Jawaharlal’s approach to the economy was in many ways characteristic of the great flaw that afflicted many freedom fighters: the experience of exclusion and prison gave them an excessively theoretical notion of governance, while nationalist passions injected mistrust of foreigners into policy. Public-sector ventures were run like government departments, overstaffed by bureaucrats with no commitment to their products and no understanding of business. Of course, some good came of Nehru’s bad economics: above all, the establishment of a norm of peaceful social change, eschewing both the violence from above favored by the Communists and the laissez-faire conservatism of the landed zamindars and commercial interests. Some would point also to the development of India’s industrial and intellectual infrastructure — the dams, steel mills, and institutes of technology that are the most visible result of Jawaharlal’s leadership of India’s economic policy. Yet others could argue both that these could have come through the private sector and that most of India’s public-sector industries were so inefficient that the country would actually have been better off without them. (Certainly the most successful steel plant in India was one set up in the private sector by the Tatas — under British rule.)
Jawaharlal bore a great deal of personal responsibility for the follies of planning, since it was not only led and directed by him in pursuit of his own convictions, but was conducted in a manner that discouraged dissent. All too often, opposition to planning was made to seem like opposition to a fundamental national interest and disloyalty to Jawaharlal himself. Under Nehru, socialism (as he practiced it) became a national dogma, to which his successors stayed loyal long after other developing countries, realizing the folly of his ways, had adopted a different path. Rajaji abandoned him to establish the Swatantra (Independence) Party in 1959 explicitly in protest against Nehru’s economic policies, but his was the only dissent from what became a national consensus, and the Swatantra, a pro–free enterprise, pro-Western, conservative party, never acquired enough support to mount a serious challenge to Nehruvian dominance.
The fact was that, following Patel’s death, Nehru had progressively turned into a leader without equal and without a rival. Having ousted Tandon and taken on the party presidency himself in 1951, Jawaharlal felt confident enough of his power within three years to relinquish it again. An unthreatening veteran, U. N. Dhebar, was chosen to replace him from January 1955, not by a full ballot of the All-India Congress Committee as in the past, but by the Congress Working Committee under Nehru’s chairmanship — a throwback to the days when that body simply rubber-stamped the Mahatma’s nominee for president. If some thought that Jawaharlal had become the uncrowned king of the Congress, the adjective was soon remedied by a fifty-year-old Tamilian woman who came up to him unbidden (at the very session in which he gave up his presidency) and placed a golden crown on his balding head. (She then turned to the audience and announced that Jawaharlal was a modern Lord Krishna, confusing the symbols of monarchy with those of mythology.) Nehru promptly handed the crown to Dhebar and asked him to sell it off to benefit the party’s coffers. But that minor moment of embarrassment epitomized a reality that Jawaharlal implicitly understood and never exploited.
At least not to the hilt. He could have used the adulation of the masses to turn himself into the dictator his own Modern Review article had suggested he might become. It was, indeed, the way most nationalist leaders in developing countries had gone. “Every conceivable argument has been available to tempt Mr. Nehru to forego democratic institutions in India,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote. “Illiteracy and poverty, disease and ignorance, a great subcontinent to govern, severe differences between Muslim and Hindu, many scores of languages and varied cultures reflecting a tendency toward a breaking up of the Union.” Nehru rejected all these arguments.
Instead he went out of his way to demonstrate respect for the institutions of the state, showing due deference to the president as head of state (and even to the vice president, who had little to do but also outranked the prime minister in protocol terms). He treated Parliament as a serious and august body to which he was accountable, and ensured that his officials treated it as more than a forum for launching policy, but one whose demands and questions had to be treated with due deference. He set the example himself, spending hours in Parliament, suffering Prime Minister’s Question Time, and responding seriously to queries unworthy of his attention. He wrote regular monthly letters to the chief ministers of the provinces (later states) to share national and international concerns with them and consult them on issues of policy. He was astonishingly accessible to supplicants and complainants alike. As he explained,
It is perfectly true that I make myself accessible to every disgruntled element in India. That is my consistent practice. In fact, I go out of my way … [to be] accessible to everyone, time permitting. I propose to continue this because that is the way I control these people and, if I may say so, to some extent, India.
During the 1952 elections, when enthusiastic crowds shouted, “Pandit Nehru zindabad” (“Long live Pandit Nehru”), he would urge them to shout instead, “Naya Hindustan zindabad” (“Long live the new India”) or simply “Jai Hind” (“Victory to India”). When challenged on fundamental issues of policy his instinct was to offer his resignation: this instantly brought his critics around, but it was not the gesture of a Caesar. It revealed him to be both a democrat and a statesman conscious of his own indispensability.
Indispensable he was. In 1956 the cartoonist R. K. Laxman depicted Nehru playing several instruments simultaneously — a tabla with his right hand, a French horn with his left, a sitar propped up against a shoulder and a pair of cymbals at his feet, and even a party tooter in his mouth — as his audience of Congress stalwarts dutifully marked time. The instruments were labeled “financial affairs,” “foreign affairs,” “domestic affairs,” “Congress affairs,” and “SRC affairs” (for the States’ Reorganization Commission). Laxman titled his cartoon “The show must go on.” No one doubted the polyphonic excellence of the virtuoso performer.
World affairs had always been Jawaharlal’s favorite subject, and from the days when he drafted resolutions on international affairs for the annual sessions of the Congress, he enjoyed an unchallenged standing in the country as the maker and enunciator of policy. He carried this on into his prime ministership, retaining the External Affairs portfolio for himself. In one analyst’s words, “Nehru’s policies were India’s, and vice-versa.” (Indeed, for all practical purposes, India had no foreign policy, but Nehru did: senior Indian diplomats sometimes learned of policy from Nehru’s extempore speeches in Parliament.) This also meant that areas in which Jawaharlal was not particularly interested — geographically (Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa) or substantively (international commerce and trade relations, defense and security policy) — were largely ignored. Diplomats conducted themselves in his image, focusing on policy, pronouncement, and protocol in the assertion of India’s nationhood rather than seeing foreign policy as a means of bringing economic and security benefits to the newly independent country. Given Jawaharlal’s extraordinary personal stature, no one dared challenge him; a few who did, early on, were given a taste of the prime minister’s temper, and learned quickly to acquiesce in whatever Nehru wanted. As a result, Indian foreign policy emerged whole from the head and heart of one man.
Jawaharlal saw foreign policy as an emanation of national values as he understood and articulated them, derived from Hindu precepts and Buddhist ethics. (“There was no cold war,” he once said, “in Ashoka’s8 heart.”) The repeated articulation of idealism as the basis of policy (going back to Nehru’s invocation of “one world” in his September 1946 broadcast as head of the interim government) was matched by an Olympian disdain for “power politics”: when the U.S. offered support for an “Indian Monroe Doctrine” in southern Asia in 1953, Nehru turned John Foster Dulles down with scorn. Indian diplomats who have seen the files swear that at about the same time Jawaharlal also dec
lined a U.S. offer to take the permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council then held, with scant credibility, by Taiwan, urging that it be offered to Beijing instead. Nehru took pride in his principled approach to world politics. But it was one thing to fulminate against Great Power machinations, another to run a national foreign policy with little regard to the imperatives of power or the need for a country to bargain from a position of strength.
