Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

Along with the name and the money that came with his success as a lawyer, Motilal acquired the trappings of a Victorian gentleman of means—an elegant house (named ‘Anand Bhavan’, or ‘Abode of Bliss’) in a desirable residential area, with mostly British neighbours; a fancy carriage; a stable of Arabian steeds; and a wardrobe full of English suits, many tailored in Savile Row. Jawaharlal grew up surrounded by every imaginable creature comfort. Not only did he have electricity and running water in the house (both unheard-of luxuries for most of his compatriots), but the family home was equipped with such unusual perquisites as a private swimming pool and a tennis court. Motilal ordered the latest toys for him from England, including the newly-invented tricycle and bicycle. (Motilal himself owned Allahabad’s first car, imported in 1904.) Jawaharlal enjoyed lavish birthday parties, holidays in Kashmir, a plenitude of clothes—a classic Little Lord Fauntleroy upbringing.

when Jawaharlal was just fifteen, his father enrolled him at the prestigious British public school, Harrow. By an intriguing coincidence, some fifteen years earlier the school had educated (and sent on to Sandhurst) a young man called Winston Spencer Churchill, who after stints in the colonies was already embarking upon a prodigious career in British public life. The two Harrovians would come to have diametrically opposed views of India—dismissive on Churchill’s part, proudly nationalist on Nehru’s. ‘India,’ Churchill once barked, ‘is not a country or a nation . . . . It is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.’ A more liberal-minded Harrovian of the previous century, Sir William Jones, had founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, translated many Sanskrit classics, and greatly advanced Western appreciation of Indian culture and philosophy. But ironically, it was Churchill’s view of India that would one day make Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘invention of India’ necessary. ‘Such unity of sentiment as exists in India,’ Churchill wrote, ‘arises entirely through the centralized British government of India as expressed in the only common language of India—English.’ Jawaharlal Nehru, as the product of the same elite British school as Churchill, would use that education and the English language to complete what he called ‘the discovery of India’ and assert its right to be free of Churchill’s government.

Jawaharlal expressed admiration for the nationalism of Tilak and the Extremists, criticizing his father for being ‘immoderately moderate’. Years later he recognized that his father’s objections to the Extremists were based less on a dislike of their methods than on the Hindu nationalism they expressed, at odds with Motilal’s own secular cosmopolitanism. The radical streak in Jawaharlal Nehru began to show from the moment of his arrival in England. The news of the Japanese naval triumph over Russia at Tsushima in 1905 thrilled him with the realization that a great European power could be defeated by an Asian nation.

A later visit to Ireland also revealed to Jawaharlal the force of nationalist agitation, with the Sinn Fein movement and Irish calls for a boycott of British goods reinforcing his Extremist sympathies.

Had he been better at taking exams, he might well have followed his father’s initial wishes and joined the ICS, but his modest level of academic achievement made it clear he stood no chance of succeeding in the demanding ICS examinations. If he had joined the ICS, a career in the upper reaches of the civil service might have followed, rather than in the political fray. Officials did not become statesmen; it is one of the ironies of history that had Jawaharlal Nehru been a higher achiever in his youth, he might never have attained the political heights he did in adulthood.

As he had done at Harrow, Jawaharlal worked hard at his briefs, but his confidence faltered when he had to argue his cases in court, and he was not considered much of a success. It did not help that his interest in the law was at best tepid and that he found much of the work assigned to him ‘pointless and futile’, his cases ‘petty and rather dull’.

