Some critics see in all this an exhausted Jawaharlal’s anxiety to end the tension once and for all; others suggest that he allowed his regard for the Mountbattens to trump his own principles (and some wonder whether Edwina played a part in bringing about the series of concessions). Such arguments do a great disservice to Jawaharlal Nehru. His correspondence at the time shows a statesman in great anguish trying to do the best for his country when all other options had failed. As long as the British gave Jinnah a veto over every proposal he found uncongenial, there was little else Nehru could do. Nor is there evidence in the writings and reflections of the other leading Indian nationalists of the time that any of them had any better ideas. The only exception was Gandhi: the Mahatma went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept united if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Jawaharlal and Patel both gave that idea short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously.
There is no doubt that Mountbatten seemed to proceed with unseemly haste, and that in so doing he swept the Indian leaders along. Nehru was convinced that Jinnah was capable of setting the country ablaze and destroying all that the nationalist movement had worked for: a division of India was preferable to its destruction. “It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals,” Nehru told his party, “though I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right course.” The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling. On June 3, Jawaharlal, Jinnah, and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh broadcast news of their acceptance of partition to the country. The occasion again brought out the best in Jawaharlal:
We are little men serving a great cause, but because that cause is great something of that greatness falls upon us also. Mighty forces are at work in the world today and in India… . [It is my hope] that in this way we shall reach that united India sooner than otherwise and that she will have a stronger and more secure foundation… . The India of geography, of history and tradition, the India of our minds and hearts, cannot change.
But of course it could change: geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied, minds and hearts torn apart. Jawaharlal imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League’s demand for Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the “right” side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland. Over a million people died in the savagery that bookended the freedom of India and Pakistan; some seventeen million were displaced, and countless properties destroyed and looted. Lines meant lives. What Jawaharlal had thought of as a temporary secession of certain parts of India hardened into the creation of two separate and hostile states that would fight three wars with each other over the next twenty-four years.
The Mahatma was not the only one to be assailed by a sense of betrayal. The Congress government in the North-West Frontier Province, let down by the national party, chose to boycott the referendum there, which passed with the votes of just 50.49 percent of the electorate (but nearly 99 percent of those who voted). Mountbatten, who had seen himself serving for a while as a bridge between the two new Dominions by holding the governor-generalship of both, was brusquely told by Jinnah that the League leader himself would hold that office in Pakistan. The outgoing viceroy would therefore have to content himself with the titular overlordship of India alone.
On August 4 Jawaharlal sent Mountbatten the list of fourteen names he proposed for independent India’s first cabinet. Patel would be his deputy and in charge of home affairs, bringing his considerable organizational skills to the calamitous law-and-order situation and to the integration of the princely states. The rest of the list was a remarkably impressive distillation of the best and the brightest of India’s political elite, while ensuring regional and religious representation: four “Caste Hindus,” including the Hindu Mahasabha leader Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerji; two Muslims, Azad and Kidwai; the Sikh leader Baldev Singh; two Christians, one of whom was a princess of Sikh origin; two Scheduled Caste leaders, including the radical Ambedkar, who had so often been the Congress’s nemesis; and a Parsi. The south of India had two representatives to the north’s twelve — Rajagopalachari, a notable omission, was to be dispatched to strife-torn Bengal as governor — but this imbalance apart, Jawaharlal Nehru’s first cabinet list set a standard that would never again be matched, while establishing a precedent for diversity that all his successors would strive to emulate.
A scurrilous rumor did the rounds that Nehru had initially omitted his main rival in the Congress, Sardar Patel, from the list and had been obliged by Mountbatten to include him. This was completely untrue. Though Patel had sought to challenge Jawaharlal’s ascent in 1946, he understood why the Mahatma saw in the younger man a more plausible leader for all of India. In turn, Nehru, in inviting Patel to serve as his deputy, called him “the strongest pillar of the Cabinet.” Patel replied: “My services will be at your disposal, I hope, for the rest of my life and you will have unquestioned loyalty and devotion from me in the cause for which no man in India has sacrificed as much as you have done. Our combination is unbreakable and therein lies our strength.” The Sardar’s assurances proved completely true, and their “combination” was indispensable as independent India found its feet. Sadly, though, the “rest of my life” that Patel alluded to would extend no more than another three years.
The man who, as Congress president in Lahore in 1929, had first demanded purna swaraj (full independence), now stood ready to claim it, even if the city in which he had moved his famous resolution was no longer to be part of the newly free country. Amid the rioting and carnage that consumed large sections of northern India, Jawaharlal Nehru found the time to ensure that no pettiness marred the moment: he dropped the formal lowering of the Union Jack from the independence ceremony in order not to hurt British sensibilities. The Indian tricolor was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens. Just before midnight, Jawaharlal Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly to deliver the most famous speech ever made by an Indian:
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.