The eighteen-day state visit of Yugoslav leader Tito (Josip Broz) from December 16, 1954 reflected a decisive shift in India’s foreign policy toward the doctrine that became known as “nonalignment.” Jawaharlal pulled out all the stops for Tito, a Communist who had thumbed his nose at the Soviet Union and preserved his country’s independence from both of the blocs then dividing the world. The joint declaration issued by Nehru and Tito on that occasion spelled out what had become known as the “Panch Sheel,” or five principles Jawaharlal wished to see followed in world affairs: respect for sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in internal affairs, equality, and “peaceful coexistence.” To Nehru, who had signed a similar accord with the People’s Republic of China earlier that year, this was the only possible recipe for a self-respecting independent nation and the only means to avoid entanglement in the cold war then bedeviling the world. But the Panch Sheel formula, hailed in China and Yugoslavia, was curiously devoid of any reference to other principles he had advocated during his long struggle for freedom: democracy, human rights, and self-determination. Nor was there any explicit correlation between the principles he was affirming and the needs of the Indian people; foreign policy was an end in itself, rather than a means to promote the security and well-being of the citizenry in whose name it was conducted.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the fact that, under Nehru, the articulation of foreign policy took on the form of an extended, and excessively moralistic, running commentary on world affairs, once again something more understandable in a liberation movement than in a government. Nehru’s foreign policy positions were self-justifying emanations of his intellect; to link them to direct benefits to the Indian people was beneath him. (He refused, for instance, to raise the issue of food aid with Truman in 1949, saying he did not travel with a begging-bowl in his hand.) Nor did he draw the link between foreign policy and national security: if Kashmir and the northern borders had to be secured for India, and Western support was indispensable for this, his approach could scarcely have been better calculated to achieve the opposite effect. Indian sanctimony also periodically antagonized would-be friends among smaller states: in 1957, Thailand cancelled a royal visit to New Delhi after Jawaharlal made scathing references to its “Coca-Cola economy,” and the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations reported to Tokyo that his attempts to work with India had been rebuffed on the grounds that its policies were not sufficiently independent as to make collaboration worthwhile. Such positions might have satisfied the amour propre of a self-regarding elite, but to others they were both shortsighted and insufferable, and they would not be forgotten when, in years to come, India needed friends among those it had spurned.
The portrayal of Jawaharlal Nehru’s view of the world as synonymous with the larger interests of mankind, and of his voice as that of humanity’s conscience (a description actually used by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser), did little to promote good bilateral relations with countries that might have been useful to India. The United States, in particular, found his criticism grating, and his first two visits there, in 1949 and 1956, occurring as they did at a time of widespread fear of communism in America, were not politically successful, though Jawaharlal was accorded all the attention due an international superstar. (The U.S. also prompted his most memorable public quip, when he remarked in 1949, “One must never visit America for the first time.”) Nehru’s sympathy to China, his improving relations with the Soviet Union, and his opposition to the U.S.’s policy of regional alliances modeled on NATO (Pakistan joined both CENTO, the Central Treaty Organization, and SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) made a clash inevitable. It did not help that the U.S. dismissed nonalignment in trenchant terms — neutrality between good and evil, Dulles famously proclaimed, was itself evil — whereas Nehru prized his independence of thought and action above all else. (A probably apocryphal anecdote has Dulles demanding of Nehru, “Are you for us or against us?” Nehru replied: “Yes.”)
The story was a little different with the Soviet Union, with which Jawaharlal sought to establish relations as soon as he took over the interim government in 1946. Stalin regarded him (and for that matter Gandhi) with undisguised suspicion as bourgeois democrats and faux revolutionaries, but the Soviets welcomed any sign that India was breaking free of British (and Western) influence. One of independent India’s first ambassadors in Moscow was Jawaharlal’s sister Nan, the gracious Vijayalakshmi Pandit (later the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly). Pandit’s appointment was seen as an indication of the importance her brother attached to the relationship with the USSR, but she turned out not to be the wisest choice to convince Moscow of India’s anti-imperialist bona fides. The elegant Pandit spent so much time in Moscow’s Western diplomatic circles as to provoke one commentator to remark that “India’s ambassador forgot that Moscow was not the place to promote good relations between India and the USA.” Worse, she was indiscreet enough to express her personal anti-communism to American and British diplomats without first checking for bugs, and the Russians, unamused, did not find it worthwhile to grant her an audience with Stalin.
