FOUR

Nehru’s Temper

 

When you are in the right you can afford to keep your
temper; when you are not, you cannot afford to lose it.

—Nehru

 

At the dinner in the police mess on the evening before the police parade at Lucknow in November 1952 in which the PM presented Colours to the UP police and PAC,1 JN surprised the police officers present with a brilliant speech, “When you are in the right you can afford to keep your temper; when you are not, you cannot afford to lose it.”

But in a short span of four months with JN, I had seen him losing his temper several times, whether he was in the right or wrong. His temper was really an irritability occasioned by overwork, strain and a light touch of the blues. But it was dreaded all over India more than the disciplinary action taken by the High Command, or a notice of premature retirement. JN often made a show of it, like Disraeli did to show his sickness, to win a point or to cow down opposition.

Because his temper, like the temper of most men, was so

1 Provincial Armed Constabulary, the armed police wing.

dependent on his general state of health, it was rather unpredictable. Like in Baroda when he was suffering from a slight chill that had aggravated a sore throat contracted during his trip to Sanchi in September 1952, his flashes of temper became more frequent and more violent.

The one point on which JN was extremely touchy was false allegations regarding his integrity or character. He never developed the casualness towards public opinion displayed by other ministers, particularly those of the states. The remark in an anonymous leaflet at Bhilsa2 that he danced in the Diwan-i-Aam of Delhi with Kashmiri girls was obviously so stupid and unthinkable that it did not deserve any attention from him. He thundered against it in a public meeting, denouncing the shameful authors in such strong language that if they had been present in the meeting, the crowd would have torn them to pieces. In Parliament, an allegation by a woman member that at the time of the coronation he would have to take the oath of allegiance to the Queen, provoked ‘celestial fire’ of a type seldom seen in that banal assembly.

The same year, at Sira,3 he broke out violently at breakfast time when they kept him waiting. He barged into the kitchen in a temper, like Jesus among the moneychangers, and almost chased out all the cooks from there. It was most amusing to watch the horrified expression on the face of the Chief Minister of Mysore.

The Prime Minister of Pakistan and his wife Begum Mohammed Ali also witnessed JN’s temper when they arrived in New Delhi on 16 August 1953. Arrangements had been made on the presumption that few people would be interested in Mohammed Ali in Delhi. But the organisers did not take into account the fact that human curiosity and the convenient hour would draw people in thousands to the airport.

Before the plane arrived I went round telling everyone, including the PM, that arrangements to keep the crowd away were inadequate. The PM decided to handle the affair in his own way. He went around the crowd and picked out the women and children and sent them to

2 Now called Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh.

3 In Tumkur district of Karnataka.

a more favourable position in the forward line. While the crowd stepped forward good-humouredly, he urged them not to press forward and all readily agreed. The PM disapproved of policemen in uniform coming in front of a crowd. With him it was a deeply ingrained belief that a crowd would behave in a disciplined manner, provided you explained to them what was wanted. Time and again, after he had made these explanations, crowds had broken through, and everybody had been deeply touched by the ‘warmth of the reception’. A few people had been pushed about or trampled upon; a couple of children had a near escape from suffocation, but the PM still held fast to his belief that in a democracy, you must not put policemen between the people and their source of attraction.

As soon as the plane landed and the gangway was moved up, about 50 cameramen gathered like flies around the plane. Then, when the Pakistan PM and his Begum came down, the crowd from the rear broke through and surrounded the party in one vast exuberant embrace.

Everybody was pushed about considerably. People swarmed all over, knocking down ministers and secretaries and important Congressmen. Wherever they tried to go, the two PMs were confronted with an impenetrable wall of cheering crowds.

JN got angrier and angrier. He flung about—pushing people, running after cameramen, shouting, firing. I had never seen him so angry. Somebody opened the door of a car for him; he banged the door and beat people with a large, dishevelled bouquet.

At last I was able to persuade him to get into a jeep and the three of them drove away to Rashtrapati Bhavan, while the large empty limousines followed with an air of elegant disapproval.

I was really sorry that JN had not behaved properly. It did no good to his image for the people to see their PM, their idol, in a mood of savage petulance. The people who were insulted or felt neglected were not going to forget the incident easily. The incident would engender a lot of ill feelings among the higher-ups towards him. From the point of view of security, nothing could have been worse than a pell-mell reception of that sort, while it was no credit to us as a nation that we could not even manage a simple affair without falling over each other.

