Foreign News: Nehru Never Wins

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The shuffling of camel pads pounded softly near a great cream-colored mansion in Allahabad where the white, gold and green flag of the Indian National Congress party flirted with the wind. Here was dignity and beauty. Here, in the mansion built by his father, Jawaharlal Nehru knew that there was refuge from the world.

To this mansion had come many men: the lordly rulers of India, the sycophants, the rebels and the humblest peasants of the field. Here Nehru longed to return from the squalor and the wranglings in Bombay. Then came a knock at the door. Quickly Nehru’s Oxford-educated daughter, Indira, ran to open it. She expected radio men setting up a microphone for a broadcast that Nehru was to make to the U.S. But the callers were not radio men. They were British police.

India & the World. It was the ninth time since 1921 that Pandit (Great Scholar) Nehru had gone to jail. Only twice has he been out for more than a year at a time. Yet for ten years he was secretary general of the Congress party, three times its president and, next to the half-naked Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi, the most powerful figure in India’s political life. As a sensitive liberal and a world statesman, Nehru has outgrown the shadow of his overage Messiah. But Gandhi, self-willed, self-made symbol of the Hindu peasant, has clamped Nehru’s feet to India. It was Nehru the disciple, not Nehru the internationalist, who returned once more to jail.

He packed his bag with four crisp white suits, gathered up his books. If there had been time, he would have made his broadcast, a final appeal to America—an appeal for understanding from the world’s last great bastion of freedom. But there was not time: The British Raj, intent on crushing the second Gandhi civil-disobedience campaign in World War II, was mad and tough.

How angry the Raj can get, how tough it can be, is an old and bitter story to Nehru. Last week, having jailed Gandhi, Nehru and other Congress leaders (including Nehru’s sister, Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit), the British claimed an early victory. At least 83 known killed, hundreds of others with broken skulls—this was the price Gandhi’s followers paid for protest rioting in disobedience of Gandhi’s policy of passive resistance. But though the first flames of riot were quenched, the fire went on underground (see p. 18).

When the monsoon (political) weather ends in September and the dry (war) season sets in, the British case will be tested.

Nehru & the World. In his last interview before returning to his “other home,” Nehru told TIME Correspondent Theodore White what he might have explained in a U.S. broadcast. Above him in the reception room of the Allahabad mansion were pictures of his father, Motilal Nehru, a signed photograph of Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kaishek, a photograph of Sun Yat-sen and Madame Sun. Gone was Nehru’s laughter and the jokes he had made with the Chiangs last spring when they conferred on world problems in a villa at New Delhi. Great masses of flowers had been in bloom then. Now the flowers in India were burned out in the summer heat. So was Nehru burned out, his handsome face drawn in lines of fatigue and sorrow.

From his eyes there shone the bitterness brewed by the repeated jailings of himself and his family, the bruises left in his heart by the clubbings he and his aged mother suffered. He was beaten in a Lucknow demonstration against the Simon Commission in 1928. During a National Week demonstration in 1932 his mother was beaten and left unconscious on the side of the road near her home in Allahabad. She was dead now, and so were his father and his wife Kamala, all helped along to funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges by their work in India’s struggle for independence. There was cold fury in him at the Himalayan stupidity of Tory imperialists, and bitterness at the failure of the West he understood to meet the East, which at times still baffled him.

Basically, said Nehru, the Indian crisis is the result of Europe’s and America’s concept of Asia. “What has astounded me,” said Idealist Nehru, “is the total inability of the English-speaking peoples to think of the new world-situation in terms of realism—realism being more than military realism. It is political, psychological, economic realism. . . . Their concept of us is that of a mass people fallen low, a backward people who must be lifted out from the depths by good works. . . .

“I think about it and it seems to me that there is something essential lacking in European civilization, some poison which eats into it and brings about a war every 20 years. For the average Asiatic in this war the prestige of Europe has suffered tremendously. . . . The fall of France showed up the rottenness of Western imperialism and the burden which it imposed on the people of the West. . . . Much later came the fall of Burma and Malay. This, at any rate, was a direct lesson to the British that their empire was going to pieces. But the astounding thing is that it has had little or no effect.”

Even if Indians are fast joining the Indian Army as mercenaries at 16 rupees (about $5) a month, even if India’s industrial effort has quadrupled since 1939, Nehru believes that India cannot be defended unless India’s peoples are armed with guns and inspired by the definite knowledge that they fight for their own freedom.

Beyond that he sees at least an “Asiatic Federation of Nations,” with the millions of India joined with the millions of China, to replace the broken rule of the white man in the Far East. Beyond that Nehru dreams and believes that an India, freed from “the perfect peace of the grave and the absolute safety of a cage,” can take her place in a world order or world federation, welcoming the white man’s science and know-how, friendly to Soviet Russia, a partner with the Anglo-American federation in bringing peace and order to the world.

Nehru & the British. The British, Nehru once wrote, seized the body of India “and possessed her, but it was the possession of violence. They did not know her or try to know her. They never looked in her eyes, for theirs were averted and hers downcast through shame and humiliation.”

Less emotionally, Nehru has claimed for years that the British Indian Government is effective only with repressive measures. He has stuck barbs of sarcasm into the classic Tory theory that Britain must dominate India because: 1) it is the bastion of empire and the bulwark of Britain’s world power; 2) the economic standard of the British Isles is built on India’s wealth; 3) without Britain’s strong ruling hand, India’s racial and religious groups, unable and untrained to govern themselves, will fly at each other’s throats in anarchy, chaos and civil war.

Nehru believes, instead, that British rule has purposely thwarted and nullified Indian attempts at self-government and self-improvement; that British imperialists are “agreeable, astute, forcible, self-confident and, when hard pressed, unscrupulous people who know pretty well on which side their bread is buttered.” To him there is no turning back, for there never was a parting of the ways. Even his good friend Sir Stafford Cripps, he found four months ago, was trying to present India with what to his mind amounted to a high-handed and narrow compromise that threatened to break up India into separate states at a time when “the day of separate warring national states is over.”

Nehru & Gandhi. There are some who believe that if Nehru had not played Hamlet to Gandhi’s ghost, a compromise might have been effected before the latest call for civil disobedience. But past attempts by Nehru to enlist the services of the United Nations for a solution have ended in blind alleys.

There are others who believe that the political power of the Congress party is being broken, that India’s present pro-war Indian leaders will eventually take over whatever form of self-government India receives.

But Gandhi and Nehru cannot be brushed off the face of Bharat Mata (Mother India). Until Gandhi dies, Nehru is bound to him by ties of love and political necessity, even though their political thinking is poles apart.

To Nehru, who has written as revealingly of his own thoughts and beliefs as any man since Henry Adams, Gandhi is the great paradox—an arch reactionary,-yet the greatest revolutionary leader of his time. Invariably Nehru has swung to Gandhi’s side, often in subsequent amazement that so mystical a character could, by instinct, sense the time for mass movements and the means to arouse public support.

When Gandhi started the khadi movement of hand-spinning and hand-weaving, Nehru found it “a throwback to the pre-industrial age.” But the most fretful of Nehru’s complaints against Gandhi have been caused by the Mahatma’s support of systems Nehru believes are “obviously decaying” and which “stand as obstacles in the way of advance—the feudal states, the big zamindars (landowners) and talukdars ( land rent collectors), the present capitalist system.”

An aristocrat by birth, a “repentant bourgeois” by definition, Nehru has fought “muddled humanitarians” and opportunists among the Hindu intellectuals and middle class bourgeoisie which form the core of the Congress party. Started in 1885 by a retired British colonial, the party, since Gandhi took control of it in World War I, has had a melange of supporters held together by one goal: Swaraj (political independence).

Through Gandhi’s instinctive appeal to the peasantry and Nehru’s insistence on agrarian reforms, the party base has broadened. But calls for reforms have caused defections from party ranks. The great Satyagraha (civil disobedience) campaigns of 1920-21, 1930-32 and 1940 have caused other defections.

Not always have Congress leaders stood up to British rule as stoutly as Gandhi and the Nehru family. Once in political power in eight of the eleven provinces after the 1937 elections, Congress members became more political than reformist.

Nehru & Ideas. The Western world gives its respect to the man who starts with nothing and makes much. India reserves its plaudits for the man who starts with much and gives up everything. Gandhi has the ascetic renunciation that India best understands, but there is also a strong appeal to India in Nehru, for the Brahmin’s renunciation of a life of ease.

