Nehru (12 page)

In June 1934, as much to take his mind off his wife's deteriorating condition as anything, Jawaharlal Nehru began to write his autobiography, an elegant and fascinating portrait of his life and of his own mind. The 976-page manuscript was completed in nine months. When it was published in 1936, it bore the simple dedication “To Kamala, who is no more.” The brave and long-suffering Mrs. Jawaharlal Nehru, barely older than the century, had succumbed to tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Lausanne on February 28, 1936. Despite (or perhaps because of) the long periods of neglect of the relationship, Jawaharlal was devastated. He had sent her to Europe the previous May in the hope that she would improve, but in September her doctors had cabled him that she was in critical condition, and the British suspended his sentence to enable him to be at her side. He joined her at a clinic in Badenweiler in Nazi Germany (where he made it a point to make his purchases from Jewish shopkeepers), then moved her to Lausanne, but it was all in vain.

Kamala's had been a deeply unhappy life, marked by a sense of social and intellectual inadequacy, afflicted by severe illness (her tuberculosis had been first diagnosed three years into her marriage, in 1919), punctuated by personal tragedy (the death of her infant son two days after his birth in 1925, a miscarriage in 1928), and undermined by her husband's overwhelming preoccupation with nationalist politics, which left him little time or inclination to be an attentive husband. Jawaharlal's prison diaries and correspondence in the 1920s hardly mention her, and even after they grew closer in the last few years of her life, it is clear their mental outlooks and personal values had little in common. But she was a loyal supporter of her husband's politics, and believed passionately in such issues as the education of girls and the ending of Hindu-Muslim conflict. The marriage was its best in the last half-dozen years of her life. Jawaharlal and Kamala rediscovered their intimacy on holiday in Ceylon in 1931, and their affection grew to such an extent that, toward the end of her life, even British Intelligence concluded that Jawaharlal was a “devoted husband.” Jawaharlal ironically recalled seeing pictures of Kamala and himself being sold on the Indian sidewalks with the caption “Adarsh Jodi” (“Ideal Couple”). After her death Jawaharlal kept a photo of Kamala and a small urn of her ashes with him at all times, even in prison, and in his will he requested that her ashes be mingled with his own.

The book he dedicated to her, his
Autobiography,
was an astounding success in Britain and the West, and established Jawaharlal Nehru firmly in the world's imagination as the leader of modern India. Mahatma Gandhi, with his baffling fasts and prayers and penchant for enemas, stood for the spirit of an older tradition that imperialism could not suppress, but Jawaharlal's book spoke for the free India of the future. Though it was written entirely in a British prison, there is no rancor against the British, only against imperialism and exploitation. His rationality, his breadth of learning, his secular outlook, his moral indignation at the subjugation of his people, and the lucid fluency of his writing, attested to his own, and his country's, place in the world of the twentieth century that was still taking shape.

Of that place, Jawaharlal had no doubt, and the integrity of his convictions remained unwavering. On his way back by air from Switzerland with Kamala's ashes he was obliged to transit through the airport in Rome. Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator, sent a message of condolence and asked to meet with the Indian nationalist hero. A man of lesser principle might have seen this as an opportunity to win some international prominence for himself and his cause, but Jawaharlal, whose abhorrence of fascism was, if anything, even greater than his distaste of imperialism, firmly refused the invitation. At a time when many right-wing British politicians, a certain Winston Churchill included, had been, to say the least, ambivalent about the Fascist rulers of Germany, Italy, and Spain, Nehru's stubborn adherence to principle in the face of Italian persistence marked him as an uncommon figure of the age.

