Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Jawaharlal’s independence from the two major political currents dividing the world did give India the rhetorical leadership of the newly independent nations, who saw in nonalignment a strategy for leveraging their material weakness on the world stage. The undoubted skill of Indian diplomats from Nehru on down in developing and articulating their positions meant that, through most of the 1950s, Nehru’s India enjoyed an international stature out of proportion to either its military strength or its material means. Jawaharlal bestrode global diplomacy like a colossus, quoted, admired, and feted; he embodied an emerging world that was just finding its voice, and he did so with grace and style. Even that old curmudgeon Churchill called Nehru the “Light of Asia.” (A well-worn story, perhaps apocryphal, has Churchill, recalling the years Nehru spent in British prisons, saying, “You must hate us.” To which Jawaharlal replied: “I was taught by a great man never to hate — and never to fear.”)

Jawaharlal was the principal mover behind the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955; it was upon his insistence that China was invited to attend, over Western objections (and Israel was not, because of Arab ones). Nehru made a seventy-minute speech in Parliament before the meeting about the great importance of the occasion: for him Bandung marked the epochal moment when a world long dominated by imperial powers finally found its own feet. (He also arranged for an aircraft, Air India’s Kashmir Princess, to ferry Chinese diplomats to Bandung. The plane was blown up in midair by a time bomb allegedly placed in it by Taiwanese saboteurs; Chou En-lai, the intended target, was not on board.) The conference itself was something of an anticlimax, with cold war divisions diluting the final communiqué, and it is remembered chiefly for the impressive emergence of a soft-spoken but steely Chou En-lai as the moderate face of a Chinese government that had been in the shadows until then. Bandung was followed by the meeting of what the world came to see as the nonaligned triumvirate — Nehru, Nasser, and Tito — at Brioni in July 1956, where the seeds of what was to become a formal movement were sown.

Then came Suez — Nasser’s nationalization of the canal, followed by Israeli and Anglo-French invasions of Egyptian territory. The crisis brought out the anticolonial fighter in Jawaharlal. He cabled Nasser, declaring the events “a reversal of history which none of us can tolerate.” Nehru worked with the U.S. to ensure the withdrawal of the invaders and later contributed Indian troops to the United Nations peacekeeping operation that followed. His stance of firm opposition to Anglo-French imperialism won him, and India, great popularity in the Muslim world. An American diplomat, the former journalist Phillips Talbot, recalled his astonishment a few years later at seeing portraits of Nehru hanging in so many Egyptian homes. A Pakistani poet, Rais Amrohvi, published a verse declaring that Nehru was the kind of infidel Islam would love to embrace. The same year, though, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to crush a nationalist ruler, and Jawaharlal, the great international moralist, at first remained silent, explaining to Parliament that “the broad facts were not clear to us.” He later declared that “in regard to Hungary or Egypt or anywhere else, any kind of suppression by violent elements of the freedom of the people was an outrage on liberty.”

The contrast between his responses to Egypt and to Hungary have often been cited in the West as evidence of Nehruvian hypocrisy, of a moralism that stood somewhere to the left of morality. True, Jawaharlal was instinctively biased against any hint of colonialism, and he was slow to see the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in similar terms. But his prime ministership was replete with instances of intervention against non-Western tyranny. He protested against the writer Boris Pasternak’s detention in the Soviet Union; succeeded in obtaining the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas’s release from solitary confinement (though he failed to persuade Tito to free Djilas altogether); and spoke up for jailed democrats in Nepal even at the cost of relations with that vital neighbor’s monarch. Despite a foreign policy that many saw as tilted against the West (a part of the world he associated more with imperialism than with freedom), Nehru remained a friend to liberty everywhere.

On the whole, India’s international standing in the 1950s was Nehru’s principal vindication. The thoughtful Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik, president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1958, paid tribute to five elements of Nehru’s leadership of India that bear quoting here: “the adoption and cultivation of representative government through free and democratic institutions; the serious and responsible grappling with the immense social and economic problems of the nation; the retention and cementing of the unity of the Republic through the great leadership that has been displayed; the leading international role that India has played, especially at the United Nations; and the bringing of questions of principle (such as equality, freedom, nondiscrimination, human rights, humanity, peace) to bear upon political questions.” The force of example, the nobility of aspiration, and the articulation of India’s interests as those of a humanistic universalism, all served to give Nehru’s India stature and prestige. India did not speak in terms of nation-state rivalry or patriotic chauvinism; under Nehru it sought an altogether loftier place on the world stage. For all its flaws, this credibility was not easily achieved. In the early years of freedom, for instance, the Soviets scoffed at the idea that India was genuinely independent. Nehru’s statements and actions dispelled their skepticism.

Jawaharlal’s first decade in office as prime minister of India was crowned by the award to him in 1955 by President Rajendra Prasad of the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna. The “Light of Asia” was now officially the “Jewel of India.” There is a photograph of him at the ceremony, in his white achkan (formal long coat) with a red rose in the buttonhole, almost boyishly slim, smiling bashfully as the president and an aide-de-camp pin the decoration on him. He was sixty-six and in his pomp, a colossus on the national and international stages.

That first decade of power ended on a dramatic note of triumph. His dominance of the country was once again confirmed in the general elections of 1957, when the Congress Party was returned to office in an overwhelming victory — and with an increased majority in Parliament: 75 percent of the seats in the House and 65 percent in the state legislatures.

There was almost nowhere left to go but down.

8 Ashoka was a pacifist Buddhist monarch of the third century B.C.

In April 29, 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru announced his wish to resign. He did so in a public statement to the Congress parliamentary party, in which he pleaded fatigue and staleness. “The work of a prime minister,” he said, “allows no respite, it is continuous and unceasing. … There is little time for quiet thinking. I feel now that I must … free myself from this daily burden and think of myself as an individual citizen of India and not as prime minister.” He was not quite halfway between sixty-eight and sixty-nine; he had been head of the government for almost a dozen of those years, but he was as fit and vigorous as many half his age, practicing yoga daily and working late into the night. Had his offer been accepted, it would have set a democratic precedent around the developing world, none of whose first independence leaders had ever resigned voluntarily, nor would until the 1970s. The Congress parliamentary party, though, refused to entertain the thought; taken aback by the statement, they held an emergency meeting to urge Nehru to stay on. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev wrote expressing their hope that Jawaharlal would not leave. In the end, he settled for a long holiday in his beloved mountains instead, where he climbed with all the ardor of his youth until stopped by his doctors at 13,600 feet.