Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Nor could Jawaharlal prevent the growth of the corruption which his own statist policies facilitated. The image of the self-sacrificing Congressmen in homespun gave way to that of the professional politicians the educated middle classes came to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and unaccountable) riches by manipulating governmental favors. With licenses and quotas for every business activity, petty politicians grew rich by profiting from the power to permit. In 1959, in a birthday tribute, no less, Jawaharlal’s sister Krishna (Betty) wrote sadly: “Nehru the Prime Minister no longer remembers or adheres to the ideals or dreams that Jawahar the Rebel had. … [H]e can no longer arouse his people as he did in years gone by, for he has allowed himself to be surrounded by those who are known to be opportunists and the entire Government machinery, corrupt and heavy with intrigue, rules the land with no hope of an honest hearing from any quarter.” A sympathetic biographer, Frank Moraes, wrote that “in India today there is no one to restrain or guide Nehru. He is Caesar, and from Caesar one can appeal only to Caesar.”

The stench of corruption reached Jawaharlal’s own circles three times in the later years of his rule: when his finance minister, T. T. Krishnamachari, was obliged to resign in 1958 over improprieties in a life insurance scandal (it was Feroze Gandhi’s muckraking that brought about Krishnamachari’s downfall); when his friend Jayanti Dharma Teja, whom Nehru had helped set up a major shipping line, defaulted on loans and skipped the country; and when Jawaharlal’s own private secretary since 1946, M. O. Mathai, who was accused both of spying for the CIA and of accumulating an ill-gotten fortune, was forced to resign in 1959. In none of these cases was there the slightest suggestion that Jawaharlal had profited personally in any way from the actions of his associates, but they again confirmed that Nehru’s loyalty exceeded his judgment. (And in dozens of other cases where corruption was not an issue, he picked unsuitable aides and persisted in his support for them well after their ineptitude had been revealed.) By the late 1950s he was widely considered a poor judge of men, and not merely by his critics. An admirer and former cabinet colleague, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, put it bluntly:

He is not a good judge of character and is therefore easily deceived. He is not averse to flattery and there is a conceit in him which makes him at once intolerant of criticism and may even warp his better judgment. His very loyalty to friends blinds him to their faults. For this very reason he is not ruthless enough as a leader and his leadership is weakened thereby.

But Nehru’s own conduct was exemplary; when in 1957 the city of Allahabad levied a trivial wealth tax on his property there, Nehru insisted it be assessed five times higher.

The task of nation-building remained a vital preoccupation for Jawaharlal. India’s freedom from colonial rule was not complete with the adoption of the republican Constitution on January 26, 1950. France and Portugal still maintained territories on Indian soil. The French negotiated an amicable withdrawal from their comptoirs in 1954, but the Portuguese, under the Salazar dictatorship, insisted their territory of Goa was a full-fledged province of Portugal, and enjoyed the overt support of Britain and the United States for their claim. The international dimension prompted Jawaharlal not to opt for the “police action” that had overrun Hyderabad and Junagadh, but domestic outrage over the continuation of the foreign enclave spilled over into the colony as nonviolent satyagrahis crossed the border in protest and were shot by Portuguese border guards. After more than a decade of vacillation, during which he agonized over Gandhi’s injunctions not to use force even in the pursuit of just ends, Nehru ordered the Army to move at the end of 1961. Goa fell within twenty-six hours; the hopelessly outgunned Portuguese governor surrendered without a fight. India weathered international opprobrium easily enough, though President Kennedy tartly suggested to the Indian ambassador in Washington that India might now consider delivering fewer self-righteous sermons on nonviolence. The victory in Goa gave Jawaharlal a great surge of domestic popularity, which helped carry him and the Congress to another resounding victory in the general elections of 1962. It would be his last.

His final visit to the United States occurred in November 1961, during the presidency of a man who had long admired him, John F. Kennedy. But Nehru was at his worst, moody and sullen at times, didactic and superior at others. The two statesmen failed to hit it off; JFK was later quoted as saying this was the worst state visit he had suffered. Nehru no longer attracted uncritical admiration. His positions, both domestic and international, were seen by many as hypocritical. A satirical view of Nehru’s inconsistencies came in the words of the American poet Ogden Nash, who published a savage piece of doggerel, “The Pandit”:

Just how shall we define a Pandit?

It’s not a panda, nor a bandit.

But rather a Pandora’s box

Of sophistry and paradox.

Though Oxford [ sic ] gave it a degree

It maintains its neutrality

By quietly hating General Clive

As hard as if he were alive.

On weighty international questions

It’s far more Christian than most Christians;

It’s ever eager, being meek

To turn someone else’s cheek.

Oft has it said all men are brothers,

And set that standard up for others,

Yet as it spoke it gerrymandered

Proclaiming its private Pakistandard.

The neutral pandit walks alone,

And if abroad, it casts a stone,

It walks impartial to the last, Ready at home to stone a caste.

Abandon I for now the pandit, I fear I do not understand it.

A few months before Goa, in September 1961, Nehru, Nasser, and Tito had met in Belgrade to complete the task they had begun in Brioni five years earlier — the formal creation of the Nonaligned movement. The occasion saw the passage of various resolutions condemning war and calling for nuclear disarmament, of which Nehru was inordinately proud. It was a telling indication of the gulf between his view of the world and the international realities with which he had to deal.

It is sometimes true that one’s greatest failures emerge from one’s greatest passions. Foreign policy was Jawaharlal Nehru’s favorite subject, his area of unchallenged expertise. China had been a source of intense fascination since his youth, a country he frequently sought to visit and for whose leaders he had expressed great admiration ever since his speech at the Anti-Imperialist Congress in Brussels in 1927. Yet it was his failure to manage India’s relationship with China that, more than anything else, blighted his last years of office and contributed to his final decline.

After signing the Panch Sheel agreement with China in 1954 and helping Chou Enlai emerge into the limelight in Bandung in 1955, Jawaharlal embarked on a starry-eyed phase of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” which seemed willfully blind to the real divergence of interests between the two countries at that time. Bandung marked the beginning of Sino-Pakistani contacts that would soon flower into a vital alliance, for Beijing was more conscious of its geopolitical place in the world than Nehru’s New Delhi was. China’s reestablishment of its authority over Tibet in 1950 brought the People’s Liberation Army to the frontiers of India along a British-demarcated boundary (the McMahon Line) that Beijing had never recognized. This should have prompted a certain amount of realism about national security in New Delhi; but Nehru, anxious to avoid any rupture of the anticolonial solidarity he felt with China, resisted Patel’s demands that India set out a clear (and by implication assertive) position on the border issue. His policy instead became an uneasy amalgam of idealist rhetoric about Sino-Indian relations on the one hand and firm assurances to Parliament that India would hold its border at the Mc- Mahon Line. Nehru did not, however, press Beijing to come to a negotiated agreement on the border, preferring to take at face value a statement by Chou in 1952 that China had no border dispute with India. In April 1954 Nehru formally recognized Tibet as a full-fledged part of China, giving up assorted British-era rights India had acquired there, without seizing the opportunity to obtain a border agreement in return.