Nehru (17 page)

Jawaharlal was widely blamed for his thoughtlessness in provoking the end of the brief hope of Congress-League cooperation in a united Indian government, even on the League's terms. Patel was scathing, in a private letter, about Jawaharlal's “acts of emotional insanity” and “childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly.” Nehru “feels lonely and he acts emotionally,” he wrote; “… he is impatient.” Azad himself wrote in his memoirs that Nehru had been “carried away by his feelings” and “is so impressed by theoretical considerations that he is apt to underestimate the realities of a situation.”

Had Jawaharlal held his tongue in July 1946, though, it is by no means clear that a common Congress-League understanding would have survived. Azad had been willing to relinquish the claims of Muslim Congressmen to office in the interests of unity, but the party as a whole was not prepared to concede the point to Jinnah. In stating that the grouping of provinces was not immutable, Jawaharlal was echoing the letter of the plan if not its spirit. (The League could have been accused of doing the same thing when it declared that the plan gave it the basis to work for Pakistan.) To see him as wrecker-inchief of the country's last chance at avoiding partition is, therefore, to overstate the case. As his biographer M. J. Akbar put it, “Pakistan was created by Jinnah's will and Britain's willingness,” not by Nehru's willfulness.

There was another consideration in Jawaharlal's mind when he spoke. His remarks were aimed at making the point that India's future as a sovereign independent state would depend on what Indians agreed to in a constituent assembly, not on what proposals the British got them to accept. Once again he had placed the larger principle over the immediate practical circumstance. Another politician might have considered it expedient to inveigle the League into the Constituent Assembly on the basis of the British proposals, but Jawaharlal scorned such tactics as beneath him. He later reacted to the posthumous publication of Azad's memoirs by suggesting that to blame him was to place too much importance on an individual rather than upon the forces of history. This very comment was, of course, confirmation of what his critics said of him: it was typical of Jawaharlal to dismiss a political argument with a theoretical proposition.

On August 8, 1946, the Congress Working Committee, bolstered by the admission of fresh faces appointed by the new president (including two relatively youthful women), declared that it accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan with its own interpretations on issues of detail. But this was not enough to bring Jinnah back into the game. Jawaharlal met with him (at Jinnah's home in Bombay) to seek agreement on an interim government, but Jinnah proved obdurate: he was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared August 16, 1946, as “Direct Action Day” to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting, and mayhem, and sixteen thousand innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta. The police and army stood idly by: it seemed the British had decided to leave Calcutta to the mobs. Three days of communal rioting in the city left death and destruction in their wake before the army finally stepped in. But the carnage and hatred had also ripped apart something indefinable in the national psyche. Reconciliation now seemed impossible.

Yet a week later Wavell and Nehru were discussing the composition of an interim government for India, to consist of five “Caste Hindus,” five Muslims, a “Scheduled Caste” member (one of those formerly known as “Untouchables”), and three minority representatives. They agreed that Jinnah could nominate his representatives but could have no say in the Congress's nominations — including, in principle, of a nationalist Muslim. Though the League was still deliberating about whether to join, an interim government of India was named, and its Congress members sworn in, on September 2, 1946. Jawaharlal was vice president of the Executive Council (presided over by the viceroy himself) and was assigned the portfolios of external and Commonwealth relations. In a broadcast on September 7 he seemed to view this as the culmination of a long struggle: “Too long have we been passive spectators of events, the playthings of others. The initiative comes to our people now and we shall make the history of our choice.”

Jawaharlal was quick to assert his authority and that of his ministers, speaking out both on issues of procedure (sharply restricting the viceroy's authority to deal directly with matters that now belonged to the interim government) and substance (the situation in the princely states and the conduct of the British governors in the provinces). But the British remained supportive of the League and of its government in Bengal, which had allowed the horrors of Direct Action Day to occur. “What is the good of our forming the Interim Government of India,” Nehru wrote indignantly to Wavell about conditions in Bengal in the wake of the Calcutta killings, “if all that we can do is to watch helplessly and do nothing else when thousands of people are being butchered … ?” But he went too far in insisting upon visiting the overwhelmingly Muslim, though Congress-ruled, North-West Frontier Province. The British connived in League-organized demonstrations against him at which stones were flung and Nehru was bruised. More important, the fiasco suggested that Nehru, as a Hindu, could never be acceptable to the province's Muslims as a national leader.