Father and son attended the Lucknow Congress of 1916, when a historic Hindu-Muslim pact was concluded between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, a party of Muslim notables that had been established in 1905 to advance Muslim interests (though several leading Congressmen, including three of the party’s Presidents to date, were themselves Muslim). But Jawaharlal did not speak at the Congress, remaining on the margins of that great (and sadly to prove evanescent) triumph of Hindu-Muslim political co-operation. His father, however, was emerging as a major figure in the party. Motilal was named by the Congress to draft, together with a brilliant young Muslim lawyer called Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the principles that would govern co-operation with the Muslim League. Their work, recognizing the principle that decisions would not be taken affecting the interests and beliefs of a minority community without the agreement of a majority of that community’s representatives, formed the foundation of what was widely hailed as the Lucknow Pact. The Congress’s leading literary light, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, hailed Jinnah as the ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’ and set about editing a compilation of his speeches and writings. Nineteen sixteen was a banner year for the nationalist movement. The fracture in the Congress between the Moderates and the Extremists had been overcome with the re-entry of Tilak and Besant into the party; now the chasm between the Congress and the M...

Gandhi’s singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite, pursuing the politics of the drawing-room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamouring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India’s political class, which consisted in those days largely of maharajahs and lawyers, men of means who discoursed in English and demanded the rights of Englishmen. Nor did Gandhi’s insistence that the masses be mobilized not by the methods of ‘princes and potentates’ (his phrase) but by moral values derived from ancient tradition and embodied in swadeshi (self-reliance on indigenous products) and satyagraha.

Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and travelled 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 and the beneficial effects of frequent enemas. That he was an eccentric seemed beyond doubt; that he had touched a chord amongst the masses was equally apparent; that he was a potent political force soon became clear. His crusade against the system of indentured labour 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. 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. Father and son 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 rigours 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 A...

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 13 April 1919, in the town of Amritsar. It was Baisakhi, the major spring holiday, and over 10,000 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 defenceless crowd. History knows the event as the Amritsar Massacre. The label connotes the heat and ...

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 defence, 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 unshakeable 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.

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.

the death of Tilak and the official launching of Gandhi’s Non-cooperation movement, both on 1 August 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 programme 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 ‘drawing-room’ 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.

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 travelling 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.)

Motilal finally closed down the Independent in 1921, unable to sustain its continuing losses. To o proud to draw a salary for his political work, Motilal decided to resume his legal practice so that his family would be provided for. Jawaharlal, enthralled by Gandhian self-denial, cared little about such matters, provoking his father to declare bluntly: ‘You cannot have it both ways: insist on my having no money and yet expect me to pay you money.’

Nehru’s rediscovery of India, and of his own Indianness—a process (as the reference to non-violence underlined) that was intertwined with his admiration of Mahatma Gandhi. He ‘found the whole countryside afire with enthusiasm and full of a strange excitement. Enormous gatherings would take place at the briefest notice by word of mouth.’ Roads would be built for him overnight to allow his car to pass; when his wheels got stuck in the soft mud, villagers would bodily lift his vehicle onto drier ground. ‘Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and sorrow, shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India.’

He preached unity between kisans and zamindars, rejected calls by peasant agitators for non-payment of rents, and constantly extolled Mahatma Gandhi’s message of non-violence and self-reliance. He romanticized the Indian farmer as a sort of local equivalent of the sturdy and honest English yeoman; but he saw India’s peasant masses as a base of support for nationalist politics, not as fodder for agrarian revolution. Time after time he urged angry crowds to calm down, to call off protests, to acquiesce in an arrest rather than to resist it. Like Gandhi, he was mobilizing the masses for responsible ends. ‘Greatness,’ Jawaharlal wrote to his father at the time of the Mussoorie Afghan episode, ‘is being thrust upon me.’ The words may have been slightly ironic at the time, but they were to prove prophetic.

Three years later he wrote to a Muslim friend that ‘what is required in India most is a course of study of Bertrand Russell’s books.’ The atheist rationalism of the British philosopher was to remain a profound influence; religion, Nehru wrote, was a ‘terrible burden’ that India had to get rid of if it was to ‘breathe freely or do anything useful’.

