Nehru Read online

  An example of the quickness of his control of a situation was provided when the Pakistani prime minister of the day, Mohamed Ali,20 came to Delhi on an official visit. As Mohamed Ali walked from his plane the vast crowd broke through the police cordon, surged forward, scattered the line of formally dressed ambassadors (the unfortunate Japanese ambassador was trampled underfoot and when at length rescued had to be carried off the field), and threatened to crush the two prime ministers. Nehru shouted at and harangued the crowd, he reactivated the discouraged police, and, to give an example, grabbed a policeman’s truncheon and laid about him. Order was restored; the crowd retreated.

  Then there were the occasions when Nehru was a mourner. While I was at Delhi old and close political associates died, such as Pandit Pant, also Nehru’s son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi (who had no connection with Mahatma Gandhi: Feroze was a Parsee), and various others with whom Nehru had close political or personal ties. He was not too proud to weep on occasion; notably when Maulana Azad21 died. An agnostic, he had no consolations from notions of a future life or of seeing the dead again. For him death was the end. I once had to stand near him for a quarter of an hour or so at the funeral of an ambassador of Nepal. Nehru’s solicitude for the family concerned on these occasions was delicate and without any shirking.

  Naturally, I heard him make many speeches; scores and scores of speeches, both in and out of Parliament. The range of his speeches, most of which were unprepared, and most of them without a note, must be without parallel—on political matters in a huge variety, and also on technology, science, art, morals, history, welfare, and a host of good causes. I have known Nehru to make three speeches on entirely different subjects in one day. He had an astonishing facility for speaking for half an hour or so in English and then, without a note, repeating it in Hindustani, the translation, according to my Indian friends, being word perfect. For years he was averaging, so I have been told by one of his secretaries, about twenty-five speeches a month outside of Parliament. Speaking extempore, conversationally (as was his way), so often, and on so many themes, he was bound to repeat himself at times and bound to leave some ragged edges; and occasionally what he said was indifferent stuff. But his speeches were a part of his political action and are to be judged as such and not as exercises in oratory, let alone in the profundities. He was seeking to get a view across to a particular audience, or to evoke reactions, or even to spread adult education among the illiterate masses, and even on such things as hygiene or manners. At times he would provide a little unintentional comedy, as in his speech at Amritsar in April 1961 while unveiling the memorial at Jallianwala Bagh (the scene of General Dyer’s shootings in 1919), when, seized with enthusiasm for the achievements of the Russian astronauts announced at that time, he spoke at length about the wonders of space flight and weightlessness and the promise of man’s mastery over Nature. His audience consisted mostly of illiterate peasants whose thoughts were mostly on their bullock plough and the next meal. His speeches at times were musing aloud. And in his old age, speaking too much and too long, his speeches occasionally became a jumble of clichés, anti-climaxes and non sequiturs; not unlike the speeches of Ramsay MacDonald22 at the end of his career. But only an unusually well-furnished mind, and unusually concentrated, could carry off Nehru’s quantity and quality of public speaking throughout the half century prior to his decline.

  I heard him on many dramatic occasions in Parliament. For instance the debate in 1953 over extending the old British Preventive Detention23 Bill when there was an exchange between him and S.P. Mookerjee,24 the latter being a still more effective speaker than Nehru and, after Nehru, the most forceful personality in Parliament. (Mookerjee died in Kashmir not long afterwards, in controversial conditions.) Or Nehru’s announcement to a crowded and silent House that Sheikh Abdullah,25 the prime minister of Kashmir, had been arrested. With the Sheikh, Nehru had previously worked closely and he used to extol him as a personal friend as well as a loyal collaborator with India. Or in 1960, after the Dalai Lama’s flight to India and the subsequent revelations, especially in 1961, of the border tensions with China, the country which for years had been lauded as the ever-faithful Asian brother; when angry disillusioned debates flared up on India’s relations with her and with Tibet, including bitter passages with his old Gandhian and Congress colleague, Kripalani.26 Or the affair of the resignation of General Thimayya,27 the Army Chief of Staff, following a dispute with Krishna Menon;28 and on several other dramatic occasions when Nehru spoke up passionately for Krishna Menon to a critical House. Nehru’s mastery of the House, and of its psychology, were as outstanding as his Rupert-like courage. After watching him during these years one could have no doubt that Nehru was without a match, let alone a master, in the Indian Parliament. He had perhaps only half a dozen equals in the other parliaments I have had occasion to observe—the House of Commons, the Australian House of Representatives, the Netherlands Parliament, and the Canadian House of Commons. Further, Nehru, by persistent conscious effort, had schooled the Indian Parliament into the best models of businesslike procedures and dignity, including respect for the Chair.

