Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

But Jawaharlal was not merely feckless. He immersed himself with compassion in the cause of the landless peasantry of U.P., taking on the vice presidency of the Kisan Sabha (Farmers’ Council) and lending his advocacy and his pen to their grievances. He began, too, to show some of the emotional identification with them that would forever characterize his relationship with the Indian masses. “I have had the privilege of working for them,” he wrote in 1921, “of mixing with them, of living in their mud huts and partaking in all reverence of their lowly fare. . I have come to believe that Nonviolence is ingrained in them and is part of their very nature.” Such feelings marked the beginning of the Harrovian and Cantabrigian Nehru’s rediscovery of India, and of his own Indianness — a process (as the reference to Nonviolence underlined) that was intertwined with his admiration of Mahatma Gandhi. He “found the whole countryside afire with enthusiasm and full of a strange excitement. Enormous gatherings would take place at the briefest notice by word of mouth.” Roads would be built for him overnight to allow his car to pass; when his wheels got stuck in the soft mud, villagers would bodily lift his vehicle onto drier ground. “Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and sorrow, shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India.”

Though the emotional intensity was genuine, the political opportunity was there to be seized. Jawaharlal sought to harness the peasants to the Congress’s nationalist cause and helped organize Kisan Sabhas, or farmers’ associations (though the U.P. Kisan Sabha itself split in early 1921 over the issue of noncooperation). His old shyness was now completely overcome; in its place arose the mounting oratorical confidence of an increasingly surefooted politician. After one episode where a number of farmers were killed by unprovoked police firing, Jawaharlal calmed matters by persuading angry farmers to disperse rather than to resort to violence in their turn. The episode pointed both to his increasing capacity for leadership and discipline as well as his instinct for moderation; Jawaharlal the Congress organizer was not quite the firebrand that Jawaharlal the Congress polemicist had suggested he might be.

The peasantry of U.P., whose backbreaking work under wretched conditions was exploited both by Indian landlords (zamindars) and the British administration, were in many ways ripe for revolt, but Jawaharlal was no Bolshevik (the one threat some of the British expected and feared). He preached unity between kisans and zamindars, rejected calls by peasant agitators for nonpayment of rents, and constantly extolled Mahatma Gandhi’s message of nonviolence and self-reliance. He romanticized the Indian farmer as a sort of local equivalent of the sturdy and honest English yeoman; but he saw India’s peasant masses as a base of support for nationalist politics, not as fodder for agrarian revolution. Time after time he urged angry crowds to calm down, to call off protests, to acquiesce in an arrest rather than to resist it. Like Gandhi, he was mobilizing the masses for responsible ends. “Greatness,” Jawaharlal wrote to his father at the time of the Mussoorie Afghan episode, “is being thrust upon me.” The words may have been slightly ironic at the time, but they were to prove prophetic.

1 The Press Act of 1910 was a key instrument of British control of Indian public opinion. Under its provisions an established press or newspaper had to provide a security deposit of up to five thousand rupees (a considerable sum in those days); a new publication would have to pay up to two thousand. If the newspaper printed something of which the government disapproved, the money could be forfeit, the press closed down, and its proprietors and editors prosecuted. Annie Besant had refused to pay a security on a paper she published advocating home rule, and was arrested for failing to do so and thereby violating the Act.

2 The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, named for the secretary of state for India and the viceroy, constituted the Government of India Act passed after the First World War to “reward” India for its support of the British in that conflict. Whereas Indians had expected Dominion status analogous to the arrangements prevailing in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa — or at the very least significant progress toward self-government — they received instead a system of “dyarchy” which associated Indians with some institutions of government but left power solidly in the viceroy’s hands.

3 The Rowlatt Act, perhaps the most oppressive piece of legislation passed by the British government in India, established summary procedures for dealing with political agitation, including punishments by whipping, imprisonment, fines, forfeiture of property, and death. It also sharply limited the rights of defendants in sedition trials, thus antagonizing British-trained lawyers as well as fervent Indian nationalists.

4 The acronym “U.P.” so entered the Indian consciousness that after independence the government renamed the state Uttar Pradesh (Northern Province) in order to retain the initials.

In 1920, Gandhi declared that India would have swaraj (self-government) within a year, a promise Jawaharlal Nehru described as “delightfully vague.” Less vague was the slogan that drove Gandhi’s followers in the civil disobedience movement of 1921: “Go to the villages!” Jawaharlal found himself traveling to impassioned meetings in rural areas (by car, train, and horse-drawn carriage, and once on an improvised trolley sent wheeling down the railway track after he had missed his train), calling for freedom for India, the restoration of the Khilafat in Turkey, and economic self-reliance (to be achieved through boycotting foreign goods, spinning khadi at home and consigning English suits to the bonfire). Nonviolence, Hindu-Muslim unity, harmony between tenants and landlords, and the abolition of untouchability were the pillars of the movement on which Gandhi had launched the nation. “Noncooperation” with the British was the slogan, but like so many other Indian political negatives, from nonviolence to nonalignment, it was imbued with a positive content transcending that which it sought to negate.

Jawaharlal Nehru, no longer the diffident political neophyte, plunged himself into the campaign with great zeal. He revealed, or at any rate developed, a talent for both oratory and organization: when on one occasion a government order was served on him prohibiting him from addressing a meeting, he marched four and a half miles with the entire assemblage to the next district and resumed his speech there. He formed and drilled volunteer squads, inspiring them to paralyze life in various U.P. towns through “hartals,” or work stoppages, in the name of noncooperation with the colonial authorities. The mounting momentum behind these efforts caused alarm among British officialdom, already tense about the impending visit to India of the Prince of Wales. On December 6, 1921, both Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru were arrested, each for the first time in his life.

Jawaharlal had spent part of the morning at the district court attending the trial of fellow Congressman K. D. Malaviya. “The poor judge [was] in a bad way,” he wrote in his diary. “He appeared to be the convict and the prisoners the judges.” When father and son were taken away by the police, Motilal issued a message to his compatriots: “Having served you to the best of my ability, it is now my high privilege to serve the motherland by going to jail with my only son.” Jawaharlal was taken to Lucknow for detention and trial, principally for his leadership of the volunteers, whose organization had been declared illegal. He was sentenced (under the wrong section of the penal code, as it later turned out) to six months in prison and a fine of a hundred rupees or a further month of imprisonment. Motilal, after a farcical trial in which an illiterate witness “verified” his signature on a seditious document while holding it upside down, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and a fivehundred-rupee fine. (His refusal to pay the fine resulted in the seizure of property from his home worth several times that amount.) Both father and son, in their separate jail cells, declined the special privileges offered to them in view of their social standing. Jawaharlal relished his status as a prisoner of the Raj. A fellow Congress worker noted that “the smiling and happy countenance of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stood out in relief amongst the persons in the lock-up.”