THE SPIRIT OF SPRING

K. ISWARA DUTT

“My lifetime is not ending so soon,” said Jawaharlal Nehru at his latest Press Conference held at the capital only a few days ago. And immediately after, from a brief holiday in Dehra Dun, he returned to Delhi on Tuesday morning in good cheer and quite high spirits. But the shades have so swiftly closed in on him, once again illustrating the utter inscrutability of Providence.

To his countrymen, irrespective of all other considerations, it is ever so difficult to believe that Jawaharlal Nehru has ceased to be, that the voice heard so much above the multitude in the tumultuous decades of what he used to describe as the atomic age, is stilled for ever, and that no more can we behold the face that had with its radiance illuminated the Indian landscape. It was our national bard, Rabindranath Tagore, who likened Jawaharlal Nehru with the spirit of spring. A Nehru: when comes such another?

Taste for Reading

Jawaharlal Nehru was born in the city of Allahabad on November 14, 1889, in an aristocratic family of Kashmiri Pandits whose ancestors came down from that mountain valley (Kashmir) to seek fame and fortune in the rich plains below. And both fame and fortune were the proud possessions of Motilal Nehru whose only son he was. Acknowledged leader of the Bar, astute politician and arbiter of social life in the old United Provinces, Motilal, with an unabashed fondness for things Kashmiri gave young Jawaharlal Nehru an English governess at home and later English education abroad. At eleven, he had an Irish tutor with a theosophical bias, under whom he developed a taste for reading and a liking for poetry. Swept off his feet by the spell-binding oratory of Mrs. Besant, the boy Jawaharlal strayed into the theosophical society but, at 13, dropped out of it easily. His youthful enthusiasm was never more deeply stirred than by Japan’s victory over Russia in the first half decade of the century, and for a while he was absorbed in the history of Japan and its knightly tales of old.

It was in 1905 that he went to Harrow.

Just like him perhaps, he found, the English boys dull. The general election of 1906 which registered the great Liberal revival, attracted him not a little. One may recall with interest that he was the only boy in his class who could, to his master’s delight, reel off the names of all who comprised Cambell-Bannerman’s cabinet. For good work at school, he got one of the Garibaldi triology by Trevelyan as a prize. He obtained the other two in the series and browsed on them, with the result that his mind was fixed on a like picture of India against the Italian canvas.

Finding Harrow too small a place for his big ideas, he switched on to Cambridge where, as an undergraduate, he spent three quiet and pleasant years. Literature, politics, economics – all attracted him but it was in science tripos that he obtained second class honours. It was in 1910.

The next two years he was in London, qualifying himself for the Bar. In the autumn of 1912 he returned to India – confessedly “a bit of prig” after seven years sojourn in alien clime.

Back in the old surroundings but nursing, however yet nebulously, new ideas, he attended the annual session of the Congress, held in that year at Bankipore under the presidentship of Mr. R.N. Mudholkar. It was a mild shock to him to find it all no more than “an English-knowing upper-class affair where morning coats and well-pressed trousers were greatly in evidence”. To him it was “more a social gathering with no political excitement or tension”. The only person who impressed him by his serious application to public affairs and the study of politics was Gokhale.

As a full-fledged barrister, the younger Nehru was expected to follow in the elder’s footsteps. But it was not to be, notwithstanding his equipment and undoubted ability. He found himself “engulfed in a dull routine of a pointless and futile existence”.

He had definitely not the bent of mind to pile up briefs, even under his father’s inspiring auspices, though he could have one day, as the then Chief Justice of the Alahabad High Court, Sir Grimmond Mears said, snatched away the laurels from his father’s brow.

For a time the Servants of India Society, with its strong appeal for dedicated service to the nation, appealed to him, but not its moderate gospel. He was rather drawn to the Home Rule League, sponsored by Tilak and Annie Besant, and it was highly gratifying to find his father, under the influence of Dr. Besant, slowly cutting off from the orthodox moderate position in the Congress. On his side, Motilal had been closely watching Jawaharlal Nehru’s growing drift towards extremism.

It was at the Lucknow Congress in 1916 that the younger Nehru saw Gandhiji for the first time. 1916 was of great significance to him in another way, as it was that year that he married Kamala, who, till her untimely death in early 1936, stood by him through all the stormy political vicissitudes, with exemplary courage and fortitude. In November 1917 Indira was born, their only child.

Uncharted Seas

Between the end of 1917 and beginning of 1931 Jawaharlal Nehru was variously agitated over the political situation in India when the congress was tossed on uncharted seas, with its eye on no fixed star in the firmament. Always given to reflection, he pictured India as a country “naked, starving, crushed and utterly miserable,” and thought of it, with a Shavian instinct, in terms not of individuals and groups but of the community as a whole. The realisation dawned on him quite early that Gandhiji – and Gandhiji alone – came to represent India to an amazing degree and to express the very spirit of the ancient and tortured land, and that his own place was by Gandhiji’s side.

