Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Lord Mountbatten left India for good on June 21, 1948, ten months after he had presided over its freedom — and its dismemberment. He was succeeded as governor-general of the Dominion by the man who had once been thought more likely than Jawaharlal to be Gandhi’s heir, C. Rajagopalachari. Though temperamentally a conservative, “Rajaji” had no patience for the communal sympathies of the Congress right, and so in his own way complemented Jawaharlal as head of state. But when the time came for that position to be converted to that of president of the Republic (upon the adoption of independent India’s new Constitution on the symbolic date of January 26, 1950, the old “Independence Day” becoming the new Republic Day), Patel engineered the election of his crony Rajendra Prasad as the Congress candidate. Jawaharlal had been completely by-passed; he was so surprised that he actually asked Prasad to withdraw and propose Rajagopalachari’s name himself. Prasad cleverly suggested that he would do whatever Nehru and Patel agreed upon, at which point Nehru understood and threw in the towel. One of Prasad’s first acts upon election was to ask that January 26 be changed to a date deemed more auspicious by his astrologers. Jawaharlal flatly turned him down, declaring that India would not be run by astrologers if he had anything to do with it. This time, Nehru won.

Nehru and Patel came dangerously close to a public clash only once. In 1950, under pressure from the right to intervene militarily in East Pakistan where a massacre of Hindus had begun, Jawaharlal first tried to work with his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan, on a joint approach to communal disturbances, and then, when this had been ignored by Liaquat, offered President Prasad his resignation. (Stanley Wolpert has speculated that Jawaharlal, exhausted and heartsick, was contemplating eloping with Edwina Mountbatten, who had just been visiting him at the time.) But when Patel called a meeting of Congressmen at his home to criticize Jawaharlal’s weakness on the issue, Nehru fought back, withdrawing his offer of resignation, challenging Patel to a public debate on Pakistan policy, and even writing to Patel to express doubt as to whether the two of them could work together anymore. The counter-assault was so ferocious that Patel backed off and affirmed his loyalty to Jawaharlal, supporting the pact Nehru signed with his Pakistani counterpart (which had even prompted the two cabinet ministers from Bengal to resign). The entire episode marked the closest the Congress would ever come to repudiating Nehru in his lifetime.

But in those early days Jawaharlal was not always a successful political infighter. His setback over Prasad’s election was echoed in the elections to the Congress Party presidency a few months later. Having withdrawn from the race himself on the grounds that it would not be proper for him as prime minister to also serve as party president, Jawaharlal supported his old rival Kripalani against the rightist Purushottam Das Tandon (the very man whose inability to win Muslim support for the chairmanship of the Allahabad municipality had given Jawaharlal his experience of mayoralty in 1923). But Tandon had Patel’s backing, and despite Jawaharlal’s open opposition, won handily, with over 50 percent of the votes in a three-man field. Nehru publicly grumbled that the result would only please communal and reactionary forces in the country, and refused to join Tandon’s Working Committee. When finally cajoled into doing so he made no secret of his reluctance. He spent the next year undermining Tandon much as his mentor Mahatma Gandhi had undermined Bose thirteen years earlier. In September 1951 Jawaharlal brought matters to a head by resigning his party positions and making it clear that he and Tandon could not coexist: one of them had to go. Tandon did. Jawaharlal himself was elected Congress president, his earlier scruples about the prime minister serving in such a position completely forgotten.

There was another reason for the decisiveness of his victory. By this time Nehru’s greatest rival, Sardar Patel, was dead. He had a suffered a heart attack a few months after the Mahatma’s assassination; then stomach cancer struck, and in December 1950, having fulfilled his historic role of consolidating India’s fragile freedom, he passed away, aged seventy-six. Patel and Nehru had also served as a check upon each other, and his passing left Jawaharlal unchallenged. If ever there was a moment when he might have been tempted by the prospect of near-dictatorial authority, this might have been it, but Jawaharlal remained a convinced democrat. He was not, however, a naive one. He realized that the Home Ministry, with its control over the institutions of law and order, was a valuable tool for a potential competitor. He was therefore careful after the Sardar’s death to appoint only trusted associates — with no competing political ambitions or agendas of their own — to the Home Ministry.

Jawaharlal’s efforts to resist the right-wing tendencies within his party and government were not aided by the continuing departures of his socialist allies. JP Narayan’s exit in 1948 was followed by Kripalani’s and Kidwai’s resignation from the Congress in 1951. Kidwai had been a vital Muslim ally in Uttar Pradesh and was a serving member of Nehru’s cabinet when he left to join Kripalani in forming a left-wing party. But these desertions only made Jawaharlal more determined then ever to fight his corner. When President Prasad sought directly to send Parliament his objections to the Hindu Code Bill (an attempt to reform Hindu personal law that Jawaharlal was strongly promoting), Nehru told him this would be an unconstitutional interference in the work of his government and threatened to resign over the issue. Prasad backed off.

The death of Patel and the sidelining of Rajaji also had a negative consequence. They left Jawaharlal literally peerless. With neither Patel nor Rajaji present in the councils of state, Nehru was deprived of the critical support, companionship, and challenge of an equal — someone whose standing and experience in the nationalist movement was as great, and as long, as his own. No longer was there anyone within the government or the party leadership to contest his authority or judgment. From now on, India’s triumphs and failures would rest on Jawaharlal’s shoulders alone.

In October 1951 India began conducting its first general elections, a process that took six months, engaged 176 million voters (85 percent of whom were illiterate), and saw more than 17,000 candidates from 75 political parties contest 489 seats in the national Parliament and 3,375 in the various state assemblies. The event was unprecedented, since it extended the franchise (limited under British rule) to all adults and embarked the nation upon a remarkable process of political education in the promises and the pitfalls of democracy. At a time when independence and the violence of partition were still fresh in the minds of voters, Nehru stewarded his party and his people into their first full appreciation of the rights and privileges that came with their freedom. As in 1936 and 1946, he campaigned extensively, traveling 25,000 miles, though this time mostly by plane. The voter turnout was respectable at 60 percent, and the Congress won an absolute majority of seats nationally (364 of the 489 seats) and in 18 of the 25 states — but on the strength of only 45 percent of the vote in the Westminster-style first-past-the-post system. Yet the process of having to defend itself and its policies in the face of organized opposition was healthy for the party. It was also salutary for its critics: the Socialists, for instance, were decimated (but the Communists emerged as India’s second-largest party). In his own constituency, Phulpur, Jawaharlal faced a Hindu sadhu who tried to exploit his coreligionists’ disillusionment with Nehru’s “appeasement” of Muslims. Nehru won by 233,571 votes to 56,718.