Nehru (19 page)

As prime minister, Jawaharlal had ultimate responsibility for many of the decisions taken during the tense period from 1947 to 1949, but it is true to say he was still finding his feet as a governmental leader and that on many key issues he simply went along with what Patel and Mountbatten wanted. Nehru was the uncontested voice of Indian nationalism, the man who had “discovered” India in his own imagination, but he could not build the India of his vision without help. When the Muslim rulers of Hindu-majority Junagadh and Hyderabad, both principalities surrounded by Indian territory, flirted with independence (in Hyderabad's case) and accession to Pakistan (in Junagadh's), the Indian army marched in and took over with scarcely a shot being fired. In both cases the decision was Patel's, with acquiescence from Nehru. When the Hindu maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir tried to postpone a decision to accede to either India or Pakistan and found his state invaded by Pathan “irregulars” from Pakistan, it was Mountbatten who insisted on accession to India as a precondition for sending in the army to resist the invaders. Nehru, confident in the support of Kashmiri public opinion as manifest in the support of the secular nationalist Sheikh Abdullah, made accession conditional upon a reference to the will of the people: it was Jawaharlal's proposal that a plebiscite be held immediately to ascertain their wishes. But when the Pakistani army joined the fray, and as the military tide turned in India's favor, it was Mountbatten who prevailed upon Nehru, against Patel's advice, to declare a cease-fire and take the dispute to the United Nations.

From the Indian nationalist point of view this was a gross error, since it converted what was thus far a domestic Indian problem into an international dispute. Jawaharlal's decision to appeal to the UN has been seen within the country as a blunder that snatched diplomatic stalemate from the jaws of imminent military victory. But this is unreasonable; after all, Pakistan could just as easily have raised the issue at the UN, and it would have found some support. Recent scholarship has confirmed that British diplomacy at the time played a particularly active role in recasting the issue internationally to India's disadvantage. Jawaharlal saw that policy considerations going well beyond Kashmir — including the West's general desire to improve its standing in the Islamic world amid trauma in Palestine, and the potential usefulness of Pakistan as an advocate for Britain with the Arab countries — influenced London's actions. But Nehru should hardly have been surprised to see other countries acting in pursuit of their own interests: the wonder was that a man of such sharp intelligence and insight should have failed to more clearly define and act upon India's.

By August 1953 Jawaharlal's Kashmir policy was in a shambles. His friend and ally Sheikh Abdullah had begun flirting with notions of independence, and Nehru made the painful decision to place him under arrest. A compliant pro-Congress politician replaced Abdullah, but the development changed the complexion of the Kashmir dispute, on which international opinion was now broadly ranged against India. Domestically Jawaharlal was criticized for granting Jammu and Kashmir a special constitutional status — prohibiting non-Kashmiris from buying land in the state, for example, a provision which made it impossible to resettle refugees from Pakistan there. Abroad, the dispute Nehru had first internationalized now hung over India's head like the proverbial sword of Damocles, and the issue of Kashmir continued to bedevil relations with Pakistan throughout Jawaharlal's tenure — and beyond.

Apart from handling weighty matters of state, Jawaharlal had to deal with issues of domestic politics. He had surprised some of his most ardent supporters by his reluctance to embrace radical change, and his willingness to retain, and indeed rely on, the very civil servants and armed services personnel who had served the British Raj, the “steel frame” of which continued as the administrative superstructure of independent India. The government proved its worth in handling the rehabilitation of some seven million refugees from Pakistan, a colossal political and administrative feat. But the civil service continued in the traditions of colonial governance learned from their British masters; Nehru did little to instill in them a development orientation or a new ethic of service to the people. Continuity, not change, was the watchword. Many of the freedom fighters, who had gone to jail while these officials prospered under the British, were dismayed.

The Congress socialists, heirs to those who had found Jawaharlal insufficiently radical in the 1920s and 1930s, formally split from the parent party in March 1948. Nehru shared their ideals but was, in their view, in thrall to capitalist and right-wing forces; his ability to compromise, to work with those he had once denounced, even his eclectic cabinet which drew upon all shades of Indian opinion, were seen as proof that socialism would never come to India through him. Jawaharlal lamented their departure and particularly that of their leader, a figure of rare integrity and strength of character, Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan. Had the Congress divided completely on ideological lines, Jawaharlal might have belonged with them; but he was prime minister and leader of a party that had won India's freedom and still strived to represent the various currents of belief that had sustained this cause. Nehru sought instead to serve as a bridge between the two principal opposing forces within the Congress: the right, grouped around Patel and Rajendra Prasad, who were prepared to ban trade unions, woo the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dismiss Muslim officials, and promote the interests of the Hindu majority; and the socialist left whose policy prescriptions, in Jawaharlal's own words, “show an amazing lack of responsibility.”