Meanwhile, British pressure on the Congress to make more concessions to Jinnah in order to secure the League's entry into the interim government prompted Gandhi and Nehru to relinquish voluntarily their right to nominate a Muslim member. This had been a deal-breaker for Jinnah, and he now seemed ready, in discussions with Jawaharlal, to find a compromise. But after their talks had made headway, Jinnah once again insisted that the Congress recognize the League as the sole representative of Indian Muslims. Jawaharlal refused to do this, saying it would be tantamount to a betrayal of the many nationalist Muslims in the Congress, and a stain on his own as well as the country's honor. The viceroy thereupon went behind the Congress's back and negotiated directly with Jinnah, accepting his nominations of Muslims as well as of a Scheduled Caste member. On October 15 the Muslim League formally announced that it would join the interim government.

But the League had done so only to wreck it from within. Even before its nominees were sworn in on October 26, they had made speeches declaring their real intention to be to work for the creation of Pakistan. The League's members met by themselves separately prior to each cabinet meeting and functioned in cabinet as an opposition group rather than as part of a governing coalition. On every issue, from the most trivial to the most important, the League members sought to obstruct the government's functioning, opposing every Congress initiative or proposal. Meanwhile, the League continued to instigate violence across the country; as riots broke out in Bihar in early November (with the Mahatma walking through the strife-torn province single-handedly restoring calm), Jinnah declared on November 14 that the killing would not stop unless Pakistan was created. The British convened talks in London in December to press the Congress to make further concessions to the League in order to persuade it to attend the Constituent Assembly. Jawaharlal, still burned by the reaction to his Bombay press conference, was at his most conciliatory, but Jinnah saw in the British position confirmation that his party's fortunes were in the ascendant, and escalated his demands. To Jawaharlal it seemed the British had learned nothing from the failure of the policy of appeasement in Europe in the 1930s.

The Constituent Assembly met as scheduled on December 9, without League participation, but was careful not to take any decisions that might alienate Jinnah. Nonetheless, on January 29, 1947, the Muslim League Working Committee passed a resolution asking the British government to declare that the Cabinet Mission Plan had failed, and to dissolve the Assembly. The Congress members of the interim government in turn demanded that the League members, having rejected the plan, resign. Amid the shambles of their policy, the British government announced that they would withdraw from India, come what may, no later than June 1948, and that to execute the transfer of power, Wavell would be replaced by the blue-blooded former Supreme Commander for Asia, Lord Mountbatten.

It was now increasingly apparent even to Jawaharlal that Pakistan, in some form, would have to be created; the League was simply not going to work with the Congress in a united government of India. He nonetheless tried to prod leaders of the League into discussions on the new arrangements, which he still hoped would fall short of an absolute partition. By early March, as communal rioting continued across northern India, even this hope had faded. Both Patel and Nehru agreed that, despite the Mahatma's refusal to contemplate such a prospect, the Congress had no alternative but to agree to partition Punjab and Bengal; the option of a loose Indian union including a quasi-sovereign Pakistan would neither be acceptable to the League nor result in a viable government for the rest of India. By the time Mountbatten arrived on March 24, 1947 the die had been cast. It was he, however, who rapidly ended the game altogether.

