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NEHRU By the same author A Book of India The Rise of Modern India The Introduction of English Law into India Shahar Ke Kutte (a collection of short stories in Hindi) The Break-up of British India The Evolution of India and Pakistan Select. Documents 1858-1947 (edited jointly with C. H. Philips and H. L. Singh) B. N. Pandey NEHRU M ISBN 978-1-349-00794-3 ISBN 978-1-349-00792-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00792-9 © B. N. Pandey 1976 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1976 978-0-333-10641-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. SBN: 333 10641 5 First published 1976 by MACMILLAN LONDON LIMITED 4 Little Essex Street London WC 2R 3LF and Basingstoke Associated companies in New Tork Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Delhi Typeset in India by MACMILLAN INDIA PRESS Madras To VALERIE Contents List of Illustrations 9 Preface 11 1 Sowing of the Seed 17 2 The Growth of an Intellectual, 1905-12 29 3 Waiting for a Leader, 1913-19 49 4 The Plunge into the Politics of Suffering, 1920-1 77 5 Beginnings of Compromise, 1922-5 92 6 Emergence of a Leader, 1926-9 114 7 The Introspective Warrior, 1930-6 143 8 Farewell to Revolution, 1936-42 188 9 The Defeat of a Nationalist, 1942-7 234 10 The Years of Statesmanship, 1947-51 293 11 The Leader of the Third World, 1952-8 337 12 Defeat into Victory, 1959-63 391 13 The Last Struggle, January-May 1964 432 Notes 441 Bibliography 464 Index 471 List of Illustrations Between pages 224 and 225 la Nehru aged two lb A family group 2 New Anand Bhawan 3a In prison 3b At Harrow 4a With his two sisters and Mrs Indira Gandhi 4b Negotiating for the partition of India 5a Nehru and Chou En-lai 5b With Khrushchev and Bulganin 6-7 Low cartoons 8a Nehru and Nasser 8b Nehru and Jinnah Maps 1. India before partition page 16 2. India at the time of partition 292 Acknowledgements for permission to reproduce illustra tions are due to the following: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 1-5, 8; the Trustees of the Low Estate, and the London Evening Standard, 6--7. The map on page 292 is reprinted from Michael Brecher, Nehru: a political biography (Oxford University Press, 1959). Preface NEHRU is a formidable and fascinating subject for a full-size biography. Formidable for the vast expanse of his career as a nationalist and as a prime minister, and for the wide range of his interests and involvements. For over thirty years, from 1916 to 1947, he was one of India's foremost nationalists; for seventeen years, from 1947 to 1964, he nourished, as its first prime minister, the world's largest democracy. During the half-century of his active political life he was ardently inter ested in everything of national and international importance. He was the world's most committed and yet its most refined enemy of absolutism, exploitation and discrimination, and he strove to give reality to his vision of a new world order based on peace and co-existence. He was the first statesman in the Afro-Asian world to lead his country of millions along an un trodden path of non-alignment and a mixed economy. The multifarious roles he played in his life and the mighty pro blems he faced at each stage and level in themselves would have made the task of his biographer most difficult, but added to these are millions of words he wrote and spoke during his lifetime. He was indeed a most prolific writer. Books and articles apart, even his letters often tended to turn into book lets. And then he was a very willing speaker, prone to giving half a dozen performances in a single day, unprepared and unrehearsed. And yet he was not a person who released his own tensions fully in his writings, speeches, or even in his outbursts of temper. He sustained throughout his life an inner conflict and tension, and while living simultaneously in the worlds of ideas and realities he strove continuously to level the barrier which separated them. Among the various fascinations of Nehru the one which weighed most heavily with me was the spectacle of him as unique in the twentieth century in that he succeeded in poli tics with qualities which are commonly considered to be major handicaps in that profession. Nehru was a man of in tellect, of vision and of essential goodness. He was honest and sincere, kind and considerate, dispassionate and indecisive; he was untouched by ruthlessness, malice and pettiness; he had 12 NEHRU no aptitude for manreuvres and for dreary details of organi sation, and his personality had a sprinkling of vanity, conceit and romance which, in his case, bejewelled rather than blemi shed it. How could he have succeeded so elegantly and wielded such enormous power in a profession in which men of his stamp so often miserably fail? How and why did Nehru become a leader of men? To what extent were the peculia rities of Hindu tradition and the Indian environment res ponsible for his rise to power? Another compelling aspect of the subject is Nehru's rela tionship with Gandhi. How could such an unbreakable bond have existed between these two who were poles apart from each other in their demeanour, outlook and ideologies? Gandhi, for example, was quite indifferent to the democracy to which Nehru was devoutly committed. Gandhi would have been happier were society ruled by a single man who was spiritually emancipated. Again, the Mahatma was strongly opposed to industrialisation, a process which for Nehru was both desirable and inevitable. A closer study of their relation ship may give the impression that Nehru, while deriving his power from the Mahatma and the people, used it continuously to protect India not only from communism and fascism but also from Gandhism itself. The questions aroused by a consideration of the career of Nehru are innumerable. To mention only a few of the broader aspects of the subject which appear to require an answer: What did Nehru achieve in his lifetime at the national and international levels? How consistent was he in pursuing his avowed policies? How did his life as a nationalist shape his style as a prime minister? These, together with a number of other aspects of the subject-some relating to Nehru's family background, his upbringing, his domestic and social life, his relationships with his father, wife and daughter, his own understanding of the problems of human relationships, and the impact of all of these on his public life- have been treated in this book. The research for it was begun in the spring of 1969 and carried almost continuously for over six years. It is based almost entirely on primary sources, largely on private papers.
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