Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Jawaharlal Nehru Zindabad!’

‘Jai Hind!’

‘Congress Zindabad!’

‘Maharaj Jawaharlal ki jai!’

This last was too much for Nehru.

‘Sit down, sit down, don’t shout!’ he shouted.

The crowd laughed delightedly and kept cheering. Nehru got annoyed, jumped down from the podium before anyone could stop him, and started physically pushing people down. ‘Hurry up, sit down, we don’t have all the time in the world.’

‘He gave me a push — a hard push!’ said one man proudly to his friends. He was to boast about it ever afterwards.

When he returned to the podium, a Congress bigwig started introducing and seconding someone else on the platform.

‘Enough, enough, enough of all this, start the meeting,’ said Nehru.

Then someone started talking about Jawaharlal Nehru himself, how flattered, honoured, privileged, blessed they were to have him with them, how he was the Soul of Congress, the Pride of India, the jawahar and lal of the people, their jewel and their darling.

All this got Nehru very angry indeed. ‘Come on, don’t you have anything better to do?’ he said under his breath. He turned to Mahesh Kapoor. ‘The more they talk about me, the less use I am to you — or to the Congress — or to the people. Tell them to be quiet.’

Mahesh Kapoor hushed up the speaker, who looked hurt; and Nehru immediately launched into a forty-five-minute speech in Hindi.

He held the crowd spellbound. Whether they understood him or not was hard to say, because he rambled on in an impressionistic manner from idea to idea, and his Hindi was not much good, but they listened to him and stared at him with rapt attention and awe.

His speech went something like this:

‘Mr Chairman, etc., — brothers and sisters — we are gathered here at a troubled time, but it is also a time of hope. We do not have Gandhiji with us, so it is even more important that you have confidence in the nation and in yourselves.

The world is also going through a hard time. We have the Korean crisis and the crisis in the Persian Gulf. You have probably heard about the attempt of the British to bully the Egyptians. This will lead to trouble sooner or later. This is bad, and we cannot have it. The world must learn to live in peace.

Here at home also, we must live in peace. As tolerant people we must be tolerant. We lost our freedom many years ago because we were disunited. We must not let it happen again. Disaster will strike the country if religious bigots and communalists of all descriptions get their way.

We must reform our way of thinking. That is the main thing. The Hindu Code Bill is an important measure which must be passed. The Zamindari Bills of the various states must be implemented. We must look at the world with new eyes.

India is an ancient land of great traditions, but the need of the hour is to wed these traditions to science. It is not enough to win elections, we must win the battle of production. We must have science and more science, production and more production. Every hand has to be on the plough and every shoulder to the wheel. We must harness the forces of our mighty rivers with the help of great dams. These monuments to science and modern thinking will give us water for irrigation and also for electricity. We must have drinking water in the villages and food and shelter and medicine and literacy all around. We must make progress or else we will be left behind. . ’

Sometimes Nehru was in a reminiscent mood, sometimes he waxed poetic, sometimes he got carried away and scolded the crowd. He was, as they had sensed in their earlier slogans, rather an imperious democrat. But they applauded him, almost regardless of what he said. They cheered when he talked about the size of the Bhakra dam, they cheered when he said that the Americans must not oppress Korea — whatever Korea was. And they cheered most of all when he requested their support, which he did almost as an afterthought. In the eyes of his people, Nehru — the prince and hero of Independence, the heir of Mahatma Gandhi — could do no wrong.

Only in the last ten minutes or so of any speech did he spend time asking for their votes — for the Congress, the party which had brought freedom to the country and which, for all its faults, was the only party that could keep India together; for the Congress parliamentary candidate ‘who is a decent man’ (Nehru had forgotten his name); and for his old comrade and companion Mahesh Kapoor, who had undertaken such a heavy task for the whole state by framing the crucial zamindari laws. He reminded the audience of certain anachronisms in an age of republicanism who were attempting to misuse feudal loyalties for their own personal ends. Some of them were even standing for election as Independents. One of them, who owned a huge estate, was even using the humble bicycle as his symbol. (This local reference went down well.) But there were many such, and the lesson was a general one. He asked the audience not to swallow the present professions of idealism and humility of such notables, but to contrast these with their ugly past record, a record of oppression of the people and of faithful service to their British overlords who had protected their domains, their rents and their misdeeds. The Congress would have no truck with such feudalists and reactionaries, and it needed the support of the masses to fight them.

When the crowd, carried away with enthusiasm, shouted ‘Congress Zindabad!’ or, worse still, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru Zindabad!’ Nehru ticked them off sharply and told them to shout ‘Jai Hind!’ instead.

And thus his meetings ended, and on he went to the next one, always late, always impatient, a man whose greatness of heart won the hearts of others, and whose meandering pleas for mutual tolerance kept a volatile country, not merely in those early and most dangerous years but throughout his own lifetime, safe at least from the systemic clutch of religious fanaticism.

The few hours that Jawaharlal Nehru spent in the district had an enormous effect on all the electoral campaigns there, and on none more so than Mahesh Kapoor’s. It gave him new hope and it gave the Congress workers new heart. The people too became perceptibly more friendly. If Nehru, who was indeed perceived by the ordinary people as the Soul of Congress and the Pride of India, had put his stamp of approval on his ‘old comrade and companion’, who were they to doubt his credentials? Had the elections been held the next day instead of two weeks later, Mahesh Kapoor would probably have flown home with a large majority on the hem of Nehru’s dusty achkan.

Nehru had also partially drawn the communal sting. For among Muslims throughout the country he was perceived as their true champion and protector. This was the man who at the time of Partition had jumped down from a police jeep in Delhi and rushed unarmed into the midst of fighting mobs in order to save lives, no matter whether the lives were Hindu or Muslim. This was the man whose very dress spoke of nawabi culture, however much he fulminated against Nawabs. Nehru had been to the shrine of the great sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, and had been honoured with the gift of a gown; he had been to Amarnath, where the Hindu priests had honoured him with puja. The President of India, Rajendra Prasad, would have gone to the latter but not to the former. It gave the frightened minorities heart that the Prime Minister saw no essential difference between the two.

Even Maulana Azad, the most notable leader among the Muslims after Independence, was a moon compared to Nehru’s sun; his brightness was largely that of reflection. For it was in Nehru — though he was not a man who was in love with it, and though he did not make the most effectual use of it — that popularity — and national power — was vested.