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Off track, decades later
Jawaharlal Nehru ... his India did change.
AS these words appear in print, India will just have celebrated the 56th anniversary of its independence two days earlier. I was scheduled to spend much of the day correcting the final proofs of my forthcoming biography, Nehru: The Invention of India.
My mind turns, therefore, to that time, 55 years ago, when independence was attained and Partition proved unavoidable.
When the British government announced in early 1947 that they would withdraw from India, and that the transfer of power would be executed by the blue-blooded Lord Mountbatten, it was already apparent that Pakistan, in some form, would have to be created. The experience of the Interim Government had proved that the League was simply not going to work with the Congress in a united government of India.
Jawaharlal Nehru nonetheless tried to prod leaders of the League into discussions on the new arrangements, which he still hoped would fall short of an absolute Partition. By early March, as communal rioting continued across northern India, even this hope had faded. Both Sardar Patel and Nehru agreed that, despite the Mahatma's refusal to contemplate such a prospect, the Congress had no alternative but to agree to partitioning Punjab and Bengal; the alternative (of a loose Indian union including a quasi-sovereign Pakistan) would neither be acceptable to the League nor result in a viable government for the rest of India. Some critics see in all this an exhausted Jawaharlal's anxiety to end the tension once and for all; others suggest that he allowed his regard for the Mountbattens to trump his own principles. Such arguments do a great disservice to Jawaharlal Nehru.
His correspondence at the time shows a statesman in great anguish trying to do the best for his country when all other options had failed. Communal violence and killings were a daily feature; so was Jinnah's complete unwillingness to co-operate with the Congress on any basis other than that it represented the Hindus and he the Muslims of India.
As long as the British gave Jinnah a veto over every proposal he found uncongenial, there was little else Nehru could do. Nor is there evidence in the writings and reflections of the other leading Indian nationalists of the time that any of them had any better ideas. The only exception was Gandhi: the Mahatma went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept united if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Jawaharlal and Patel both gave that idea short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously.
There is no doubt that Mountbatten seemed to proceed with unseemly haste, and that in so doing he swept the Indian leaders along. Nehru was convinced that Jinnah was capable of setting the country ablaze and destroying all that the nationalist movement had worked for: a division of India was preferable to its destruction. "It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals," Nehru told his party, "though I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right course." The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling. On June 3, Jawaharlal, Jinnah, and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh broadcast news of their acceptance of Partition to the country. "We are little men serving a great cause," Nehru declared: "... The India of geography, of history and tradition, the India of our minds and hearts, cannot change." But of course it could change: geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied, minds and hearts torn apart. Jawaharlal imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League's demand for Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the "right" side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland. Over a million people died in the savagery that accompanied the freedom of India and Pakistan; some 17 million were displaced, and countless properties destroyed and looted. Lines meant lives.
The man who, as Congress President in Lahore in 1929, had first demanded "purna swaraj" (full independence), now stood ready to claim it, even if the city in which he had moved his famous resolution was no longer to be part of the newly-free country. Amidst the rioting and carnage that consumed large sections of northern India, Jawaharlal Nehru found the time to ensure that no pettiness marred the moment: he dropped the formal lowering of the Union Jack from the independence ceremony in order not to hurt British sensibilities.
The Indian tricolour was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens. Just before midnight, Jawaharlal Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly to deliver the most famous speech ever made by an Indian: Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.
One man did not join the celebrations that midnight. Mahatma Gandhi stayed in Calcutta, fasting, striving to keep the peace in a city that just a year earlier had been ravaged by killing.
He saw no cause for celebration. Instead of the cheers of rejoicing, he heard the cries of the women ripped open in the internecine frenzy; instead of the slogans of freedom, he heard the shouts of the crazed assaulters firing their weapons at helpless refugees, and the silence of trains arriving full of corpses massacred on their journey; instead of the dawn of Jawaharlal's promise, he saw only the long dark night of horror that was breaking his country in two.
In his own Independence Day message to the nation Jawaharlal could not help thinking of the Mahatma: On this day, our first thoughts go to the architect of freedom, the Father of our Nation who, embodying the old spirit of India, held aloft the torch ... We have often been unworthy followers of his, and we have strayed from his message, but not only we, but the succeeding generations, will remember his message and bear the imprint in their hearts ....
It was a repudiation as well as a tribute: the Mahatma was now gently relegated to the "old spirit of India" from whom the custodians of the new had "strayed". We have strayed much farther in the following 55 years.
Shashi Tharoor's new book Nehru: The Invention of India will be published by Viking on November 14, 2003.Visit the author at www.shashitharoor.com
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