Ideology was not the only dividing issue; secularism was equally important. In resisting the anti-Muslim currents in his party that had come to the fore in the wake of partition, Jawaharlal recognized that Jinnah's triumph in creating a Muslim nation had weakened the case for secularism in India and increased communal feeling in the minds of politicians who had earlier considered themselves Gandhians. The steady influx of Hindu refugees from Pakistan hardened attitudes in India. Jawaharlal's correspondence in 1948 and 1949 shows him almost reduced to despair by the growth of anti-Muslim feeling — what he called the “refugee mentality.” But he remained a staunch defender of the place of Muslims in a secular India, a position from which he never wavered either personally or politically. His idea of India explicitly rejected the two-nation theory; having spurned the logic which had created a state for Muslims, he was not about to succumb to the temptation of mirroring that logic by allowing India to become a state for Hindus. “So long as I am Prime minister,” he declared in 1950, “I shall not allow communalism to shape our policy.” And during the 1952 elections he declared to a large crowd in Old Delhi: “If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both at the head of the government and from outside.”

Gandhi's assassination by a Hindu fanatic strengthened his hand on the communal issue. Even Patel agreed to the RSS being banned, though the ban was lifted after a year. On other questions, ranging from the grant of “privy purses” (annual subventions to the erstwhile maharajahs to compensate for the loss of their princely states) to the clash between the right to property and the need for land reform, he found himself outmaneuvered by the party's right wing. Patel ran his Home Ministry as firmly as he administered the country as a whole, and he brooked little interference from Nehru.

Lord Mountbatten left India for good on June 21, 1948, ten months after he had presided over its freedom — and its dismemberment. He was succeeded as governor-general of the Dominion by the man who had once been thought more likely than Jawaharlal to be Gandhi's heir, C. Rajagopalachari. Though temperamentally a conservative, “Rajaji” had no patience for the communal sympathies of the Congress right, and so in his own way complemented Jawaharlal as head of state. But when the time came for that position to be converted to that of president of the Republic (upon the adoption of independent India's new Constitution on the symbolic date of January 26, 1950, the old “Independence Day” becoming the new Republic Day), Patel engineered the election of his crony Rajendra Prasad as the Congress candidate. Jawaharlal had been completely by-passed; he was so surprised that he actually asked Prasad to withdraw and propose Rajagopalachari's name himself. Prasad cleverly suggested that he would do whatever Nehru and Patel agreed upon, at which point Nehru understood and threw in the towel. One of Prasad's first acts upon election was to ask that January 26 be changed to a date deemed more auspicious by his astrologers. Jawaharlal flatly turned him down, declaring that India would not be run by astrologers if he had anything to do with it. This time, Nehru won.

Nehru and Patel came dangerously close to a public clash only once. In 1950, under pressure from the right to intervene militarily in East Pakistan where a massacre of Hindus had begun, Jawaharlal first tried to work with his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan, on a joint approach to communal disturbances, and then, when this had been ignored by Liaquat, offered President Prasad his resignation. (Stanley Wolpert has speculated that Jawaharlal, exhausted and heartsick, was contemplating eloping with Edwina Mountbatten, who had just been visiting him at the time.) But when Patel called a meeting of Congressmen at his home to criticize Jawaharlal's weakness on the issue, Nehru fought back, withdrawing his offer of resignation, challenging Patel to a public debate on Pakistan policy, and even writing to Patel to express doubt as to whether the two of them could work together anymore. The counter-assault was so ferocious that Patel backed off and affirmed his loyalty to Jawaharlal, supporting the pact Nehru signed with his Pakistani counterpart (which had even prompted the two cabinet ministers from Bengal to resign). The entire episode marked the closest the Congress would ever come to repudiating Nehru in his lifetime.

