Nehru (11 page)

But this time the reactionaries in London would not be allowed by the British government to scuttle compromise in New Delhi. In talks that riveted the national and world press, Gandhi met with the viceroy between February 17 and March 4 and, after eight sessions adding up to over twenty-four hours of intense give-and-take, signed an agreement that would become known to history as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Under the pact, to Jawaharlal's dismay, the Mahatma agreed to take part in a second Round Table Conference in London in exchange for the release of political prisoners and for permission to picket and protest nonviolently. Jawaharlal thought these terms were humiliating and — still mourning the loss of his father — hurtfully told Gandhi that had Motilal been alive he would have negotiated a better deal. But the die was cast. The Mahatma threatened to retire from politics if his agreement was repudiated by the Congress.

As so often happened, Jawaharlal gave in and actually proposed the resolution at the Karachi Congress in March 1931 ratifying Gandhi's terms. He made no secret of his objections but, unlike in 1929, did not even offer to resign, urging all Congressmen to put aside their differences and follow the directions of the party's Working Committee. The British had feared he might split the party and lead a radical group into continued civil disobedience, but (as when they thought he was a Communist) they had failed to understand Motilal Nehru's son. “We cannot afford to get excited in politics,” Jawaharlal advised a young party worker in 1931. “We must preserve our balance and not rush into any action without proper consideration… . [We must not] lose the benefit of collective action and of [a united] organization.”

Once again, Jawaharlal chose to bide his time. He had lost a father, but in the Mahatma he had a father figure whom he could not betray. If Gandhi thought his pact and a Round Table Conference were tactically the right means to the ultimate end of Indian freedom, Jawaharlal was prepared to swallow his objections, however profound his disagreement. In any case, the nation was with the Mahatma, and Gandhi did not disagree with him over the eventual goal. When the viceroy and the Mahatma toasted their pact over a cup of tea, Gandhi mischievously produced some contraband salt from under his shawl. “I will put some of this salt into my tea,” he announced, “to remind us of the famous Boston Tea-Party.” The viceroy was gracious enough to laugh, but neither man needed reminding that, in less than a decade after that event, the American colonists were free of their British rulers.

5

“In Office but Not in Power”:
1931–1937

I
n concluding the Gandhi-Irwin Pact the viceroy disregarded one of the Mahatma's pleas, that the lives of the young revolutionary Bhagat Singh and his companions, who had been arrested for throwing bombs into the Legislative Assembly, be spared. Less than three weeks after the agreement, on March 23, the patriots were hanged; angry demonstrators blamed Gandhi's pact with the British for their deaths. Jawaharlal himself declared that “the corpse of Bhagat Singh shall stand between us and England.” But Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had succeeded him as Congress president, aided the Mahatma in steering the party's Karachi session toward moderation. Nehru's major contribution at Karachi was the formulation of a “minimum program” for the Congress, which guaranteed Indians freedom of expression and assembly, equality before the law, universal adult franchise, and a secular state, as well as a number of less easily realizable social and economic rights. The resolution embodying these freedoms passed after some resistance from the right wing, and went on to constitute the nucleus of the Constitution that free India would give itself nearly two decades later.

After a break holidaying in Ceylon with Kamala and Indira for seven weeks, an all-too-rare gesture of attention to his neglected family, Jawaharlal returned to political action. Seeing the unrest amongst the U.P. peasantry, long oppressed by their British-imposed land-lords, or
taluqdar
s, he decided to launch a campaign against the payment of rent. He was careful not to do this as a form of class warfare, instead couching his appeals in anti-British terms, since the government clearly had the capacity to provide relief to the tenant farmers but chose not to do so. Ordered by the government to discontinue his public speaking in favor of the “no-rent” campaign, Jawaharlal refused. He was arrested on December 26, 1931 and, early in the New Year, sentenced to the usual two years' rigorous imprisonment and a five-hundred-rupee fine. (Once again he refused to pay the fine, and the authorities seized a car registered in Indira's name, which they subsequently auctioned off for three times the amount of the fine.)

