NEHRU
NEHRU
Also by Shashi Tharoor
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The Great Indian Novel
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Riot
NEHRU
THE INVENTION OF INDIA
SHASHI THAROOR
ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK
Copyright © 2003, 2011 by Shashi Tharoor
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“The Pandit” copyright 1962 by Ogden Nash.
Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Excerpt from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The
Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright
© 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1954 by
Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-411-6
Printed in the United States of America
To Kofi Annan,
who, as a young man in Ghana,
admired Nehru,
this book is dedicated
with respect and affection
Contents
Preface
A Note on Indian Political Movements
The Nehru Family Tree: Five Generations
1 “With Little to Commend Me”:
1889–1912
2 “Greatness Is Being Thrust upon Me”:
1912–1921
3 “To Suffer for the Dear Country”:
1921–1928
4 “Hope to Survive the British Empire”:
1928–1931
5 “In Office but Not in Power”:
1931–1937
6 “In the Name of God, Go!”:
1937–1945
7 “A Tryst with Destiny”:
1945–1947
8 “Commanding Heights”:
1947–1957
9 “Free Myself from this Daily Burden”:
1957–1964
10 “India Must Struggle against Herself”:
1889–1964–2003
Who’s Who: Short Biographical Notes on Personalities Mentioned
A Note on Sources
Select Bibliography
Preface
For the first seventeen years of India’s independence, the paradox-ridden Jawaharlal Nehru — a moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent almost ten years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi — was India. Upon the Mahatma’s assassination, Nehru became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of India’s struggle for freedom. Incorruptible, visionary, ecumenical, a politician above politics, Nehru’s stature was so great that the country he led seemed inconceivable without him. A year before his death a leading American journalist published a book entitled After Nehru, Who? The unspoken question around the world was: “after Nehru, what?”
Today, nearly four decades after his death, we have something of an answer to the latter question. As an India still seemingly clad in the trappings of Nehruvianism steps out into the twenty-first century, little of Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy appears intact. India has moved away from much of it, and so (in different ways) has the rest of the developing world for which Nehruvianism once spoke. As India nears the completion of the sixth decade of its independence from the British Raj, a transformation — still incomplete — has taken place that, in its essentials, has changed the basic Nehruvian assumptions of postcolonial nationhood.
In this short biography, I have sought to examine this great figure of twentieth-century nationalism from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first. Jawaharlal Nehru’s life is a fascinating story in its own right, and I have tried to tell it whole, because the privileged child, the unremarkable youth, the posturing young nationalist, and the heroic fighter for independence are all inextricable from the unchallengeable prime minister and revered global statesman. A concluding chapter critically analyzes the principal pillars of Nehru’s legacy to India — democratic institution-building, staunch pan- Indian secularism, socialist economics at home, and a foreign policy of nonalignment — all of which were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally contested today.
Nehru: The Invention of India is not a scholarly work; it is based on no new research into previously undiscovered archives; it is not footnoted, though a Note on Sources and a Select Bibliography will guide the curious toward further reading. It is, instead, a reinterpretation — both of an extraordinary life and career and of the inheritance it left behind for every Indian. The very term “Indian” was imbued with such meaning by Nehru that it is impossible to use it without acknowledging a debt: our passports incarnate his ideals. Where those ideals came from, whether they were brought to fulfillment by their own progenitor, and to what degree they remain viable today are among the themes of this book. I started it as divided between admiration and criticism as I finished it; but the more I delved into Nehru’s life, it was the admiration which deepened.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s impact on India is too great not to be reexamined periodically. As an Indian writer, I am conscious that his legacy is ours, whether we agree with everything he stood for or not. What India is today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man. This is his story.
A Note on Indian
Political Movements
This book mentions a number of Indian political parties and movements of importance to understanding Jawaharlal Nehru’s life and times and appreciating his legacy.
The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 by a liberal Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, to provide a forum for the articulation of an Indian viewpoint on issues of the country’s governance and political development. The Congress evolved into the country’s premier political party (whose annual sessions, in different venues around India, attracted ever-greater attendance and attention). Its leadership was initially drawn from the educated professional classes, and its presidents, who were elected annually, belonged to various faiths, with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis among the first two dozen presidents. Around the cusp of the century a schism developed within the Congress between the Extremists, led by Tilak, and the Moderates, led by Gokhale — the former seeking more radical action to overthrow the British, the latter pursuing their goals through constitutional means while seeking fundamental reforms leading to self-government. This schism ended around the time of the First World War.