The diplomatic corps that was present at the aerodrome must have witnessed Nehru’s temper. It was therefore no surprise that his temper was often talked of by foreign statesmen in a slighting manner whenever he made a strong statement against them. It was a curious part of his personality. They were often tantrums like that of a spoilt child’s.

When JN got angry, he behaved exactly like my little three year old daughter, Kerman. He would get up, stamp up and down, refuse anything that was given to him, get red in the face and become incoherent; if given a chance, I am sure he would have sprawled on the ground and kicked his legs about and cried.

This was what happened when they delayed the coffee at a certain resthouse on the way to Chamba (Himachal Pradesh) in 1954. Within a few minutes he was cheerful again and laughed at a policeman, who forgot all his training and bowed low in obeisance when our car went past.

The same year, at Neemuch,4 a socialist youth came forward to the PM’s car at the aerodrome and threw a bundle of leaflets inside and which fell on the PM. JN got angry. Said “Aap badtameezh (ill mannered) hain, nalayak (useless) hain, etc.” These were the two words which were the strongest expletives in his vocabulary. Only once have I heard him use anything stronger. That was in Madras when a stupid driver of his car stopped in front of a demonstration organised by the Dravida Kazhagam, and seemed to be so hypnotised that he refused to take the car forward in spite of my vigorous prods. Then JN shouted, “Go on, go on, bloody fool.”

Sometimes he displayed his temper without uttering a word. He usually put off autograph hunters with a nod of the head and there were days when he would sign several books. He would pull back a boy who had been pushed aside by the police. Yet, on another occasion, a small boy who ran through the people when ‘jana gana mana’ was being sung, saw his autograph book snatched from his hand and flung into space. A girl who touched his feet, for the same purpose, received the same treatment and with less reason. If the

4 Now in Madhya Pradesh.

boys would not sit down, he would push them down in rage. If the loudspeaker was not on, he would get angry with the attendant. All the time I felt sorry for the man, who did so much more than he should that he would one day have to pay a heavy penalty for it. I knew that he was doing a lot. The signs of over-work were unmistakable. How can one man shoulder all the responsibilities, national and international, and not feel the strain?

The overwork and strain translated into angry outbursts at seemingly minor errors made by the organisers of the meetings. At Bhagalpur (Bihar), a jeep had been decorated to appear like a boat and JN was driven in it from the airport to the place where the public meeting had been arranged. The rostrum had been built on a hillock 50 feet high and to make matters worse, they had placed the first row of the audience about 40 feet from the hillock base. On reaching the spot, I had gone below to see the plainclothes men. Suddenly I heard JN shouting excitedly, “Rustamji, Rustamji, look at this—they have put me on top of a hill.”

I ran up to him. He was in a blazing temper — he rampaged about like an angry child. “Security, security—look what they have done,” he said to me. I knew JN too well to argue with him.

I spoke calmly, “It seems to be somebody’s mistake, sir. They wanted a high place so that all the people would be able to see you. But they made a mistake in placing the people too far.”

“I must go and meet the people,” he said and crashed through the bamboo to go round the public meeting. He then came back to the rostrum to tell the organisers exactly what he thought of the arrangements. As the loudspeaker was on, the whole crowd was able to listen to his remarks. As the officials were being shouted at by the PM, the crowd felt delighted and began to clap.

A similar incident happened in Madras in October 1955. As soon we emerged from the plane, he blew me up about the security arrangements because the Governor, Sri Prakasa, complained of the measures taken by the Madras police. We had a heated discussion at lunch when I tried to stand up to him and have it out once and for all.

Later, in the evening, he deliberately walked into the public meeting at the beach to satisfy a personal pique against me. The crowd of three lakhs of people rose to their feet, barriers crashed, women and children screamed. I seized the mike and angrily told him to come out of the crowd. “Mr Prime Minister, you must come back to the rostrum,” I said repeatedly. The PM, the Governor with his ADCs and all the others in the PM’s party were rightly pushed about. The Chief Minister lost his chappals in the melee. After the meeting, we returned home in a strained silence.

Thus began another tour of the south—Salem, Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Vellore. Crowds, flowers, dust, heat and an unbecoming silence in the car. At each place a new problem. Someone had put the barricades too far from the rostrum; someone had reserved vast areas in the meeting for special invitees; the loudspeaker system was faulty; there was no table for the PM to sit on and no footstool for him to rest his feet on. The ground was too small, the crowd was too big, the people were too exuberant, the motorcyclists were too close.

