about the utterly sudden death of Lady Mountbatten but he showed no sign of it. He sat next to Toynbee at dinner and for a while was silent, but for the rest of the meal was plunged into a lively conversation with him. As usual everyone around looked by comparison, strained, inhibited, dim. There was not a hint of self-consciousness or fear or hesitation about him. His physical handsomeness in itself was dominating—the eyes, the golden-light brown and healthy skin, the healthy hair . . . What a man, whatever his policies.
As a first-hand account of how Jawaharlal Nehru felt and acted the day Edwina Mountbatten died, this is striking indeed. With an almost magisterial self-will, Nehru appears to have kept his thoughts (and we may presume, his grief) hidden within himself. An honoured guest had come to town, and the prime minister’s duty was to entertain and amuse him. At the time, Toynbee had a colossal popular following. Never since (and rarely before) has a mere historian been treated with such deference around the globe or so readily acknowledged as an oracle. That evening at Hyderabad House, the others around the table, whether Indian or western, were inhibited, even tongue-tied. It was only the prime minister who could engage Toynbee in a conversation of intellectual equals. His dearest friend had just died: but his office, and his country, demanded of Nehru that he set aside his personal grief and act as was expected of him.
Indian xenophobes and Pakistani nationalists both charge Nehru with having acted in political matters under the influence of Edwina Mountbatten. Their accusations have not yet been backed by concrete evidence. On the other hand, reading Walter Crocker’s account of Nehru’s conduct in public on 21st February 1960, it is hard to believe that while Edwina was alive, Nehru would have abandoned principle and patriotism in deference to her whims and charms.
VII
In middle age, as in youth, a photograph of Nehru occupies a prominent place in my house. The photo I grew up with was generic, part of a print run of many thousands (if not millions); this is a one-off, almost certainly the only copy now in existence or display.
The photograph was taken in 1949, while the prime minister was visiting the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun, where my grandfather and father both worked. The great man is signing an autograph book. The right hand carries a pen; the left hand contains a cigarette holder. Also visible is a handkerchief with the monogrammed initials, ‘JN’.
I acquired the photograph from my grandmother. She gave it to me shortly before she died in 2001, saying, ‘No one else in the family will want it.’ My grandmother knew English, although her reading was confined to books and magazines in Tamil. From them, and from the world around, she seemed to know about the fall in Nehru’s reputation
, and to sense that her grandson was, in his eccentrically obsessive way, seeking to reverse it.
My mother put up her hero’s photograph in her bedroom, to be seen only by the family. My Nehru is on the mantelpiece in our drawing room, visible to all visitors. This is not to say that my admiration is as deep or as unforgiving as hers. I do admit that Nehru made mistakes, sometimes serious ones. I do think that there were other modern Indians who were as great as him—Ambedkar, Patel, Rajagopalachari, and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay come to mind—and others who were even greater (notably, Gandhi and Tagore). That I choose still to have his photograph on public display is in part an act of defiance, a desire to mock the conventional wisdom. For, in the judgement of this historian, Nehru was a true maker of modern India. Besides, it is a charming photograph.
APPENDIX
DEBATING NEHRU WITH A FRIEND
In 2001, when Nehru’s historical reputation was at an all-time low (in part, but only in part, because the BJP was in power in New Delhi), I wrote an essay in The Hindu on how the debunking of India’s first prime minister was mostly misplaced. This prompted a long letter from a friend in Bangalore, a brilliant and public-spirited businessman who both cared deeply about India (he has given away vast sums of money to rural education) and was (rightly) disgusted with the culture of sycophancy in the Congress party. The exchange between my friend (referred to below by the initials ‘PP’, for ‘Patriotic Philanthropist’) and myself is reproduced below:
PP: Nehru was a liberal no doubt and a towering figure, but he quietly decimated the political leadership in the Congress. While Gandhi created leaders, Nehru destroyed them. So people asked the question, ‘After Nehru Who?’ The local leadership at the state level crumbled and no new leaders of good calibre came up.
RG: I think this is to some extent a fair and just criticism . . . [H]e could have more actively sought out and nurtured second-rung leaders. His own preference was for non-political types like Homi Bhabha and T.T. Krishnamachari—people who shared his liberal and cosmopolitan world view. However, he did actively try to get brilliant young socialists like Jayaprakash Narayan back to the Congress. I think it a real pity that the best, that is, the most intelligent and idealistic of the young Indians, who were then in the socialist and Communist parties, set themselves up in opposition to Nehru. Had they worked with him and within the Congress in the 1950s and 1960s, as he asked them to do, they might collectively have ended illiteracy and brought about effective land reforms, which were crucial if India was to progress economically. On that socialist or social democratic base we could have, from the 1970s, more effectively built capitalism and private enterprise. That was a real lost chance.
