Nehru (15 page)

Nonetheless, Jawaharlal remained an outspoken advocate of the Allied cause, even threatening guerrilla warfare against the Japanese if they were to invade — an issue on which he earned a sharp rebuke from the Mahatma. His attempts to enlist American sympathy for the Indian case in the negotiations with the British, however, did not succeed; Roosevelt, who might have been able to temper the racist imperialism of Churchill, declined to intervene. Gandhi, increasingly exasperated by the British, argued that Jawaharlal's proAllied position had won India no concessions. His public message to the Government was to “leave India to God or anarchy.” Jawaharlal, ever the Harrovian Anglophile, quoted Cromwell (in a conscious echo of the Harrovian Amery, who had used the same words just two years earlier in Parliament in calling for Neville Chamberlain's resignation as prime minister): “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” On August 7, 1942 in Bombay, the All-India Congress Committee, at the Mahatma's urging, adopted a resolution moved by Nehru, and seconded by Patel, calling upon Britain to — in a journalistic paraphrase that became more famous than the actual words of the resolution — “Quit India.” (Gandhi's own preferred phrase was “Do or Die.”) Within thirty-six hours the Congress leaders were under arrest. Mahatma Gandhi was incarcerated in the Aga Khan's palace in Poona; Jawaharlal Nehru and the rest in Ahmadnagar Fort.

Jawaharlal was always a curious combination of the idealist intellectual and the man of action. On the way to jail, an incident occurred that brought out the latter quality. At the station in Poona, when the train made an unscheduled stop, a crowd of people recognized Jawaharlal and ran toward his compartment. The police tried to prevent them approaching him by resorting to a
lathi
charge. Outraged at seeing unarmed civilians being beaten by police staves, Jawaharlal leapt out onto the platform through the narrow window of the train to remonstrate with the police. Though he was fifty-three, it took four policemen to restrain him and force him back onto the train — and the officer in charge apologized personally for the incident.

Some of that fury communicated itself to the populace at large. For all of the Mahatma's devotion to nonviolence, his jailing, together with the rest of the Congress leadership, left the Quit India movement in the hands of the young and the hotheaded. An underground movement was born, which actively resorted to acts of sabotage. Ordinary people took improbable risks to hoist the national flag on government buildings. Young newsboys added sotto voce subversion to their sales cries: “
Times of India
. Quit India.
Times of India
. Quit India.” In the weeks after the arrests, no day passed without reports of clashes between demonstrators and police. The British responded with ruthless repression, firing upon unarmed protestors, killing dozens every week, flogging offenders, and censoring (and closing down) nationalist newspapers. “Quit India” became the drumbeat of a national awakening, but all it did was to prolong the nation's continued subjugation.

In this climate, there was to be no respite for Jawaharlal; this became his longest spell in prison, a total of 1,040 days, or more than 34 months, from August 9, 1942 to June 15, 1945. Initially cut off from all communication (even newspapers), the Congress leaders were gradually allowed a few limited privileges, but Jawaharlal rejected many of the humiliating conditions imposed upon him. “I do not fancy being treated like a wild beast in a cage with occasional rope allowed so that I can move a few feet if I behave myself,” he wrote to his sister Nan, imprisoned elsewhere. “… Where force prevents me from acting as I wish, I have to accept it, but I prefer to retain such freedom of mind and action as I possess.” His freedom was not much: Jawaharlal's prison diary abounds in trivia, featuring the acquisition of new canvas shoes and the death of a cat inadvertently hit on the head by a cook. He read Proust, and learned Urdu poetry from Maulana Azad, for whom his friendship and respect deepened.