On New Year’s Day 1931 her mother was arrested for leading a women’s demonstration; typically the news of Kamala’s arrest (and especially of her defiant statement as she was carted off to jail, saying ‘I am happy beyond measure and proud to follow in the footsteps of my husband’) delighted Jawaharlal, who completely overlooked the fact that it would leave a thirteen-year-old at home without either parent at a time when the larger family was consumed with the condition of her dying grandfather. Motilal’s letters to his son were full of practical advice, paternal love and pride, friendly reassurance (and some political observations); Jawaharlal’s cerebral ones to his daughter were completely removed from the quotidian concerns of her lonely life. If Motilal left his stamp on Jawaharlal by being a fully engaged and even over-directive father, Jawaharlal’s influence on Indira would be marked by his disengagement from her needs.

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.’

Electioneering brought out the best in Jawaharlal. He pounded tirelessly through the country on foot, by bicycle, in the back of a cart or the front of a car, by tonga, ekka and even more exotic forms of locomotion (horseback, elephant and camel), by canoe, paddle-boat, steamship, train and plane. By his own calculation he covered some 50,000 miles in 130 days of campaigning, with only 1,600 of these by air (his campaign plane was itself a first in India). The crowds turned out in their tens of thousands to greet him, and on one occasion they were packed so thick that he could only reach the rostrum by walking on their shoulders, which he did to general good cheer (though he realized only later that he should have taken off his shoes first). The reserved aristocrat came alive before a large audience; his speeches, whether in Hindi or English, were always clear, direct, easily understood if somewhat lecturing (the Communists’ nickname for him was ‘the Professor’.) His stamina was astonishing, accommodating innumerable engagements and several twenty-four-hour days. Somewhat remote and yet so palpably engaging, obviously well-bred yet capable of losing his temper in incandescent rages that passed as quickly as they came, handsome as no other Indian politician was, Jawaharlal Nehru at forty-six was the glamorous face of Indian nationalism just as Gandhi was its other-worldly deity.

The Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore hailed Jawaharlal as the embodiment of spring itself, ‘representing the season of youth and triumphant joy.’

The Congress party contested 1,161 of the 1,585 seats at stake; it won 716, an astonishing 62 per cent of the seats contested. This was despite restrictions on the franchise, which gave disproportionate influence to the educated and the well-off by granting the vote to only 36 million out of India’s 300-million population, and the active hostility of the governmental machinery. Further, the Congress emerged as the largest single party in 9 of the 11 provinces; in six of them it had an outright majority. Jawaharlal interpreted this as a mandate to reject the Government of India Act and demand a Constituent Assembly instead, but his partymen preferred immediate office to future freedom—jam today rather than bread tomorrow. They accepted his draft resolution describing the election results as a repudiation of the Act, but added a clause (dictated by Gandhi) authorizing Congressmen to take office in each province if they were satisfied that they could rule without interference by the British-appointed Governor. Once again Jawaharlal came close to resigning. Once again, he chose to put party unity ahead of his own convictions. (‘Just as the King can do no wrong,’ he said after having been outvoted by his colleagues, ‘the Working Committee can do no wrong.’) In July 1937, Congress ministries were formed in six provinces.

As early as 1888, the Congress’s founder, Allan Octavian Hume, felt obliged to denounce British attempts to promote Hindu-Muslim division by fostering ‘the devil’s . . . dismal doctrine of discord and disunion’. The strategy was hardly surprising for an imperial power. ‘Divide et impera was the old Roman motto,’ wrote Lord Elphinstone after the 1857 Mutiny, ‘and it should be ours.’ Promoting communal discord became conscious British policy. In December 1887—at a time when the Congress’s first Muslim President, Badruddin Tyabji, was striving to unite Hindus and Muslims in a common cause—the pro-British judge and Muslim educationist, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was arguing in a speech in Lucknow that the departure of the British would inevitably lead to civil war. The numerical advantage of Hindus over Muslims would give them unfair advantage in a democratic India; imperial rule by the Christian British, fellow ‘people of the book’, was therefore preferable. In 1906, a deputation of Muslim notables led by the Aga Khan and seeking separate privileges for Muslims was received by the British Viceroy, and the Muslim League was born. But in its thirty years of existence, the League had failed to become a potent force in national politics. Jinnah formulated an effective strategy to raise the League to political prominence as the ‘third party’ in a struggle involving the British and the Congress. He argued that he too was an Indian nationalist who sought greater rights from the British, bu...