  Then there was Nehru in holiday mood—going up in a glider (aged seventy-one the last time I saw him doing that), going on a trial flight in the first jet plane which came to Delhi, playing in a cricket match, enjoying Indian classical music and classical dancing, and showing off his pets or his flowers. These occasions became less frequent in the last few years; but it is an incomplete and misleading picture of Nehru which does not give some place, though it can never be a major place, to his outbursts of gaiety, as also to his wit.

  For example, the smile, half-gentle, half-wry, with which he greeted me after an incident which occurred at a time when there had been some excitement in the Indian press over the White Australia policy,29 and especially over a speech made by the Australian prime minister in South Africa which Indian newspapers denounced as a seal of what they called the Malan–Menzies axis30 (i.e. of anti-coloured policy). This was the moment chosen by an Australian sheep breeding expert, who had been appointed to carry out an experimental project under technical aid to improve Indian sheep by crossing them with Australian sheep, for getting a little publicity for himself. He gave an interview to an Indian journalist. He had discovered, he told the journalist, that a colour bar existed amongst sheep: the Australian rams didn’t care for Indian ewes and wouldn’t mate with them.

  It was pleasant to see Nehru enjoying the ancient Hindu festivals, especially Diwali, the lovely poetic festival of the lights, and Ramlila.

  According to old friends—and I knew several who had known him closely for over half a century—Nehru had always preferred his own company, and for long had little taste for social life. Yet no man could be a better host than Nehru, whether at formal dinner parties or, best of all, at small dinners and lunches, especially en famille. The same traits were invariable: good breeding, elegance combined with simplicity, and wholesomeness. Alcohol was not served but the food though plain and unspiced—more English than Indian—was always of good quality, well prepared, and with an abundance of the best fruit. Unlike most of the Indian leaders he was not a vegetarian though for a time he had been. One was spared too long a period at table or too much food: three courses and fruit were the rule. Nehru himself was attentive to his guests without being pressing or fussy. He delighted to recommend a choice fruit and then to peel it or to cut it up for a guest. He was nearly always relaxed, or, more likely, he took pains not to show any of the cares agitating him; for there could scarcely have been a time when cares were not. He was always ready for interesting conversation, his own contribution being lively, various, quiet-voiced and unegotistical. He was interested in facts and ideas for their own sake and not in himself. If he told a story involving himself—for instance, about bureaucracy: the first time as prime minister he was brought a sealed envelope marked ‘Confidential’ he found on opening it, not, as he expected, some secret of state, but the daily meteorological repor
t—it was tersely worded and was told to illustrate a point, not to glorify himself. (He had no time for the bureaucrat’s spirit; he had knowledge of and contempt for the Indian variety.) I have seen him on these occasions with scientists like Lord Florey,31 the pathologist Sir Mark Oliphant,32 the physicist, and, others whose investigations and talk he relished; with political figures like Lord Attlee and Bevan,33 who were obviously congenial, and with those, better left unnamed (especially a fading conservative minister who before he faded into an earldom moved unerringly from cliché to cliché), who were probably not; but Nehru’s good manners never failed him. A prime minister from a Commonwealth country who, as he himself remarked, was no reading man, was once asked by Nehru in my time whether he would like to be taken to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. ‘The Taj Mahal? What’s that?’, the visitor asked. Nehru explained patiently. On another occasion a prime minister from another Commonwealth country missed the point of a story told by Radhakrishnan, then vice-president of India, which the latter had from Khrushchev himself. (Khrushchev when visiting a collective farm looked in at the school and questioned some of the children to see what they knew. At the end he called over a boy and said to him ‘Who wrote War and Peace?’ ‘Not I, Sir, I didn’t write it,’ the frightened boy pleaded… Next morning the principal of the school called and asked if he could see Mr Khrushchev over something urgent. When admitted to Khrushchev’s presence he blurted out that he wanted to report that the boy had come to him with a confession: he did write War and Peace.) The visiting prime minister had not heard of War and Peace. Another memorable lunch was one he gave for an American admiral of great power in the Dulles’ days, at the suggestion of the American ambassador. The admiral for some years, and especially when on his Pacific or South East Asian travels, used to make public statements along the most menacing lines of brinkmanship and massive retaliation and so was one of Nehru’s bêtes noires. The American ambassador felt that if he could get the two men together they might think better of one another. Hence the lunch. The admiral came and brought his wife with him, a lady who turned out to be no student of India or of current affairs. On being introduced to Nehru’s son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi, who was not Gandhian in type, she thought she was meeting the Mahatma himself, and gushed over him accordingly before the ambassador could head her off. The Mahatma had been assassinated some years before.