“This is no time … for ill-will or blaming others,” he added. “We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.” And typically he ended this immortal passage with a sentence that combined both humility and ambition, looking beyond the tragedy besieging his moment of triumph to India’s larger place in the world: “It is fitting,” he said, “that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.”
There would be challenges enough ahead, but Jawaharlal Nehru would never cease, even at the moment of his greatest victory, to look above the suffering around him and fix his gaze upon a distant dream.
7 V. K. Krishna Menon, an acerbic south Indian intellectual and longtime London resident, had helped publish Jawaharlal in England and led the pro-Congress India League since 1929. Jawaharlal met Menon for the first time in London in 1935 and was greatly impressed with his intelligence, his energy, and his left-wing credentials, but observed: “he has the virtues and failings of the intellectual.” Their friendship was deep, abiding, and, as we shall see, ultimately ill-starred.
8
“Commanding Heights”:
1947–1957
One man did not join the celebrations that midnight. Mahatma Gandhi stayed in Calcutta, fasting, striving to keep the peace in a city that just a year earlier had been ravaged by killing. He saw no cause for cel
ebration. Instead of the cheers of rejoicing, he heard the cries of the women ripped open in the internecine frenzy; instead of the slogans of freedom, he heard the shouts of the crazed assaulters firing their weapons at helpless refugees, and the silence of trains arriving full of corpses massacred on their journey; instead of the dawn of Jawaharlal’s promise, he saw only the long dark night of horror that was breaking his country in two. In his own Independence Day message to the nation Jawaharlal could not help thinking of the Mahatma:
On this day, our first thoughts go to the architect of freedom, the Father of our Nation who, embodying the old spirit of India, held aloft the torch…. We have often been unworthy followers of his, and we have strayed from his message, but not only we, but the succeeding generations, will remember his message and bear the imprint in their hearts.
It was a repudiation as well as a tribute: the Mahatma was now gently relegated to the “old spirit of India” from whom the custodians of the new had “strayed.” In his crushing disillusionment with his own people (of all religions), the Mahatma announced that he would spend the rest of his years in Pakistan, a prospect that made the leaders of the League collectively choke. But he never got there: on January 30, 1948, a Hindu extremist angered by Gandhi’s sympathy for Muslims shot him dead after a prayer meeting. Mahatma Gandhi died with the name of God on his lips.
The grieving nation found grim solace only in the fact that his assassin had been a Hindu, not a Muslim; the retaliatory rage that a Muslim killer would have provoked against his coreligionists would have made the partition riots look like a school-yard brawl. “The light has gone out of our lives,” a brokenhearted Jawaharlal declared in a moving broadcast to the nation, “and there is darkness everywhere. . . . The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong…. For that light represented something more than the immediate present; it represented the living truth, the eternal truths, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom.” Jawaharlal Nehru had lost a father figure; after Motilal’s death he had grown at the feet of the Mahatma, relying on the older man’s wisdom, advice, and patronage. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, he was truly alone.
The first months of independence were anything but easy. Often emotional, Jawaharlal was caught up in the human drama of the times. He was seen weeping at the sight of a victim one day, and erupting in rage at a would-be assailant hours later. Friends thought his physical health would be in danger as he stormed from city to village, ordering his personal bodyguards to shoot any Hindu who might attack a Muslim, providing refuge in his own home in Delhi for Muslims terrified for their lives, giving employment to young refugees who had lost everything. The American editor Norman Cousins recounted how one night in August Hindu rioters in New Delhi, “inflamed by stories of Moslem terror … smashed their way into Moslem stores, destroying and looting and ready to kill”:
Even before the police arrived in force, Jawaharlal Nehru was on the scene …, trying to bring people to their senses. He spied a Moslem who had just been seized by Hindus. He interposed himself between the man and his attackers. Suddenly a cry went up: “Jawaharlal is here!” … It had a magical effect. People stood still…. Looted merchandise was dropped. The mob psychology disintegrated. By the time the police arrived people were dispersing. The riot was over…. The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India, staking their lives on Nehru’s ability to protect them and assure them justice.
Affairs of state were just as draining. The new prime minister of India had to deal with the consequences of the carnage sweeping the country; preside over the integration of the princely states into the Indian Union; settle disputes with Pakistan on issues involving the division of finances, of the army, and of territory; cope with massive internal displacement, as refugees thronged Delhi and other cities; keep a fractious and divided nation together; and define both a national and an international agenda. On all issues but that of foreign policy, he relied heavily on Patel, who welded the new country together with formidable political and administrative skills and a will of iron. A more surprising ally was the former viceroy, now governor-general of India, Lord Mountbatten.