Jawaharlal’s contempt was based both on his distaste for communal bigotry (he often condemned the Hindu Mahasabha, the principal political vehicle of Hindu chauvinism, in the same breath) and his political judgement. The latter was borne out by the 1937 election results. Under the British provisions for separate communal electorates, 7,319,445 votes were cast by Muslim voters for Muslim candidates; only 4.4 per cent of these, 321,772, went to the Muslim League. In other words the League had been overwhelmingly repudiated by the very community in whose name it claimed to speak. Instead Muslim voters had voted for a wide variety of other parties, from the landholding Unionists in the Punjab to a peasants and tenants’ party in Bengal, and even for the Congress, which foolishly had run very few Muslim candidates (it put up 58 candidates in the 482 seats reserved for Muslims and won 26 of those races). Victorious Muslim politicians were more interested in securing power in their provinces than in supporting Jinnah’s advocacy of a pan-Indian Muslim identity.

In July 1937 Jinnah issued a statement deploring the Congress’ ‘mass contact’ policy with Muslims: ‘There is plenty of scope for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to improve his own people, the Hindus,’ he declared. Nehru replied immediately: ‘Not being religiously or communally inclined, I venture to think of my people as the Indian people as a whole.’ Two months earlier he had confessed to the press: ‘Personally I find it difficult to think of any question on communal lines. I think on political and economic lines.’ In those fundamentally irreconcilable attitudes lay the seeds of a divide that would, over the next decade, tear the country apart.

Increasingly disenchanted with the compromises he saw his party making domestically, Jawaharlal—pausing only to establish a pro-Congress newspaper in Lucknow, the National Herald—turned his attention to world affairs, in particular the civil wars then raging in Spain and China, as well as the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. He organized demonstrations against Mussolini, a boycott of Japanese goods (over that country’s conduct in China), a China relief fund and a medical unit to serve there. When his mother passed away, after a long illness, in January 1938, and since his daughter, Indira was studying at Oxford, Jawaharlal decided to travel to Europe. This time there were no Government-imposed restrictions on his activities, and he pursued an openly political agenda, meeting with Egyptian nationalists at Alexandria before travelling overland to Spain as a guest of the Republican government. He spent five days in Barcelona, braving Franco’s air-raids, and felt strongly tempted to join the International Brigades battling Fascism there. He tried to arrange for the settlement of European Jewish refugees in India, despite stringent conditions imposed by the British authorities. In England, buoyed by the increased stature that had followed the success of his Autobiography, he addressed public meetings at Trafalgar Square and at the Royal Albert Hall, lunched with editors, journalists and members of parliament, and even met the new Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, who had succeeded Willin...

As early as 1927, in moving a resolution on the international situation at the Madras Congress, Jawaharlal had foreseen the prospect of another major war in Europe. His view was that India should stay out of any such conflict until she had obtained her freedom from the imperialists who would seek to exploit her. But his abhorrence of Fascism was so great that he would gladly lead a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and not imposed upon them by the British.

When Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend the sovereignty of a weak country resisting the brute force of foreign conquest—precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years. Yet, it would have found allies in the anti-Fascist Congress governments in the provinces and amongst Congress legislators in the Central Assembly. Gandhi and Rajagopalachari were effusive in their immediate professions of support to Britain in her hour of peril. Lord Linlithgow, however, did not so much as make a pretence of consulting India’s elected leaders before declaring war on Germany on behalf of India.

He blamed British appeasement for the fall of Spain to the Fascists, the betrayal of Ethiopia to the Italians, and the selling out of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis: he wanted India to have no part of the responsibility for British policy, which he saw as designed to protect the narrow class-interests of a few imperialists. Why, he asked, should Indians be expected to make sacrifices to preserve British rule over them? How could a subject India be ordered to fight for a free Poland? A free and democratic India, on the other hand, would gladly fight for freedom and democracy. Under his direction, the Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution making this case (while rejecting Bose’s demand that civil disobedience be launched immediately).

