Nehru (24 page)

It was a rout. The war lasted a month, with only ten days of actual fighting; brave Indian troops, underequipped and understrength, without firewood or adequate tentage, many wearing canvas shoes in the Himalayan snows, and short of ammunition for their antiquated Lee Enfield rifles, were simply overwhelmed. On November 21 China, with its forces seemingly unstoppable, unilaterally declared a cease-fire and then withdrew from much of the territory it had captured, retaining some 2,500 square miles in the western sector. It had, in the words of Liu Shao-chi, taught India a lesson. Nehru's grand international pretensions had been cut down to size.

A calamitous military defeat was only the most evident of Nehru's setbacks. His foreign policy lay in a shambles, as the Soviet Union and most of the nonaligned world remained neutral in the conflict and India turned to the United States (itself in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis) for help — including, to the astonishment of Jawaharlal's ambassador in Washington, his cousin B. K. Nehru, American military aircraft. Nehru's stature as the leader of the newly liberated colonial peoples and his authority to speak for the “Third World” had been dealt a major blow. But this time Jawaharlal did not offer to resign. The public and Parliament turned on Menon instead; not even the loyal support of Nehru could save him, and on November 7 Menon was forced out of the government. Nehru, let down by those in whom he had placed such trust, betrayed by his own idealism, was a broken man. In April 1963 he suffered the first of a series of serious illnesses that would mark his rapid downward spiral toward death.

And yet one should not overlook the transcendent irony of 1962, the reawakening of an Indian nationalism that Jawaharlal had once incarnated but had since sought to subsume in idealist internationalism. For the first time since that midnight moment of independence, the country rallied together as one: housewives knit sweaters for the soldiers on the Himalayan front and donated their gold jewelry to the servicemen's fund, moviegoers stood respectfully to attention as the national anthem played in theaters after the film, schoolchildren discovered a sense of patriotism that had nothing to do with overthrowing the English. In the moment of his greatest failure, the preeminent voice of Indian freedom unwittingly gave a new boost to a nationalist resurgence. War, and defeat, destroyed illusions but nurtured resolve, tightening the bonds Nehru had helped put in place to hold his disparate country together.

The eighteen months left to him after the Chinese debacle added little to Jawaharlal Nehru's reputation. In August 1963, forty opposition members of Parliament sponsored a no-confidence motion against his government. The Congress's crushing majority meant that it was easily defeated, but a new slogan was heard in the House: “Quit, Nehru, quit!” Three months later, in November 1963, Jawaharlal launched India's own space program, a moment immortalized in a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson showing a rocket part being carried on the back of a bicycle. Six years earlier Jawaharlal had inaugurated India's first atomic research reactor. Nuclear power and space technology: there was no limit to his scientific aspirations for India, and yet the country was moored in the bicycle age at least partly because of his unwillingness to open up its economy to the world.

By 1964 the signs of mortality were impossible to ignore. Jawaharlal was visibly ailing; the puffy face, the sunken eyes, the shuffling gait were of a man in irreversible decline. His visits to Parliament were, in the words of a senior opposition member, those of “an old man, looking frail and fatigued … with a marked stoop in his gait … [and] slow, faltering steps, clutching the backrests of benches for support as he descended.” Nehru suffered a cerebral stroke at the annual Congress session in January and missed most of it, but within days was back in New Delhi trying to manage his usual routine. Work was his lifeblood. “If I lie down in bed for even a week,” he declared, “I know I will not get up!” That moment was not long in arriving. A second stroke felled him on May 17, but he resumed his schedule within days. On May 22 he told a press conference, in response to a question about whether he should not settle the question of his successor in his own lifetime: “My life is not coming to an end so soon.” On May 27, 1964 — a date astonishingly foretold five years earlier by one of his ministers' favorite astrologers, Haveli Ram Joshi — Jawaharlal Nehru passed away in his sleep after a massive aortic rupture. On his bedside table were found, jotted down in his own hand, the immortal lines from Robert Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

Sleep had come to Nehru at the age of seventy-four. The nation was plunged into mourning; tributes poured in from around the world. An earthquake rocked the capital on the day of his death, a portentous omen to some. Cynics waited for the survivors to fight over the spoils; many predicted India's inevitable disintegration. But Jawaharlal had prepared his people well, instilling in them the habits of democracy, a respect for parliamentary procedure, and faith in the constitutional system. There were no succession squabbles. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a modest figure of unimpeachable integrity and considerable political and administrative acumen, was elected India's second prime minister. The country wept, and moved on.

Years earlier Jawaharlal had repeated a question posed to him by an American interviewer: “My legacy to India? Hopefully, it is 400 million people capable of governing themselves.” The numbers had grown, but in the peaceful transfer of power that followed his death, Jawaharlal Nehru had left his most important legacy.

His last will and testament, written in 1954 when he was not yet sixty-five, was released to the nation upon his death. In it he spoke of his gratitude for the love and affection of the Indian people and his hope that he would not prove unworthy of them. He asked that his body be cremated and the ashes transported to Allahabad, his birthplace, where a “small handful” was to be “thrown in the Ganga.” This last request would not have been surprising from a devout man, but from India's most famous agnostic, a man who openly despised temples and was never known to have worshipped at any Hindu shrine in his long life, it came as a surprise. Nehru's reasons, spelled out in his will, had little to do with religion:

The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall, a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter and a vast, roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea's power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future. And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, … I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.

