If Kamala’s impact on Jawaharlal’s thought or action is difficult to discern, she was indirectly responsible for the turn her daughter’s life had taken. During her brief stint, between bouts of ill-health, as a Congress volunteer, Kamala went to address a college in Lucknow and fainted from the heat and exhaustion. The young student who rushed to her succor became a lifelong fan and soon followed her into active work for the Congress Party. His name was Feroze Gandhi.
Nehru’s sister Betty described Feroze as enamored of Kamala “in a romantic, Dante-and-Beatrice way, content if he could just be near her.” He dropped out of college to be at her side, and was in Lausanne at Kamala’s deathbed. His fidelity to her mother was certainly a crucial factor in Indira’s own attraction to the fair-skinned, stocky Parsi (a member of India’s tiny Zoroastrian minority, descended from Persian refugees who had fled Muslim persecution in the seventh century, and no relation of the Mahatma). In India the development of such a relationship would have had severe obstacles to overcome, but Feroze and Indira both decided to study in England and became intimate there, Indira finally accepting Feroze’s proposal of marriage on the steps of the SacréCoeur in Paris. When they returned to India they found the Nehru family, particularly Jawaharlal’s sisters, implacably opposed to their marriage plans (an impecunious Parsi without a college degree for the only heir of the future leader of free India? The prospect, Nan averred, was out of the question). But Jawaharlal could not bring himself to stand in the way of the happiness of his only child. Though he tried to delay her decision, and though hate mail arriving at his residence left him in no doubt of the views of the self-appointed guardians of Hindu purity, Jawaharlal acquiesced in her wishes. He issued a statement to the press in February 1942. Marriage, he declared, was a personal affair; “on whomsoever my daughter’s choice would have fallen, I would have accepted it or been false to the principles I have held.” But he was careful enough to cite the Mahatma’s blessing of the match, and to conduct the wedding according to Vedic Hindu rites.
Nehru often called his daughter “Indu-boy,” a term of affection that could not but have reminded her of her duty to compensate for his lack of a son. His own relationship with his father had been paramount, and he tried to replicate it with Indira, particularly in their correspondence; but here she could not hold her own quite as he had been able to do. Jawaharlal was also far more of an absentee father than Motilal had been; there was no equivalent in his parental career of Motilal’s risking all to intercede for him in Nabha, or of Motilal’s sacrifice of wealth and security to advance the convictions (and ambitions) of his son. Where Jawaharlal had been the repository of all of Motilal’s hopes for his country and his heritage, Indira was merely his daughter, and even the nickname “Indu-boy” seemed to suggest that was not somehow quite good enough.
Jawaharlal was in prison when Indira made him a grandfather, with the birth of Rajiv (a name chosen by Jawaharlal, since it means the same as “Kamala” — “lotus”) on August 20, 1944. Indira paid him the quiet tribute of adding a middle name for her son that was a synonym of her father’s name — “Ratna,” which like “Jawahar” means “jewel.” That was the only good news in a period of torment for the Nehru family, all of whom were in jail in appalling conditions. Indira herself was out of prison only because she had been released on grounds of ill-health; she had contracted pleurisy, the same affliction that had laid Nan’s husband, Ranjit Pandit, low, and which took his life in early 1944. Betty’s husband, Raja Hutheesing, also left jail beset by ailments from which he would never quite recover.
Personal setbacks were mirrored by political ones. With the Congress leadership in jail, the British moved to strengthen the position of Jinnah and the Muslim League, pressuring Jinnah’s critics within the party to remain in the League and under his leadership. Muslim opponents of the Pakistan idea were dissuaded, sidelined, or (like Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan in Punjab and Allah Bux in Sind) died. The League formed governments (often with the votes of British members, and with Congress legislators in jail) in provinces where it had been routed in the elections, and enjoyed patronage appointments where formal office was not possible. The futility of the Quit India movement, which accomplished little but the Congress’s own exclusion from national affairs, compounded the original blunder of the Congress in resigning its ministries. It had left the field free for the Muslim League, which emerged from the war immeasurably enhanced in power and prestige. Even the Mahatma, after his release from prison on health grounds in May 1944, held talks with Jinnah that seemed to confirm the latter’s stature as an alternative center of power in the country.
On June 15, 1945, Jawaharlal and his Congress colleagues emerged from prison, blinking in the sunlight. The war was over, and they had been freed. But they would be taking their first steps in, and toward, freedom in a world that had changed beyond recognition.
6 He spent an afternoon with the American and British battalions of the International Brigades and wrote of the deep sense of longing he felt to join them: “something in me wanted to stay on this inhospitable looking hillside which sheltered so much human courage, so much of what was worthwhile in life.” But he was nearly fifty years old, and he knew he had a greater cause to serve in his own country.
7
“A Tryst with Destiny”:
1945–1947
The British had not covered themselves with glory during the war. They had run a military dictatorship in a country that they had claimed to be preparing for democracy. They had presided over one of the worst famines in human history, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, while diverting food (on Churchill’s personal orders) from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies. (Tens of thousands of Bengalis perished, but Churchill’s only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about the famine was to ask peevishly why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.) Even Lord Wavell, who had been rewarded for military failure (in both the deserts of North Africa and the jungles of Burma) by succeeding Linlithgow as viceroy, considered the British government’s attitude to India “negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated.”