The Congress had in fact hoped for a joint approach on the war issue with the League. Jinnah was invited to the Working Committee meeting of September, but refused to attend. Jawaharlal nonetheless met with him, the second time together with Gandhi, and a convergence of views seemed to be emerging. The Viceroy’s statement in October 1939 emphatically rejecting the Congress position, however, prompted the Working Committee, with Jawaharlal in the lead, to order all its provincial ministries to resign rather than continue to serve a war effort in which they had been denied an honourable role. The decision was taken on a point of principle, but politically it proved a monumental blunder. It deprived the Congress of their only leverage with the British Government, cast aside the fruits of their electoral success, and presented Jinnah with a golden opportunity. He broke off talks with the Congress—declaring the day of the Congress resignations a ‘day of deliverance’—and turned to the Viceroy instead. Two years in the political wilderness after the electoral setbacks of 1937 had already transformed the League. Congress rule in many provinces had unwittingly increased Muslim concern, even alarm, about the implications of democratic majoritarian rule in a country so overwhelmingly Hindu. Many Muslims began to see themselves as a political and economic minority, and the League spoke to their insecurities. Jinnah had begun to come to the conclusion that the only effective answer to ...

Part of the problem at the time may well have lain in a profound miscalculation on Jawaharlal’s part about the true intentions of the British. Cut off by imprisonment from the political realities of world affairs, Nehru came to Simla believing (as he asserted to Phillips Talbot) that perfidious Albion was still trying to hold on to the jewel in her imperial crown by encouraging division amongst the Indian parties. Talbot felt that Nehru had simply not realized that Britain was exhausted, near bankrupt, unwilling and unable to despatch the 60,000 British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to ‘cut’ the country quite literally before running.

As his biographer, M.J. Akbar put it, ‘Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness,’ not by Nehru’s wilfulness.

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 16 August 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 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta. The police and army stood by idly: 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.

Jawaharlal, still burnt 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.

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 10 May, Jawaharlal erupted in indignation, storming into his friend Krishna Menon’s* 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.

The only exception was Gandhi: the Mahatma went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept united if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Jawaharlal and Patel both gave that idea short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously.

The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling. On 3 June, Jawaharlal, Jinnah, and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh broadcast news of their acceptance of Partition to the country. The occasion again brought out the best in Jawaharlal: We are little men serving a great cause, but because that cause is great something of that greatness falls upon us also. Mighty forces are at work in the world today and in India . . . . [It is my hope] that in this way we shall reach that united India sooner than otherwise and that she will have a stronger and more secure foundation . . . . The India of geography, of history and tradition, the India of our minds and hearts, cannot change. But of course it could change: geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied, minds and hearts torn apart. Jawaharlal imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League’s demand for Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the ‘right’ side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland. Over a million people died in the savagery that bookended the freedom of India and Pakistan; some seventeen million were displaced, and countless properties destroyed and looted. Lines meant lives. What Jawaharlal had thought of as a temporary secession of certain parts of India hardened into the creation of two separate and hostile sta...

