The Congress socialists, heirs to those who had found Jawaharlal insufficiently radical in the 1920s and 1930s, formally split from the parent party in March 1948. Nehru shared their ideals but was, in their view, in thrall to capitalist and right-wing forces; his ability to compromise, to work with those he had once denounced, even his eclectic cabinet which drew upon all shades of Indian opinion, were seen as proof that socialism would never come to India through him. Jawaharlal lamented their departure and particularly that of their leader, a figure of rare integrity and strength of character, Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan. Had the Congress divided completely on ideological lines, Jawaharlal might have belonged with them; but he was prime minister and leader of a party that had won India’s freedom and still strived to represent the various currents of belief that had sustained this cause. Nehru sought instead to serve as a bridge between the two principal opposing forces within the Congress: the right, grouped around Patel and Rajendra Prasad, who were prepared to ban trade unions, woo the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dismiss Muslim officials, and promote the interests of the Hindu majority; and the socialist left whose policy prescriptions, in Jawaharlal’s own words, “show an amazing lack of responsibility.”
Ideology was not the only dividing issue; secularism was equally important. In resisting the anti-Muslim currents in his party that had come to the fore in the wake of partition, Jawaharlal recognized that Jinnah’s triumph in creating a Muslim nation had weakened the case for secularism in India and increased communal feeling in the minds of politicians who had earlier considered themselves Gandhians. The steady influx of Hindu refugees from Pakistan hardened attitudes in India. Jawaharlal’s correspondence in 1948 and 1949 shows him almost reduced to despair by the growth of anti-Muslim feeling — what he called the “refugee mentality.” But he remained a staunch defender of the place of Muslims in a secular India, a position from which he never wavered either personally or politically. His idea of India explicitly rejected the two-nation theory; having spurned the logic which had created a state for Muslims, he was not about to succumb to the temptation of mirroring that logic by allowing India to become a state for Hindus. “So long as I am Prime minister,” he declared in 1950, “I shall not allow communalism to shape our policy.” And during the 1952 elections he declared to a large crowd in Old Delhi: “If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both at the head of the government and from outside.”
Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu fanatic strengthened his hand on the communal issue. Even Patel agreed to the RSS being banned, though the ban was lifted after a year. On other questions, ranging from the grant of “privy purses” (annual subventions to the erstwhile maharajahs to compensate for the loss of their princely states) to the clash between the right to property and the need for land reform, he found himself outmaneuvered by the party’s right wing. Patel ran his Home Ministry as firmly as he administered the country as a whole, and he brooked little interference from Nehru.
Lord Mountbatten left India for good on June 21, 1948, ten months after he had presided over its freedom — and its dismemberment. He was succeeded as governor-general of the Dominion by the man who had once been thought more likely than Jawaharlal to be Gandhi’s heir, C. Rajagopalachari. Though temperamentally a conservative, “Rajaji” had no patience for the communal sympathies of the Congress right, and so in his own way complemented Jawaharlal as head of state. But when the time came for that position to be converted to that of president of the Republic (upon the adoption of independent India’s new Constitution on the symbolic date of January 26, 1950, the old “Independence Day” becoming the new Republic Day), Patel engineered the election of his crony Rajendra Prasad as the Congress candidate. Jawaharlal had been completely by-passed; he was so surprised that he actually asked Prasad to withdraw and propose Rajagopalachari’s name himself. Prasad cleverly suggested that he would do whatever Nehru and Patel agreed upon, at which point Nehru understood and threw in the towel. One of Prasad’s first acts upon election was to ask that January 26 be changed to a date deemed more auspicious by his astrologers. Jawaharlal flatly turned him down, declaring that India would not be run by astrologers if he had anything to do with it. This time, Nehru won.
