Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

In a gesture so counterproductive that it might almost have been an act of expiation, the Raj clumsily gave the warring factions a last chance at unity. It decided to prosecute the defectors of Bose’s Indian National Army. Bose himself had died in a fiery plane crash at war’s end in Formosa, so the Raj sought to find scapegoats among his lieutenants. In a desire to appear even-handed, the British chose to place three INA soldiers on trial in Delhi’s historic Red Fort: a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh. The result was a national outcry that spanned the communal divide. Whatever the errors and misjudgments of the INA men (and Jawaharlal believed freedom could never have come through an alliance with foreigners, let alone foreign Fascists), they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule. Both the Congress and the League rose to the trio’s defense; for the first time in their long careers, Jawaharlal and Jinnah accepted the same brief, Nehru donning a barrister’s gown after twenty-five years.

But the moment passed: the defense of three patriots was no longer enough to guarantee a common definition of patriotism. The ferment across the country made the result of the trials almost irrelevant. The trials were eventually abandoned, because by the time they had begun it was apparent that the ultimate treason to the British Raj was being contemplated in its own capital. London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of the burdens of its Indian empire. In February 1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India “to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution.” The endgame had begun.

Before the arrival of the Mission, Jawaharlal indulged his internationalist interests with a visit to Singapore and Malaya (with an unscheduled stop in Burma on the way back, where a weather delay enabled him to thwart the British and meet the Burmese nationalist hero Aung San). Permission to visit had initially been denied, then extended with humiliating conditions which he had declined to accept, but these had been overruled by the Supreme Commander for Asia himself, Lord Mountbatten. When he arrived in Singapore in March 1946 Nehru was welcomed with honors worthy of a head of government. Mountbatten received him personally and drove him to a canteen for Indian soldiers, where he was mobbed by the admiring men in uniform. Looking around for his hostess, Jawaharlal found Edwina Mountbatten crawling out from under the crowd; she had been knocked to the floor in the mad rush to greet him. It was, he later recalled, an unusual introduction. It was to become an unusual friendship.

The status Mountbatten chose to accord Jawaharlal was not accidental. It was clear he was India’s man of destiny at a time when India’s destiny was about to be realized. In early 1942 Mahatma Gandhi had told the Congress that there was no truth in the rumors that Nehru and he were estranged or that the more conservative Rajagopalachari, whose daughter had married one of the Mahatma’s sons, was Gandhi’s preferred successor. Jawaharlal liked to claim that he and the Mahatma spoke different languages, but “language,” the Mahatma said, “is no bar to a union of hearts. And … when I am gone, [Nehru] will speak my language.” The shrewd Gandhi had nurtured his protégé’s leadership claims, engineering his ascent three times to the Congress’s presidency. He knew that Jawaharlal had adopted him as a father figure, and if he was not always a faithful Gandhian, he would never fail to be a dutiful son.

In April 1946 Maulana Azad, after an unprecedented six years as Congress president, announced that he would be resigning and handing the reins to Jawaharlal. Sardar Patel and Acharya Kripalani, the Congress’s general secretary, announced their candidacies as well, but the Mahatma intervened swiftly and decisively, and both men withdrew. On May 9, Kripalani announced that Jawaharlal Nehru had been elected unopposed as president of the Congress. Gandhi had managed to arrange his protégé’s triumph at the most crucial time of all, with rumors of an interim Indian government being formed in advance of talks with the Cabinet Mission in Simla in May.

The Mission, a triumvirate of Sir Stafford Cripps (now the president of the Board of Trade), the British secretary of state for India, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, and First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander, had arrived on March 24. The vultures, scenting the dying emanations of the Raj, began gathering for the kill. The negotiations and confabulations, intrigue and maneuvering among and within the various interested parties — the British, the Congress, the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the loyalists, the Communists, the civil servants — became more intense and more convoluted with each passing day. Wavell’s astonishingly candid diaries reveal his distaste for, and distrust of, practically every Indian politician he had to deal with, each (in his eyes) proving more dishonest than the next. Though he was, like most of the British administration, hostile to the Congress and sympathetic to the League his government had helped nurture, he was scathing in his contempt for the mendacity of the League’s leaders, and of their “hymn of hate against Hindus.” (No Congress leader expressed any hatred of Muslims to the viceroy.) Even the idea of Pakistan seemed to take many forms in the minds of its own advocates, with several seeing it as a Muslim state within a united India, and others advocating assorted forms of decentralized confederation rather than outright secession. (The American journalist Phillips Talbot recalls Sir Abdullah Haroon of the League showing him, in 1940, eight separate plans for Pakistan then being debated by the League’s High Command.) Jinnah was steadfast in his demand for a separate state in the northwest and east of the country, but avoided giving specific answers as to how the creation of such a state could serve its declared purpose of protecting Muslims in the Hindu-majority provinces. Jawaharlal, meanwhile, sought nothing less than an Act of Abdication from the British: India’s political arrangements should, he declared, be left to Indians to determine in their own Constituent Assembly, free of British mediation.

Part of the problem at the time may well have lain in a profound miscalculation on Jawaharlal’s part about the true intentions of the British. Cut off by imprisonment from the political realities of world affairs, Nehru came to Simla believing (as he asserted to Phillips Talbot) that perfidious Albion was still trying to hold on to the jewel in her imperial crown by encouraging division among the Indian parties. Talbot felt that Nehru had simply not realized that Britain was exhausted, near-bankrupt, unwilling and unable to dispatch the sixty thousand British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to “cut” the country quite literally before running. Nehru, still imagining an all-powerful adversary seeking to perpetuate its hegemony, and unaware of the extent to which the League had become a popular party among Indian Muslims, dealt with both on erroneous premises. “How differently would Nehru and his colleagues have negotiated,” Talbot wondered, “had they understood Britain’s weakness rather than continuing to be obsessed with its presumed strength?” The question haunts our hindsight.

When the Simla Conference began on May 9, 1946, Jinnah — who was cool but civil to Nehru — refused to shake hands with either of the two Muslim leaders of the Congress party, Azad and Abdul Ghaffar Khan; he wished to be seen as the sole spokesman of Muslim India. Nonetheless, when the Cabinet Mission proposed a three-tier plan for India’s governance, with a weak center (limited to defense, external affairs, and communications), autonomous provinces (with the right of secession after five years), and groups of provinces (at least one of which would be predominantly Muslim), the League accepted the proposal, even though it meant giving up the idea of a sovereign Pakistan. The viceroy, without waiting for the Congress’s formal acceptance of the scheme, invited fourteen Indians to serve as an interim government. While most of the leading Muslim Leaguers and Congressmen were on the list, there was a startling omission: not a single Muslim Congressman had been invited to serve. The Congress replied that it accepted the plan in principle, but could not agree to a government whose Muslim members were all from the League. Jinnah made it clear he could not accept anything else, and the resultant impasse proved intractable. The Cabinet Mission left for London with its plan endorsed but this dispute unresolved, leaving a caretaker Viceroy’s Council in charge of the country. Ironically, its only Indian member (along with seven Englishmen) was a Muslim civil servant, Sir Akbar Hydari, who had made clear his fundamental opposition in principle to the idea of Pakistan.