Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

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.