Nonetheless the prison experience was not without significance. Tempers frayed among the Congressmen; the strain of prolonged incarceration proved unbearable for many, and Jawaharlal's close friend for thirty-five years, Syed Mahmud, obtained his release in 1944 by disowning the Congress resolution. Gandhi nearly died after a fast in 1943. And Jawaharlal finished
The Discovery of India,
which he had begun during his earlier stint in jail. Instead of the Marxian obsession with social and economic forces that characterized
Glimpses of World History,
Jawaharlal revealed an abiding fascination with the making of the Indian nation, its cultural and historical antecedents, and the continuity of the Indian heritage from the days of the Indus Valley Civilization to the privations of British rule. For all the weaknesses of the book — born from the circumstances of its composition, the lack of source material, and the absence of a skilled editor — it is a striking articulation of a view of Indian nationhood that transcended the petty pride of most nationalisms. To Nehru, India was a palimpsest on which many had written their contributions and none were to be disowned; the greatness of India lay in her diversity, the richness of her varied civilization, her willingness to absorb and accommodate disparate religions and ethnicities. It is a stirring evocation of the past as an instrument to explain the present and give hope for the future, and as such it is the primordial text in what was, ultimately, Jawaharlal Nehru's invention of India.

But before “Quit India” and prison consumed him, a major development had occurred on the personal front. In March 1942, his daughter, Indira, now twenty-four, married the man who had been courting her for nearly seven years, her mother's faithful admirer Feroze Gandhi.

If Kamala's impact on Jawaharlal's thought or action is difficult to discern, she was indirectly responsible for the turn her daughter's life had taken. During her brief stint, between bouts of ill-health, as a Congress volunteer, Kamala went to address a college in Lucknow and fainted from the heat and exhaustion. The young student who rushed to her succor became a lifelong fan and soon followed her into active work for the Congress Party. His name was Feroze Gandhi.

Nehru's sister Betty described Feroze as enamored of Kamala “in a romantic, Dante-and-Beatrice way, content if he could just be near her.” He dropped out of college to be at her side, and was in Lausanne at Kamala's deathbed. His fidelity to her mother was certainly a crucial factor in Indira's own attraction to the fair-skinned, stocky Parsi (a member of India's tiny Zoroastrian minority, descended from Persian refugees who had fled Muslim persecution in the seventh century, and no relation of the Mahatma). In India the development of such a relationship would have had severe obstacles to overcome, but Feroze and Indira both decided to study in England and became intimate there, Indira finally accepting Feroze's proposal of marriage on the steps of the SacréCoeur in Paris. When they returned to India they found the Nehru family, particularly Jawaharlal's sisters, implacably opposed to their marriage plans (an impecunious Parsi without a college degree for the only heir of the future leader of free India? The prospect, Nan averred, was out of the question). But Jawaharlal could not bring himself to stand in the way of the happiness of his only child. Though he tried to delay her decision, and though hate mail arriving at his residence left him in no doubt of the views of the self-appointed guardians of Hindu purity, Jawaharlal acquiesced in her wishes. He issued a statement to the press in February 1942. Marriage, he declared, was a personal affair; “on whomsoever my daughter's choice would have fallen, I would have accepted it or been false to the principles I have held.” But he was careful enough to cite the Mahatma's blessing of the match, and to conduct the wedding according to Vedic Hindu rites.

Nehru often called his daughter “Indu-boy,” a term of affection that could not but have reminded her of her duty to compensate for his lack of a son. His own relationship with his father had been paramount, and he tried to replicate it with Indira, particularly in their correspondence; but here she could not hold her own quite as he had been able to do. Jawaharlal was also far more of an absentee father than Motilal had been; there was no equivalent in his parental career of Motilal's risking all to intercede for him in Nabha, or of Motilal's sacrifice of wealth and security to advance the convictions (and ambitions) of his son. Where Jawaharlal had been the repository of all of Motilal's hopes for his country and his heritage, Indira was merely his daughter, and even the nickname “Indu-boy” seemed to suggest that was not somehow quite good enough.