On 4 August Jawaharlal sent Mountbatten the list of fourteen names he proposed for independent India’s first Cabinet. Patel would be his deputy and in charge of home affairs, bringing his considerable organizational skills to the calamitous law-and-order situation and to the integration of the princely states. The rest of the list was a remarkably impressive distillation of the best and the brightest of India’s political elite, while ensuring regional and religious representation: four ‘Caste Hindus,’ including the Hindu Mahasabha leader, Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerji; two Muslims, Maulana Azad and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai; the Sikh leader, Sardar Baldev Singh; two Christians, Dr John Matthai and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the latter a princess of Sikh origin; two Scheduled Caste leaders, Jagjivan Ram and the radical Ambedkar, who had so often been the Congress’s nemesis; and a Parsi, Dr C.H. Bhabha. The South of India had two representatives to the north’s twelve—Rajagopalachari, a notable omission, was to be despatched to strife-torn Bengal as Governor—but this imbalance apart, Jawaharlal Nehru’s first Cabinet list set a standard that would never again be matched, while establishing a precedent for diversity that all his successors would strive to emulate.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. ‘This is no time . . . for ill-will or blaming others,’ he added. ‘We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.’ And typically he ended this immortal passage with a sentence that combined both humility and ambition, looking beyond the tragedy besieging his moment of triumph to India’s larger place in the world: ‘It is fitting,’ he said, ‘that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.’ There would be challenges enough ahead, but Jawaharlal Nehru would never cease, even at the moment of his greatest victory, to look above the suffering around him and fix his gaze upon a distant dream.

The first months of Independence were anything but easy. Often emotional, Jawaharlal was caught up in the human drama of the times. He was seen weeping at the sight of a victim one day, and erupting in rage at a would-be assailant hours later. Friends thought his physical health would be in danger as he stormed from city to village, ordering his personal bodyguards to shoot any Hindu who might attack a Muslim, providing refuge in his own home in Delhi for Muslims terrified for their lives, giving employment to young refugees who had lost everything. Norman Cousins recounted how one night in August, Hindu rioters in New Delhi, ‘inflamed by stories of Moslem terror . . . smashed their way into Moslem stores, destroying and looting and ready to kill’: Even before the police arrived in force, Jawaharlal Nehru was on the scene . . ., trying to bring people to their senses. He spied a Moslem who had just been seized by Hindus. He interposed himself between the man and his attackers. Suddenly a cry went up: ‘Jawaharlal is here!’ . . . . It had a magical effect. People stood still . . . . Looted merchandise was dropped. The mob psychology disintegrated. By the time the police arrived people were dispersing. The riot was over . . . . The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India, staking their lives on Nehru’s ability to protect them and a...

The General Elections legitimized Congress rule and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Prime Ministership of India. It was an India whose internal political contours he would soon have to change. During the nationalist movement the Congress had affirmed the principle of linguistic states, arguing that language was the only viable basis for India’s political geography. But Partition shocked Nehru (and Patel) into rejecting any proposal to redraw state boundaries, for fear of accelerating any latent fissiparous tendencies in the country. So independent India’s provincial boundaries remained drawn for administrative convenience until a southern Gandhian, Potti Sriramulu, undertook a fast-unto-death for the creation of a Telugu-speaking Andhra state—and, after fifty-five days of fasting, died. Protests erupted throughout the Telugu-speaking districts of Madras, and Nehru gave in. Andhra Pradesh was created and a States’ Reorganization Commission appointed, whose recommendation in 1955 to redraw India’s internal boundaries along mainly linguistic lines was largely implemented the following year.

Though not formally a Marxist, Jawaharlal had revealed a susceptibility to Marxian analyses of historical forces in his early writings. In an unfinished review of Bertrand Russell’s 1918 book Roads to Freedom Nehru had already articulated the basics of his political philosophy. ‘Present-day democracy,’ he wrote (in 1919), ‘manipulated by the unholy alliance of capital, property, militarism and an overgrown bureaucracy, and assisted by a capitalist press, has proved a delusion and a snare.’ But ‘Orthodox Socialism does not give us much hope . . . [A]n all-powerful state is no lover of individual liberty . . . . Life under Socialism would be a joyless and soulless thing, regulated to the minutest detail by rules and orders. . . .’ At the Lucknow Congress in 1936 Nehru had gone further, declaring: I am convinced that the only key to the solution of the world’s problems and of India’s problems lies in socialism . . . . I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation and the subjection of the Indian people except through socialism. That involves vast and revolutionary changes in our political and social structure, . . . a new civilization radically different from the present capitalist order. Some glimpse we can have of this new civilization in the territories of the USSR . . . . If the future is full of hope it is largely because of Soviet Russia.

