Nehru (5 page)

To put his principles into practice, the Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and traveled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poor sanitation, and child marriage, and preaching an eclectic set of virtues from sexual abstinence to the weaving of
khadi
(a coarse homespun cloth) and the beneficial effects of frequent enemas. That he was an eccentric seemed beyond doubt; that he had touched a chord among the masses was equally apparent; that he was a potent political force soon became clear. His crusade against the system of indentured labor that had transported Indians to British colonies across the world so moved the public, poor and rich alike, that the viceroy of India put an end to it in 1917 (it was formally abolished in 1920).

Gandhi next turned his attention to the appalling conditions of indigo farmers in the north Indian district of Champaran, where he agitated for better terms for the peasant cultivators who had long been oppressed by English planters and British laws. More important, he captured the imagination of the nation by publicly breaking English law in the name of a higher law (“the voice of conscience”) and challenging the British to imprison him. The British, not desirous of making a martyr of the Mahatma, dropped all charges — and made him a national hero instead.

It was when the British passed the Rowlatt Act in March 1919 suspending the rights of defendants in sedition trials that Gandhi, despite being seriously ill with dysentery, conceived of the satyagraha pledge that Jawaharlal Nehru signed in April. The younger man was rapidly converted to the Mahatma's zeal and commitment to action. Motilal, though equally contemptuous of legislation that most educated Indians called the “Black Act,” and willing to challenge the law in the courts, was dismayed by his son's willingness to disobey it in the streets. They argued furiously about Motilal's conviction that Jawaharlal should not break the law because doing so would make him a criminal. But Jawaharlal was not swayed. His apparent determination to follow Gandhi's call first appalled, then moved, his father: Motilal, who thought the very idea of going to jail was “preposterous,” decided to join his son if he could not dissuade him, and secretly slept on the floor to prepare himself for the rigors of the imprisonment he knew would follow. But as ever, Motilal did not give up easily. As a wise father, he had one last trump up his sleeve. He invited Mahatma Gandhi to visit him in Allahabad in March 1919. After long conversations between the two older men at Anand Bhavan, Gandhi advised Jawaharlal to put his love for and duty toward his father ahead of his commitment to satyagraha. The shrewd Mahatma had perhaps realized that the Indian nationalist movement would need both Nehrus, and sought to avoid alienating the father by winning over his son too soon.

So the younger Nehru did not get to follow the Mahatma to jail, or even to his ashram. Jawaharlal was increasingly spending time on journalistic pursuits, first for the
Leader
, a newspaper controlled by his father, and then for the
Independent
, founded by Motilal when the
Leader
's editor won a boardroom battle over his opposition to the increasingly confrontationist line Motilal wished him to follow. Jawaharlal even edited the
Independent
for a while, before surrendering the reins to the fiery (and, as it turned out, irresponsible) Bipin Chandra Pal. Though the paper lost a great deal of Motilal's money and would eventually have to be closed, it gave Jawaharlal an opportunity to hone his skills as an essayist and polemicist. At last the English education was put to good use; the experience shaped a gift for words which would leave the world with some of the finest political writing to emerge from India in the twentieth century.

The event that sealed the fate of the British Raj in India, that underlined Gandhi's leadership of the national movement, and that irrevocably brought Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru to the conviction that nothing short of independence was acceptable, occurred on April 13, 1919, in the town of Amritsar in the province of Punjab. It was Baisakhi, the major spring holiday, and more than ten thousand people had gathered in a walled open area, the Jallianwalla Bagh, for a peaceful gathering of satyagrahis protesting British iniquities. Brigadier General R. E. H. Dyer, the newly arrived local military commander, saw the meeting as an affront and the crowd of unarmed men and women, some with their families, as an incipient mob. He ordered his troops to take up positions around the enclosure, from which there was only a single narrow exit. And though there is no record of any act by the crowd, any provocation that could be cited as triggering his decision, Dyer ordered his men, standing behind the brick walls surrounding the Bagh, to level their rifles at the assembled men, women, and children barely 150 yards away and fire.

