NEHRU THE INVENTION OF INDIA SHASHI THAROOR A P • N Y RCADE UBLISHING EW ORK Copyright © 2003, 2011 by Shashi Tharoor All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected]. ® ® Arcade Publishing is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. , a Delaware corporation. Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com. “The Pandit” copyright 1962 by Ogden Nash. 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ISBN: 978-1-61145-411-6 Printed in the United States of America Also by Shashi Tharoor India: From Midnight to the Millennium The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone Bookless in Baghdad The Great Indian Novel Show Business Riot To Kofi Annan, who, as a young man in Ghana, admired Nehru, this book is dedicated with respect and affection Contents Preface A Note on Indian Political Movements The Nehru Family Tree: Five Generations 1 “With Little to Commend Me”: 1889–1912 2 “Greatness Is Being Thrust upon Me”: 1912–1921 3 “To Suffer for the Dear Country”: 1921–1928 4 “Hope to Survive the British Empire”: 1928–1931 5 “In Office but Not in Power”: 1931–1937 6 “In the Name of God, Go!”: 1937–1945 7 “A Tryst with Destiny”: 1945–1947 8 “Commanding Heights”: 1947–1957 9 “Free Myself from this Daily Burden”: 1957–1964 10 “India Must Struggle against Herself”: 1889–1964–2003 Who’s Who: Short Biographical Notes on Personalities Mentioned A Note on Sources Select Bibliography Preface For the first seventeen years of India’s independence, the paradox-ridden Jawaharlal Nehru — a moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent almost ten years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi — was India. Upon the Mahatma’s assassination, Nehru became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of India’s struggle for freedom. Incorruptible, visionary, ecumenical, a politician above politics, Nehru’s stature was so great that the country he led seemed inconceivable without him. A year before his death a leading American journalist published a book entitled After Nehru, Who? The unspoken question around the world was: “after Nehru, what?” Today, nearly four decades after his death, we have something of an answer to the latter question. As an India still seemingly clad in the trappings of Nehruvianism steps out into the twenty-first century, little of Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy appears intact. India has moved away from much of it, and so (in different ways) has the rest of the developing world for which Nehruvianism once spoke. As India nears the completion of the sixth decade of its independence from the British Raj, a transformation — still incomplete — has taken place that, in its essentials, has changed the basic Nehruvian assumptions of postcolonial nationhood. In this short biography, I have sought to examine this great figure of twentieth-century nationalism from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first. Jawaharlal Nehru’s life is a fascinating story in its own right, and I have tried to tell it whole, because the privileged child, the unremarkable youth, the posturing young nationalist, and the heroic fighter for independence are all inextricable from the unchallengeable prime minister and revered global statesman. A concluding chapter critically analyzes the principal pillars of Nehru’s legacy to India — democratic institution-building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home, and a foreign policy of nonalignment — all of which were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally contested today. Nehru: The Invention of India is not a scholarly work; it is based on no new research into previously undiscovered archives; it is not footnoted, though a Note on Sources and a Select Bibliography will guide the curious toward further reading. It is, instead, a reinterpretation — both of an extraordinary life and career and of the inheritance it left behind for every Indian. The very term “Indian” was imbued with such meaning by Nehru that it is impossible to use it without acknowledging a debt: our passports incarnate his ideals. Where those ideals came from, whether they were brought to fulfillment by their own progenitor, and to what degree they remain viable today are among the themes of this book. I started it as divided between admiration and criticism as I finished it; but the more I delved into Nehru’s life, it was the admiration which deepened. Jawaharlal Nehru’s impact on India is too great not to be reexamined periodically. As an Indian writer, I am conscious that his legacy is ours, whether we agree with everything he stood for or not. What India is today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man. This is his story. A Note on Indian Political Movements This book mentions a number of Indian political parties and movements of importance to understanding Jawaharlal Nehru’s life and times and appreciating his legacy. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 by a liberal Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, to provide a forum for the articulation of an Indian viewpoint on issues of the country’s governance and political development. The Congress evolved into the country’s premier political party (whose annual sessions, in different venues around India, attracted ever-greater attendance and attention). Its leadership was initially drawn from the educated professional classes, and its presidents, who were elected annually, belonged to various faiths, with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis among the first two dozen presidents. Around the cusp of the century a schism developed within the Congress between the Extremists, led by Tilak, and the Moderates, led by Gokhale — the former seeking more radical action to overthrow the British, the latter pursuing their goals through constitutional means while seeking fundamental reforms leading to self-government. This schism ended around the time of the First World War. The advent of Mahatma Gandhi, who returned to India from a long sojourn in South Africa in 1916, transformed the Congress from an elite debating society passing largely ineffectual resolutions into a mass movement for complete independence. In order to engage the Muslim masses and to promote Hindu- Muslim unity, Gandhi committed the party to supporting the Khilafat movement, which organized anti-British demonstrations around India clamoring for the restoration of the Caliphate in the defeated Ottoman Turkey. The victory of the secular republican Kemal Ataturk in the Turkish civil war rendered that cause otiose, but the campaign demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of popular mobilization cutting across communal lines. During the 1920s the major division in the Congress Party was between those advocating civil disobedience and noncooperation with the British and those who, calling themselves Swarajists, contested elections for seats in the institutions of limited self-governance allowed by the British. By the turn of the decade, though, both groups had reunited under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership to demand full