This was Jawaharlal at his finest: lyrical, sentimental, passionately combining a reverence for the past with his aspirations for the future, making the most sacred river of Hinduism into a force for cultural unity, a torrent that unites history with hope. There is nothing in Nehru's use of the Ganga as symbol that could alienate an Indian Muslim or Christian. Here was the magic of Indian nationalism as no one else could express it, capped by a concluding request:

The major portion of my ashes should … be carried high up into the air in an airplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil … and become an indistinguishable part of India.

During his years as prime minister, many at home and abroad could not distinguish Jawaharlal Nehru from the country he so unchallengeably led. That task would now become literally impossible. In death, as in life, Jawaharlal would become India.***

10

“India Must Struggle against Herself”:
1889–1964–2003

“M
y presents,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his daughter Indira from prison on her thirteenth birthday in November 1930, “cannot be very material or solid. They can only be of the air and of the mind and of the spirit, such as a good fairy might have bestowed on you — things that even the high walls of prison cannot stop.” These gifts he bestowed in plenty, and when he died in 1964, Nehru's legacy to the nation and the world seemed secure. A towering figure in national politics and on the international stage, the reflective, mercurial Nehru had — in innumerable books and speeches, but also in his conduct as a prime minister — developed and articulated a worldview that embodied the aspirations of his generation, of his country, and (many believed) of the developing postcolonial world as a whole. “We are all Nehruvians,” a senior Indian official told me years later, with conviction and pride, of his colleagues in the Indian ruling establishment.

Two and a half decades after that remark, there are fewer Nehruvians in office. Indeed, Nehruvianism seems to have lost both power and allure. Nehru is criticized, even derided, by votaries of an alternative version of Indian nationalism, one that claims to be more deeply rooted in the land (and therefore in its religious traditions and customary prejudices). His mistakes are magnified, his achievements belittled. How are we, today, to parse his legacy? Nehru's impact on India rested on four major pillars — democratic institution-building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home, and a foreign policy of nonalignment. All four remain as official tenets of Indian governance, but all have been challenged, and strained to the breaking point, by the developments of recent years.

“The world's largest democracy” remains the sobriquet of which all Indians are proud. India became that under the tutelage of a man so unquestionably its leader — so unchallengeably the personification of its very freedom — that all he needed to do if anyone opposed him was to threaten to resign. Nehru usually got his way. And yet he was a convinced democrat, a man so wary of the risks of autocracy that, at the crest of his rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. As prime minister he carefully nurtured democratic institutions, paying careful deference to the country's ceremonial presidency, regularly writing letters to the chief ministers of India's states explaining his policies, subjecting himself to cross-examination in Parliament by a fractious opposition, taking care not to interfere with the judiciary (on the one occasion where he publicly criticized a judge, he apologized the next day to the individual and to the chief justice of India).

Though he was, in the celebrated Indian metaphor, the immense banyan tree in whose shade no other plant could grow, he made sure that every possible flora flourished in the forest.

In his 1937
Modern Review
article in which he had anonymously portrayed himself as a potential dictator “sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy,” Jawaharlal had added the revealing aside: “He is far too much of an aristocrat for the crudity and vulgarity of fascism.” As an aristocrat he disdained autocracy, and this paradox illuminated his nurturing of Indian democracy. If there was something tutelary about it — the idol of the masses dispensing democracy like so much
prasad
⁹
to the worshipping throngs — that was a necessary phase in the process of educating a largely illiterate, overwhelmingly poor people in the rights and prerogatives that came with freedom. There is no doubt that Nehru romanticized his connection to the Indian masses. As he wrote to Edwina in 1951: “Wherever I have been, vast multitudes gather at my meetings and I love to compare them, their faces, their dresses, their reactions to me and what I say… . I try to probe into the minds and hearts of these multitudes… . The effort to explain in simple language our problems and our difficulties, and to reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.”

When Dr. Rafiq Zakaria began a biographical essay on Nehru for his compilation
A Study of Nehru,
published to mark the prime minister's seventieth birthday, he noted the “extravagance” of the Indian people's love of Jawaharlal:

They have idolized him; they have worshipped him. Even in the inaccessible tribal areas, his name is a household word; to the illiterate villagers he has become almost a god. To most Indians he has symbolized everything that is good and noble and beautiful in life. Even his faults are admirable; his weaknesses, lovable. In a land of hero-worship he has become the hero of heroes. To criticize him is wrong; to condemn him is blasphemous… . They may be dissatisfied with his party; they may be unhappy under his Government, but such is their devotion to the man that he is not blamed for anything.

Yet by his speeches, his exhortations, and above all by his own personal example, Jawaharlal imparted to the institutions and processes of democracy a dignity that placed it above challenge from would-be tyrants. He instituted a public audience at his home every morning where ordinary people could come to petition or talk with their prime minister. His speeches were an extended conversation with the people of India. “Sometimes,” wrote the journalist A. M. Rosenthal, “he talked angrily to his India and sometimes he shrieked at it and denounced it and said it was just impossible, impossible. Sometimes he courted his India, laughed with it, and was merry and delicate and understanding. But it was always as if Jawaharlal Nehru was looking into the eyes of India and India was just one soul.”