Nehru and Patel came dangerously close to a public clash only once. In 1950, under pressure from the right to intervene militarily in East Pakistan where a massacre of Hindus had begun, Jawaharlal first tried to work with his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan, on a joint approach to communal disturbances, and then, when this had been ignored by Liaquat, offered President Prasad his resignation. (Stanley Wolpert has speculated that Jawaharlal, exhausted and heartsick, was contemplating eloping with Edwina Mountbatten, who had just been visiting him at the time.) But when Patel called a meeting of Congressmen at his home to criticize Jawaharlal’s weakness on the issue, Nehru fought back, withdrawing his offer of resignation, challenging Patel to a public debate on Pakistan policy, and even writing to Patel to express doubt as to whether the two of them could work together anymore. The counter-assault was so ferocious that Patel backed off and affirmed his loyalty to Jawaharlal, supporting the pact Nehru signed with his Pakistani counterpart (which had even prompted the two cabinet ministers from Bengal to resign). The entire episode marked the closest the Congress would ever come to repudiating Nehru in his lifetime.
But in those early days Jawaharlal was not always a successful political infighter. His setback over Prasad’s election was echoed in the elections to the Congress Party presidency a few months later. Having withdrawn from the race himself on the grounds that it would not be proper for him as prime minister to also serve as party president, Jawaharlal supported his old rival Kripalani against the rightist Purushottam Das Tandon (the very man whose inability to win Muslim support for the chairmanship of the Allahabad municipality had given Jawaharlal his experience of mayoralty in 1923). But Tandon had Patel’s backing, and despite Jawaharlal’s open opposition, won handily, with over 50 percent of the votes in a three-man field. Nehru publicly grumbled that the result would only please communal and reactionary forces in the country, and refused to join Tandon’s Working Committee. When finally cajoled into doing so he made no secret of his reluctance. He spent the next year undermining Tandon much as his mentor Mahatma Gandhi had undermined Bose thirteen years earlier. In September 1951 Jawaharlal brought matters to a head by resigning his party positions and making it clear that he and Tandon could not coexist: one of them had to go. Tandon did. Jawaharlal himself was elected Congress president, his earlier scruples about the prime minister serving in such a position completely forgotten.
There was another reason for the decisiveness of his victory. By this time Nehru’s greatest rival, Sardar Patel, was dead. He had a suffered a heart attack a few months after the Mahatma’s assassination; then stomach cancer struck, and in December 1950, having fulfilled his historic role of consolidating India’s fragile freedom, he passed away, aged seventy-six. Patel and Nehru had also served as a check upon each other, and his passing left Jawaharlal unchallenged. If ever there was a moment when he might have been tempted by the prospect of near-dictatorial authority, this might have been it, but Jawaharlal remained a convinced democrat. He was not, however, a naive one. He realized that the Home Ministry, with its control over the institutions of law and order, was a valuable tool for a potential competitor. He was therefore careful after the Sardar’s death to appoint only trusted associates — with no competing political ambitions or agendas of their own — to the Home Ministry.
Jawaharlal’s efforts to resist the right-wing tendencies within his party and government were not aided by the continuing departures of his socialist allies. JP Narayan’s exit in 1948 was followed by Kripalani’s and Kidwai’s resignation from the Congress in 1951. Kidwai had been a vital Muslim ally in Uttar Pradesh and was a serving member of Nehru’s cabinet when he left to join Kripalani in
forming a left-wing party. But these desertions only made Jawaharlal more determined then ever to fight his corner. When President Prasad sought directly to send Parliament his objections to the Hindu Code Bill (an attempt to reform Hindu personal law that Jawaharlal was strongly promoting), Nehru told him this would be an unconstitutional interference in the work of his government and threatened to resign over the issue. Prasad backed off.
The death of Patel and the sidelining of Rajaji also had a negative consequence. They left Jawaharlal literally peerless. With neither Patel nor Rajaji present in the councils of state, Nehru was deprived of the critical support, companionship, and challenge of an equal — someone whose standing and experience in the nationalist movement was as great, and as long, as his own. No longer was there anyone within the government or the party leadership to contest his authority or judgment. From now on, India’s triumphs and failures would rest on Jawaharlal’s shoulders alone.