For all his culpability in rushing India to an independence drenched in blood, Mountbatten made Nehru partial amends by staying on in India for just under a year. As heir to a British government whose sympathy for the League had helped it carve out a country from the collapse of the Raj, Mountbatten enjoyed a level of credibility with the rulers of Pakistan that no Indian governorgeneral could have had. This made him a viable and impartial interlocutor with both sides at a time of great tension. When fighting broke out over Kashmir between the two Dominions (whose armies were still each commanded by a British general), Mountbatten helped prevent a deeper engagement by the Pakistani army and brought about an end to the war. Equally, as a governor-general above the political fray, he played a crucial role in persuading maharajahs and nawabs distrustful of the socialist Nehru to accept that they had no choice but to merge their domains into the Indian Union. And the governor-general and his wife distinguished themselves by their personal interest in and leadership of the emergency relief measures that saved millions of desperate refugees from misery and worse. In 1950, when India became a republic with its own Constitution, Jawaharlal arranged for it to remain within the British Commonwealth, acknowledging the British sovereign no longer as head of state but as the symbol of the free association of nations who wished to retain a British connection. Mountbatten’s influence was decisive in prompting Jawaharlal to make this choice. Nehru’s close relations with Edwina Mountbatten have been the stuff of much posthumous gossip, but his relationship with her husband was to have the more lasting impact on India’s history.
As prime minister, Jawaharlal had ultimate responsibility for many of the decisions taken during the tense period from 1947 to 1949, but it is true to say he was still finding his feet as a governmental leader and that on many key issues he simply went along with what Patel and Mountbatten wanted. Nehru was the uncontested voice of Indian nationalism, the man who had “discovered” India in his own imagination, but he could not build the India of his vision without help. When the Muslim rulers of Hindu-majority Junagadh and Hyderabad, both principalities surrounded by Indian territory, flirted with independence (in Hyderabad’s case) and accession to Pakistan (in Junagadh’s), the Indian army marched in and took over with scarcely a shot being fired. In both cases the decision was Patel’s, with acquiescence from Nehru. When the Hindu maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir tried to postpone a decision to accede to either India or Pakistan and found his state invaded by Pathan “irregulars” from Pakistan, it was Mountbatten who insisted on accession to India as a precondition for sending in the army to resist the invaders. Nehru, confident in the support of Kashmiri public opinion as manifest in the support of the secular nationalist Sheikh Abdullah, made accession conditional upon a reference to the will of the people: it was Jawaharlal’s proposal that a plebiscite be held immediately to ascertain their wishes. But when the Pakistani army joined the fray, and as the military tide turned in India’s favor, it was Mountbatten who prevailed upon Nehru, against Patel’s advice, to declare a cease-fire and take the dispute to the United Nations.
From the Indian nationalist point of view this was a gross error, since it converted what was thus far a domestic Indian problem into an international dispute. Jawaharlal’s decision to appeal to the UN has been seen within the country as a blunder that snatched diplomatic stalemate from the jaws of imminent military victory. But this is unreasonable; after all, Pakistan could just as easily have raised the issue at the UN, and it would have found some support. Recent scholarship has confirmed that British diplomacy at the time played a particularly active role in recasting the issue internationally to India’s disadvantage. Jawaharlal saw that policy considerations going well beyond
Kashmir — including the West’s general desire to improve its standing in the Islamic world amid trauma in Palestine, and the potential usefulness of Pakistan as an advocate for Britain with the Arab countries — influenced London’s actions. But Nehru should hardly have been surprised to see other countries acting in pursuit of their own interests: the wonder was that a man of such sharp intelligence and insight should have failed to more clearly define and act upon India’s.
By August 1953 Jawaharlal’s Kashmir policy was in a shambles. His friend and ally Sheikh Abdullah had begun flirting with notions of independence, and Nehru made the painful decision to place him under arrest. A compliant pro-Congress politician replaced Abdullah, but the development changed the complexion of the Kashmir dispute, on which international opinion was now broadly ranged against India. Domestically Jawaharlal was criticized for granting Jammu and Kashmir a special constitutional status — prohibiting non-Kashmiris from buying land in the state, for example, a provision which made it impossible to resettle refugees from Pakistan there. Abroad, the dispute Nehru had first internationalized now hung over India’s head like the proverbial sword of Damocles, and the issue of Kashmir continued to bedevil relations with Pakistan throughout Jawaharlal’s tenure — and beyond.
Apart from handling weighty matters of state, Jawaharlal had to deal with issues of domestic politics. He had surprised some of his most ardent supporters by his reluctance to embrace radical change, and his willingness to retain, and indeed rely on, the very civil servants and armed services personnel who had served the British Raj, the “steel frame” of which continued as the administrative superstructure of independent India. The government proved its worth in handling the rehabilitation of some seven million refugees from Pakistan, a colossal political and administrative feat. But the civil service continued in the traditions of colonial governance learned from their British masters; Nehru did little to instill in them a development orientation or a new ethic of service to the people. Continuity, not change, was the watchword. Many of the freedom fighters, who had gone to jail while these officials prospered under the British, were dismayed.