Things began looking up after the dictator’s death. The USSR’s willingness to enter into barter trade with India (Russian wheat in exchange for Indian jute and cotton), Moscow’s support for India over Kashmir (resulting from Soviet concerns about Western strategic designs in the area), and Nehru’s frequent criticisms of the West, all helped smooth the way to better relations. Jawaharlal’s visit to the USSR in June 1955 was a huge success (“I am leaving a part of my heart,” he declared upon his departure), as was its reciprocation by Khrushchev and Bulganin in November. The Russians were happy to oblige Jawaharlal by building the public-sector steel plants he so craved at a time when the West was insisting that such investment would have to come in the private sector. All the same, Jawaharlal kept his independence from the Communists, playing a neutral role on Korea (where India supported the West on the UN resolution and chaired the Repatriation Commission) and Indochina (though India’s chairmanship of the International Control Commission was seen by the U.S. as tilted toward the Communists). India’s mediation was also crucial in obtaining the release in 1955 of U.S. pilots downed in China, to which Jawaharlal had paid a visit the previous year, meeting Mao for an hour and Chou En-lai for three (the slogan “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” — “Indians and Chinese are brothers” — was reportedly coined by Nehru at this time).
Jawaharlal’s independence from the two major political currents dividing the world did give India the rhetorical leadership of the newly independent nations, who saw in nonalignment a strategy for leveraging their material weakness on the world stage. The undoubted skill of Indian diplomats from Nehru on down in developing and articulating their positions meant that, through most of the 1950s, Nehru’s India enjoyed an international stature out of proportion to either its military strength or its material means. Jawaharlal bestrode global diplomacy like a colossus, quoted, admired, and feted; he embodied an emerging world that was just finding its voice, and he did so with grace and style. Even that old curmudgeon Churchill called Nehru the “Light of Asia.” (A well-worn story, perhaps apocryphal, has Churchill, recalling the years Nehru spent in British prisons, saying, “You must hate us.” To which Jawaharlal replied: “I was taught by a great man never to hate — and never to fear.”)
Jawaharlal was the principal mover behind the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955; it was upon his insistence that China was invited to attend, over Western objections (and Israel was not, because of Arab ones).
Nehru made a seventy-minute speech in Parliament before the meeting about the great importance of the occasion: for him Bandung marked the epochal moment when a world long dominated by imperial powers finally found its own feet. (He also arranged for an aircraft, Air India’s Kashmir Princess, to ferry Chinese diplomats to Bandung. The plane was blown up in midair by a time bomb allegedly placed in it by Taiwanese saboteurs; Chou En-lai, the intended target, was not on board.) The conference itself was something of an anticlimax, with cold war divisions diluting the final communiqué, and it is remembered chiefly for the impressive emergence of a soft-spoken but steely Chou En-lai as the moderate face of a Chinese government that had been in the shadows until then. Bandung was followed by the meeting of what the world came to see as the nonaligned triumvirate — Nehru, Nasser, and Tito — at Brioni in July 1956, where the seeds of what was to become a formal movement were sown.
Then came Suez — Nasser’s nationalization of the canal, followed by Israeli and Anglo-French invasions of Egyptian territory. The crisis brought out the anticolonial fighter in Jawaharlal. He cabled Nasser, declaring the events “a reversal of history which none of us can tolerate.” Nehru worked with the U.S. to ensure the withdrawal of the invaders and later contributed Indian troops to the United Nations peacekeeping operation that followed. His stance of firm opposition to Anglo-French imperialism won him, and India, great popularity in the Muslim world. An American diplomat, the former journalist Phillips Talbot, recalled his astonishment a few years later at seeing portraits of Nehru hanging in so many Egyptian homes. A Pakistani poet, Rais Amrohvi, published a verse declaring that Nehru was the kind of infidel Islam would love to embrace. The same year, though, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to crush a nationalist ruler, and Jawaharlal, the great international moralist, at first remained silent, explaining to Parliament that “the broad facts were not clear to us.” He later declared that “in regard to Hungary or Egypt or anywhere else, any kind of suppression by violent elements of the freedom of the people was an outrage on liberty.”