Nehru (14 page)

Jawaharlal had little patience for Bose and his ways, but could not bring himself to approve of the defenestration of the party's elected president. As a result he came across as ambivalent on the divisions within the party, with Bose in particular accusing him of betrayal and of siding with the conservatives. Jawaharlal's sympathies were hardly with the Congress's right wing, but he was swayed by his admiration for Gandhi and his distaste for what he saw as Bose's dangerous flirtations with fascism and his political inconsistencies. Nor did he appreciate Bose's provoking the party into a split when the international situation called for unity at home. So, though he did not join the organized revolt against Bose, he separately resigned from Bose's Working Committee. Some cynics saw him as merely seeking to emerge on the winning side; and his rupture with Bose over the episode was to be permanent. (“Quite a remarkable feat,” Jawaharlal mused, “to displease almost everybody concerned.”)

As war clouds gathered over Europe in 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru's focus at home was on two domestic issues: the battle for civil liberties in the “princely states” (ruled nominally by maharajahs and nawabs under British tutelage, but therefore out of the reach of normal Indian politics) and the task of long-term national economic planning. He served as president of the All-India States People's Conference and as chairman of the National Planning Committee set up by ministers of industry of the Congress-ruled provinces. In both cases his contributions were vital: he hammered the first nails into the coffin of monarchical rule in India (whose collapse was made inevitable by Nehru's efforts to organize resistance in what was called the “States' Congress”) and the first pegs into the wall on which the trappings of Indian socialism would eventually be hung.

Meanwhile, the shadow of what would be known as the Second World War was looming. As early as 1927, in moving a resolution on the international situation at the Madras Congress, Jawaharlal had foreseen the prospect of another major war in Europe. His view was that India should stay out of any such conflict until she had obtained her freedom from the imperialists who would seek to exploit her. But his abhorrence of fascism was so great that he would gladly lead a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and not imposed upon them by the British. When Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend the sovereignty of a weak country resisting the brute force of foreign conquest — precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years. Yet it would have found allies in the anti-Fascist Congress governments in the provinces and among Congress legislators in the Central Assembly. Gandhi and Rajagopalachari were effusive in their immediate professions of support to Britain in her hour of peril. Lord Linlithgow, however, did not so much as make a pretense of consulting India's elected leaders before declaring war on Germany on behalf of India.

Jawaharlal Nehru was in China when war broke out. He was enormously attracted to the idea of India enjoying close relations with another great ancient Asian civilization, and he entertained romantic notions of a grand eastern alliance between the two as they each emerged from the incubus of colonialism and rose to the challenge of developing their fractured societies. He got along well with Chiang Kai-shek but had also arranged to visit the communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung when news of the war obliged him to cut short his trip and return home. The news left him seething. He blamed British appeasement for the fall of Spain to the Fascists, the betrayal of Ethiopia to the Italians, and the selling out of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis: he wanted India to have no part of the responsibility for British policy, which he saw as designed to protect the narrow class interests of a few imperialists. Why, he asked, should Indians be expected to make sacrifices to preserve British rule over them? How could a subject India be ordered to fight for a free Poland? A free and democratic India, on the other hand, would gladly fight for freedom and democracy.

Under his direction, the Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution making this case (while rejecting Bose's demand that civil disobedience be launched immediately). Nehru made no secret of his own anti-Nazi views; his dislike of fascism ran so deep that he dismissed a sub-editor at the
National Herald
who, in an excess of patriotism, had published a pro-German headline. All he wanted was some indication from the British government of respect for his position so that India and Britain could then gladly “join in a struggle for freedom.” The Congress leaders made it clear to the viceroy that all they needed was a declaration that India would be given the chance to determine its own future after the war. The Congress position was greeted with understanding and even some approval in left-wing circles in Britain, and Labour Party politicians, including Clement Attlee (a former member of the Simon Commission and a future prime minister) pressed the government to come to terms with Indian aspirations. But Linlithgow, who had already revealed his lack of tact in making the declaration of war, now revealed his lack of imagination as well. Jawaharlal tried his best to appeal privately to the viceroy in remarkably conciliatory terms, but found him “heavy of body and slow of mind, solid as a rock and with almost a rock's lack of awareness.” Linlithgow failed to respond to the Congress's implicit call for talks on the issue and instead turned to the Muslim League for support.