Almost every one of the security rules, framed in an excessively theoretical manner, was broken. An old Congressman pushed a rickshaw in front of the car and tried to achieve fame like Baburao Marathe in Nagpur—and in the process consumed a pint of my blood. A lunatic constable stopped the PM’s car to tell him about a plan he had chalked out for improving the conditions of the people.

At the end of the tour, Sri Prakasa, Governor of Madras, who was a witness to all the incidents, was gracious enough to send a handwritten letter to me stating:

‘Kindly accept this small symbol of South Indian art as well as thoughts—and, above all, an expression of the sincere appreciation of my heart of the great and affectionate care you take of the most valuable life in our land.

‘I know your task is very difficult and delicate and the person concerned not always easy to manage; and I very greatly admire you for your courage, your devotion and your resourcefulness.’

It was a brooding, gloomy plane journey back to Delhi when again and again I wondered how our lives would get sorted out from a most mindless muddle.

Again in October 1956, the students of Ahmedabad (demanding a separate state of Gujarat) gave an exhibition, the like of which I have not seen before. When the PM arrived to address the students (the meeting was held at his request), groups of them began to raise hostile slogans and kept on shouting and jumping till they became hysterical with excitement. The PM tried every possible method of silencing them. He joked and made the crowd laugh, got angry with them and rebuked them, called them neurotics and juvenile delinquents and went on speaking in spite of the demonstrations. The police had no strength to counter the demonstration, because the Chief Minister (Morarji Desai) felt there was no need to intervene or to ask them to stop the nuisance, by force. After all, he himself had been through all that. Why should the PM not be given the treatment that he (the hero of Gujarat) had received? For full one-and-a-half hours, the disturbances continued. When the shouting failed to stop the PM from speaking, the demonstrators cut disgraceful capers in front of him. Children were hoisted on shoulders and made to wave black flags. Some were sent up through the police cordon to throw pamphlets on him, describing the ‘atrocities’.

JN was deeply hurt and moved. Never in his life had he been given such treatment. Never had he been so flagrantly insulted by a group of young hooligans. Never did he expect that in Ahmedabad, the city of Gandhi, people would sit quiet and listen to the shouts of a group of hysterical young men and not make a move to stop them.

We moved away in silence from the meeting place and at the airport, a kindly providence arranged that a young ASP (Assistant Superintendent of Police) should amass uniformed policemen so that JN could blow off the steam that had accumulated inside him on me. The explosion will be remembered in Gujarat for a long time.

In the plane, JN looked tired and haggard. I reflected, ‘Mine is indeed a strange kind of national service. I have to serve as the sparring partner on whom the champion can expend his energy and temper; I am the person who has to bear the wrath, which others have raised inside him, so that it may not cause harm to him.’

He slept for a bit in the plane and got down as fresh and handsome as ever.

“Goodbye Rustamji,” he said with a smile and I knew that he harboured no ill will.

A few days later, after a public meeting in Rajkot, when we were leaving the grounds in an open car, JN put his hands on my shoulder from behind and said, “Rustamji, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

It was so sudden that for a moment I could say nothing. What was it about? I didn’t even know. Then I looked round and found that uniformed policemen had been amassed on either side of the road by some stupid officer, who expected the crowd to make a rush towards the motorcade.

Even after four years with Nehru, I hadn’t got used to his asperity and sudden sharp fits of anger. He said that he had read in the papers that President Soekarno had paid a visit to Peking and in the reception organised for him, not a single policeman or armyman was to be seen. I controlled my temper that was rising within me.

We went a little further to find several constables posted with their backs to the road. There was another outburst, and as the representative of the Indian police closest on hand, I had to bear the brunt of it.

Often, I used to sit and moan about something he had said to me. But then I consoled myself with the thought that he had reduced a Cabinet minister to tears, been sharp with his daughter or sent a whole host of top-ranking politicians and administrators into hiding.

Once Morarji Desai asked him politely, “Panditji, at what time would you like breakfast?”

“What time! What time?” he shouted, “Naturally a few minutes before going out in the morning.”

After recounting these incidents, I took heart again. ‘He’s made that way’, I told myself. ‘He is like a prize fighter. He likes a joust in a hard, cold, matter-of-fact manner. He loves a fight with an agile, hard-hitting mind’. In a speech he made, he paid a tribute to the debating powers of Parliament and said he thoroughly enjoyed sparring with members of the House.

