Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

It was suggested to him that, in order to facilitate the issuance of a passport for his journey, he provide an assurance that he was not traveling to Europe for political purposes. Even though his primary motive was Kamala’s health, which necessitated treatment in Switzerland, Jawaharlal refused to provide any such assurance. The passport was issued anyway; the British had never lost their regard for the Nehrus. His letters to various friends in early 1926 reveal considerable reluctance about his departure, even guilt at being absent from the national political arena; he was anxious about leaving and did not expect to be happy in Europe. Yet by October he was telling his father: “I must confess to a feeling of satisfaction at not being in India just at present. Indeed the whole future outlook is so gloomy that, from the political viewpoint, a return to India is far from agreeable.”

Settling initially in inexpensive lodgings in Geneva, Jawaharlal busied himself walking Indira to and from school, nursing Kamala, studying French, managing a prolific correspondence, reading as eclectically as ever, and attending lectures, conferences, and symposia. (“The older I grow the more I feel that there is so much to be learnt and studied and so little time to do it in.”) Since Kamala showed little improvement from her treatment, Jawaharlal moved her to a sanatorium in the mountains, at Montana-Vermala in the canton of Valais, near Indira’s school at Bex. There he learned skiing and practiced the ice-skating he had learned at Harrow, but he also became restive at his physical and intellectual isolation. It was not long before the Nehrus embarked upon forays into the Continent. Their travels took in Berlin and Heidelberg as well as London and Paris; they visited museums and factories, and Jawaharlal took Indira to Le Bourget to watch, hoisted upon his shoulders, the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh land after his historic solo crossing of the Atlantic.

There were, inevitably, dozens of meetings, conversations, and encounters with Indian exiles, students, and revolutionaries, as well as with European political figures. Jawaharlal kept up his writing, publishing a letter in the Journal de Genève and numerous articles in the Indian press, one of which, advocating the creation of an “extremist” pressure group in the Congress Party to push for full independence, was interpreted as an attack on the Swarajists and caused Motilal considerable irritation.

But the high point of his political development in Europe came when he was invited to represent the Congress Party at the Brussels International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in February 1927. A gathering largely of Soviet sympathizers and “fellowtravelers” (the principal organizer, Willi Muenzenberg, was the man who had coined the phrase), with Communists, pacifists, trade unionists, and nationalists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as Europe, the meeting was clearly aimed at rallying international opposition to imperialism, especially of the British variety.

Though the conference was riddled with spies and provocateurs of all stripes (including several secret agents busy double-and triple-crossing each other), Jawaharlal was an active and visible participant, presiding over one of the sessions and drafting many of the resolutions. The Brussels Congress confirmed his conversion to socialism.

The participants’ list was a veritable who’s who of Europe’s leading socialists and Marxists, including Englishmen like the Labourite Fenner Brockway and the leader of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt. Nehru was receptive to their ideas. His public statements and speeches explicated his understanding of the forces that sustained imperialism, which drew more deeply from Marxist critiques than previously, including the link between imperialism and capitalism. His resolution on India called not only for independence but for “the full emancipation of the peasants and workers of India, without which there can be no real freedom.” He made common cause with the Chinese delegation, drafting a joint Indian-Chinese declaration that hailed three thousand years of cultural links between the two peoples and pledged to work together to thwart British imperialist designs in both countries. (His admiration for China was deeply rooted in a sense of civilizational commonality, and would last through the Communist Revolution, foundering finally on the Himalayan wastes captured by the People’s Liberation Army in their war with India in 1962.)

Nehru was the star of the show, his role being crowned by appointment as honorary president of the new body set up by the meeting, the League against Imperialism and for National Independence. Its executive committee included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, the French philosopher and writer Romain Rolland, Madame Sun Yat-sen, the former Labour minister George Lansbury — and Jawaharlal Nehru. Motilal’s son had arrived on the international stage.

Father joined son in Europe soon after and was distinctly unenthusiastic about Jawaharlal’s keenness to accept an invitation to visit the Soviet Union on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. In the end Motilal gave in, though he was unamused by the charmlessness of socialist hospitality and the privations the family had to endure in spartan Moscow. Jawaharlal was considerably more impressed with the achievements of the Russian Revolution in “this strange Eurasian country of the hammer and sickle, where workers and peasants sit on the thrones of the mighty and upset the best-laid schemes of mice and men.” His four-day visit, supplemented by extensive reading about Russia in English, prompted a series of articles on the USSR in the Indian papers, which were compiled in one volume in December 1928 under the unimaginative title Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions. The USSR’s progress in such diverse areas as agriculture and literacy, its eradication of class and gender discrimination, its treatment of minorities, and the combination of professionalism and zeal that marked the Leninist revolutionaries, all made a deeply positive impression on the Indian nationalist. Jawaharlal Nehru’s first book was, therefore, a paean in praise of the Soviet Union.

Within a year of his return to India he told an audience of students that “though personally I do not agree with many of the methods of [the] communists, and I am by no means sure to what extent communism can suit present conditions in India, I do believe in communism as an ideal of society. For essentially it is socialism, and socialism, I think, is the only way if the world is to escape disaster.” In his 1941 book Towards Freedom, he wrote that “the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind.… I was filled with a new excitement.” Such statements would later lead some to see Nehru as a fellow-traveler himself, but the critics overlooked his independence of mind, always his most attractive feature. In a secret report on the International Congress to his own party back in India, Jawaharlal suggested that “the Russians will try to utilize the League to further their own ends,” adding: “Personally I have the strongest objection to being led by the nose by the Russians or anybody else.”

This capacity for independent thought was confirmed during his European sojourn. The British Labourites who met and patronized him expected his gratitude or at the very least his socialist solidarity, but Nehru saw them as fundamentally in the imperialist camp; he described them in 1928 as “the sanctimonious and canting humbugs who lead the Labour Party.” His insights into world affairs revealed both intelligence and acuity. He wrote in 1927 (!) that “England, in order to save herself from extinction, will become a satellite of the United States and incite the imperialism and capitalism of America to fight by her side.” He suggested that a Communist victory in China would not necessarily mean that the country would be ruled by the principles of Marx; the role of the “small peasant” would ensure a departure from “pure communism.” At the same time he found it difficult to escape the prism of the anticolonial freedom fighter; while taking a benign view of Russian and Chinese communism, he thought that “the great problem of the near future will be American imperialism, even more than British imperialism. Or it may be … that the two will join together to create a powerful Anglo-Saxon bloc to dominate the world.”