The Congress had in fact hoped for a joint approach on the war issue with the League. Jinnah was invited to the Congress Working Committee meeting in September, but refused to attend. Jawaharlal nonetheless met with him, the second time together with Gandhi, and a convergence of views seemed to be emerging. The viceroy's statement in October 1939 emphatically rejecting the Congress position, however, prompted the Working Committee, with Jawaharlal in the lead, to order all its provincial ministries to resign rather than continue to serve a war effort in which they had been denied an honorable role. The decision was taken on a point of principle, but politically it proved a monumental blunder. It deprived the Congress of their only leverage with the British government, cast aside the fruits of their electoral success, and presented Jinnah with a golden opportunity. He broke off talks with the Congress — declaring the day of the Congress resignations a “day of deliverance” — and turned to the viceroy instead.

Two years in the political wilderness after the electoral setbacks of 1937 had already transformed the League. Congress rule in many provinces had unwittingly increased Muslim concern, even alarm, about the implications of democratic majoritarian rule in a country so overwhelmingly Hindu. Many Muslims began to see themselves as a political and economic minority, and the League spoke to their insecurities. Jinnah had begun to come to the conclusion that the only effective answer to the Congress's political strength would be separation — the partition of the country to create an independent state in the Muslim-majority areas of the northwest and east. This demand would be enshrined in the League's Lahore resolution of March 23, 1940 calling for the creation of Pakistan. Jawaharlal and his fellow Congress leaders were largely oblivious of the change of thinking among many League members, manifest in an increasingly populist political strategy (it was only in 1939, for instance, that Jinnah began to learn Urdu and to don the
achkan
for official photographs, actions reminiscent of that old saw from the French Revolution: “I am their leader — I must follow them”).

In October 1939 Jinnah persuaded Linlithgow to enlist the League as an interlocutor equal to the Congress and as the sole representative of India's Muslims, a position to which its electoral results did not yet entitle it. The viceroy, anxious to prevent Congress-League unity on the war issue, consented. The League's policy, he observed, was now the most important obstacle to any talk of Indian independence, and therefore needed to be encouraged. That November Jinnah was invited, for the first time, to broadcast a special message to Muslims on the occasion of the Id festival — an explicit recognition of the League president as the spokesman of the Muslim community. Nehru and the Congress simply saw such claims as illegitimate and premised on bigotry; they did not do enough to address the real crisis of confidence brewing in the Muslim community at the prospect of majority rule.

That was the month Jawaharlal marked his fiftieth birthday. It was a muted celebration, and the poet Sarojini Naidu captured the mood well in her birthday greetings: “I do not think that personal happiness, comfort, leisure, wealth … can have much place in your life. … Sorrow, suffering, anguish, strife, yes, these are the predestined gifts of life for you …. You are a man of destiny born to be alone in the midst of crowds — deeply loved, but little understood.” It was an assessment that many, not least Jawaharlal's daughter, Indira, shared.

Through much of 1940 the Congress played a waiting game, hoping for British concessions. It was a period of a “phony stalemate” in India to match the “phony war” in Europe. Jawaharlal spent much of his time writing brilliant articles for the
National Herald,
none more moving than his paean, upon the fall of Paris, to “the France of the Revolution, the breaker of the Bastille and of all the bonds that hold the human body and spirit captive.” Despite the provincial resignations, Gandhi was not in favor of outright civil disobedience. Jawaharlal, disillusioned by the Soviet Union's opportunistic conduct in the war, turned increasingly in his writings to the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy. Together they compromised on what was called “partial noncooperation” with the British. The party was to prepare for satyagraha and nonviolent resistance, but to undertake no action that would undermine the British war effort. Gandhi and Jawaharlal had no desire to be seen as taking advantage of Britain's hour of peril.

