TEN

Nehru’s Faults

 

I would be unworthy if I cannot serve India righteously. Then
I go and you should push me out.

—Nehru

 

The eminent historian, Sir Jadunath Sircar has said of Aurangzeb: “With the death of the older nobility, outspoken, responsible advisers disappeared from his council, and Aurangzeb, in later years, like Napolean I after the climax of Tilsit, could bear no contradiction, could hear no unpalatable truth, and surrounded himself with smooth-tongued sycophants and pompous echoes of his own voice.”

There were indications that JN in his later life became like Aurangzeb. The old guard of the Congress went fading out gradually. The new men who were coming up in the Congress were afraid of facing Nehru. It was true that facing him was difficult. It required a man of brains to deal with the genius of Nehru, matured as it was during all the years of struggle, experience and travel. Nor did JN try to encourage those below him who had the seeds of ability. They lived in constant dread of him—chilled by his cold manners, frightened by his explosive temperament—they dare not contradict him or even deviate an inch from the path of rectitude.

JN, on his part, was often troubled by the stupidity of Congressmen, the lack of adequate support from all sides in the difficult tasks he faced. At such times, he should have tried and found out the men of ability, encouraged them to come forward and get his work done through them. It was exactly at these times that even his friends found him difficult. His conversational silence and testiness increased. He flared up at any sort of criticism, even when he agreed with it and even perhaps respected the person who criticised him or his ideas. The ordinary persons, even his relations, when faced with JN in that mood, generally became sycophanti—the men with ability (lacking pugnacity) found it impossible to speak to him, while the pugnacious (lacking ability) had a row with him, went out of the Congress, and formed a separate political party, which lived for a few days on some reactionary policies before fading out.

It is difficult to say whether in suppressing those below him, JN was merely maintaining discipline, or preparing the Congress party for its decline. Time alone can tell. Even Gandhiji in his days was rather authoritarian about his views. Yet, the Congress could find a capable leader after him. What JN had done was to prevent, or at any rate, discourage the growth of any other personality capable of taking over command when he laid it down.

Nehru’s second fault was that he had continued to stay in the Congress when the rank and file were no longer enthusiastic about his views. Many tolerated him; even needed him perhaps as an attraction at elections, and had no other man to replace him. And they did not believe in his aims with the faith and determination with which a party should, if it expects to keep its place in the sun. The fact was that the staid policies of JN—his insistence on national reconstruction, the Five-Year Plans, communal amity, etc. did not appeal to men who wanted excitement in politics—a militant procession seeks rioting and shooting. Unfortunately, in all the past years, it was on disorder that political parties had thrived. If Nehru wanted to stay in the Congress and run the country, he ought to have foreseen that the Congress could not be the premier political party in the future; that once Independence was achieved, its popularity was sure to decline. He should not have introduced or assented to a Constitution that deprived him of the strength to rule—a ‘straight-jacket’ in which he himself would be imprisoned. JN was in the paradoxical position of having popular support in a limited way for his government, but not having the power to suppress those who, although in a minority, threatened to destroy his government. The government, like the Weimar Republic, faced the danger of perishing due to an overdose of goodness.

Another fault of JN was that he refused to see what the effect of his public speeches was. In the old days, when he was agitating for Independence, his presence and his speeches electrified the people. When speaking about Independence, he could touch the chord of sentiment and enthusiasm in the heart of each one of his listeners. Every man felt noble, heroic. His speeches after Independence became more or less an amplification of the thinking behind policies done as much for public approbation as for personal satisfaction. He liked to think that he could explain all that the government was doing in a manner that would satisfy a trained, cold and calculating intellect. But he forgot that the majority of his hearers were not interested in the deeper implications of policies. Nor were they very impressed by homilies on unity, the danger of communalism and so on. They listened to him because of the sheer force of his personality—but as soon as he was gone, it was all lost. It left no permanent impression. Even his closest friends, who sat behind him on the rostrum in public meetings, had no desire to hear him. Their attitude was, ‘We’ve heard all this before—besides there is so much more fun in gossip.’

In a democracy, it is necessary that a party should have a programme and a policy that is attractive, dynamic, vital; even controversial. A party cannot exist on the personality of one man, as the Congress had been doing, or on policies which might be the most sober, but lack fire and purpose. In a religious country like India, religion can supply an incentive to a party that the communalists are quick to make use of. Secularism can never attract the masses, even though it is a counsel of perfection, unless you go to the other extreme and denounce religion as a cause of intense misery to the human race.