Upon his release from prison Jawaharlal gave vent to his rage in such intemperate terms — at one point accusing members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council of corruption — that he was very nearly arrested again. The Labour victory in the British general elections meant that the egregious Churchill was soon to be replaced as prime minister by Attlee, but this did not bring about any change in the anti-Congressism of the British authorities in India. Wavell convened a conference in Simla from late June 1945 (to which Jawaharlal, who held no major post in Congress, was not invited) which the viceroy allowed Jinnah to wreck. In this atmosphere of frustration and despair, the British called elections in India at the end of 1945, with the same franchise arrangements as in 1937, for seats in the central and provincial assemblies.
The Congress was woefully unequipped to contest them. Their blunder in surrendering the reins of power in 1939 and then losing their leadership and cadres to prison from 1942 meant that they went into the campaign tired, dispirited, and ill-organized. The League, on the other hand, had flourished during the war; its political machinery was well-oiled with patronage and pelf, while the Congress’s was rusty from disuse. The electoral fortunes of 1937 were now significantly reversed. The Congress still carried a majority of the provinces. But except for the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress won nineteen Muslim seats to the League’s seventeen, the League swept the reserved seats for Muslims across the board, even in provinces like Bombay and Madras which had seemed immune to the communal contagion. Whatever the explanation — and Jawaharlal could have offered a few — there was no longer any escaping the reality that Jinnah and the Muslim League could now legitimately claim a popular mandate to speak for the majority of India’s Muslims.
Jawaharlal did not believe this to mean that the partition of the country, which he thought totally impractical, was inevitable. In speeches, intervie
ws, and articles throughout late 1945 and early 1946, he expressed the belief that, free of foreign rule, the Muslims of India would relinquish any thought of secession. The Muslims of India, he wrote, “are only technically a minority. They are vast in numbers and powerful in other ways, and it is patent that they cannot be coerced against their will. … This communal question is essentially one of protection of vested interests, and religion has always been a useful stalking horse for this purpose.” He even argued that the Congress should grant the right of secession just to allay any Muslim fears, not in the expectation that the Muslim League–ruled provinces would actually exercise it. But whether, as many Indian analysts have suggested, Jinnah had really meant to establish a separate state or was merely advocating Pakistan to obtain leverage over the Congress, his followers had taken him at his word. A state of their own was what they were determined to have, and by the spring of 1946 Jawaharlal’s idealism appeared naive, even dangerously so.
Divide et impera had worked too well. A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.
The British hold on the country was slipping. Even soldiers and policemen openly expressed their support for the nationalist leaders, heedless of the reaction of their British officers. Mutinies broke out in the air force and the British Indian navy. Violence erupted at political events. The demand for freedom was all but drowned out by the clamor for partition.
In a gesture so counterproductive that it might almost have been an act of expiation, the Raj clumsily gave the warring factions a last chance at unity. It decided to prosecute the defectors of Bose’s Indian National Army. Bose himself had died in a fiery plane crash at war’s end in Formosa, so the Raj sought to find scapegoats among his lieutenants. In a desire to appear even-handed, the British chose to place three INA soldiers on trial in Delhi’s historic Red Fort: a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh. The result was a national outcry that spanned the communal divide. Whatever the errors and misjudgments of the INA men (and Jawaharlal believed freedom could never have come through an alliance with foreigners, let alone foreign Fascists), they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule. Both the Congress and the League rose to the trio’s defense; for the first time in their long careers, Jawaharlal and Jinnah accepted the same brief, Nehru donning a barrister’s gown after twenty-five years.
But the moment passed: the defense of three patriots was no longer enough to guarantee a common definition of patriotism. The ferment across the country made the result of the trials almost irrelevant. The trials were eventually abandoned, because by the time they had begun it was apparent that the ultimate treason to the British Raj was being contemplated in its own capital. London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of the burdens of its Indian empire. In February 1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India “to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution.” The endgame had begun.
Before the arrival of the Mission, Jawaharlal indulged his internationalist interests with a visit to Singapore and Malaya (with an unscheduled stop in Burma on the way back, where a weather delay enabled him to thwart the British and meet the Burmese nationalist hero Aung San). Permission to visit had initially been denied, then extended with humiliating conditions which he had declined to accept, but these had been overruled by the Supreme Commander for Asia himself, Lord Mountbatten. When he arrived in Singapore in March 1946 Nehru was welcomed with honors worthy of a head of government. Mountbatten received him personally and drove him to a canteen for Indian soldiers, where he was mobbed by the admiring men in uniform. Looking around for his hostess, Jawaharlal found Edwina Mountbatten crawling out from under the crowd; she had been knocked to the floor in the mad rush to greet him. It was, he later recalled, an unusual introduction. It was to become an unusual friendship.