But in those early days Jawaharlal was not always a successful political infighter. His setback over Prasad's election was echoed in the elections to the Congress Party presidency a few months later. Having withdrawn from the race himself on the grounds that it would not be proper for him as prime minister to also serve as party president, Jawaharlal supported his old rival Kripalani against the rightist Purushottam Das Tandon (the very man whose inability to win Muslim support for the chairmanship of the Allahabad municipality had given Jawaharlal his experience of mayoralty in 1923). But Tandon had Patel's backing, and despite Jawaharlal's open opposition, won handily, with over 50 percent of the votes in a three-man field. Nehru publicly grumbled that the result would only please communal and reactionary forces in the country, and refused to join Tandon's Working Committee. When finally cajoled into doing so he made no secret of his reluctance. He spent the next year undermining Tandon much as his mentor Mahatma Gandhi had undermined Bose thirteen years earlier. In September 1951 Jawaharlal brought matters to a head by resigning his party positions and making it clear that he and Tandon could not coexist: one of them had to go. Tandon did. Jawaharlal himself was elected Congress president, his earlier scruples about the prime minister serving in such a position completely forgotten.

There was another reason for the decisiveness of his victory. By this time Nehru's greatest rival, Sardar Patel, was dead. He had a suffered a heart attack a few months after the Mahatma's assassination; then stomach cancer struck, and in December 1950, having fulfilled his historic role of consolidating India's fragile freedom, he passed away, aged seventy-six. Patel and Nehru had also served as a check upon each other, and his passing left Jawaharlal unchallenged. If ever there was a moment when he might have been tempted by the prospect of near-dictatorial authority, this might have been it, but Jawaharlal remained a convinced democrat. He was not, however, a naive one. He realized that the Home Ministry, with its control over the institutions of law and order, was a valuable tool for a potential competitor. He was therefore careful after the Sardar's death to appoint only trusted associates — with no competing political ambitions or agendas of their own — to the Home Ministry.

Jawaharlal's efforts to resist the right-wing tendencies within his party and government were not aided by the continuing departures of his socialist allies. JP Narayan's exit in 1948 was followed by Kripalani's and Kidwai's resignation from the Congress in 1951. Kidwai had been a vital Muslim ally in Uttar Pradesh and was a serving member of Nehru's cabinet when he left to join Kripalani in forming a left-wing party. But these desertions only made Jawaharlal more determined then ever to fight his corner. When President Prasad sought directly to send Parliament his objections to the Hindu Code Bill (an attempt to reform Hindu personal law that Jawaharlal was strongly promoting), Nehru told him this would be an unconstitutional interference in the work of his government and threatened to resign over the issue. Prasad backed off.

The death of Patel and the sidelining of Rajaji also had a negative consequence. They left Jawaharlal literally peerless. With neither Patel nor Rajaji present in the councils of state, Nehru was deprived of the critical support, companionship, and challenge of an equal — someone whose standing and experience in the nationalist movement was as great, and as long, as his own. No longer was there anyone within the government or the party leadership to contest his authority or judgment. From now on, India's triumphs and failures would rest on Jawaharlal's shoulders alone.

In October 1951 India began conducting its first general elections, a process that took six months, engaged 176 million voters (85 percent of whom were illiterate), and saw more than 17,000 candidates from 75 political parties contest 489 seats in the national Parliament and 3,375 in the various state assemblies. The event was unprecedented, since it extended the franchise (limited under British rule) to all adults and embarked the nation upon a remarkable process of political education in the promises and the pitfalls of democracy. At a time when independence and the violence of partition were still fresh in the minds of voters, Nehru stewarded his party and his people into their first full appreciation of the rights and privileges that came with their freedom. As in 1936 and 1946, he campaigned extensively, traveling 25,000 miles, though this time mostly by plane. The voter turnout was respectable at 60 percent, and the Congress won an absolute majority of seats nationally (364 of the 489 seats) and in 18 of the 25 states — but on the strength of only 45 percent of the vote in the Westminster-style first-past-the-post system. Yet the process of having to defend itself and its policies in the face of organized opposition was healthy for the party. It was also salutary for its critics: the Socialists, for instance, were decimated (but the Communists emerged as India's second-largest party). In his own constituency, Phulpur, Jawaharlal faced a Hindu sadhu who tried to exploit his coreligionists' disillusionment with Nehru's “appeasement” of Muslims. Nehru won by 233,571 votes to 56,718.