The struggle was already requiring him to draw upon inner resources he had not known he possessed. His sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit would never forget Jawaharlal's imprisonment this time:

We were permitted to go and say good-bye. He was his usual self, full of assurances … and humorous messages to the younger members of the family. As we walked away, I turned back for a last look. He stood against the sun which was setting in a great orange ball behind his head. He held the bars on either side and the face, so recently full of mirth, was serene and withdrawn, and there was infinite compassion in the eyes, which no longer saw us. He was already deep in his own contemplation.

Mahatma Gandhi was at sea, literally and metaphorically, at the time of Jawaharlal's arrest. He was returning from the second Round Table Conference, which had proved as infructuous as the first, when the news reached him on board his ship from London. The Conservatives had returned to power in Britain and London was no longer enthused by Irwin's conciliatory approach. Irwin's successor, the disagreeable Tory grandee Lord Willingdon, did not consider it part of a viceroy's brief to mollify law-breaking Indians; indeed he saw himself as “a sort of Mussolini in India.” Under Willingdon the British adopted a general policy of political repression, banning the Congress, seizing its properties, confiscating its assets, destroying its records, and prohibiting political activity. The press was censored and thousands of “subversives” were jailed, among them Jawaharlal, seen as a potential Indian Lenin. He spent most of the next four years in prison, with only two brief spells of freedom.

During the first of these stints behind bars, beginning just after Christmas 1931, his health suffered; unexplained fevers, tooth ailments, and a bout of pleurisy laid him low, and he was unable to maintain his regular exercise. (Later, he mastered yoga and wrote of “standing on his head” in his prison cell.) Conditions were abominable, with bedbugs, mosquitoes, flies, wasps, and even bats his constant companions. The fortnightly visits from his relatives were so closely monitored, and his visitors so badly treated, that he placed a self-imposed ban on them rather than see his family insulted — but not seeing his family only heightened his anxiety about their welfare. (The Mahatma finally persuaded him to end this self-denial after eight months.) In April 1932 his mother was badly beaten about the head and severely injured when a demonstration she was participating in was
lathi
-charged by the police. “The mother of a brave son is also some-what like him,” she wrote, but Jawaharlal's despondency was great — a chronically ill wife, a neglected daughter, and now a widowed mother who had nearly died at the hands of the police, in addition to his two sisters also being jailed, all weighed on him. There is a photograph of him in prison at this time, nearly bald, attired in a white dhoti (full-length waistcloth) and kurta (loose-fitting shirt) with a black khadi (homespun) waistcoat buttoned above the navel. He is posing for the camera with his hands behind his back, but there is no hiding the grim pallor of his countenance, the downturned cast of his mouth, the hollowness of the determined expression he has put on. This is a man living in the depths. A year before, he had been dancing around the flagpole in Lahore.

His only consolation in prison lay in his continued writing of the letters to Indira on world history — letters that he was not, for a while, allowed to send her. They reveal Jawaharlal's vision of human progress, advancing through periods of inhumanity and suffering but teleologically moving onward toward better lives for the world's ordinary people. The Marxian idea that control of the means of production is the key to political dominance, and that history is essentially a tale of class conflict, strongly informs his analysis. But his British liberal education also shows through, as does his syncretic view of Indian nationalism. Jawaharlal was certainly aware that his letters would find a larger public, and in writing about India as well as the world he was careful to articulate views consistent with his political objectives. There is great praise for the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (in particular the Bhagavad Gita), but as works of literature rather than as sacred texts; and he is careful to write about Islam with respect, describing even the depredations of the eleventh-century invader Mahmud of Ghazni as nothing more than the deeds of a warrior of those times rather than as evidence of what Hindu chauvinists were portraying as Muslim barbarism. In these letters there clearly emerge the fundamental convictions of the young statesman: his secularism, his socialism (underscored by the seeming collapse of capitalism with the global depression then at its worst), his detestation of strongmen (linked to the rise of fascism in Europe, which he believed only communism could defeat), and his faith in a “scientific” approach to human history.

