Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Internationalism was Jawaharlal’s forte among Indian nationalist politicians. “I welcome all legitimate methods of getting into touch with other countries and peoples so that we may be able to understand their viewpoint and world politics generally,” he wrote to Mahatma Gandhi from Europe in April 1927. “I do not think it is desirable … for India to plough a lonely furrow now or in the future. It is solely with a view to selfeducation and self-improvement that I desire external contacts. I am afraid we are terribly narrow in our outlook and the sooner we get out of this narrowness the better.” His broad-mindedness, foreign travels and contacts, and astute judgment of the world situation meant that Jawaharlal had no serious rivals within the Congress Party on international questions. Gandhi, whose own concerns were primarily domestic, was content to leave the field of foreign affairs entirely to his protégé.

It was a physically and intellectually rejuvenated Jawaharlal Nehru who stepped off a ship in Madras in December 1927, just in time to attend the annual session of the Congress which was being held in the southern port city. Motilal had suggested to Gandhi that his son be offered the presidency of the party at the session, but Jawaharlal had turned down an exploratory inquiry from the Mahatma while he was in Switzerland, and Gandhi was reluctant to make the offer anyway: “He is too highsouled to stand the anarchy and hooliganism that seem to be growing in the Congress.” Jawaharlal himself took another view in a letter to his close friend Syed Mahmud: “The real objection to me is not youth or jealousy but fear of my radical ideas. I do not propose to tone down my ideas for the presidentship.”

But the formerly uncritical Gandhian had returned a self-consciously radical anti-imperialist, impatient with the cautiousness of his elders and convinced that the British connection had to be completely severed. No sooner had the Congress session begun than Jawaharlal was embroiled in a controversy over a draft resolution he submitted calling, in explicit detail, for complete independence for India. The party leaders, including Gandhi himself, thought this was going too far; freedom within the Empire, or Dominion status, was the most they felt they could stake a claim for, and it was already more than the British had shown any inclination to grant. (The British refusal to reciprocate the cooperation extended them by the Indian-elected members of the Viceroy’s Council had already disillusioned both Jinnah and Motilal.) The party elders could not persuade Jawaharlal to back down, however, and a compromise was eventually struck on a demand for “complete national independence,” the details left carefully undefined. Most of the radical language in Jawaharlal’s draft (calling, for instance, for the immediate withdrawal of Britain’s “army of occupation”) was excised.

Mahatma Gandhi had not been present in Madras when the resolution was carried, but he wrote in his magazine Young India that the resolution was “hastily conceived and thoughtlessly passed” by a Congress descending to the level of a “schoolboys’ debating society.” Gandhi rebuked Nehru for his zeal, pointing out that “the Congress stultified itself” by passing such resolutions “when it knows that it is not capable of carrying them into effect. By passing such resolutions we make an exhibition of our impotence.” These were harsh words; Jawaharlal was furious, and dashed off an excoriating letter to his mentor which so hurt the older man that he destroyed it. A second letter, still angry but more measured, has survived. In it Nehru reiterates his long-held admiration for the Mahatma and expresses his disappointment: “I have asked you many times what you expected to do in the future and your answers have been far from satisfying.” That blunt sentence was followed by a long list of objections to the Mahatma’s views on matters ranging from religion to contraception. Jawaharlal seemed conscious that his words would cause deep offense. “I have already exceeded all reasonable limits,” he wrote in conclusion, acknowledging how far he had strayed from his previously undiluted fealty to the Mahatma. “My only excuse is my mental agitation.”

Gandhi’s reply saw this as “an open warfare against me and my views.… The differences between you and me appear to me to be so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us.” He made it clear he was prepared to break publicly with his former acolyte, offering to make this correspondence public. Jawaharlal immediately realized he had gone too far. Matters had not been helped by distorted (and sometimes deliberately false) reports in the newspapers suggesting he had been even far more critical in public of Gandhi (one report alleged that he had described the Mahatma as “effete and fossilized”). He wrote an abject letter of apology to “my dear Bapuji” (a term he had begun using for Gandhi, connoting filial devotion): “Am I not your child in politics, though perhaps a truant and errant child?” The Mahatma was disarmed, and immediately forgiving. The crisis between mentor and protégé was defused.

In reality the only difference between their approaches related to timing. Gandhi did not disagree about the ultimate goal, but he believed his countrymen had to be prepared for it through a mass mobilization that had not yet occurred. Jawaharlal’s resolution was the work of a few English-educated elitists; it was carried by the party but had not yet aroused the consciousness of the nation. In March 1928 he wrote a letter to the press calling on people who were in favor of independence, against religion in political life, and sought to end class inequalities to get in touch with each other and with him. Nehru himself started two policy study groups within the party to press his agenda — the Republican Congress and the Independence for India League, the latter adding socialism to its republican ideals. But these were again the forums of the privileged. Gandhi wanted to take the issue of freedom beyond the party conclaves, to the people at large. And in doing so he wanted Jawaharlal Nehru by his side.

5 Not to be confused with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Maulana Muhammad Ali (1878–1931) was a leader of the Khilafat agitation and president of the Congress in 1923.

In 1927, while Jawaharlal Nehru was in Europe, the British delivered themselves of an imperial specialty, the insult dressed up as a concession. An all-party commission, the government declared, would be established to visit India and examine whether the country was ready for further constitutional reform. But — and here lay the insult — it would be composed entirely of British members of Parliament. Indian opinion, of all shades, was outraged; though Indians were divided over such issues as political participation and noncooperation, full independence or Dominion status, they were united in their utter rejection of this British offer. Even Liberals like Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, a loyalist known as Britain’s favorite Indian politician, could not swallow the humiliation and refused to have anything to do with the commission. When Sir John Simon and his six fellow commissioners landed in Bombay on February 3, 1928, they found themselves facing a full-fledged boycott. Thousands of demonstrators thronged the port area holding black flags and placards that echoed their chant: “Simon go back!” Wherever the commission traveled, similar demonstrations took place, often ending in police firing and lathi -charges on the unarmed protestors (a lathi is a bamboo stave, wielded to great effect by Indian policemen). The visit was an unmitigated fiasco.

Among the principal organizers of the boycott, in his capacity as general secretary of the Congress Party, was Jawaharlal Nehru. When he arrived in Lucknow on November 25, 1928 to rally his followers against the commission’s visit to U.P., the national mood had turned particularly ugly, for the Punjab Congress leader Lala Lajpat Rai, a veteran Extremist, had succumbed the previous week to injuries inflicted by the police during his participation in the Lahore protests against Simon. The protest demonstrations in Lucknow were unprecedented in their size and intensity, and demonstrators were twice attacked by the police, with Jawaharlal himself receiving two blows from police batons. When the commission arrived in the city on November 30, the police resorted to a cavalry charge against the demonstrators, beating and trampling hundreds of them; once again, Jawaharlal received several blows from police lathi s, “a tremendous hammering,” in his own words. Public opinion around the country was outraged, and Nehru saw parallels to the country’s response to that earlier episode of British brutality, the Amritsar Massacre. “That awakening shook the fabric of British rule,” he wrote. “[This] is likely to lead to an even greater national response which may carry us to our goal.”