Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Barbarous,’ he muttered to himself as he walked back across the lawn, frowning as he realized that his white achkan was now entirely smeared with mud.

Delhi, August 6, 1951

Dear Mr. President,

I beg to tender my resignation from membership of the Congress Working Committee and the Central Election Board. I shall be grateful if you will be good enough to accept these resignations.

Yours sincerely,

Jawaharlal Nehru

This formal letter of resignation to the President of the Congress Party, Mr Tandon, was accompanied by a letter beginning: ‘My dear Purushottamdas,’ and ending:

You will forgive me if by resigning I cause you embarrassment. But the embarrassment has been there anyhow for both of us and others and the best way to deal with it is to remove the cause.

Yours affectionately,

Jawaharlal Nehru

Mr Tandon replied as soon as he read the letter a couple of days later. In his reply he wrote:

You have yourself as the leader of the nation appealed to Congressmen and to the country to present a united front to the situation that is facing us both externally and internally. The step that you propose to take, namely, that of resigning from the Working Committee and the Parliamentary Board, goes directly against that appeal for solidarity and is likely to create a schism in the Congress which has greater potentiality for harm to the country than any that the Congress has yet had to face.

I beg of you not to precipitate a crisis at the present juncture and not to press your resignation. I cannot accept it. If you insist on it the only course left to me will be to place it before the Working Committee for consideration. I trust that, in any case, you will attend the meeting of the Working Committee on the 11th instant.

If, to keep you in the Working Committee, it is necessary or desirable that I should resign the presidentship of the Congress I am ready to do so with great pleasure and goodwill.

Yours affectionately,

Purushottamdas Tandon

Pandit Nehru replied the same day, making rather clearer than before what had been on his mind:

I have been long distressed at the attitude of some persons which indicated that they wished to drive out others from the Congress who did not fit in with their views or their general outlook. .

I feel that the Congress is rapidly drifting away from its moorings and more and more the wrong kind of people, or rather people who have the wrong kind of ideas, are gaining influence in it. The public appeal of the Congress is getting less and less. It may, and probably will, win elections. But, in the process, it may also lose its soul. .

I am fully conscious of the consequences of the step I am taking and even the risks involved. But I think these risks have to be taken, for there is no other way out. .

I am more conscious than anyone else can be of the critical situation which the country has to face today. I have to deal with it from day to day. .

There is no reason why you should resign the presidentship of the Congress. This is not a personal matter.

I do not think it would be proper for me to attend the meeting of the Working Committee. My presence will embarrass me as well as others. I think it is better that the questions that arise should be discussed in my absence.

Mr Tandon replied the next day, which was the day before the actual meeting of the Congress Working Committee. He agreed, ‘It is no use winning the elections if, as you say, the Congress is “to lose its soul” in the process.’ But it was clear from his letter that the two men had very different conceptions of the soul of the Congress. Tandon wrote that he would place Nehru’s letter of resignation before the Working Committee the next day. ‘But that need not prevent your taking part in some other matters. May I suggest that you come to the meeting though only for a short time and that the matters which concern you may not be discussed in your presence.’

Nehru attended the meeting of the Working Committee and explained his letter of resignation; he then withdrew so that the others could discuss it in his absence. The Working Committee, faced with the unimaginable loss of the Prime Minister, attempted to find some way of accommodating him. But all immediate attempts to mediate the conflict failed. One possible means was to reconstitute the Working Committee and appoint new general secretaries of the Congress so that Nehru would feel less ‘out of tune’ with them. But here Tandon put his foot down. He said he would rather resign than allow the office of the Congress President to become subservient to that of the Prime Minister. Appointing the Working Committee was part of the role of the former; it could not be tampered with at the will of the latter. The Working Committee passed a resolution calling upon Nehru and Tandon to confer to solve the crisis, but could do nothing further.

A few days later, on Independence Day, Maulana Azad resigned from the Congress Working Committee. Just as the resignation from the Congress of the popular Muslim leader Kidwai had stung Nehru into action, the resignation of the scholarly Maulana cemented it. Since it was largely these two leaders at the national level whom the Muslims looked to in their post-Partition uncertainty — Kidwai because of his own great popularity, not only among Muslims but among Hindus, and Azad because of the respect in which he was held and the fact that he had Nehru’s ear — it now appeared that the Congress was in danger of losing its Muslim following entirely.

S.S. Sharma made every possible effort to dissuade Nehru from what looked increasingly like a collision course between him and Tandon. In this, Sharma was one of many, for leaders like Pant of U.P. and B.C. Roy of West Bengal had attempted to do the same. When they got to Delhi, however, they found Nehru as vaguely adamant as ever. But this time S.S. Sharma’s ego was slightly hurt: Nehru did not suggest that he come to Delhi and join his Cabinet. Presumably he either knew that Sharma would beg off as usual — or he was not pleased with Sharma’s attempts to paper over the cracks in the party — or else the invitation had been displaced by other matters of greater urgency that were on his mind.

One of these matters was a meeting of the Members of Parliament from the Congress Party, which he had called in order to explain the events that had led to the drastic rift and his resignation. He asked them for a vote of confidence. Whatever their political complexion (and there were, as Nehru was soon to discover when the bill to reform Hindu law was brought up before Parliament, many diehard conservatives among them), most Congress MPs perceived the dispute largely in terms of a conflict between the mass party and the parliamentary party. They were not enamoured of the thought that the Congress President would try to dictate policy to them through resolutions of the Congress, as he had on several occasions stated that he had the right to do. Besides, they knew that without the national image of Nehru they would have a very difficult time getting themselves re-elected in a few months’ time. Whether it was because of the fear that they would lose their soul or their power or the elections, they overwhelmingly passed a motion of confidence in his favour.

Since confidence in Nehru as such had never been at issue, Tandon’s supporters resented this action, which smacked of the build-up to a showdown. They were also somewhat surprised by Nehru’s most uncharacteristic unwillingness to back down, to understand their point of view, to postpone unpleasantness, to compromise. He was talking now of insisting on a ‘change of outlook’ and a ‘clear-cut verdict’. And rumours had begun to float about of the possibility of Nehru taking on the Congress Presidency together with the Prime Ministership, an onerous — and, in some ways, ominous — combination that he had in the past declared himself against on principle. Indeed, in 1946, he had resigned the Congress Presidency to become the Prime Minister. But now that the main threat to his power came from within the Congress Party itself he had begun to hedge on the issue.