Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

As prime minister, Jawaharlal had ultimate responsibility for many of the decisions taken during the tense period from 1947 to 1949, but it is true to say he was still finding his feet as a governmental leader and that on many key issues he simply went along with what Patel and Mountbatten wanted. Nehru was the uncontested voice of Indian nationalism, the man who had “discovered” India in his own imagination, but he could not build the India of his vision without help. When the Muslim rulers of Hindu-majority Junagadh and Hyderabad, both principalities surrounded by Indian territory, flirted with independence (in Hyderabad’s case) and accession to Pakistan (in Junagadh’s), the Indian army marched in and took over with scarcely a shot being fired. In both cases the decision was Patel’s, with acquiescence from Nehru. When the Hindu maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir tried to postpone a decision to accede to either India or Pakistan and found his state invaded by Pathan “irregulars” from Pakistan, it was Mountbatten who insisted on accession to India as a precondition for sending in the army to resist the invaders. Nehru, confident in the support of Kashmiri public opinion as manifest in the support of the secular nationalist Sheikh Abdullah, made accession conditional upon a reference to the will of the people: it was Jawaharlal’s proposal that a plebiscite be held immediately to ascertain their wishes. But when the Pakistani army joined the fray, and as the military tide turned in India’s favor, it was Mountbatten who prevailed upon Nehru, against Patel’s advice, to declare a cease-fire and take the dispute to the United Nations.

From the Indian nationalist point of view this was a gross error, since it converted what was thus far a domestic Indian problem into an international dispute. Jawaharlal’s decision to appeal to the UN has been seen within the country as a blunder that snatched diplomatic stalemate from the jaws of imminent military victory. But this is unreasonable; after all, Pakistan could just as easily have raised the issue at the UN, and it would have found some support. Recent scholarship has confirmed that British diplomacy at the time played a particularly active role in recasting the issue internationally to India’s disadvantage. Jawaharlal saw that policy considerations going well beyond Kashmir — including the West’s general desire to improve its standing in the Islamic world amid trauma in Palestine, and the potential usefulness of Pakistan as an advocate for Britain with the Arab countries — influenced London’s actions. But Nehru should hardly have been surprised to see other countries acting in pursuit of their own interests: the wonder was that a man of such sharp intelligence and insight should have failed to more clearly define and act upon India’s.

By August 1953 Jawaharlal’s Kashmir policy was in a shambles. His friend and ally Sheikh Abdullah had begun flirting with notions of independence, and Nehru made the painful decision to place him under arrest. A compliant pro-Congress politician replaced Abdullah, but the development changed the complexion of the Kashmir dispute, on which international opinion was now broadly ranged against India. Domestically Jawaharlal was criticized for granting Jammu and Kashmir a special constitutional status — prohibiting non-Kashmiris from buying land in the state, for example, a provision which made it impossible to resettle refugees from Pakistan there. Abroad, the dispute Nehru had first internationalized now hung over India’s head like the proverbial sword of Damocles, and the issue of Kashmir continued to bedevil relations with Pakistan throughout Jawaharlal’s tenure — and beyond.

Apart from handling weighty matters of state, Jawaharlal had to deal with issues of domestic politics. He had surprised some of his most ardent supporters by his reluctance to embrace radical change, and his willingness to retain, and indeed rely on, the very civil servants and armed services personnel who had served the British Raj, the “steel frame” of which continued as the administrative superstructure of independent India. The government proved its worth in handling the rehabilitation of some seven million refugees from Pakistan, a colossal political and administrative feat. But the civil service continued in the traditions of colonial governance learned from their British masters; Nehru did little to instill in them a development orientation or a new ethic of service to the people. Continuity, not change, was the watchword. Many of the freedom fighters, who had gone to jail while these officials prospered under the British, were dismayed.

The Congress socialists, heirs to those who had found Jawaharlal insufficiently radical in the 1920s and 1930s, formally split from the parent party in March 1948. Nehru shared their ideals but was, in their view, in thrall to capitalist and right-wing forces; his ability to compromise, to work with those he had once denounced, even his eclectic cabinet which drew upon all shades of Indian opinion, were seen as proof that socialism would never come to India through him. Jawaharlal lamented their departure and particularly that of their leader, a figure of rare integrity and strength of character, Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan. Had the Congress divided completely on ideological lines, Jawaharlal might have belonged with them; but he was prime minister and leader of a party that had won India’s freedom and still strived to represent the various currents of belief that had sustained this cause. Nehru sought instead to serve as a bridge between the two principal opposing forces within the Congress: the right, grouped around Patel and Rajendra Prasad, who were prepared to ban trade unions, woo the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dismiss Muslim officials, and promote the interests of the Hindu majority; and the socialist left whose policy prescriptions, in Jawaharlal’s own words, “show an amazing lack of responsibility.”

Ideology was not the only dividing issue; secularism was equally important. In resisting the anti-Muslim currents in his party that had come to the fore in the wake of partition, Jawaharlal recognized that Jinnah’s triumph in creating a Muslim nation had weakened the case for secularism in India and increased communal feeling in the minds of politicians who had earlier considered themselves Gandhians. The steady influx of Hindu refugees from Pakistan hardened attitudes in India. Jawaharlal’s correspondence in 1948 and 1949 shows him almost reduced to despair by the growth of anti-Muslim feeling — what he called the “refugee mentality.” But he remained a staunch defender of the place of Muslims in a secular India, a position from which he never wavered either personally or politically. His idea of India explicitly rejected the two-nation theory; having spurned the logic which had created a state for Muslims, he was not about to succumb to the temptation of mirroring that logic by allowing India to become a state for Hindus. “So long as I am Prime minister,” he declared in 1950, “I shall not allow communalism to shape our policy.” And during the 1952 elections he declared to a large crowd in Old Delhi: “If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both at the head of the government and from outside.”

Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu fanatic strengthened his hand on the communal issue. Even Patel agreed to the RSS being banned, though the ban was lifted after a year. On other questions, ranging from the grant of “privy purses” (annual subventions to the erstwhile maharajahs to compensate for the loss of their princely states) to the clash between the right to property and the need for land reform, he found himself outmaneuvered by the party’s right wing. Patel ran his Home Ministry as firmly as he administered the country as a whole, and he brooked little interference from Nehru.