There was no warning, no announcement that the gathering was illegal and had to disperse, no instruction to leave peacefully: nothing. Dyer did not order his men to fire in the air, or at the feet of their targets. They fired, at his orders, into the chests, the faces, and the wombs of the unarmed and defenseless crowd.

History knows the event as the Amritsar Massacre. The label connotes the heat and fire of slaughter, the butchery by bloodthirsty fighters of an outgunned opposition. But there was nothing of this at Jallianwalla Bagh. Dyer's soldiers were lined up calmly, almost routinely; they were neither threatened nor attacked by the crowd; it was just another day's work, but one unlike any other. They loaded and fired their rifles coldly, clinically, without haste or passion or sweat or anger, emptying their magazines into the shrieking, wailing, then stampeding crowd with trained precision. As people sought to flee the horror toward the single exit, they were trapped in a murderous fusillade. Sixteen hundred bullets were fired that day into the unarmed throng, and when the job was finished, just ten minutes later, 379 people lay dead and 1,137 lay injured, many grotesquely maimed for life. A total of 1,516 casualties from 1,600 bullets: only 84 had failed to find their mark, a measure of how simple, and how brutal, Dyer's task was.

The Amritsar Massacre was no act of insane frenzy but a conscious, deliberate imposition of colonial will. Dyer was an efficient killer rather than a crazed maniac; his was merely the evil of the unimaginative, the brutality of the military bureaucrat. But his action that Baisakhi day came to symbolize the evil of the system on whose behalf, and in whose defense, he was acting. In the horrified realization of this truth by Indians of all walks of life lay the true importance of the Amritsar Massacre. It represented the worst that colonialism could become, and by letting it occur, the British crossed that point of no return that exists only in the minds of men — that point which, in any unequal relationship, both master and subject must instinctively respect if their relationship is to survive.

The massacre made Indians out of millions of people who had not thought consciously of their political identity before that grim Sunday. It turned loyalists into nationalists and constitutionalists into agitators, led the Nobel Prize–winning poet Rabindranath Tagore to return his knighthood to the king and a host of Indian appointees to British offices to turn in their commissions. And above all it entrenched in Mahatma Gandhi a firm and unshakable faith in the moral righteousness of the cause of Indian independence. He now saw freedom as indivisible from Truth (itself a concept he imbued with greater meaning than can be found in any dictionary), and he never wavered in his commitment to ridding India of an empire he saw as irremediably evil, even satanic.

While the official commission of inquiry largely whitewashed Dyer's conduct, Motilal Nehru was appointed by the Congress to head a public inquiry into the atrocity, and he sent his son to Amritsar to look into the facts. Jawaharlal's diary meticulously records his findings; at one point he counted sixty-seven bullet marks on one part of a wall. He visited the lane where Indians had been ordered by the British to crawl on their bellies and pointed out in the press that the crawling had not even been on hands and knees but fully on the ground, in “the manner of snakes and worms.” On his return journey to Delhi by train he found himself sharing a compartment with Dyer and a group of British military officers. Dyer boasted, in Nehru's own account, that “he had [had] the whole town at his mercy and he had felt like reducing the rebellious city to a heap of ashes, but he took pity on it and refrained. . . . I was greatly shocked to hear his conversation and to observe his callous manner.”

The son's investigations drew him even closer politically to his father. Motilal was elected president of the Congress session of 1919, which took place, deliberately, in Amritsar. The massacre dispelled some of his doubts about Gandhi's doctrine of noncooperation; henceforward he joined his son in accepting that the British had left little room for an alternative. For Jawaharlal, the English reaction to the massacre — Dyer was publicly feted, and a collection raised for him among English expatriates in India brought him the quite stupendous sum of a quarter of a million pounds — was almost as bad as the massacre itself. “This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly,” he later wrote. “It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent; to use public school language, it was the height of bad form. I realized then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes.”

