Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Through the mid-1950s, and particularly after Bandung, Jawaharlal seemed to see himself as virtually a patron of China, a position hardly likely to be well received in Beijing. Jawaharlal saw it as India’s duty to sponsor China’s arrival on the world scene and to lead the demand for Beijing to assume its rightful place at the United Nations. An escalating series of disputes and mutual protests over territorial issues were treated in New Delhi as minor misunderstandings that should not be allowed to cloud the larger picture. So self-delusion compounded arrogance. Nehru was also impervious to China’s increasing irritation with what its leaders saw as Indian pretensions to Great Power standing globally and specifically in Asia, a position which by size and strength Beijing viewed as more naturally China’s. By 1959 Beijing openly declared that the Sino-Indian boundary had never been formally delineated and that China had never recognized the McMahon Line drawn by British imperialists. When China cracked down on a Tibetan rebellion that year, New Delhi’s grant of asylum to the fleeing Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers in March 1959 further embittered relations.

But by that point Nehru had given away all of India’s cards. When the shooting started with a series of border incidents later that year, India was found woefully unprepared. Yet Nehru refused to believe China would ever embark on war with India, and did unconscionably little to prepare his forces for one. His defense minister from 1957 on was the leftist ideologue Krishna Menon, a votary of self-reliance who refused to import defense equipment and turned the military factories into production lines for hairpins and pressure-cookers. In 1959 Menon clashed publicly with the army chief, General Thimayya, who had to be persuaded by Nehru to withdraw his resignation after being denounced as pro-West by his own minister. In the next couple of years the warnings from the armed forces about their inability to protect Indian positions without additional resources proliferated, but were largely ignored by Nehru and Menon. As late as August 1961 Jawaharlal told Parliament that India did not believe in war, and would not act “in a huff” but behave with “wisdom and strength,” complacent banalities that revealed neither wisdom nor strength. In November that year, on the basis of a flawed intelligence estimate from another trusted acolyte, the head of the Intelligence Bureau, B. N. Mullick, Nehru instructed the army “to patrol as far forward as possible from our present positions … without getting involved in a clash with the Chinese.” But the patrols moved without adequate logistical support, and the troops were at their most vulnerable just as clashes became inevitable. On September 8, 1962, the Chinese crossed the McMahon Line, claiming self-defense against Indian “aggression,” then stopped. Nehru and Menon persuaded themselves that the incident was only a skirmish, and each traveled on planned visits abroad. But neither seemed to have realized the extent of the Chinese mobilization. On October 20 waves of Chinese troops poured across the border. Fullfledged war had broken out.

It was a rout. The war lasted a month, with only ten days of actual fighting; brave Indian troops, underequipped and understrength, without firewood or adequate tentage, many wearing canvas shoes in the Himalayan snows, and short of ammunition for their antiquated Lee Enfield rifles, were simply overwhelmed. On November 21 China, with its forces seemingly unstoppable, unilaterally declared a cease-fire and then withdrew from much of the territory it had captured, retaining some 2,500 square miles in the western sector. It had, in the words of Liu Shao-chi, taught India a lesson. Nehru’s grand international pretensions had been cut down to size.

A calamitous military defeat was only the most evident of Nehru’s setbacks. His foreign policy lay in a shambles, as the Soviet Union and most of the nonaligned world remained neutral in the conflict and India turned to the United States (itself in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis) for help — including, to the astonishment of Jawaharlal’s ambassador in Washington, his cousin B. K. Nehru, American military aircraft. Nehru’s stature as the leader of the newly liberated colonial peoples and his authority to speak for the “Third World” had been dealt a major blow. But this time Jawaharlal did not offer to resign. The public and Parliament turned on Menon instead; not even the loyal support of Nehru could save him, and on November 7 Menon was forced out of the government. Nehru, let down by those in whom he had placed such trust, betrayed by his own idealism, was a broken man. In April 1963 he suffered the first of a series of serious illnesses that would mark his rapid downward spiral toward death.

And yet one should not overlook the transcendent irony of 1962, the reawakening of an Indian nationalism that Jawaharlal had once incarnated but had since sought to subsume in idealist internationalism. For the first time since that midnight moment of independence, the country rallied together as one: housewives knit sweaters for the soldiers on the Himalayan front and donated their gold jewelry to the servicemen’s fund, moviegoers stood respectfully to attention as the national anthem played in theaters after the film, schoolchildren discovered a sense of patriotism that had nothing to do with overthrowing the English. In the moment of his greatest failure, the preeminent voice of Indian freedom unwittingly gave a new boost to a nationalist resurgence. War, and defeat, destroyed illusions but nurtured resolve, tightening the bonds Nehru had helped put in place to hold his disparate country together.

The eighteen months left to him after the Chinese debacle added little to Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation. In August 1963, forty opposition members of Parliament sponsored a no-confidence motion against his government. The Congress’s crushing majority meant that it was easily defeated, but a new slogan was heard in the House: “Quit, Nehru, quit!” Three months later, in November 1963, Jawaharlal launched India’s own space program, a moment immortalized in a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson showing a rocket part being carried on the back of a bicycle. Six years earlier Jawaharlal had inaugurated India’s first atomic research reactor. Nuclear power and space technology: there was no limit to his scientific aspirations for India, and yet the country was moored in the bicycle age at least partly because of his unwillingness to open up its economy to the world.

By 1964 the signs of mortality were impossible to ignore. Jawaharlal was visibly ailing; the puffy face, the sunken eyes, the shuffling gait were of a man in irreversible decline. His visits to Parliament were, in the words of a senior opposition member, those of “an old man, looking frail and fatigued … with a marked stoop in his gait … [and] slow, faltering steps, clutching the backrests of benches for support as he descended.” Nehru suffered a cerebral stroke at the annual Congress session in January and missed most of it, but within days was back in New Delhi trying to manage his usual routine. Work was his lifeblood. “If I lie down in bed for even a week,” he declared, “I know I will not get up!” That moment was not long in arriving. A second stroke felled him on May 17, but he resumed his schedule within days. On May 22 he told a press conference, in response to a question about whether he should not settle the question of his successor in his own lifetime: “My life is not coming to an end so soon.” On May 27, 1964 — a date astonishingly foretold five years earlier by one of his ministers’ favorite astrologers, Haveli Ram Joshi — Jawaharlal Nehru passed away in his sleep after a massive aortic rupture. On his bedside table were found, jotted down in his own hand, the immortal lines from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: