Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Once again, Jawaharlal chose to bide his time. He had lost a father, but in the Mahatma he had a father figure whom he could not betray. If Gandhi thought his pact and a Round Table Conference were tactically the right means to the ultimate end of Indian freedom, Jawaharlal was prepared to swallow his objections, however profound his disagreement. In any case, the nation was with the Mahatma, and Gandhi did not disagree with him over the eventual goal. When the viceroy and the Mahatma toasted their pact over a cup of tea, Gandhi mischievously produced some contraband salt from under his shawl. “I will put some of this salt into my tea,” he announced, “to remind us of the famous Boston Tea-Party.” The viceroy was gracious enough to laugh, but neither man needed reminding that, in less than a decade after that event, the American colonists were free of their British rulers.

In concluding the Gandhi-Irwin Pact the viceroy disregarded one of the Mahatma’s pleas, that the lives of the young revolutionary Bhagat Singh and his companions, who had been arrested for throwing bombs into the Legislative Assembly, be spared. Less than three weeks after the agreement, on March 23, the patriots were hanged; angry demonstrators blamed Gandhi’s pact with the British for their deaths. Jawaharlal himself declared that “the corpse of Bhagat Singh shall stand between us and England.” But Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had succeeded him as Congress president, aided the Mahatma in steering the party’s Karachi session toward moderation. Nehru’s major contribution at Karachi was the formulation of a “minimum program” for the Congress, which guaranteed Indians freedom of expression and assembly, equality before the law, universal adult franchise, and a secular state, as well as a number of less easily realizable social and economic rights. The resolution embodying these freedoms passed after some resistance from the right wing, and went on to constitute the nucleus of the Constitution that free India would give itself nearly two decades later.

After a break holidaying in Ceylon with Kamala and Indira for seven weeks, an all-too-rare gesture of attention to his neglected family, Jawaharlal returned to political action. Seeing the unrest amongst the U.P. peasantry, long oppressed by their British-imposed land-lords, or taluqdar s, he decided to launch a campaign against the payment of rent. He was careful not to do this as a form of class warfare, instead couching his appeals in anti-British terms, since the government clearly had the capacity to provide relief to the tenant farmers but chose not to do so. Ordered by the government to discontinue his public speaking in favor of the “no-rent” campaign, Jawaharlal refused. He was arrested on December 26, 1931 and, early in the New Year, sentenced to the usual two years’ rigorous imprisonment and a five-hundred-rupee fine. (Once again he refused to pay the fine, and the authorities seized a car registered in Indira’s name, which they subsequently auctioned off for three times the amount of the fine.)

The struggle was already requiring him to draw upon inner resources he had not known he possessed. His sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit would never forget Jawaharlal’s imprisonment this time:

We were permitted to go and say good-bye. He was his usual self, full of assurances … and humorous messages to the younger members of the family. As we walked away, I turned back for a last look. He stood against the sun which was setting in a great orange ball behind his head. He held the bars on either side and the face, so recently full of mirth, was serene and withdrawn, and there was infinite compassion in the eyes, which no longer saw us. He was already deep in his own contemplation.

Mahatma Gandhi was at sea, literally and metaphorically, at the time of Jawaharlal’s arrest. He was returning from the second Round Table Conference, which had proved as infructuous as the first, when the news reached him on board his ship from London. The Conservatives had returned to power in Britain and London was no longer enthused by Irwin’s conciliatory approach. Irwin’s successor, the disagreeable Tory grandee Lord Willingdon, did not consider it part of a viceroy’s brief to mollify law-breaking Indians; indeed he saw himself as “a sort of Mussolini in India.” Under Willingdon the British adopted a general policy of political repression, banning the Congress, seizing its properties, confiscating its assets, destroying its records, and prohibiting political activity. The press was censored and thousands of “subversives” were jailed, among them Jawaharlal, seen as a potential Indian Lenin. He spent most of the next four years in prison, with only two brief spells of freedom.

During the first of these stints behind bars, beginning just after Christmas 1931, his health suffered; unexplained fevers, tooth ailments, and a bout of pleurisy laid him low, and he was unable to maintain his regular exercise. (Later, he mastered yoga and wrote of “standing on his head” in his prison cell.) Conditions were abominable, with bedbugs, mosquitoes, flies, wasps, and even bats his constant companions. The fortnightly visits from his relatives were so closely monitored, and his visitors so badly treated, that he placed a self-imposed ban on them rather than see his family insulted — but not seeing his family only heightened his anxiety about their welfare. (The Mahatma finally persuaded him to end this self-denial after eight months.) In April 1932 his mother was badly beaten about the head and severely injured when a demonstration she was participating in was lathi -charged by the police. “The mother of a brave son is also some-what like him,” she wrote, but Jawaharlal’s despondency was great — a chronically ill wife, a neglected daughter, and now a widowed mother who had nearly died at the hands of the police, in addition to his two sisters also being jailed, all weighed on him. There is a photograph of him in prison at this time, nearly bald, attired in a white dhoti (full-length waistcloth) and kurta (loose-fitting shirt) with a black khadi (homespun) waistcoat buttoned above the navel. He is posing for the camera with his hands behind his back, but there is no hiding the grim pallor of his countenance, the downturned cast of his mouth, the hollowness of the determined expression he has put on. This is a man living in the depths. A year before, he had been dancing around the flagpole in Lahore.

His only consolation in prison lay in his continued writing of the letters to Indira on world history — letters that he was not, for a while, allowed to send her. They reveal Jawaharlal’s vision of human progress, advancing through periods of inhumanity and suffering but teleologically moving onward toward better lives for the world’s ordinary people. The Marxian idea that control of the means of production is the key to political dominance, and that history is essentially a tale of class conflict, strongly informs his analysis. But his British liberal education also shows through, as does his syncretic view of Indian nationalism. Jawaharlal was certainly aware that his letters would find a larger public, and in writing about India as well as the world he was careful to articulate views consistent with his political objectives. There is great praise for the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (in particular the Bhagavad Gita), but as works of literature rather than as sacred texts; and he is careful to write about Islam with respect, describing even the depredations of the eleventh-century invader Mahmud of Ghazni as nothing more than the deeds of a warrior of those times rather than as evidence of what Hindu chauvinists were portraying as Muslim barbarism. In these letters there clearly emerge the fundamental convictions of the young statesman: his secularism, his socialism (underscored by the seeming collapse of capitalism with the global depression then at its worst), his detestation of strongmen (linked to the rise of fascism in Europe, which he believed only communism could defeat), and his faith in a “scientific” approach to human history.