The advent of Mahatma Gandhi, who returned to India from a long sojourn in South Africa in 1916, transformed the Congress from an elite debating society passing largely ineffectual resolutions into a mass movement for complete independence. In order to engage the Muslim masses and to promote Hindu-Muslim unity, Gandhi committed the party to supporting the Khilafat movement, which organized anti-British demonstrations around India clamoring for the restoration of the Caliphate in the defeated Ottoman Turkey. The victory of the secular republican Kemal Ataturk in the Turkish civil war rendered that cause otiose, but the campaign demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of popular mobilization cutting across communal lines. During the 1920s the major division in the Congress Party was between those advocating civil disobedience and noncooperation with the British and those who, calling themselves Swarajists, contested elections for seats in the institutions of limited self-governance allowed by the British. By the turn of the decade, though, both groups had reunited under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership to demand full independence (though many were prepared to settle for Dominion status within the British Empire). The principal differences within the Congress through the 1930s were between the radical socialists and the more conservative party elders. As the book explains, Jawaharlal Nehru had a foot in both camps.
Outside the Congress, a number of minor parties advanced various particularist interests, of which the main group mentioned in this book is the Liberal Party, led by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, which sought to work with the British to progressively expand Indian self-rule. The Liberals had little popular support and sought no mass base, but the British accorded them attention out of proportion to their political importance.
In the meantime, a far more fundamental challenge developed within the nationalist movement, this time not on ideological or tactical lines but on communal ones. The All-India Muslim League was founded in 1906 after a deputation of Muslim notables called on the viceroy to affirm their loyalty to British rule and seek the authorities’ support for Muslim interests. For a long time the League was not seen as a viable alternative to the Congress, and indeed many of its leaders enjoyed membership in both bodies. Up until the late 1920s it is possible to find the same names presiding over different sessions of the Congress and the League. Serious differences arose in the course of the Gandhian success at mass mobilization, leading the League, under Mohammed Ali Jinnah, principally out of fear of the consequences of “majority rule” (which they saw as likely to permit Hindu domination), to develop an increasingly separatist platform. While the Congress claimed throughout to represent Indians of all faiths, and continued to have important Muslim leaders (notably Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, its president from 1940 to 1946, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi”), the League increasingly asserted that it alone spoke for India’s Muslims. Though various regional parties sought to transcend the Congress- League divide by including members of all communities on nonsectarian platforms — notably the Unionist Party in Punjab, which advanced agrarian interests, and the Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party (Farmers, Workers, and Tenants Party) in Bengal — the League eventually triumphed in its aspirations. This book describes the evolution of the chasm between the Congress and the League and its ultimate conclusion — the partition of the country into two states, India and Pakistan, when the British left in 1947.
One other political movement deserves mention. Hindutva, literally “Hinduness,” is the cause advanced by Hindu zealots who harken back to atavistic pride in India’s Hindu heritage and seek to replace the country’s secular institutions with a Hindu state. Their forebears during the nationalist struggle were the Hindu Mahasabha, a party advancing Hindu communal interests neglected by the secular Congress, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, modeled on the Italian Brown Shirts. Neither found much traction within the Congress, and the Hindu Mahasabha faded away, but the creation of Pakistan and the terrible communal bloodletting that accompanied partition provided Hindu zealots new sources of support. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, or Indian People’s Party, was founded after independence as the principal vehicle for their political aspirations. The Sangh merged into the short-lived omnibus party, the Janata, in 1977, and reemerged in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Today the principal votaries of Hindutva are a “family” of organizations collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, including the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), the Bajrang Dal, and a large portion of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which since 1998 heads a coalition government in New Delhi.
THE NEHRU FAMILY TREE: FIVE GENERATIONS
1
“With Little to Commend Me”:
1889–1912
In January 1889, or so the story goes, Motilal Nehru, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer from the north Indian city of Allahabad, traveled to Rishikesh, a town holy to Hindus, up in the foothills of the Himalayas on the banks of the sacred river Ganga (Ganges). Motilal was weighed down by personal tragedy. Married as a teenager, in keeping with custom, he had soon been widowed, losing both his wife and his firstborn son in childbirth. In due course he had married again, an exquisitely beautiful woman named Swarup Rani Kaul. She soon blessed him with another son — but the boy died in infancy. Motilal’s own brother Nandlal Nehru then died at the age of forty-two, leaving to Motilal the care of his widow and seven children. The burden was one he was prepared to bear, but he desperately sought the compensatory joy of a son of his own. This, it seemed, was not to be.
Motilal and his two companions, young Brahmins of his acquaintance, visited a famous yogi renowned for the austerities he practiced while living in a tree. In the bitter cold of winter, the yogi undertook various penances, which, it was said, gave him great powers. One of the travelers, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, informed the yogi that Motilal’s greatest desire in life was to have a son. The yogi asked Motilal to step forward, looked at him long and hard, and shook his head sadly: “You,” he declared, “will not have a son. It is not in your destiny.”