Mountbatten later claimed he governed by personality, and indeed both his positive and negative attributes would prove decisive. On the one hand he was focused, energetic, charming, and free of racial bias, unlike almost every one of his predecessors; on the other, he was astonishingly vain, alarmingly impatient, and easily swayed by personal likes and dislikes. His vicereine, Edwina, was a vital partner, one who took a genuine interest in Indian affairs. Theirs was a curious marriage, marked by her frequent infidelities, which he condoned, and it has been suggested that her affection for Jawaharlal played a part in some of his (and Mountbatten's) decisions relating to Indian independence. There is no question that Jawaharlal and Edwina indeed became close, and some circumstantial evidence that they may well have become closer at a later stage in their lives, but it does not seem likely that this occurred early enough to have any political impact (or indeed that, if it did, it would have had any political impact). Nehru was certainly no celibate; particularly after the death of Kamala when he was only forty-seven, he enjoyed close relations with a number of women friends, though he never contemplated marriage again. Nehru's biographer Frank Moraes wrote that Edwina “sensed that what Nehru most wanted and did not know how to achieve was to relax.” This she was able to get him to do, at a time of great tension. But while he enjoyed Edwina's company, he had far more on his mind in 1947 than a dalliance with the viceroy's spouse.

For one thing, India was aflame; for another, it stood on the brink of a new dawn, one that would, in Jawaharlal's view, enable it to play a great role in world affairs. Nehru was therefore instrumental in convening the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947, attended by delegates, officials, and scholars of almost every conceivable shade of Asian opinion, including representatives of the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang, of Soviet Central Asia and British Malaya, of the Arab League and the Hebrew University (and even of Egypt, despite the geographical anomaly of its presence at an Asian gathering), but not of Japan, whose invitees were denied exit permits by the American occupying forces. The USA, the USSR, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain sent observers, who heard Jawaharlal declaim at the opening: “Standing on this watershed which divides two epochs of human history and endeavor, we can look back on our long past and look forward to the future that is taking shape before our eyes… . For too long we of Asia have been petitioners in Western courts and chancelleries. That story must now belong to the past. We propose to stand on our own feet and to co-operate with all others who are prepared to cooperate with us.” But even as he spoke, the country around him was consumed by violence, as the freedom struggle crumbled toward partition.

For Jawaharlal the conference marked “the beginnings of a new era in Asian history,” though it is difficult, with hindsight, to see how. Certainly there were no follow-up conferences held, no pan-Asian institutions established. But perhaps it signaled the first articulation of a postcolonial consciousness which was later to find expression in the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 and the Nonaligned movement. Asia as a political idea remained Jawaharlal's alone.

Meanwhile events at home were deteriorating. Communal violence and killings were a daily feature; so was Jinnah's complete unwillingness to cooperate with the Congress on any basis other than that it represented the Hindus and he the Muslims of India. The British gave him much encouragement to pursue this position: the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, the pro-League Sir Olaf Caroe, was unconscionably pressing the Congress government of this Muslim-majority state to make way for the League, since its continuation would have made Pakistan impossible. As the impasse in the interim government continued, Mountbatten and his advisers drew up a “Plan Balkan” that would have transferred power to the provinces rather than to a central government, leaving them free to join a larger union (or not). The British kept Nehru in the dark while “Plan Balkan” was reviewed (and revised) in London. When he was finally shown the text by Mountbatten at Simla on the night of May 10, Jawaharlal erupted in indignation, storming into his friend Krishna Menon's
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room at 2 a.m. to sputter his outrage. Had the plan been implemented, the idea of India that Jawaharlal had so brilliantly evoked in his writings would have been sundered even more comprehensively than Jinnah was proposing. Balkanization would have unleashed civil war and disorder on an unimaginable scale, as provinces, princely states, and motley political forces contended for power upon the departure of the Raj.

A long, passionate, and occasionally incoherent note of protest from Jawaharlal to Mountbatten killed the plan. But the only alternative was partition. In May Jawaharlal saw the unrest in the country as “volcanic”: the time had come for making hard and unpleasant choices, and he was prepared to make them. Reluctantly, he agreed to Mountbatten's proposal for a referendum in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Muslim-majority district of Sylhet, gave in on a Congress counterproposal for a similar approach in regard to Hindu-majority districts of Sind, and, most surprisingly, agreed to Dominion status for India. The Jawaharlal who agreed to Dominion status was the same man who had moved the independence resolution in Madras in 1927 and danced around the flagpole in Lahore two years later. In December 1946 he had proposed in the Constituent Assembly that India should be a sovereign democratic republic. Yet six months later he was willing to accept Dominion status for India within the British Commonwealth.