In October 1951 India began conducting its first general elections, a process that took six months, engaged 176 million voters (85 percent of whom were illiterate), and saw more than 17,000 candidates from 75 political parties contest 489 seats in the national Parliament and 3,375 in the various state assemblies. The event was unprecedented, since it extended the franchise (limited under British rule) to all adults and embarked the nation upon a remarkable process of political education in the promises and the pitfalls of democracy. At a time when independence and the violence of partition were still fresh in the minds of voters, Nehru stewarded his party and his people into their first full appreciation of the rights and privileges that came with their freedom. As in 1936 and 1946, he campaigned extensively, traveling 25,000 miles, though this time mostly by plane. The voter turnout was respectable at 60 percent, and the Congress won an absolute majority of seats nationally (364 of the 489 seats) and in 18 of the 25 states — but on the strength of only 45 percent of the vote in the Westminster-style first-past-the-post system. Yet the process of having to defend itself and its policies in the face of organized opposition was healthy for the party. It was also salutary for its critics: the Socialists, for instance, were decimated (but the Communists emerged as India’s second-largest party). In his own constituency, Phulpur, Jawaharlal faced a Hindu sadhu who tried to exploit his coreligionists’ disillusionment with Nehru’s “appeasement” of Muslims. Nehru won by 233,571 votes to 56,718.
The general elections legitimized Congress rule and Jawaharlal Nehru’s prime ministership of India. It was an India whose internal political contours he would soon have to change. During the nationalist movement the Congress had affirmed the principle of linguistic states, arguing that language was the only viable basis for India’s political geography. But partition shocked Nehru (and Patel) into rejecting any proposal to redraw state boundaries, for fear of accelerating any latent fissiparous tendencies in the country. So independent India’s provincial boundaries remained drawn for administrative convenience until a southern Gandhian, Potti Sriramulu, undertook a fast-unto-death for the creation of a Telugu-speaking Andhra state — and, after fifty-five days of fasting, actually died. Protests erupted throughout the Telugu-speaking districts of Madras, and Nehru gave in. Andhra Pradesh was created and a States’ Reorganization Commission appointed, whose recommendation in 1955 to redraw India’s internal boundaries along mainly linguistic lines was largely implemented the following year.
Meanwhile, Jawaharlal saw in his 1952 electoral victory an affirmation of popular support for the principles of socialism and anti-imperialism that he had begun articulating publicly in the 1936 campaign. Though not formally a Marxist, Jawaharlal had revealed a susceptibility to Marxian analyses of historical forces in his early writings. In an unfinished review of Bertrand Russell’s 1918 book Roads to Freedom Nehru had already laid out the basics of his political philosophy. “Present-day democracy,” he wrote (in 1919), “manipulated by the unholy alliance of capital, property, militarism and an overgrown bureaucracy, and assisted by a capitalist press, has proved a delusion and a snare.” But “Orthodox Socialism does not give us much hope…. [A]n all-powerful state is no lover of individual liberty…. Life under Socialism would be a joyless and soulless thing, regulated to the minutest detail by rules and orders.” At the Lucknow Congress in 1936 Nehru had gone further, declaring: “I am convinced that the only key to the solution of the world’s problems and of India’s problems lies in socialism…. I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation and the subjection of the Indian people except through socialism. That involves vast and revolutionary changes in our political and social structure, … a new civilization radically different from the present capitalist order. Some glimpse we can have of this new civilization in the territories of the USSR…. If the future is full of hope it is largely because of Soviet Russia.”
But he came to temper that view: Nehru was too much of a Gandhian to be a fellow-traveler of the Soviet Union, though he shared the admiration for the triumphs of the 1917 Revolution commonly felt by leftists of his generation. But he always put nationalism before ideology: convinced that the Communists’ loyalties were extraterritorial, he demanded of a band of Communists waving their hammer-and-sickle banner during the 1952 campaign, “Why don’t you go and live in the country whose flag you are carrying?” (They replied, in staggering ignorance of their critic: “Why don’t you go to New York and live with the Wall Street imperialists?”)