PP: Nehru stayed non-aligned, but India lost. India today is a third-rate power, given to pontification on the world stage, obsessed with Pakistan. Nehru took the Kashmir issue to the UN listening to Mountbatten, and the British took us to the cleaners. While the Marshall Plan made Japan and Europe, India got peanuts. His policies led to India’s closing shop which we had never done in our long history because we are a trading nation. So we became like the galli ka kutta, nobody wanted us.
RG: Here I am not with you. In fact, the entire Cabinet, including Patel, was with the decision to go to the UN. We had to, if only because in Junagadh (which had a Muslim Nawab and a [majority] Hindu population), Patel helped organize a plebiscite when the Nawab voted [to join] Pakistan. We could scarcely not agree to a plebiscite for Kashmir, which was the same situation—in reverse. Also, I think non-alignment was necessary in the 1950s—though we could have been more consistent in its application.
PP: It was Nehru’s arrogance that turned China against us despite India supporting China.
RG: Yes, on the China front he made serious mistakes, of his own, and by trusting Krishna Menon, but given the suspicions and ambitions of the Chinese after their Revolution, and the ambiguities about the border, conflict was more or less inevitable.
PP: Yes, Nehru created the educated elite and the elite got on to the gravy train. He also created the largest pool of poor people in the world, deprived of education. Look at China for education. The poor paid for the rich and the rich left India . . . He warped the thinking of the educated class who depended on the state even for education.
RG: Yes, this was indeed his greatest failure, the failure to abolish illiteracy. Part of this was because of his fascination with high-tech (hence his vigorous promotion of the IITs). But if the socialists had been with him, and Communists like EMS [Namboodiripad] too, who knows?
PP: Yes, he integrated socially. He truly believed in a free society without discrimination, but he forgot what India was, a deeply religious society with religion permeating throughout. He worked on the western concepts which were alien in their approach. Gandhi was a true Indian who believed in an Indian society but sought to achieve it through what existed, our belief in Dharma, our tolerance for others, our acceptance of others and our indifference to others. We are a multi-religious society and not what Nehru defined as a secular society. It is better to accept what we are and then change than build an edifice on top only to see it crumble. Caste was and is a reality and to deny [it] is to live in a make-believe world. Caste could only be eradicated by education and urbanization and by social action as in Kerala. Nehru tried a top–down approach and created the base of a disaster.
RG: I think there might be a real disagreement here. I agree that change must come from above and from below, but insist that religion has no place in public or political life. The Nehru way of secularism remains the only alternative, unless we want to replicate Gujarat everywhere. More on this below.
PP: Nehru had contempt for an Indian, the real Indian in a dhoti, speaking his language, following his rituals and leading his life, howsoever bad. He believed that an Indian was a brown-skinned Englishman, a caricature in his own country. He created all of us who speak English at home, forget our roots, despise our own people and do not know our own country and have forgotten our own culture. His idea of India was not India’s idea of itself.
RG: There is no one ‘authentic’ Indian or even an ‘authentic’ Hindu as you seem to believe. We are riven apart by our particularities—of caste, language, religion, province. Rajmohan Gandhi (in a chapter of his book The Good Boatman) argues that the reason Gandhi chose Nehru as his successor was that he was a genuinely Indian or all-India figure—where Patel was a Gujarati, Rajaji a Tamil, Azad a Muslim, etc. The fact that he was not at all provincial, that non-Hindi speakers, non-Brahmins, women and non-Hindus could all trust him was crucial in his helping build and nurture a unifying and inclusive idea of India. Moreover, he gave Indians hope—that we could build a more prosperous and peaceful society—whereas the politicians nowadays who claim to be authentically Hindu or Indian only stoke our fears—that we will be swamped by Muslims or upper castes or whatever. I think that a modern society needs a liberal cosmopolitan worldview—glorification of what is ‘authentic’, ‘real’ or ‘indigenous’ is a recipe for sectarian violence and, in the worst case, for fascism.
PP: I like Nehru but he is not the God you make him out to me. I would give him 50 per cent in marking.
RG: Fifty per cent is quite good—what would you give Vajpayee or Deve Gowda? Much less I am sure. Nehru had a more difficult task, I believe, than any other politician in history—unifying a desperately divided and very poor country, and doing so democratically. On the whole, he did this very well. We should ask ourselves before we bash him—how would we have done in his position? We might simply have fled or capitulated.
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Verdicts on Nehru Page 3