Close association with the Mahatma meant to him as to several of his colleagues, life behind prison bars in the course of freedom’s struggle. Between 1921 and 1934 he was repeatedly in jail – for five and a half years and for seven terms. It was certainly a hardship to one born to fortune and bred in luxury. But Jawaharlal Nehru made the best use of his confinement by voracious reading and deep thinking to the point of developing his own political philosophy, essentially Gandhian in spirit but not entirely Gandhian in its texture. His conversion to Gandhism was sincere but not unreserved. While, he never doubted his heart in his allegiance to Gandhiji he was not prepared to surrender his soul. As long as Gandhiji was the generalissimo of the Congress army, Jawaharlal Nehru was a true soldier.

On the fast moving Congress scene, he gradually rose to be a colossus, next in importance only to Gandhiji, so much so that the latter came to look up to him as his successor and ultimately adopted him as his political heir – despite the knowledge that Jawaharlal, while true to him to the utmost, had a mind of his own. But before the “adoption” was made public, Jawaharlal Nehru distinguished himself as a Gandhite who could see ahead of Gandhi.

It was significant that in the early years of the non-co-operation movement when Gandhiji virtually laid down the law and had he entire Congress in his hand, Jawaharlal Nehru had grown apprehensive of the one-track mind of his colleagues who took little or no account of the great historical forces contending for mastery beyond our shores or frontiers. He made useful contacts and travelled widely. In 1927 he paid a visit to Soviet Russia.

Towards the end of the year, at Madras, he moved the resolution on independence at the annual session of the Congress; a year later he founded the Independence of India League while the elders, including his father, toyed with the idea of Dominion Status. In 1929 as President (for the first time) he got the Congress at Lahore committed to complete independence and simultaneously took his stand as a socialist. In 1931 at the Karachi Congress he made himself responsible for the famous resolution on fundamental rights. Five years later, presiding over the Lucknow Congress, he unfurled the banner as much alike in the cause of socialism as in that of independence. Thus it was that he was about the first in the congress to give economic content to what had been till then a mere political doctrine – and a larger purpose to the corporate existence of the biggest political organisation in the country.

There was something of a flutter in congress ranks when the image of Jawaharlal Nehru was developed (in the expressive phraseology of George Slocombe) as “an agnostic Lenin meekly obedient to the precept of a Christian Tolstoy”. Gandhiji, however, kept his head cool, though he knew that, particularly since Motilal’s death in 1931, Jawaharlal Nehru was under little restraint to follow his own line, without, however any marked deviation from his dictates. Gandhiji prized. Jawaharlal’s noble frankness above everything else and knew his man who sharply reacted to political developments here or abroad, whether it was a lathi-charge in Lucknow or bombing in Chunking. It was characteristic of Jawaharlal Nehru that the turmoil in Spain should have agitated him greatly and led him to think of himself as a world citizen, with stakes in freedom’s cause under whatever skies.

In the later Thirties, Jawaharlal Nehru was in some respects a lonely man. His father died in 1931, his wife in 1936, and his mother in 1938. His friends were few but they were not all of this country. In 1939 he struck a friendship with Marshal and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

As the world slided into the second war, he was back from China. Immediately on his return, he repeated his demand for “complete independence” so that India might play a really effective part at a crucial hour in history – and that too on the side of the Allies.

Eighth Term

Alas, his own freedom was soon cut short, in the wake of the second Satyagraha movement sponsored by Gandhiji. He was arrested on October 31, 1940 and sentenced to four years rigorous imprisonment. It was his eighth term in jail. It was not till the Pearl Harbour incident in 1941 that he was released. Later followed the momentous Cripps negotiation. Their abortive end found him an irreconcilable opponent to British imperialism. Back in jail in 1942, in the wake of the Quit India movement, he had his longest and last detention until 1945 when there was a general release of political prisoners.

Jawaharlal Nehru took an active part, under the leadership of Maulana Azad in the Simla conference convened by Lord Wavell, to bring about an understanding between the Congress and the Muslim League. He resisted the emergence of Pakistan and plunged into campaign for general, provincial and central legislatures. It was in the same year that at the I.N.A. trial held in the Red Fort he reappeared in the barrister’s gown which he had discarded thirty years earlier, thus making his appearance symbolic of a turn of the tide in Indian history.