His stature had been diminished neither by imprisonment nor absence abroad; indeed, while he was in Europe the Congress elected him once more as its president for 1936. This was again Gandhi's doing; he saw Jawaharlal as a vital bridge to the radical left within the nationalist movement. In 1934, the Congress Socialist Party had been formed and the Mahatma had made clear his disagreement with its platform. Jawaharlal, whom the Socialists hoped would lead them in a revolt against Gandhi, had stayed within the establishment's fold, helping forestall an irrevocable split. Once again now, at Lucknow in April 1936, he delivered a presidential address that was strongly leftist in both tone and content, while presiding over a session whose resolutions were anything but. The Indian capitalist and benefactor of Gandhi, G. D. Birla, wrote that Nehru's speech “was thrown into the waste paper basket. … Jawaharlalji seems to be like a typical English democrat who takes defeat in a sporting spirit. He seems to be [keen on] giving expression to his ideology, but he realizes that action is impossible and so does not press for it.” Under Gandhi's influence, Jawaharlal even appointed a Working Committee for the party packed with moderates and conservatives.

Jawaharlal's personal finances were in poor shape for much of the 1930s; until supplemented by royalties from his best-selling autobiography, he could barely make ends meet after Motilal's death, having to maintain the large establishment at Anand Bhavan in Allahabad and support his extended family. He gave his sister Krishna (Betty) away during a brief spell out of jail in October 1933, but could not afford the traditional trousseau, let alone the “Nehru wedding camp” that Motilal had arranged for his own wedding in 1916. “You do not much look like a bride,” Jawaharlal is said to have observed ruefully as he went to collect his sister for the ceremony. (Typically, he redressed matters by picking a red rose out of a vase and tucking it into her hair.) And yet he refused all offers of help, even when doing so might have eased the living conditions of his ailing wife. Birla, at whose home Mahatma Gandhi could often be found, discreetly offered Jawaharlal a monthly stipend to free his mind of financial worries. Jawaharlal turned it down, furious that any capitalist could presume to place him on his payroll.

The British had declared that elections would be held to form new provincial assemblies under the Government of India Act of 1935 (which was to come into effect on April Fool's Day 1937 as the new Constitution of British India). Jawaharlal wanted to settle for nothing short of full independence, but was outmaneuvered by his party elders into a collective decision to contest the elections. Indeed, as party president he had to lead the campaign, a task for which, with the adulation he excited among the masses, he was ideally suited. He roused the crowds as no one but the Mahatma could. He was initially less successful with his own party leaders, whose complaints against his style of functioning led the Mahatma to send him a confidential but severe rebuke for his “magisterial manner” and his arrogance to his senior colleagues:

You are in office by their unanimous choice but you are not in power yet. To put you in office was an attempt to find you in power quicker than you would otherwise have been.

Thus reminded of whom he owed his position to, a chastened Jawaharlal mended his ways.

Electioneering brought out the best in Jawaharlal. He pounded tirelessly through the country on foot, by bicycle, in the back of a cart or the front of a car, by tonga, ekka, and even more exotic forms of locomotion (horseback, elephant, and camel), by canoe, paddleboat, steamship, train, and plane. By his own calculation he covered some 50,000 miles in 130 days of campaigning, with only 1,600 of these by air (his campaign plane was itself a first in India). The crowds turned out in their tens of thousands to greet him, and on one occasion they were packed so thick that he could only reach the rostrum by walking on their shoulders, which he did to general good cheer (though he realized only later that he should have taken off his shoes first). The reserved aristocrat came alive before a large audience; his speeches, whether in Hindi or English, were always clear, direct, easily understood if somewhat lecturing (the Communists' nickname for him was “the Professor”). His stamina was astonishing, accommodating innumerable engagements and several twenty-four-hour days. Somewhat remote and yet so palpably engaging, obviously well-bred yet capable of losing his temper in incandescent rages that passed as quickly as they came, handsome as no other Indian politician was, Jawaharlal Nehru at forty-six was the glamorous face of Indian nationalism just as Gandhi was its otherworldly deity. About him there was a presence that went beyond mere charisma; people who could understand neither English nor Hindi came just to catch a glimpse of him, and a British official reported in surprisingly generous terms to his superiors that “there is no doubt that his manliness, frankness and reputation for sacrifice attracts a large public.” His reelection to a second consecutive presidential term for 1937 (after the conservative Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel withdrew his challenge) underscored the extent to which he had out-stripped his rivals within the party. The Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore hailed Jawaharlal as the embodiment of spring itself, “representing the season of youth and triumphant joy.”