Jawaharlal’s constant search for the politically viable middle had kept him at the head of the eclectic Congress Party rather than led him to the ranks of his ideological soulmates, the Socialists. Nehruvian socialism was a curious amalgam of idealism (of a particularly English Fabian variety), a passionate if somewhat romanticized concern for the struggling masses (derived from his own increasingly imperial travels amid them), a Gandhian faith in self-reliance (learned at the spinning wheel and typified by the ostentatious wearing of khadi), a corollary distrust of Western capital (flowing from his elemental anticolonialism), and a “modern” belief in “scientific” methods like Planning (the capital letter is deliberate: Nehru elevated the technique to a dogma).
This idiosyncratic variant of socialism became an increasing hallmark of his rule. Jawaharlal saw Indian capitalism as weak and concentrated in a few hands; to him the state was the only guarantor of the economic welfare of ordinary people. Some degree of planning was probably unavoidable; even the Bombay business community drew up a plan in 1944 for India’s rapid industrialization. There was certainly a need for the state to invest some resources where the private sector would not, particularly in infrastructure and in agriculture. The economist Jagdish Bhagwati has suggested that what India needed at the time was probably socialism on the land and capitalism in industry. Nehru tried the opposite. Despite Patel’s skepticism, Nehru prompted the government of India to adopt an Industrial Policy Resolution in April 1948 that granted the state monopolies over railways, atomic energy, and defense manufacturing as well as reserved rights relating to any new enterprise in a host of vital areas, from coal and steel to shipbuilding and communications. The Constitution that came into force on January 29, 1950 included a section on the “Directive Principles of State Policy” which enshrined socialist goals but made them objectives, not enforceable rights. In 1950 the government of India created a permanent Planning Commission with Jawaharlal Nehru as chairman.
The result was to embark the nation upon a series of Five-Year Plans, starting in 1952, that bore successively decreasing relation to reality; actively impeded, rather than facilitated, the country’s development; and shackled India to what became derisively known in economic circles as “the Hindu rate of growth” (a fitful 3 percent when the rest of the developing countries of Asia were racing along at 10 to 12 percent or better). Nehru’s mistrust of foreign capital kept out much-needed foreign investment but paradoxically made India more dependent on foreign aid. This applied not just to industry: the First Plan’s necessary emphasis on agricultur
e (essential following the loss of the “national granary,” West Punjab, to Pakistan) was so faulty in conception that by 1957 the country’s agricultural output had dropped below that of 1953 and the government was soon importing food grains in a country where four out of five Indians scratched their living from the land.
Nehru’s economic assumptions demonstrated that one of the lessons history teaches is that history often teaches the wrong lessons: since the East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule, Nehru was instinctively suspicious of every foreign businessman, seeing in every Western briefcase the thin end of a neo-imperial wedge. The Gandhian equation of political nationalism with economic self-sufficiency only served to underscore Nehru’s prejudice against capitalism, which (far from being synonymous with freedom) was in his mind equated principally with the slavery of his people. Protectionism was the inevitable result: in Jawaharlal’s mindset the essential corollary of political independence was economic independence. That this meant a far slower release from poverty for the Indian people he never understood.
There followed the inaptly named Industries (Development and Regulation) Act of 1951, which entrenched regulation and strangled development, and a series of similarly wrongheaded laws that enshrined what Rajaji called the “license-permit-quota Raj.” The road to disaster was, as usual, paved with good, even noble, intentions. In December 1954 the government, under Jawaharlal’s prodding, formally adopted the goal of “a socialistic pattern of society,” and the Congress resolved at Avadi the next year to place the state on the “commanding heights” of the national economy. Within a year the Second Five-Year Plan enshrined industrial self-sufficiency as the goal, to be attained by a state-controlled public sector which would dominate the “commanding heights” of the economy. This public sector would be financed by higher income, wealth, and sales taxes on India’s citizenry. India would industrialize, Indians would pay for it, and the Indian government would run the show. This approach was formalized in an Industrial Policy Resolution in 1956 that enshrined state capitalism in India while calling it socialism. Nehru placed bureaucrats rather than entrepreneurs upon the commanding heights, stifled initiative and investment, and spent the rest of his rule presiding over a system that sought to regulate stagnation and divide poverty.