Some of their colleagues were prepared to go even further and extend direct support to the war effort if there was a national government established in India to support it. But Linlithgow's thinking was far removed from even the most basic of Indian aspirations. (He wrote to London in April 1940: “I am not too keen to start talking about a period after which British rule will have ceased in India. I suspect that that day is very remote and I feel the [less] we say about it in all probability the better.”) When the official response of the government came in August 1940, it was a derisory offer to associate a few “representative Indians” with the viceroy's toothless advisory councils. Jawaharlal rejected this utterly. Civil disobedience seemed the only answer.

The government decided not to wait for what Jawaharlal might do. They arrested him on October 30, 1940 and, after a trial distinguished by a magnificent statement by the accused (“it is the British Empire itself that is on trial before the bar of the world”), sentenced him to four years in prison. The conditions of his detention were unusually harsh, with a number of petty indignities inflicted upon him, in particular relating to his ability to send or receive mail, which deprived him of the solace that letters had provided over the years. Cleaning, washing, and gardening became his principal chores in prison. He was soon joined in jail by his brother-in-law Ranjit Pandit, Nan's husband, who had a greener thumb, and their jail garden flourished. There was time for reading and reflection; once again Jawaharlal's thoughts turned to the historical forces that had shaped his country, and he began writing, with his now customary rapidity, what was to become a monumental work of Indian nationalism,
The Discovery of India.

In December 1941, despite the opposition of Winston Churchill, the War Cabinet in London authorized the release of all the imprisoned Congressmen. Jawaharlal hoped in vain for some policy declaration by the British that would enable him to commit India to the Allied cause, but the reactionary Churchill and his blinkered representatives in New Delhi went the other way, with Churchill (whose subsequent beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous) explicitly declaring that the principles of the Atlantic Charter would not apply to India. The “Tory”Congressman Rajagopalachari even persuaded the Working Committee to offer Britain the defense cooperation of a free India, but the British did not take the bait. This was all the more inexplicable in the face of the rout of British forces in Asia: Singapore fell in February, Burma in March; the Japanese were at India's gates in the east, and Subhas Bose, who had fled British India, fashioned an “Indian National Army” in mid-1941 out of prisoners of war to fight alongside the Japanese. Jawaharlal had no desire to see one emperor's rule supplanted by another's: he started organizing the Congress to prepare for resistance to the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek visited India to counsel support for the British, then urged U.S. president Roosevelt to persuade the British to change their policies. American sympathy was matched by that of the Labour Party in the War Cabinet. Clement Attlee persuaded his colleagues to send the socialist Sir Stafford Cripps to India in early 1942 with an offer of Dominion status after the war, with the possibility of partition.

Cripps was already a legend in British politics, a former solicitor-general who had been expelled from the Labour Party in 1939 for advocating a united front with the Conservatives (which of course came to pass during the war), and who combined an ascetic vegetarianism with a flamboyant ego (“there, but for the grace of God, goes God,” Churchill remarked of him). Cripps had visited India after the outbreak of war in 1939 and knew many Indian leaders; he considered Jawaharlal a friend. Yet the Cripps mission was welcomed by Jinnah, but foundered on the opposition of the Congress. Gandhi objected principally because the British proposal appeared to concede the idea of partition; he memorably called the offer “a post-dated cheque” (an imaginative journalist added, “on a crashing bank”) and urged its rejection. Rajagopalachari was willing to accept the proposal. Congress president Maulana Azad insisted that the defense of India should be the responsibility of Indian representatives, not the unelected government of India led by the British viceroy, and it was on this issue that Jawaharlal refused to compromise. Cripps was inclined to give in, and spoke of an Indian national government running the country's defense with the viceroy functioning as a figurehead (like the British king). But he had exceeded his instructions: the egregious Churchill (“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”), abetted by the reluctance of the hidebound viceroy, Linlithgow, and the diplomatic ineptitude of the commander in chief, Lord Wavell, scuttled the negotiations. Now obliged to disown his own gloss on the offer, Cripps, to his discredit, publicly blamed the Indians and in particular Gandhi for his failure — a misrepresentation of the discussions for which Jawaharlal never forgave him.