The campaign marked his rediscovery of India and of the Indian masses — till then, he said, “I had not fully realized what they were and what they meant to India” — and confirmed him as Gandhi's most likely successor at the head of the Congress Party. Yet Jawaharlal was always conscious of the risk that power, and in particular mass adulation, could turn one's head. Within a year of the election this unusual democrat pseudonymously authored a remarkable attack upon himself in the
Modern Review:

[Nehru] has all the makings of a dictator in him — vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organizational capacity, ability, hardness, and, with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt of the weak and the inefficient…. From the far north to Cape Comorin he has gone like some triumphant Caesar, leaving a trail of glory and legend behind him…. [I]s it his will to power that is driving him from crowd to crowd? His conceit is already formidable. He must be checked. We want no Caesars.

The election campaign inevitably crystallized the implicit choice Jawaharlal had consistently made each time he was confronted with it — nationalism above socialism. His first campaign speech in Bombay, an assault on capitalism, won him cheers from the sans-culottes and such opprobrium from businessmen that the British thought his leadership would divide the party irrevocably and lead it to electoral disaster. Once again, they were proved wrong; but this was at least partly because Jawaharlal chose not to go so far as to damage the party.

The Congress election manifesto made no mention of socialism. What it did focus on was the constitutional system built into the Government of India Act, in particular the pernicious Communal Award, under which the British had again sought to divide Indians by creating seventeen separate electorates for different communities. The principal purpose of seeking election, the Congress declared, was to undo this British perfidy by wrecking the constitutional system from within and demanding full freedom and unfettered democracy rather than political half-measures.

The allocation of seats under the Act was deliberately stacked against the Congress, in particular by arrangements giving the Muslims and other minorities (and therefore the parties seeking to represent such narrower identities) a larger number of seats than their proportion of the population would have warranted; and the rural poor, Gandhi's natural base (and to a great extent Jawaharlal's), were denied the vote altogether. Yet the election results exceeded the expectations of even the most optimistic Congressman. The Congress Party contested 1,161 of the 1,585 seats at stake; it won 716, an astonishing 62 percent of the seats contested. This was despite restrictions on the franchise, which gave disproportionate influence to the educated and the well-off by granting the vote to only 36 million out of India's 300 million population, and the active hostility of the governmental machinery. Further, the Congress emerged as the largest single party in nine of the eleven provinces; in six of them it had an outright majority. Jawaharlal interpreted this as a mandate to reject the Government of India Act and demand a Constituent Assembly instead, but his partymen preferred immediate office to future freedom — jam today rather than bread tomorrow. They accepted his draft resolution describing the election results as a repudiation of the Act, but added a clause (dictated by Gandhi) authorizing Congressmen to take office in each province if they were satisfied that they could rule without interference by the British-appointed governor. Once again Jawaharlal came close to resigning. Once again, he chose to put party unity ahead of his own convictions. (“Just as the King can do no wrong,” he said after having been outvoted by his colleagues, “the Working Committee can do no wrong.”) In July 1937, Congress ministries were formed in six provinces.

Meanwhile, the Muslim League had awoken from a long slumber. After years of inactivity crowned by political success (since the British government tended to grant the League's princely leaders everything they asked for, and in the Communal Award actually exceeded the League's own requests) the party's grandees began to take note with concern of the mass mobilization led by the Congress. In response, they invited Jinnah back from his long self-exile in London and made him “permanent president” of the League in April 1936.

The British government was not averse to this development. As early as 1888, the Congress's founder, Allan Octavian Hume, felt obliged to denounce British attempts to promote Hindu-Muslim division by fostering “the devil's doctrine of discord and disunion.” The strategy was hardly surprising for an imperial power. “
Divide et impera
was the old Roman motto,” wrote Lord