In March 1946, he went on a tour of south-east Asia, where he had his first friendly encounter with Lord Mountbatten. Three years later, as Congress President for the fourth time, it was he who discussed the British Cabinet Mission’s plan with the Viceroy and later accepted his invitation to form an interim Government. On September 2 (1946) he was sworn in as Vice-President and member in charge of external affairs. Since then – and more particularly as the Prime Minister of India since August 15, 1947 when India came into her own at long last, though at the expense of partition – he had been continuously in the saddle, till he died in harness on the fatal 27th of May, 1964, thus establishing record of the longest political hegemony in contemporary affairs.

On the historic day of August 15, 1947, the nation woke up to a new ecstasy as it heard Jawaharlal Nehru’s message to it in words that will for ever be remembered: “We shall never allow that torch of freedom to be blown out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest”. In this context, let us also recall his memorable words to the Constituent Assembly: “Peace has been said to be indivisible, so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world, that can no longer be split into isolated fragments”. Herein we find his whole political philosophy summed up mangnificently – a philosophy that had governed the entire outlook of his administration.

The hour of triumph for the nation brought, however, little joy to it because of the wounds of partition which are yet to be healed, and less to Jawaharlal Nehru who took upon his shoulders the biggest responsibilities that had fallen to the lot of any Indian since Creation’s dawn, But for his herculean shoulders, India would have perhaps felt crushed under the weight. For, be it remembered that within hardly six months of the attainment of Independence disappeared the Mahatma from mortal ken as a result of brutal assassination. More than anyone else, Jawaharlal Nehru felt orphaned, politically as well as spiritually.

As Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru’s place is among the world’s outstanding statesmen. But he was something more than the Prime Minister of India. He was the prime architect of post-Gandhi India. To put it briefly summing up recent history to have inaugurated a soverign republic, to have ushered in a new era in democracy, to have laid the foundations of a welfare state and of a socialist cooperative Commonwealth, to have harnessed the country to huge plans that promised prosperity in the widest commonalty spread, to have given to the people a secular outlook, to have sought to remove all irritants on the international scene by a scrupulous adherence to a policy of non-alignment in a world torn by conflicting ideologies, and to have incessantly worked for peace on earth, is seldom the content of a single individuals achievement – or even effort – in history.

Uniting Link

Long after he is dead, will his name be cherished with gratitude as that of a man who strove in his day as a uniting link (and no dividing hyphen) between the east and the west, or the democracies and the communist systems of government. India’s place as a republic inside the Commonwealth was Jawaharlal Nehru’s personal triumph. He set the whole perspective of a vast democratic set up and insisted on a get together of people to the farthest extent possible. And history will also perhaps record that no one else had more valiantly stood between chaos and cosmos, whenever there was the threat of a nuclear war.

To him as Prime Minister, the greatest shock came as a direct result of Chinese perfidy for, more than anyone else on the contemporary scene, it was he who, had for years striven to bring Communist China into the United Nations. The Chinese invasion of India was his greatest disillusionment. Yet he refused to be inveigled into hostility to communism as such, for it went against his grain and all that he had stood for, to antagonise friendly Soviet Russia.

He put his finger on the sore spot by disentangling Chinese communism from the Chinese expansionism which was at the root of all evil. Never had his policy of non-alignment stood a greater test than amid the confusion created by the Chinese in their mad exploits across our northern borders. It was equally significant of Jawaharlal Nehru’s breadth of mind as a statesman that he was always prepared to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan, even after Pakistan’s honeymoon with China.

What kind of man is this who had thus singled himself out – with all his temperamental drawbacks – for a niche of his own in contemporary annals? Where does his greatness spring from? What was the secret of his charm? These are relevant questions today, now that he is gone. We have his own word that he was influenced in life by three men–his father, Gandhiji and Rabindranath Tagore. As Motilal’s son, Jawaharlal was heir to a great tradition. Under Gandhiji’s banner, he slided into a “brave new world” which called for an inquiring mind, and intrepid spirit and an inflexible purpose. Of Tagore he owed something of his international outlook and much of his refined taste. To so rich a mixture, he brought some of his own inestimable qualities-a child-like enthusiasm, a certain nobility of mind and a sense of humanity.

While there can be yet no final estimate of Jawaharlal Nehru as India’s Prime Minister, it can be safely said that he had set India on the road to planned progress and given her too a set of values, and incidentally become a kind of baromater of international conscience. If in the union of theory and practice, he was reminiscent of Gladstone, he was more like the younger Pitt – an heir to paternal eminence and an adept in the exercise of political power. And he had about him too, “an air of solitude, – the solitude of superiority, of a transcendent greatness of ability and character”.

With his passing on May 27, 1964, in undimmed glory, ended an era in our history, the Nehru era, following the Gandhian. What next? Jawaharlal Nehru himself never bothered about it, perhaps in the belief that his countrymen will remain true to his ideals and firm in their devotion to the memory of the architects of Indian freedom.

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