The status Mountbatten chose to accord Jawaharlal was not accidental. It was clear he was India’s man of destiny at a time when India’s destiny was about to be realized. In early 1942 Mahatma Gandhi had told the Congress that there was no truth in the rumors that Nehru and he were estranged or that the more conservative Rajagopalachari, whose daughter had married one of the Mahatma’s sons, was Gandhi’s preferred successor. Jawaharlal liked to claim that he and the Mahatma spoke different languages, but “language,” the Mahatma said, “is no bar to a union of hearts. And … when I am gone, [Nehru] will speak my language.” The shrewd Gandhi had nurtured his protégé’s leadership claims, engineering his ascent three times to the Congress’s presidency. He knew that Jawaharlal had adopted him as a father figure, and if he was not always a faithful Gandhian, he would never fail to be a dutiful son.
In April 1946 Maulana Azad, after an unprecedented six years as Congress president, announced that he would be resigning and handing the reins to Jawaharlal. Sardar Patel and Acharya Kripalani, the Congress’s general secretary, announced their candidacies as well, but the Mahatma intervened swiftly and decisively, and both men withdrew. On May 9, Kripalani announced that Jawaharlal Nehru had been elected unopposed as president of the Congress. Gandhi had managed to arrange his protégé’s triumph at the most crucial time of all, with rumors of an interim Indian government being formed in advance of talks with the Cabinet Mission in Simla in May.
The Mission, a triumvirate of Sir Stafford Cripps (now the president of the Board of Trade), the British secretary of state for India, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, and First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander, had arrived on March 24. The vultures, scenting the dying emanations of the Raj, began gathering for the kill. The negotiations and confabulations, intrigue and maneuvering among and within the various interested parties — the British, the Congress, the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the loyalists, the Communists, the civil servants — became more intense and more convoluted with each passing day. Wavell’s astonishingly candid diaries reveal his distaste for, and distrust of, practically every Indian politician he had to deal with, each (in his eyes) proving more dishonest than the next. Though he was, like most of the British administration, hostile to the Congress and sympathetic to the League his government had helped nurture, he was scathing in his contempt for the mendacity of the League’s leaders, and of their “hymn of hate against Hindus.” (No Congress leader expressed any hatred of Muslims to the viceroy.) Even the idea of Pakistan seemed to take many forms in the minds of its own advocates, with several seeing it as a Muslim state within a united India, and others advocating assorted forms of decentralized confederation rather than outright secession. (The American journalist Phillips Talbot recalls Sir Abdullah Haroon of the League showing him, in 1940, eight separate plans for Pakistan then being debated by the League’s High Command.) Jinnah was steadfast in his demand for a separate state in the northwest and east of the country, but avoided giving specific answers as to how the creation of such a state could serve its declared purpose of protecting Muslims in the Hindu-majority provinces. Jawaharlal, meanwhile, sought nothing less than an Act of Abdication from the British: India’s political arrangements should, he declared, be left to Indians to determine in their own Constituent Assembly, free of British mediation.
Part of the problem at the time may well have lain in a profound miscalculation on Jawaharlal’s part about the true intentions of the British. Cut off by imprisonment from the political realities of world affairs, Nehru came to Simla believing (as he asserted to Phillips Talbot) that perfidious Albion was still trying to hold on to the jewel in her imperial crown by encouraging division among the Indian parties. Talbot felt that Nehru had simply not realized that Britain was exhausted, near-bankrupt, unwilling and unable to dispatch the sixty thousand British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind
a united India, they were prepared to “cut” the country quite literally before running. Nehru, still imagining an all-powerful adversary seeking to perpetuate its hegemony, and unaware of the extent to which the League had become a popular party among Indian Muslims, dealt with both on erroneous premises. “How differently would Nehru and his colleagues have negotiated,” Talbot wondered, “had they understood Britain’s weakness rather than continuing to be obsessed with its presumed strength?” The question haunts our hindsight.
When the Simla Conference began on May 9, 1946, Jinnah — who was cool but civil to Nehru — refused to shake hands with either of the two Muslim leaders of the Congress party, Azad and Abdul Ghaffar Khan; he wished to be seen as the sole spokesman of Muslim India. Nonetheless, when the Cabinet Mission proposed a three-tier plan for India’s governance, with a weak center (limited to defense, external affairs, and communications), autonomous provinces (with the right of secession after five years), and groups of provinces (at least one of which would be predominantly Muslim), the League accepted the proposal, even though it meant giving up the idea of a sovereign Pakistan. The viceroy, without waiting for the Congress’s formal acceptance of the scheme, invited fourteen Indians to serve as an interim government. While most of the leading Muslim Leaguers and Congressmen were on the list, there was a startling omission: not a single Muslim Congressman had been invited to serve. The Congress replied that it accepted the plan in principle, but could not agree to a government whose Muslim members were all from the League. Jinnah made it clear he could not accept anything else, and the resultant impasse proved intractable. The Cabinet Mission left for London with its plan endorsed but this dispute unresolved, leaving a caretaker Viceroy’s Council in charge of the country. Ironically, its only Indian member (along with seven Englishmen) was a Muslim civil servant, Sir Akbar Hydari, who had made clear his fundamental opposition in principle to the idea of Pakistan.