PANDIT NEHRU is not fond of birthday celebrations
but the nation did not spare him. He was smothered with greetings and on
Sunday, November 14, 1948, in every hamlet and city in India people knew it was
the sixtieth birthday of the Prime Minister. Nehru was second to none in
framing the country’s freedom, and today he is that freedom’s chiefest pillar.
Panditji is sixty, yet in the prime of life. The
elements so mix in him that others often feel in themselves the throb and stir
of his personality. When one is sixty one should always be young. It is the
magical meridian birthday for the gifted. At sixty we know our powers and how
best to make use of them. The book of experience lies open. The future whispers
her syllables for those who listen. It is a birthday at which, if need be, one
may take resolutions afresh and step forward.
But Panditji is not aware of any particular day in
his span calling for any particular attention, and so it is perhaps all the
more fitting the nation should use the opportunity of a birthday to show him
its affection and love. We have done so and his response is typical:
“Innumerable friends and comrades, known and
unknown, have sent me greetings and good wishes on the occasion of my birthday.
Birthdays are no longer occasions for me to rejoice over, and I would rather
not be reminded of them. But I am deeply grateful for the affection and
goodwill that my people have showered upon me and I thank them for their
message. No man can live up to such expectations and I am not vain enough to
imagine that I can do so. I have felt very humble in the face of this
overwhelming affection and confidence. All I can hope is that, so long as there
is any strength left in my mind and body, I shall do nothing to betray this.”
It is typical in its unstressed humbleness of
spirit, in its wistful simplicity, and we cannot understand it unless we
remember the broad outlines of his life and personality.
Born into the pink of prosperity and intellectual
peership, brought up in the richest traditions of learning, he yet preferred a
life of struggle and suffering for the sake of his country. He went through the
storm and pined in prison, again and again. He spoke of the life that had
fallen to his lot. He conversed with lonely chagrin and grief and often caught
the eye of the world by inborn gestures of the spirit. He has paid the price of
poignant loss and shed tears at the tale of mankind.
Yet the flame of the cause to which he had given
himself never faltered; nor his indefatigable faith in the larger role this
country is destined to play, not in a millennium yet dimly yearned for. It is
the same love, the same halo, that still calls him and keeps him to his most
arduous tasks.
Nehru in fact is one of those rare souls for whom
patriotism such as it goes was not enough.
Then he found one greater than a patriot or
prophet, one who, though he was steeped in the freedom struggle, yet wanted
that struggle to typify some broader and more enduring facets. Thus it was,
while yet hardly twenty-eight he became a disciple of Gandhiji, taking much,
giving something, but always jealous of his fidelity. So it was, when Gandhiji
was struck down, people far away from the spot said to themselves: “Thank God,
Nehru is alive!”
He wept like Ananda and said the light was gone
out, adding quickly, the lamp would shine!
It was Nehru alone who could have spoken so in that
moment of overwhelming dismay and grief, for few were so nicely attuned to the
finer rhythms for which Gandhiji had stood.
This oneness lay at the bottom. There was sometimes
all the difference on the surface. The casual onlooker could have said they
stood at opposite poles. Nehru’s acceptance of non-violence was incomplete so
also of the charka. He seemed to be at the forefront of applied science;
Gandhiji flying off to the pristine simplicity of the hand and eye, to the
applied human spirit in all its pureness and beauty. Yet they were one, both
passionately attached to truth and justice. Nehru has never flagged in his faith
in the ultimate triumph of non-violence and human brotherhood, succoured from
warring passions. They met and never parted, and though Gandhiji is no longer
with us in the flesh, his chosen heir goes on gently but with firm steps. There
is a deeper echo in Nehru’s words, “Birthdays are no longer occasions for me to
rejoice over and I would rather not be reminded of them.”
I first saw Jawaharlal many many years ago when he
seemed to be making his way through a jungle of public opinion. I have still a
crystalline likeness of him in my mind as I saw him on a platform, young,
almost boyish, somewhat shy; a limp in the voice, a glimmer in the eye.
Perhaps, even today that quality of shyness is lurking. The limp has
disappeared in a broad flow of sparkling speech. The glimmer has grown into a
chaste diffusion. It isn’t perhaps that one imagines. London and Paris were
equally struck.
Who in this country cannot figure him in Paris at
the Palais de Challot a solitary guest sitting in a chair of gold at the
General Assembly of the “United Nations”? He moves forward quietly through a
gauntlet of lamps to the Speaker’s desk. He has had not time to commit his
thoughts to paper. He just speaks:
“My master taught me there is another force than
force of arms. Out of hatred and violence only hatred and violence can come.
“Our great leader taught us that it was not enough
that the end was good but that the means should also be equally good. The best
of ends may not be reached if our eyes are bloodshot and our minds clouded with
passion. Therefore it becomes essential for a while to think more of how we are
doing things than of what we are aiming at.
“We won our freedom by relatively peaceful means
because we had decided neither to submit to evil nor be afraid of the consequences.
I do not know if it is possible to apply that lesson to the whole world with
all its problems, but the principles underlying it can certainly be applied.”
It was the first time that the “United Nations” at
such short notice so honoured and listened to a visitor speaking on a subject
‘off the agenda’. The Assembly at once recognised that they had listened to a
great man but not perhaps to a great messenger.
On his way back home from Paris he rode away from
Cairo to ‘call on’ the Sphinx, that most solemn reminder of life’s mystery. One
can think that this philosopher Prime Minister went not so much to see the mere
image but to sense afresh her great riddle.
In him mix the nobler dreams, the richer visions,
the fearlessness of the true warrior the freedom of the poet, the politeness of
princes, and often, too high and detached for a politician, he impresses on the
Prime Ministership itself the qualities of a Counselor for the Nations.
Nehru is the bridge between Gandhiji and his
teaching, the bridge between the East and the West and, if anyone could be that
at this critical juncture in world affairs, a bridge between the two opposing
Big Blocs–this lover of beauty, this passionate believer and guarantor of
righteous government in our Secular State.