Jawaharlal was in prison when Indira made him a grandfather, with the birth of Rajiv (a name chosen by Jawaharlal, since it means the same as “Kamala” — “lotus”) on August 20, 1944. Indira paid him the quiet tribute of adding a middle name for her son that was a synonym of her father's name — “Ratna,” which like “Jawahar” means “jewel.” That was the only good news in a period of torment for the Nehru family, all of whom were in jail in appalling conditions. Indira herself was out of prison only because she had been released on grounds of ill-health; she had contracted pleurisy, the same affliction that had laid Nan's husband, Ranjit Pandit, low, and which took his life in early 1944. Betty's husband, Raja Hutheesing, also left jail beset by ailments from which he would never quite recover.

Personal setbacks were mirrored by political ones. With the Congress leadership in jail, the British moved to strengthen the position of Jinnah and the Muslim League, pressuring Jinnah's critics within the party to remain in the League and under his leadership. Muslim opponents of the Pakistan idea were dissuaded, sidelined, or (like Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan in Punjab and Allah Bux in Sind) died. The League formed governments (often with the votes of British members, and with Congress legislators in jail) in provinces where it had been routed in the elections, and enjoyed patronage appointments where formal office was not possible. The futility of the Quit India movement, which accomplished little but the Congress's own exclusion from national affairs, compounded the original blunder of the Congress in resigning its ministries. It had left the field free for the Muslim League, which emerged from the war immeasurably enhanced in power and prestige. Even the Mahatma, after his release from prison on health grounds in May 1944, held talks with Jinnah that seemed to confirm the latter's stature as an alternative center of power in the country.

On June 15, 1945, Jawaharlal and his Congress colleagues emerged from prison, blinking in the sunlight. The war was over, and they had been freed. But they would be taking their first steps in, and toward, freedom in a world that had changed beyond recognition.

 

6
He spent an afternoon with the American and British battalions of the International Brigades and wrote of the deep sense of longing he felt to join them: “something in me wanted to stay on this inhospitable looking hillside which sheltered so much human courage, so much of what was worthwhile in life.” But he was nearly fifty years old, and he knew he had a greater cause to serve in his own country.

7

“A Tryst with Destiny”:
1945–1947

T
he British had not covered themselves with glory during the war. They had run a military dictatorship in a country that they had claimed to be preparing for democracy. They had presided over one of the worst famines in human history, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, while diverting food (on Churchill's personal orders) from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies. (Tens of thousands of Bengalis perished, but Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about the famine was to ask peevishly why Gandhi hadn't died yet.) Even Lord Wavell, who had been rewarded for military failure (in both the deserts of North Africa and the jungles of Burma) by succeeding Linlithgow as viceroy, considered the British government's attitude to India “negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated.”

Upon his release from prison Jawaharlal gave vent to his rage in such intemperate terms — at one point accusing members of the Viceroy's Executive Council of corruption — that he was very nearly arrested again. The Labour victory in the British general elections meant that the egregious Churchill was soon to be replaced as prime minister by Attlee, but this did not bring about any change in the anti-Congressism of the British authorities in India. Wavell convened a conference in Simla from late June 1945 (to which Jawaharlal, who held no major post in Congress, was not invited) which the viceroy allowed Jinnah to wreck. In this atmosphere of frustration and despair, the British called elections in India at the end of 1945, with the same franchise arrangements as in 1937, for seats in the central and provincial assemblies.

The Congress was woefully unequipped to contest them. Their blunder in surrendering the reins of power in 1939 and then losing their leadership and cadres to prison from 1942 meant that they went into the campaign tired, dispirited, and ill-organized. The League, on the other hand, had flourished during the war; its political machinery was well-oiled with patronage and pelf, while the Congress's was rusty from disuse. The electoral fortunes of 1937 were now significantly reversed. The Congress still carried a majority of the provinces. But except for the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress won nineteen Muslim seats to the League's seventeen, the League swept the reserved seats for Muslims across the board, even in provinces like Bombay and Madras which had seemed immune to the communal contagion. Whatever the explanation — and Jawaharlal could have offered a few — there was no longer any escaping the reality that Jinnah and the Muslim League could now legitimately claim a popular mandate to speak for the majority of India's Muslims.