I often wondered if JN ever felt it was a mistake to concede Pakistan—or did he feel it was a price worth paying for Independence and the power to run your own affairs? The fact is that in such a matter, whatever is done, it is, at some point in the future, judged as a wrong decision. When the Congress leaders agreed to Partition, it was done on the assumption or thinking that our relationship with Pakistan would be that of two friendly neighbouring countries. That is where the Congress leaders went wrong. They did not realise that communalism would not end with Partition. It would receive a new impetus in a separate state.

If we had lived together, there would have been endless wrangles, much bloodshed, and constant frustration. We would have hindered each other far more than at present. Who knows? Poverty binds rioting and bloodshed of one sort or another; and you can blame it on whatever you like.

I think Nehru could not foresee that communalism would raise its head again. Later on, he did see communal and casteist tendencies appearing during election time. He fought them; he resisted them as much as he could, but the picture today shows that he or any other Congressman of his time did not foresee what serious consequences awaited us.

JN was essentially an evolutionist; not a revolutionist. It is difficult to say which one of the two was needed in India then. Would a gradual improvement be better than a sudden change? JN had foreseen that a sudden change could prove dangerous for a country like India. Until 1947, he was a revolutionist. He believed in rapidity of change and thus showed impatience in failing to achieve the goal of a healthy society. The disturbances that followed in the wake of Independence destroyed to a great extent his faith in the revolutionary method. To him the disturbances, the killing of Hindus and Muslims, the burning of houses, the outrages on women, were signs of depravity and degradation that this country could ever reach. They were so unexpected from every point of view.

Till 1947, the masses had given the Congress their support, their sacrifice, their constant applause. JN had developed a sort of benevolent faith in mankind. He was sure that as soon as Independence was achieved, the people would make rapid strides towards “the India of our dreams”. Instead, when Independence was achieved, the people gave vent to fury and malice of a type that he had never imagined! Would Nehru have accepted Partition if he had realised that it would mean death and destruction on a scale unknown? Would he not, at least, have ensured that more preventive measures were taken to control the bloodshed that ensued?

One can accuse JN of having too much faith in the people, of not being realistic enough, of not forecasting as a policeman can that people can commit unforgivable atrocities when angry. The bloodshed that he witnessed and the after-effects of suffering that followed left a mark on JN. He admitted that China and Russia had achieved much, but he invariably asked if the price they paid was worth paying. Are we in India prepared to adopt the strictest regimentation and a cruel code of laws in order to quicken the pace of progress?

Historians, when they assess our times, will probably say that the biggest fault of Nehru was that he permitted corruption to flourish all around him. Like Chiang Kai-shek, Nehru too was austere, simple and incorruptible; and like the Chinese dictator, he was unable to suppress the corrupt practices of Congressmen, his personal friends and his own Secretariat. No person, however high placed he might be, could shake Nehru’s faith in men who made a semblance of devoting their lives to him. If a man pledged life-long devotion to him, and constantly spoke of his greatness and safeguarded his interests in minor matters, if he was prepared for a certain amount of physical inconvenience like late hours, and if he, as a token of devotion to his master abjured marriage, a separate house, and the liberty to say what he liked, he could be sure that Nehru would have faith in him and would never permit anyone to speak against him. In a few years time, provided he worked steadily to eliminate rivals and to keep the others fighting among themselves, he could go still higher to the stage when he could become a confidant of Nehru, entitled to address the Secretaries of the government by their initials as his master did.

This aspect of JN’s personality was taken advantage of by Mr X1 whose influence on him was considerable. He was a man who had not been blessed with restraint of any type. He had the ability to make a large number of underground moves that were very useful. He abjured marriage, a separate house and other pleasures of life. He placed his own men in positions of authority, as ‘the PM would like it’, maintained accounts of all sorts of money‘entrusted to him by the PM’, dispensed largesse to all those who had to be kept quiet as ‘we feel they had done good work’ and in clever ways, built up his own fame and fortune by doing everything ‘for the PM’. He was feared all over for his tone of rude, arrogant authority. Before the Prime Minister, he was, however, the simple village lad, led by an ideal, who had devoted his life and his special talents to the service of the country and his chief, Nehru.

Another fault of JN was that, like Aurangzeb, he encouraged a peculiar form of flattery. In every forum, someone or the other close to him, spoke in a flattering tone. He was never rude to those people who kept praising him and his work, often in ornate language. On a visit to Bhopal in 1954, speaker after speaker kept praising the PM in high-flown Urdu. ‘Can’t the PM see through it?’ I asked myself. I suppose he could, but there was a strain of weakness in him, which found support by such recitations. It was as if he preferred asking himself, ‘We never seem to be achieving anything. What are we doing? Are we doing anything substantial?’ Then these voices assured him that something was being done, that his labour was not all in vain. I felt that it was good for his ego and his feeling of insecurity to hear such lavish praise.