This idiosyncratic variant of socialism became an increasing hallmark of his rule. Jawaharlal saw Indian capitalism as weak and concentrated in a few hands; to him the state was the only guarantor of the economic welfare of ordinary people. Some degree of planning was probably unavoidable; even the Bombay business community drew up a plan in 1944 (called the Bombay Plan) for India’s rapid industrialization. There was certainly a need for the state to invest some resources where the private sector would not, particularly in infrastructure and in agriculture. The economist Jagdish Bhagwati has suggested that what India needed at the time was probably socialism on the land and capitalism in industry. Nehru tried the opposite.

Nehru’s economic assumptions demonstrated that one of the lessons history teaches is that history often teaches the wrong lessons: since the East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule, Nehru was instinctively suspicious of every foreign businessman, seeing in every Western briefcase the thin end of a neo-imperial wedge. The Gandhian equation of political nationalism with economic self-sufficiency only served to underscore Nehru’s prejudice against capitalism, which (far from being synonymous with freedom) was in his mind equated principally with the slavery of his people. Protectionism was the inevitable result: in Jawaharlal’s mindset the essential corollary of political independence was economic independence. That this meant a far slower release from poverty for the Indian people he never understood.

Jawaharlal’s approach to the economy was in many ways characteristic of the great flaw that afflicted many freedom-fighters: the experience of exclusion and prison gave them an excessively theoretical notion of governance, while nationalist passions injected mistrust of foreigners into policy. Public sector ventures were run like government departments, overstaffed by bureaucrats with no commitment to their products and no understanding of business. Of course, some good came of Nehru’s bad economics: above all, the establishment of a norm of peaceful social change, eschewing both the radical violence and passive conservatism. The former was the preference of the Communists who felt the government should use its power to bring ‘a revolution from above’, while the latter was favoured by the landed zamindars and commercial interests who bankrolled the Congress party. But Jawaharlal was able to resist both tendencies in favour of promoting gradual change through land reforms and progressive legislation. Some would point also to the development of India’s industrial and intellectual infrastructure—the dams, steel mills and institutes of technology that are the most visible result of Jawaharlal’s leadership of India’s economic policy. Yet others could argue both that these could have come through the private sector and that most of India’s public sector industries were so inefficient that the country would actually have been better off without them.

Jawaharlal bore a great deal of personal responsibility for the follies of Planning, since, following his own convictions, it was not only led and directed by him, but was conducted in a manner that discouraged dissent. All too often, opposition to planning was made to seem like opposition to a fundamental national interest and disloyalty to Jawaharlal himself. Under Nehru, socialism (as he practised it) became a national dogma, to which his successors stayed loyal long after other developing countries, realizing the folly of his ways, had adopted a different path.

He could have used the adulation of the masses to turn himself into the dictator his own Modern Review article had suggested he might become. It was, indeed, the way most nationalist leaders in developing countries had gone. ‘Every conceivable argument has been available to tempt Mr Nehru to forego democratic institutions in India,’ Bertrand Russell wrote. ‘Illiteracy and poverty, disease and ignorance, a great subcontinent to govern, severe differences between Muslim and Hindu, many scores of languages and varied cultures reflecting a tendency toward a breaking up of the Union . . . .’ Nehru rejected all these arguments. Instead, he went out of his way to demonstrate respect for the institutions of the state, showing due deference to the President as Head of State (and even to the Vice-President, who had little to do but also outranked the Prime Minister in protocol terms). He treated Parliament as a serious and august body to which he was accountable, and ensured his officials treated it as more than a forum for launching policy, but one whose demands and questions had to be treated with due deference. He set the example himself, spending hours in Parliament, suffering Prime Minister’s Question Time and responding seriously to queries unworthy of his attention. He wrote regular monthly letters to the Chief Ministers of the provinces (later states) to share national and international concerns with them and consult them on issues of policy. He was astonishingly accessible ...