In early 1920 Mahatma Gandhi embarked on the Khilafat movement, which rallied Hindus and Muslims together on the somewhat obscure platform of demanding the restoration of the Caliphate in Turkey. Gandhi did not particularly want a religious figurehead to take over the dissolving Ottoman Empire in preference to a secularizing figure (such as later emerged in the person of Kemal Ataturk), but he saw that the issue mattered to several Indian Muslim leaders and he wished to seize the opportunity to consolidate the Hindu-Muslim unity that had emerged over the previous four years. Jawaharlal's secular instincts would ordinarily have put him on the opposite side of this issue, but he saw the political merits of the movement and wrote articles in the
Independent
depicting the Khilafat movement as an integral part of the ongoing political struggle for Asia's freedom. The agitation briefly inspired the masses, many of whom had no real idea where Turkey was or why the Khilafat mattered. It also brought anti-British Muslims into the Congress, since many Muslim Leaguers were allied with the government and unwilling to oppose it for the sake of the caliph. But as a modernizing Turkey itself turned away from the cause, it petered out as a significant issue in Indian politics.

Meanwhile, the death of Tilak and the official launching of Gandhi's noncooperation movement, both on August 1, 1920, marked the Mahatma's ascension to unchallenged leadership of the Indian National Congress. (Gokhale had died earlier, in 1915, at the shockingly young age of forty-nine.) The special session of the Congress in Calcutta that year saw the entire old guard of the party arrayed against Gandhi, but as the debates progressed and the Mahatma clung stubbornly to the dictates of his conscience, the leadership realized they needed him more than he needed them. Gandhi's program passed in committee with strong Muslim support and the surprising defection from the old guard of Motilal Nehru; it was then resoundingly adopted by the plenary. This was a defeat, above all, for Jinnah, the principal epitome of the old “drawingroom” politics, who wrote to the Mahatma to deplore his appeal to “the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means complete disorganization and chaos. What the consequences of this may be, I shudder to contemplate.” His disillusionment with Gandhi's mass mobilization led to Jinnah's gradual withdrawal from political life — booed off the stage at the 1920 Nagpur Congress, he took the next train to Delhi, never to return to the party — and later, in 1930, to bitter, if comfortable, self-exile in England. When he returned, it would be to challenge everything that Gandhi stood for.

But Jawaharlal was thrilled by the Mahatma's triumph. Some have suggested that Motilal's shift to the pro-Gandhi side at Calcutta was prompted by his regard for his son, whose affections he feared he would otherwise have lost. The Khilafat movement and noncooperation prompted Jawaharlal also to follow Gandhi's call to boycott the legislative councils for which elections were to be held under the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. Motilal had been leading the Congress's election effort in the province and only reluctantly acquiesced in the party's decision — which his son had strongly urged — to boycott the elections. Jawaharlal was soon a leading figure in the United Provinces (U.P.)
⁴
noncooperation movement, organizing drills for volunteers and casting aside his diffidence to address large crowds. His message was simple: “there was no middle course left; one was with either the country or its enemies, either with Gandhi or the Government.” His first direct clash with the government occurred in May 1920 when he was on holiday with his family in Mussoorie and was asked by the police to provide an undertaking not to contact an Afghan delegation which was staying at the same hotel. Though Jawaharlal had had no intention of meeting the Afghans — whom the British suspected of being in India to lend support to the Khilafat movement — he refused to furnish such an undertaking, and was duly externed from Mussoorie. Jawaharlal accepted his expulsion; for all his admiration for the Mahatma, he was not yet politician enough, or Gandhian enough, to defy the police and court arrest — much to the relief of Motilal, who feared the consequences to the family of such an action.

These were difficult times for Motilal. He had given up his legal practice at the peak of his career to devote himself to politics, but it saddened him to see his son, in his prime, embracing Gandhian austerity and traveling in third-class railway carriages. The loss of a steady income from what had been a flourishing practice meant that the comforts of life were being denied his family. (Some of this was by choice: the closing of the wine cellar, the exchange of the Savile Row suits for homespun khadi, the replacement of three English meals a day by one simple Indian lunch.)