  Nehru’s first visit to the United States had left an impression on him which endured; especially the weekend at the Government Guest House, presided over for the occasion by a cabinet minister, where the other state guest was a female cosmetics magnate; or, again, the banquet of business leaders in New York when Mr——, the famous banker, is said to have opened his speech of welcome with: ‘Mr Neeroo, there are fifty billion dollars sitting around this table…’ Nehru by then had learnt with surprise, but apparently not with appreciation, that the ticker tape showered down on him during his procession along Fifth Avenue was done as a regular routine by a private commercial enterprise hired for the occasion; one or other Welcomes, Inc.

  President Johnson34 came to India—said to be his first visit overseas—not long after becoming vice-president but his activities with bullock carts, babies, and camel drivers represented a different sense of humour from Nehru’s.

  Nehru’s visit to President Kennedy in 1961 apparently modified some of his earlier reactions.

  Finally, there was Nehru with the Indian crowd. His relationship with it was unique, not equalled even by Gandhi’s. His prestige with the Indian people had something of the magical about it. Here was the source of his power. Here was why over a dozen years or so he could have been a dictator if he had so desired, without guns or propaganda. How this prestige came about, how the Nehru myth had been created, is something for the psychologists to explain. The vast majority of Indians had never set eyes on him; and those who had would in the vast majority of cases have done so for an hour or two at the most. The myth owed nothing to the projection of his personality through the mass media, for few villagers had any acquaintance with the radio or the cinema and none with TV, and four out of five were illiterate. That is to say, the myth owed nothing to the synthetic fabrication of personality by the artifices of ‘public relations’. It is unlikely that much discrepancy between public reputation and the private truth will ever be unearthed about Nehru, in the way, for example, it has recently been unearthed about Lloyd George35—this darling of the Welsh chapels being revealed as redoubtable in adultery, and in keeping injured victims at bay, as in political wiles, though the secret remained intact throughout his life. Nehru did his fair share of looking happy with the crowd, and of loving little children, and at times he got near to demeaning himself by this Hitler and Stalin type of histrionics. But in general what acting he did was little in comparison with what the average politician in the United States or even in England goes in for. Nor was the truth ever long in coming out that at bottom Nehru was alone. The notion of Nehru’s spending halcyon hours relaxing with peasants is comically wide of the mark. It would be too much to say that while he loved India he did not love Indians; but he undoubtedly disliked certain Indian traits. Yet wherever he travelled in India he could count on crowds running into half a million or more flocking to him. Men and women often spent a day or two to get to the place where he would be speaking, or even merely passing by. Nor did his oratory account for this magnetism. He was a good rather than a stirring speaker. His speech, delivered in a clear and well-modulated but also in rather a light voice, was rarely uninteresting and often it was persuasive, but in his last decade it was more didactic than rousing. Moreover, he had to speak in Urdu (or Hindustani) rather than in Hindi, or in English; many in his audience, especially in south India, therefore could not understand a word of what he was saying.

