Nehru and Bose: Parallel Lives

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

Jawaharlal wrote, ‘[T]he association of vague Leftist slogans with no clear Leftist ideology or principles has in recent years been much in evidence in Europe. It has led to Fascist development . . . The possibility of such a thing happening in India possessed my mind and disturbed me. The fact that in international affairs you held different views from mine and did not wholly approve our condemnation of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy added to my discomfort, and looking at the picture as a whole, I did not at all fancy the direction in which apparently you wanted us to go.’ In a more general context, Jawaharlal commented, ‘We are temperamentally different and our approach to life and its problems is not the same.’ And as if to elaborate his attitude to life, Jawaharlal, towards the end of his reply, mused thus with more than a hint of self-pity: ‘I am an unsatisfactory human being who is dissatisfied with himself and the world, and whom the petty world he lives in does not particularly like.’38 The two points are important as they throw some light on the two different paths the two men would take.

Nehru to subash