As a despairing Motilal stood crestfallen before him, the other man, the learned Pandit Din Dayal Shastri, argued respectfully with the yogi. The ancient Hindu shastras, he said, made it clear that there was nothing irreversible about such a fate; a great karmayogi like him could simply grant the unfortunate man a boon. Thus challenged, the yogi looked at the young men before him, and finally sighed. He reached into his brass pitcher and sprinkled water from it three times upon the wouldbe father. Motilal began to express his gratitude, but the yogi cut him short. “By doing this,” the yogi breathed, “I have sacrificed all the benefits of all the austerities I have conducted over many generations.”
The next day, as legend has it, the yogi passed away.
Ten months later, at 11:30 P.M. on November 14, 1889, Motilal Nehru’s wife, Swarup Rani, gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He was named Jawaharlal (“precious jewel”), and he would grow up to be one of the most remarkable men of the twentieth century.
Jawaharlal Nehru himself always disavowed the story as apocryphal, though it was attributed by many to two of the protagonists themselves — Motilal and Malaviya. Since neither left a firsthand account of the episode, the veracity of the tale can never be satisfactorily determined. Great men are often ascribed remarkable beginnings, and at the peak of Jawaharlal Nehru’s career there were many willing to promote a supernatural explanation for his greatness. His father, certainly, saw him from a very early age as a child of destiny, one made for extraordinary success; but as a rationalist himself, Motilal is unlikely to have based his faith in his son on a yogi’s blessing.
The child himself was slow to reveal any signs of potential greatness. He was the kind of student usually referred to as “indifferent.” He also luxuriated in the pampering of parents whose affluence grew with the mounting success of Motilal Nehru’s legal career. In a pattern well-known in traditional Indian life, where wives received very little companionship from their husbands and transferred their emotional attentions t
o their sons instead, Jawaharlal was smothered with affection by his mother, in whom he saw “Dresden china perfection.” Years later he would begin his autobiography with the confession: “An only son of prosperous parents is apt to be spoilt, especially so in India. And when that son happens to have been an only child for the first eleven years of his existence, there is little hope for him to escape this spoiling.”
The young Jawaharlal Nehru’s mind was shaped by two sets of parental influences that he never saw as contradictory — the traditional Hinduism of his mother and the other womenfolk of the Nehru household, and the modernist, secular cosmopolitanism of his father. The women (especially Swarup’s widowed sister Rajvati) told him tales from Hindu mythology, took him regularly to temples, and immersed him for baths in the holy river Ganga. Motilal, on the other hand, though he never disavowed the Hindu faith into which he was born, refused to undergo a “purification ceremony” in order to atone formally for having “crossed the black water” by traveling abroad, and in 1899 was formally excommunicated by the high-caste Hindu elders of Allahabad for his intransigence. The taint lingered, and Motilal’s family was socially boycotted by some of the purists, but the Nehrus typically rose above the ostracism through their own worldly success.
The Nehrus were Kashmiri Pandits, scions of a community of Brahmins from the northernmost reaches of the subcontinent who had made new lives for themselves across northern and central India since at least the eighteenth century. Kashmir itself had been largely converted to Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but Kashmiri Muslims followed a syncretic version of the faith imbued with the gentle mysticism of Sufi preachers, and coexisted in harmony with their Hindu neighbors. Though the Pandits left Kashmir in significant numbers, they did so not as refugees fleeing Muslim depredation, but as educated and professionally skilled migrants in quest of better opportunities. Though the Kashmiri Pandits were as clannish a community as any in India — conscious that their origins, their modest numbers, their high social standing, and their pale, fine-featured looks all made them special — they were proud of their pan-Indian outlook. They had, after all, left their original homes behind in the place they still called their “motherland,” Kashmir; they had thrived in a state where Muslims outnumbered them thirteen to one; they had no history of casteist quarrels, since the non-Brahmin castes of Kashmir, and several of the Brahmins, had converted to Islam; they were comfortable with Muslim culture, with the Persian language, and even with the eating of meat (which most Indian Brahmins other than Kashmiris and Bengalis abjured). Secure in themselves and at ease with others, Kashmiri Pandits inclined instinctively toward the cosmopolitan. It was no accident, for instance, that Motilal’s chief household retainer was a Muslim, Munshi Mubarak Ali. Jawaharlal learned a great deal from him: “With his fine grey beard he seemed to my young eyes very ancient and full of old-time lore, and I used to snuggle up to him and listen, wide-eyed, by the hour to his innumerable stories.”