  His incomparable prestige was based on other things. It was based in part upon the fact that the people believed that he had been chosen by Gandhi as his political heir; in part upon the charm and aliveness of his mere presence; in part upon his devotion to the national interest as he saw it, so self-evident and so marking him off from the run of Indian politicians; the rich man who renounced his wealth and who for years lived something of the hard life of the Indian people, even to travelling third class; in part upon the fact that the Indian is traditionally a hero-worshipper (the classic British writers on India have recounted from their experiences many significant examples, including the deification of dead rajas and maharajas) and not a few of the Indian villagers had been apt to see him as the great new maharaja; and, finally, in part, and not least of all, upon the fact that Nehru survived. All his potential rivals and all his equals (except Rajagopalachari) died off in his active lifetime. Had Bose36 or had Sardar Patel37 lived as long as Nehru the story might have been different.

  Towards the end, however, great as Nehru’s prestige remained, his worshippers or admirers were the countrymen rather than the townsmen. This was one of the ironies of Nehru’s position, for he was entirely the townsman and disliked, if he did not loathe, the life of the Indian villager, just as, being a declared agnostic, he disliked the villagers’ religion and social rules. Further, even the villagers, though they might gather in their hundreds of thousands to hear him or to salute him, more and more voted against Nehru’s men or disregarded Nehru’s urgings. The Nehru myth, in short, though mighty in India up until the end—so mighty that he could not be unseated during the great disillusionment following the Chinese attacks in the winter of 1962-63—was declining in his latter years, even amongst the country people. Amongst the townsmen, especially amongst the educated classes, it had declined sharply for some time. He had, moreover, positive and active enemies. Owing to the security service, not to his own wishes, Nehru never moved without a security guard, and his house was carefully guarded day and night. On the occasions when he dined at my house one of his security guards inspected the kitchen thoroughly and stood by to watch the cooking of the dinner, so that there was no risk of his being poisoned; an armed securit
y man dressed like a servant waited upon him at table; and a squad of men were hidden in the shrubbery surrounding the house.

  But the diminution of his prestige, and these risks of assassination—after all Gandhi himself had been assassinated—do not affect the cardinal fact that few if any leaders in any country have attained to such a prestige amongst their own people; or have held on to it for so long. The great bulk of the people of India sensed, and they never lost the sense, that Nehru wanted only to help them and wanted nothing for himself; and that he was a ruler who had pity and kindness.

  My last official business with Nehru was over a trifle. Not long before I left India in 1962 he had received a request from a students’ group in the University of Adelaide. He consulted me about it, questioning me about the university and asking my opinion on the request. There were delays in carrying out his intentions, due to various crises and to illness. As a result the shield he donated as a trophy for inter-faculty debating competitions in the University reached Australia a few weeks after he died; the last gift made by him to anyone. There was no call whatever on Nehru to bother with the Adelaide students; there are hundreds of universities in the world as well as a score of crushing problems in India; but I could see that he sensed the Adelaide students’ goodwill and that some gesture from him would give them pleasure. I felt, too, as I had been made to feel more than once, that he was concerned about certain fears widespread in Australia regarding Asian neighbours and colour and he would lose no opportunity, even the smallest, for reassuring Australians that Asians could be good neighbours.