In 1938, concluding a report that he made after lunching with Jawaharlal Nehru, the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, observed, “Judging the man as I found him today I can hardly suppose that he could ever emerge as an outstanding leader of men, much less that he has in him to prove himself a great man of action.” Linlithgow was among those who grossly underestimated Nehru.
As Indians paid tributes to Nehru on his 55th death anniversary this week, they remembered him, among other things, for establishing India’s space and atomic energy programmes and for setting up the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management that make Indians proud. But what is hardly ever acknowledged or accepted is Nehru’s decisiveness as a leader.
After being inducted into the Congress party by Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru rose to become its most powerful leader and its sole negotiator of the terms of India’s freedom with the British. He ensured India’s emergence as a secular state with universal adult franchise and not one that had long been saddled with an electoral system that allowed communal representation, even if that meant conceding Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s demand for a separate Muslim homeland.
As Prime Minister, Nehru had a troubled relationship with his powerful Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, widely credited for integrating the princely states into the Indian Union. Gandhi had to mediate between them. When, with Patel’s support, Purushottam Das Tandon — who Nehru disliked for his “obscurantism”, “communalism” and “zeal for Hindi” — became President of the Congress, he forced him to resign and proceeded to get himself elected in his place. Nehru stood up for India’s Muslims at a time when it was unfashionable to do so and intervened strongly to make sure that Hindi was not forced on the country’s non-Hindi speakers. Some of his actions bordered on the undemocratic but in hindsight they were necessary. He retained several of colonial India’s repressive laws and never hesitated to use them. He had Sheikh Abdullah dismissed as Kashmir’s Prime Minister and imprisoned him for 11 years for conspiring against the state. He had an elected communist government in Kerala dismissed in 1959 and proceeded to quell an insurgency in Nagaland by forcing its leader, Angami Zapu Phizo, to flee the country in 1956.
It is strange then that many, including well-known historians such as Perry Anderson, view Nehru as a waffler in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But for the decisive way that he repeatedly intervened to preserve the integrity, unity and secularism of a fledgling country, we wouldn’t have this India to call our own today.
( The writer, a former civil servant, taught public policy and contemporary history at IISc. Bengaluru )