1 In none of Rustamji’s diaries is there a derogatory remark about any individual. That could be the reason why he has not named the person. However, Rustamji, pasted the cutting of the report in the newspaper New Age in his journal when he was IGP of Madhya Pradesh. The New Age in its issue of 11 January 1959 featured on the front page, a report about setting up of a trust in memory of Mr Mathai’s mother alleging that a sum of nearly Rs 24 lakh had been collected from some top ranking capitalists in India. Mathai quit the post on 16 January 1959. After going through some books on Nehru in which there are references to Mathai and comparing the details with those given in the above paragraph, I would tend to surmise that the person referred to as Mr X is, in all probability, MO Mathai, Private Secretary to Nehru since 1946. The above excerpts are from entries in Rustamji’s diaries of mainly 1953 and partly of 1957.

We have to judge Nehru’s thinking and his words with one important consideration. Nobody could foresee the rapid way in which change would occur in the world. The changes that occurred in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars, the industrial and scientific revolution, the Independence of India, set in motion a series of shock waves that changed the world completely. Can we, therefore, blame anyone who was formulating policies for not being able to foresee what the world would be like some 30, 40 or 50 years hence?

There were a series of, what I would call, misjudgments and I think, the one great misjudgment was that Nehru never fully realised that we would have a population explosion or that it would dampen our economic development. He did say once or twice there would be a lot of people, but in his own mind, he felt that they would be an asset—more hands to work, more work to be done, more development, more rise in income and in our achievements.

The great blow in Pandit Nehru’s life came from the Chinese episode. He never thought that the Chinese would attack us as they did. His mistake was that he did not accept or realise how our ‘forward policy’ was being received in China. We tried to make several incursions into areas that we had not visited before. Perhaps, our embassy in China did not keep him posted or the Chinese were inscrutable; but that incursion by China, that attack by China—was not only unexpected, but it was a humiliating defeat that was inflicted upon us. It was a failure of our political aims, of our anticipation of military apparatus and, most of all, of our Generals, who did not stand their grounds to fight. But it was a bitter blow to a man who wanted to build up years of peace with China, the ‘Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai’ policy, which could have yielded enormous benefits and goodwill for both India and China.

These faults or these mistakes were not the inadvertent omissions of a person who was unaware of the way things were going. In many ways, it was easier, perhaps, to fight evil not frontally but by building up resistance in other ways. Maybe he misjudged it; maybe the country did not come up to his expectations; maybe the world situation itself took a turn that prevented the rise of the creative spirit in India. The fact is that, as the years went by, as Nehru became older, there was probably a lesser desire to fight the evils of the land. All the time he hoped that by doing good, by improving the economy, by industrialisation, by increasing the income of the average person, the evils that were apparent would not become dominant. In this he was thinking of what had happened in other countries. The industrial revolution, the French revolution and the gradual increase in the wealth of the people took them away from the religious wars that had shaken Europe.

I think a lot has been said about Jawaharlal Nehru’s background in Allahabad, his English tutor, education outside the country at Harrow and Cambridge, his specialisation in botany—all these left a deep impact on him. He thrived on and gained a great deal from his contact with the West. He would criticise the Englishman for what he did to India, but felt greatly attracted to him because of his ways, his literature, his thinking regarding his own country, and most of all, the progress made.

JN was essentially a peaceful man. He hated bloodshed, cruelty, jail-going and violence of any type. He felt that he would never give to ordinary persons what he and his friends had received at the hands of the British. The result was that all those who threatened with bloodshed, or actually caused it, were placated. This was the cause of linguistic states and the attitude of labour in public sector plants. JN was one of those who believed in negotiated settlement—like the British—and like them, he felt that if there was no political solution, then one should agree to any terms, provided bloodshed was avoided. He could never think in terms of keeping order with severity or of subduing those whose viewpoints ran contrary to the interests of the state. He felt there was always room for fresh thinking, fresh doubting, for a new approach.

Another shortcoming that could be mentioned is that in those years, we did not think that freedom would come so soon. So, we never prepared, studied or made arrangements for running governments in the proper way.

Despite all of Nehru’s faults, he had virtues in him that made him great. His intellect was a giant’s intellect—and his industry was remarkable. He was truthful, straightforward and compassionate. Above all, he had conviction in following policies such as anti-communalism, even in the face of severe opposition. I feel convinced that he was a great visionary and a man of principles.