Though writing (and eclectic reading, this time without restrictions) warded off some of the tedium of jail, Jawaharlal spent a great deal of his solitude mourning his father. On one occasion he was reading a newspaper article about the unveiling of a bust of Motilal when he suddenly found his eyes full of tears. He had always known how much he was reliant on that strong, protective, and overindulgent paternal force in his life, and he was now suffused with the extent of his loss. The Mahatma was, of course, the closest substitute. When Gandhi undertook a fast-unto-death in September 1932 in protest against a British decision to treat the “Untouchables” as a separate community outside the Hindu fold, Jawaharlal feared he would lose a second father figure. (Gandhi, who had been seeking to reform the discriminatory practices within Hinduism in order to ensure the Untouchables — whom he called Harijans, or “Children of God” — full acceptance within Hindu society, saw the British decision as a further scheme to divide Indians against each other.) That crisis passed, but in 1933 Gandhi undertook another potentially fatal fast and an anxious Jawaharlal cabled him: “I feel lost in a strange country where you are [the] only familiar land-mark and I try to gropeexile in London and made him “permanent my way in [the] dark but I stumble.” Yet politically the two diverged more and more; Jawaharlal's prison diaries reveal his increasing conviction that Gandhi was too willing to compromise with reactionary social, political, and religious forces which were anathema to the radical Nehru. The Mahatma derived his ethic from God; the author of
Glimpses of World History
derived his from Man, or at least from his study of mankind. He found Gandhi's “frequent references to God … most irritating.”

On August 12, 1933, with his mother seriously ill and his sentence having less than two weeks to run, the British released Jawaharlal. Perhaps they expected him to break decisively with Gandhi and split the Congress Party. Indeed, Jawaharlal traveled to Poona to meet the Mahatma in a somewhat rebellious mood. But once again the two men found common ground; his great need for the paternal figure of Gandhi, his admiration for the Mahatma's common touch with ordinary Indians (which he, as an aristocratic intellectual, felt he could never match), and his conviction that party unity was indispensable for an effective freedom struggle, prompted Jawaharlal to articulate his views in terms that the Mahatma could live with. Gandhi declared the differences between them to be merely those of temperament; he told an interviewer that Jawaharlal's “communist views … need not frighten anyone.” Some of Nehru's radical followers in the Congress were disappointed at this seeming gulf between analysis and action, but it was wholly characteristic of Jawaharlal. Rather than attacking the Congress leadership, he turned his anger against the forces of Hindu bigotry which had begun to organize themselves under the Hindu Mahasabha. (In an approach that would lead to him being forever accused of double standards, he was less harsh on Muslim communalism, seeing this as to some degree excusable in a minority afraid for its future.)

Nonetheless his new pact with Gandhi made him a dangerous figure in British eyes. The authorities feared the pair would shortly revive the dormant civil disobedience movement, this time with a communistic tinge. The government sent secret instructions around the country that Jawaharlal was to be closely watched, and arrested at the slightest provocation. Various speeches were examined as suitable candidates for prosecution, before a stinging denunciation of imperialism in Calcutta in January 1934 gave the Bengal government the excuse to arrest and try him. In February he was sentenced to another two years in His Majesty's prisons.

After three months with no books other than a German grammar, no companion other than a clerk jailed for embezzlement, and severe restrictions on his writing, Jawaharlal was transferred from Calcutta to a prison in the U.P. hills, in Dehra Dun. In April a disillusioned Mahatma Gandhi suspended civil disobedience altogether, to Jawaharlal's great disappointment. Yet again, Jawaharlal confided to his diary that the time had come for a parting of the ways with his mentor. “I felt with a stab of pain that the cords of allegiance that had bound me to him for many years had snapped.” He said as much in an emotional letter to Gandhi, which the Mahatma chose to regard merely as the letting off of steam rather than the sign of a definitive break. Gandhi was wise: Jawaharlal had no taste for patricide. Briefly released from prison on compassionate grounds — Kamala's health was worsening by the day — he disassociated himself from public criticism of the Congress leaders, to the dismay of his leftist followers, who had constituted themselves into a Congress Socialist Party and were looking to him for leadership. Jawaharlal kept his disagreements with Gandhi to himself; in any case the British authorities, fearing what he might do if he were left at large, put him back into prison the moment Kamala's health showed a slight improvement. He had been free for just eleven days.