Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

This could never be acceptable to Nehru. Jawaharlal saw the communal card as rank political opportunism. In a passionate letter to his old friend Khaliquzzaman, he asked: “Why should I accept it [the League] as the representatives of the Muslims of India when I know it represents [only] the handful of Muslims at the top who deliberately seek refuge in the name of religion to avoid discussing mass problems?” The Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru was committed to land reform; the League was in thrall to big Muslim landowners. Jawaharlal was also conscious that, as his Muslim colleague Abdul Walli wrote to him, “once the Congress enters into a pact with the Muslim League it loses the right to ask the Muslims to join it.” Jawaharlal believed at the very core of his being that the nationalist movement had to be a movement of the masses, animated by political and economic considerations, not religious ones. In his Autobiography, he had already written of being “troubled … at the growth of this religious element in our politics, both on the Hindu and Muslim side”:

I did not like it at all. Much that Moulvies and Maulanas and Swamis and the like said in their public addresses seemed to me unfortunate. Their history and sociology and economics appeared to me all wrong, and the religious twist that was given to everything prevented all clear thinking. Even some of Gandhiji’s phrases sometimes jarred upon me — thus his frequent reference to Ram Raj as a golden age which was to return.

It is telling that Jawaharlal denounced the use of religious imagery in politics quite impartially, even reproaching the Mahatma for evoking Hindu mythology in painting a vision of post-British India. To Jinnah’s communal politics Jawaharlal opposed his secular and rationalist beliefs; there would be no question of allowing the Congress to become the party of any one community. From such a perspective, giving the Muslim League the respectability of holding ministerial office in U.P. as the representative of the province’s Muslims stuck in Jawaharlal’s craw.

Some — most notably Maulana Azad himself, in his posthumous memoir — have suggested that Jawaharlal’s implacable opposition scuttled a possible deal and set the seal on the widening divergence between the parties that would ultimately culminate in the partition of India. There is no doubt that Jawaharlal was not in favor of a deal with the Muslim League, but the negotiations appear to have collapsed because of the intractability of the conditions posed by both sides, rather than solely because of his opposition to them. In any case, other political developments at the time do not suggest that this episode deserves to be given quite so much weight in the history of the freedom struggle. Strikingly, a Muslim League legislator in U.P., Hafiz Ibrahim, resigned from his party and ran again for his own seat as a Congress candidate. Despite virulent opposition from the League, Ibrahim was elected, giving the Congress an elected “Muslim” seat in the provincial assembly. The Congress also formed the government in the overwhelmingly Muslim North-West Frontier Province, where the “Frontier Gandhi,” Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, had led his red-shirted nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgars (“Servants of God”) into the party. At that stage Jawaharlal’s (and the Congress’s) claim to speak for Indians of all communities, and his refusal to concede the Muslims of India to the League, remained entirely tenable.

In July 1937 Jinnah issued a statement deploring the Congress’s “mass contact” policy with Muslims: “There is plenty of scope for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to improve his own people, the Hindus,” he declared. Nehru replied immediately: “Not being religiously or communally inclined, I venture to think of my people as the Indian people as a whole.” Two months earlier he had confessed to the press: “Personally I find it difficult to think of any question on communal lines. I think on political and economic lines.” In those fundamentally irreconcilable attitudes lay the seeds of a divide that would, over the next decade, tear the country apart.

To the surprise of both their supporters and their critics, the Congress ministries in the provinces conducted themselves as able stewards of the governmental system of the British Raj. For the most part they did little to dismantle oppressive British laws, and in some cases proved as zealous in arresting radicals as the British themselves had been. The delighted governor of Madras, Lord Erskine, commented privately that his Congress chief minister, the conservative C. Rajagopalachari, was “even too much of a Tory for me.” In the exuberance of their first crack at governance, some Congress ministries failed to pay sufficient heed to Muslim sensibilities in their appointments, regulations, or promotion of nationalist (often Hindu) symbols. Jawaharlal observed all this with dismay; having already objected to his party’s assumption of office, he was distressed by his colleagues’ willingness to serve the colonial system in a manner that was antithetical to the Congress’s declared policies and principles. Yet, typically, he put party loyalty above private conviction (“we cannot agitate against ourselves”) and spoke in defense of the Congress ministries in public, leading his radical supporters to write him off as a “parlor socialist” incapable of leading genuine revolutionary change. His presidency ended in the proverbial whimper, with his rival Subhas Chandra Bose’s election to office for 1938.

Increasingly disenchanted with the compromises he saw his party making domestically, Jawaharlal — pausing only to establish a pro-Congress newspaper in Lucknow, the National Herald — turned his attention to world affairs, in particular the civil wars then raging in Spain and China, as well as the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. He organized demonstrations against Mussolini, a boycott of Japanese goods (over that country’s conduct in China), a China relief fund, and a medical unit to serve there. When his mother passed away, after a long illness, in January 1938, and since his daughter, Indira, was studying at Oxford, Jawaharlal decided to travel to Europe. This time there were no government-imposed restrictions on his activities, and he pursued an openly political agenda, meeting with Egyptian nationalists in Alexandria before traveling overland to Spain as a guest of the Republican government. He spent five days in Barcelona, braving Franco’s air raids, and felt strongly tempted to join the International Brigades battling fascism there. 6He tried to arrange for the settlement of European Jewish refugees in India, despite stringent conditions imposed by the British authorities. In England, buoyed by the increased stature that had followed the success of his Autobiography, he addressed public meetings at Trafalgar Square and at the Royal Albert Hall, lunched with editors, journalists, and members of Parliament, and even met the new viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, who had succeeded Willingdon in 1936 and was then on holiday in Britain. At this meeting he declared to the nonplussed viceroy that he “gave England at the outside ten years before India [became] independent.”

The same spirit revealed itself in a fiery address to an international conference in Paris on the bombing of civilians, followed by two days in Munich (where he refused to meet with Nazi officials despite the German government’s entreaties) and an emotional visit to Czechoslovakia on the verge of its surrender to German might and Anglo-French complicity. Nehru was in Geneva when the League of Nations met to discuss the Czech crisis, then in London again at the height of the appeasement drama (where amid the general panic he was outfitted with a gas mask). His views were clear and uncompromising; he was hostile both to British imperialism and to European fascism, and he would place India firmly on the side of democracy in the inevitable conflict, provided the British proved their democratic credentials by granting freedom to India first. Sickened by Chamberlain’s sellout at Munich and unable to obtain a Russian visa for a planned overland return home through Central Asia, Jawaharlal arrived home at the end of 1938, ready again for domestic politics.