JN’s outbursts were most in evidence when he was frustrated in certain places, or when a course of action was taken against him which upset all his plans. Whenever he was anxious or worried, he would sulk and become rebellious. In several persons, anxiety produces brooding inaction; in JN it meant action, impatience and childish outbursts.

After a couple of years with JN, I came to know him so thoroughly that his outbursts amused me more than anything else. I could always guess what was behind his temper and tell when the frustration had dissipated or spent. He did not annoy me as much as he seemed to annoy the others. I think he knew that I understood, while on my part, I felt that a man in his position, who had to bear so much, could show that basically he too was an ordinary human being without detracting from his greatness. Most people believed that he was chronically bad tempered. That he certainly was not.

To a small man like me entrusted with a big task, his bouts of temper were the cause of uncertainty and indecision. Often I had to gird up my loins to say a small thing to him. If it was something different from what he thought, I told myself, ‘Courage before everything’ and I would go up to him and tell him what I had to say in carefully prepared words. If I began badly, he would say nothing at first, listen in awesome silence and then ask, “What are you talking about?” I would give more details, stammer and stutter, because I had prepared nothing further and then retreat without knowing what effect it has had on him. And we would drift back again into the same silence. Quite often, what I would have said was discernible in his next speech, or in the scrap of an office note.

In moods of exultation, any other person as powerful as he was in the country could have cut my head off long ago. But beneath the display of temper, there was a heart that was shy and afraid of imposing upon anyone, and one that had never yet harmed anyone in my knowledge.

Being confident about this aspect of JN’s personality, very often when he got angry at the security, I would take the blame in order to protect the police officers of the state whom he was finding fault with. I knew nothing would happen to me. However, in a state an officer could be punished if the PM found fault with him. JN was extremely ill-humoured during his visit to Indore for the AICC session in January 1957. On several occasions, he lost his temper completely because of some small incident—a truckload of uniformed men following him around, a wrong direction to his car, the fixing of barriers at the wrong place in the public meeting. Finally, one morning, when he saw that a bus-load of children had been held up in the cold by a traffic constable, he erupted like a volcano. “Rustamji, you don’t seem to have the slightest respect for me...” and on and on... “I would like to see the IG or DIG or whoever is responsible for security.”

It was a strained party at dinner that day. I let him go through the meal, coffee, cigarette. Then I told him that the DIG had come, but before he saw him I would be grateful if he heard me out first. We sat together on a sofa in the lounge and I told him that the security precautions we took were less than the minimum and yet he found them excessive and wanted to reduce them. On the whole, the police had done well and only a short while earlier, I had congratulated the police officers on their work. Slowly his annoyance dissipated, the colour came back to his face and when he saw (RN) Nagu, the DIG, he was his usual calm and austere self again. Nagu wanted to apologise but JN just waved him of, “Jao, apna kaam karo” (go, get on with your job).

Just after two months, there was another angry display of Nehru’s temper at Kanpur. It was in the last leg of the election tour in March 1957. A large meeting of about four lakh people was to be addressed by JN. The public address system proved quite inadequate. People in the audience began to wave and shout that they could not hear him. JN was in a furious temper. He shouted angrily, stamped his feet and threatened to dismiss anyone who came in his way. Consequently, none of the officials of the Congress party came near him. We tried our best, but could not increase the sound. In the end, he gave up the meeting and went back to the Circuit House in a rage.

Only two days prior to that at Meerut, he had said, “I don’t know why people say I am a short-tempered man. I am really quite a quiet sort of individual. I admit I lose my temper occasionally, but I do it only because I expect much from the Indian people and when they fall in my expectations, I lose my patience with them.”

I felt no annoyance with JN over these incidents—only a deep sympathy and affection. He was so made that whenever he was tired or worried, or made to feel small, he “blew his top off”, and in a small way, I felt gratified that it had been given to me to be of some service to him. It was good that I had a temper that was not aroused so easily; I got to understand him and could bring him round without provoking him, or making him feel that he had done something bad.

During the six years I served him, he got angry with me on a countless number of occasions. The good thing about JN was that he used to make immediate amends for his outbursts and give an impression that he was genuinely sorry for losing his temper. Now, when I look back at the events, I wonder how many people in the country have had the courage to speak to a Prime Minister as powerful as Nehru, when he was in such a blazing temper.