Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress was, to use a contemporary idiom, pushing the envelope as far as it would go, but still the British did not crack down. While Mahatma Gandhi began to prepare for a campaign of civil disobedience to give effect to the independence pledge, Jawaharlal turned his attention to two vital domestic political issues. First, he took on the Communists, denouncing their attempts to infiltrate the Congress as the work of British agents, and condemning their capture of the League against Imperialism and for National Independence, from whose Executive Committee he offered to resign. (He was expelled from it as a “left reformist” in 1931.) Then he addressed the concerns of Muslim Congressmen who feared that Gandhian civil disobedience would simply lead to communal rioting as had been seen in the mid-1920s. Where the Mahatma seemed to believe that the risk could be ignored, Nehru made specific commitments to offer various protections to the minorities. He wanted the Muslim population behind the Congress’s campaign.

Then Mahatma Gandhi embarked on the first act of willful lawbreaking that would capture the imagination of the country and the world. To defy a British tax on salt, he led thousands of followers on a 241-mile march from his Sabarmati ashram to the Gujarat seacoast at Dandi, surrounded by the cameras and notebooks of enthralled reporters, and broke the law by letting a raised fistful of seawater evaporate in his hand, leaving an illegal residue of untaxed salt in his palm. Jawaharlal later wrote of the indelible sight of the Mahatma “marching, staff in hand, to Dandi…. He was the pilgrim on his quest for truth, quiet, peaceful, determined and fearless.” Salt was a commodity every poor Indian needed to consume; by drawing attention to the British salt monopoly, the Mahatma demonstrated the iniquity of imperialism far more effectively than a thousand other protests might have done. “Today the pilgrim marches onwards on his long trek,” Jawaharlal wrote at his most poetic. “The fire of a great resolve is in him. … And love of truth that scorches and love of freedom that inspires. And none that pass him can escape the spell, and men of common clay feel the spark of life.”

As the march progressed, with the government unable to arrest Gandhi until he had actually broken the law, Jawaharlal and other party leaders galvanized popular support for the cause in a nation already transfixed by the media’s reporting of the frail Mahatma’s political pilgrimage. In a gesture rich with symbolism, Gandhi chose April 6, the anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre, to break the law. The moment the Mahatma held his handful of salt up to the cameras, Jawaharlal led the nation in echoing his act of defiance by collecting salt from the sea and from salt-bearing rocks, in selling contraband salt and in courting arrest for doing so. “Will you be mere lookers-on in this glorious struggle?” he demanded of Indian youth. “What shall it profit you to get your empty degrees and your mess of pottage if the millions starve and your motherland continues in bondage? Who lives if India dies? Who dies if India lives?” His wife, Kamala, despite her frailty, and his sister Krishna (“Betty”) joined him in Allahabad’s first batch of satyagrahis. On April 14 he was finally taken into custody. “Great Day!” he wrote in his diary as he was thrown into solitary confinement for six months.

But conditions were more severe than in his previous stint in jail — he was, for instance, only allowed to write and receive one letter a week, and was denied daily news-papers — and he did not help matters by refusing special privileges offered to him, such as sweets from his home and the use of a manual fan ( punkah ) operated by a pair of prison servants. Exercise was, however, possible, as was weaving, spinning, and, of course, reading. He devoured Bukharin, Bertrand Russell, and Spengler, read Maurois and Rolland in French, and even threw in Lloyd George’s speeches and Shakespeare’s sonnets. He was allowed to take notes, though he rarely needed to consult them; once he had finished a book it found a place in his mental reference library.

Nehru’s prison diary reveals how he closely followed political events in the outside world — the Peshawar disturbances in April, which showed that an overwhelmingly Muslim population had heeded the call to rise against the British (and featured a remarkable incident in which Hindu soldiers laid down their weapons rather than use them against their Muslim compatriots), episodes of police firing in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi (three corners of the subcontinent), and the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi on May 5, which confirmed that the British and the Indians were now embarked on a “full-blooded war to the bitter end.” Then, on June 30, a new prisoner was brought into his jail: Motilal Nehru. Though the father was clearly ailing and would soon be released on grounds of ill health, by July the two were caught up in political negotiations with the British, the Liberal Sapru acting as a willfully self-deluding mediator. At Sapru’s urging the Nehrus were transported in a special train to meet the Mahatma at his prison, Yeravda Central Jail, in August to discuss (despite Jawaharlal’s obvious obduracy) the terms of a possible settlement with the British government. In these negotiations it was Jawaharlal’s uncompromising view that prevailed. The British secretary of state for India wrote of his unhappiness at “Gandhi’s deference to Jawaharlal and Jawaharlal’s pride … which depressed me, because it did not show the spirit of a beaten man.”

Indeed Jawaharlal was anything but beaten. His six-month sentence ended on October 11; within eight days he was back in jail. Resuming his interrupted presidency of the Congress, he had defiantly called for renewed civil disobedience:

It is clear that India, big as it is, is not big enough to contain both the Indian people and the British Government. One of the two has to go and there can be little doubt as to which. … [W]e are in deadly earnest, we have burnt our boats … and there is no going back for us.

In his case there was a “going back” — to prison, this time for sedition and for a much longer term of two years’ rigorous imprisonment, with an additional five months if he did not pay his five-hundred-rupee fine, which of course he had no intention of doing.

During his brief period of liberty (memorialized, typically, in a pamphlet he authored called The Eight-Day Interlude ) Jawaharlal had visited his ailing father at the hill station of Mussoorie. Motilal, who had taken over his jailed son’s presidency as Jawaharlal’s nominated replacement when Mahatma Gandhi was arrested, called for Indians to celebrate his son’s forty-first birthday as “Jawahar Day.” The occasion was marked by anti-British demonstrations around the country (and in Colombo) involving more than twenty million demonstrators; twenty people lost their lives to police bullets and another fifteen hundred were wounded. Recording the events in his prison diary, Jawaharlal allowed his exhilaration to outweigh his sadness. It seemed as if battle had truly been joined.

“If Jawahar lives for ten years,” Motilal wrote to a nephew in 1928, “he will change the face of India.” But he added: “Such men do not usually live long; they are consumed by the fire within them.” The father’s fears proved unfounded; Jawaharlal had another thirty-six years to live. Instead it was Motilal whom destiny had chosen for a rapid demise. The years of political agitation and imprisonment had taken a devastating toll on the formerly sybaritic lawyer; his chronic asthma was now a daily trial, there was fibrosis in his lungs and a tumor in his chest. When, in January 1931, he came to see his son in prison on the one family visit permitted Jawaharlal every fortnight, Motilal could barely speak; even his mind seemed to wander. It was clear to the son that only his father’s indomitable will was keeping him going.