Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Though his father’s presumptuous notation on that old postcard to Harrow had come true, the election of Jawaharlal as Congress president was hardly the great triumph it has since been portrayed as being. The only one who really sought it was Gandhi, who saw great symbolic value in passing the torch to the embodiment of a new generation — but who simultaneously declared that Jawaharlal was such a faithful acolyte of his that his being president was just as good as the Mahatma himself holding the job. The shrewd Mahatma had no doubt calculated that if he did not publicly co-opt Jawaharlal into the party establishment at the expense of the conservative Patel, the younger Nehru could drift away into active radicalism. Those party elders who reluctantly voted for him did so not out of any great love for Jawaharlal but out of regard for Gandhi; many hoped that the presidency would rein in the younger man’s tendency to hotheadedness, keeping the proponents of “full independence” within the Congress tent. Jawaharlal’s leftist and “Extremist” allies, though, expected him to use his position to lead the party away from what they saw as the temporizing of the Nehru Report into a full-throated battle for freedom from British rule. Jawaharlal himself, aware of these contrary pulls, accepted the honor with unfeigned diffidence. He wrote to a close friend that it would not be easy in his new assignment “to avoid losing all my cheerfulness and light-heartedness.” The perceptive nationalist poet Sarojini Naidu, whose daughter Padmaja was to become an intimate of Nehru’s, wrote to Jawaharlal: “I wonder if in the whole of India there [is] a prouder heart than your father’s or a heavier heart than yours.”

And yet there was no doubt about Jawaharlal’s potential as a leader. The Congress politician Y. B. Chavan recounted meeting Jawaharlal at a public gathering around 1929, when he was fifteen and Nehru forty. The impact of the leader on the crowd was inspirational: “The younger ones among us swore by the vigor of his intellect, the freshness of his outlook, and the radiance of his youth; the older folk nodded to one another, wondering at the wise head he carried on his young shoulders; and admiring women agreed with both.”

The country was at a crossroads: the Simon Commission’s visit had been a disaster; the Nehru Report was looking increasingly like a dead letter; Hindu-Muslim relations had declined from the peak of amity at the beginning of the decade; the cracks in the Congress Party could barely be papered over; and young men were turning to violence. In April 1929 the now legendary Bhagat Singh threw bombs into the Legislative Assembly, expressing the hope that the explosions would “make the deaf hear” (he was hanged for his pains, but in 2002 the popular Indian film industry of Bollywood would release not one but five competing films about his courage and daring). It was widely expected that, with Jawaharlal in the chair and the Mahatma’s one-year deadline having expired, the Congress would push for full independence ( purna swaraj ) at its Lahore session in December 1929. Looking for ways to head off the impending crisis, the British viceroy, Lord Irwin, announced on October 31, 1929 that His Majesty’s Government would convene, at a date to be determined, a Round Table Conference of all the Indian parties to discuss the country’s future. Irwin’s declaration included, almost as an afterthought, the admission that “the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress … is the attainment of Dominion Status.” This might have been treated seriously by a Congress still formally committed to the Nehru Report, but Irwin’s words created such an outcry from the blimps and the reactionaries in the British Parliament that it vitiated whatever appreciation such an announcement might have elicited from Indian opinion-makers. Irwin himself, scalded by the outrage back home, backpedaled swiftly away from any suggestion that Dominion status was imminent. Gandhi initially responded favorably to the announcement, prompting Jawaharlal to offer his resignation from his party positions; but when the British refused to honor the four provisos the Congress had put forward for its support, the danger of a split in the Congress ranks receded. The singularly unimaginative Irwin did not even offer to release political prisoners, a gesture that would have met one of Gandhi’s conditions and helped win the Mahatma’s cooperation.

That ended the last hope of compromise on the issue with the Indian National Congress. Two days before the Congress session, Irwin met with Gandhi and Motilal from the Congress, along with Jinnah, representing the Muslim League, and the Liberals Sapru and V. J. Patel, to urge a more measured pace for change. On a day when a terrorist bomb had exploded under the viceroy’s railway carriage, the other three were amenable to seeing things Irwin’s way; the Congress leaders were not. The meeting marked the irretrievable breakdown between the Congress and those Indians who were still prepared to work within the British framework. Motilal and the Mahatma traveled to and from the meeting in one vehicle, the three others in a different car. They no longer agreed either on the destination or on how to get there.

On December 25, 1929 the citizens of Lahore greeted the Christmas holiday by turning out in large numbers to hail the new young president of the Congress as he trotted down the narrow thoroughfares on a white steed, resplendent in a long black sherwani coat, waving as women sprinkled him with rose petals from the windows. Motilal saw the adulation from his perch on a balcony in the Anarkali marketplace, and was inspired to quote Persian poetry to the effect that the son had surpassed the father. Contemporary accounts describe the excitement now generated by the ascension of the forty-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru to the leadership of the party. Gone were memories of the reluctance with which the party had chosen him; instead his call for purna swaraj was unanimously passed, and on the night of December 29 the new president raised the flag of a free India. It was saffron, white, and green, its three horizontal stripes capturing three colors that were sacred to, and touched the hearts of, India’s major communities (and which stood, respectively, for courage, unity, and fertility, among other virtues). In the middle was a spinning wheel, proclaiming the country’s attachment to self-reliance. Jawaharlal made a stirring speech about the flag standing for all Indians, whether Hindu or Muslim; and as the stars twinkled in an ink-black sky, men and women, President Nehru himself among them, danced with childlike jubilation around the flagpole. It was midnight, but few doubted that a new dawn had broken over India.

“The love for the idea of India,” wrote a British conservative in Lahore, “is one of the finest, and also one of the most incalculable, forces in the country.” Mahatma Gandhi, who just a year earlier had thought that Jawaharlal had been too hasty in his advocacy of full independence at the Madras session, embraced the new spirit. He proposed that Indians in every village or town across the land observe “Independence Day” on January 26 by taking a pledge to end exploitation, restore liberty, break the chains of their slavery, and resolve to defend themselves without the help of the Raj. “We hold it to be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to [British] rule,” declared the pledge. “It is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil.” For the next seventeen years, this pledge would be repeated throughout India. January 26 ceased to be “Independence Day” when freedom eventually came at midnight on August 15, 1947; but twenty years after the initial pledge, an independent India would adopt its republican Constitution on January 26, 1950, so that this day of national emotional significance could continue to be celebrated as “Republic Day.”