In the 18th Century Raj Kaul, a Sanskrit and Persian scholar, came down from the mountain province of Kashmir. His descendants settled on the banks of a canal at Delhi. Nahar means canal and this word, changed to Nehru, eventually became the family name.

The Nehrus were dispossessed in the Great Revolt of 1857 and settled finally at Allahabad, where Jawaharlal spent most of his childhood. His father, vigorous, stormy-tempered and brilliant, amassed a fortune as a lawyer, surrounded his only son with English tutors, sent him to be educated at Harrow and Cambridge. In London Jawaharlal dabbled in Fabianism, entered the Inner Temple, lived beyond his generous allowance, argued Indian politics with his father by letter.

He returned to India when he was 23 and began practicing law. But much as he liked and admired the British personally, young Nehru was swept into political activity against what he then felt, and still feels, is the national humiliation of his people.

More leftist than his moderate father, Nehru read Marx, Lenin, Spengler, Plato, Shaw, Thoreau, Voltaire, Li Tai Po, the philosophy of Lord Gautama Buddha, the Upanishads, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. He ended an agnostic, a firm believer that man’s after life is not as important as the work he does on earth.

By the time he had finished his first jail sentence in 1922 Nehru was under the spell of Gandhi. He had learned that jails in India crawl with vermin, sometimes with scorpions, and that they break the spirit of most men. He also learned to discipline his emotions and keep his mind and body active. In moods of depression he sometimes reverted, as he still does, to Shirshasana, which entails standing on the head with the fingers supporting the back of the head, elbows on the floor, body vertical. From this “slightly comic position,” Nehru found, he could be “more tolerant of life’s vagaries.”

Nehru & India. The social philosophy fashioned by Nehru out of Cambridge, riots, Gandhi and jail has elements of Communism, but decries Communist dogma and bad manners. It tends, rather, toward an enlightened and idealistic international socialism. The British oppose it. So do 6,000 years of Hindu culture.

Wryly Nehru has admitted a basic factor in Indian life: the national symbol is the cow. To the Indians the cow is sacred because it stands for the giver of plenty, the tie of human nature to the animal and the soil, the quiet, contemplative qualities which the Eastern mind respects.

A Sanatani Hindu, Gandhi accepts Varna (color), while disavowing the caste system, but stands by the concept of caste in marriage and the profession as the law of heredity. The principle of Swadeshi (home manufacture, i.e., spinning) is akin to the ancient Greek spirit of the hearth and Chinese ancestor worship. Satyagraha was coined by Gandhi from the words Saty (truth and love) and agraha (firmness) as the Hindu interpretation of soul force. Closely akin to this is Christ’s admonition to “turn the other cheek.”

As an agnostic, Nehru has not accepted all these ancient beliefs; but, as an Indian, he has appreciated that soul force is a strange power. He himself has experienced the feeling of elation and victory over his adversary when being beaten down by an ironbound club. To Gandhi, the Hindu philosophy translated into terms of democracy means “complete identification with the poorest of mankind, longing to live no better than they.” To Nehru, poverty is an evil to be uprooted and corrected, not a burden to lie down with.

Nehru & Nehru. In years behind bars, Nehru has looked deeply into his own soul, has found the rationalization of loyalty for his compromises with Gandhi and the Congress party. He has found himself vain at times (his Gandhi cap habitually covers his-baldness). He has found himself loving the adoration of the crowds. He has also yearned for the mountains of Kashmir, for security and the love of his family. But these he denies himself. Last week, at the age of 52, he was still so handsome that at least six women in India were reported sending away suitors in the hope he would propose to them. And last week he was in jail again, while India seethed with hatred and turmoil. The answer to the questions, “When do the British go? When do the Japs come?” was no more settled than before police arrested Nehru in Bombay.

A good guess was that Nehru was at Ahmadnagar Fort, about 200 miles from Bombay. Here the Duke of Wellington once lunched on a grassy bank outside the fort’s huge stone walls. Here the British once kept prisoners of the Boer war. Here, more recently, they have interned Italians captured in North Africa. Here Nehru, who worked for Loyalist Spain, who cried out against Munich, who was shocked by Hitler’s Brown Shirts and twice snubbed invitations for an interview with Mussolini, could look out bitterly on monsoon skies. Nehru alone knew what thoughts were in his mind. But once before in prison he remembered T. S. Eliot’s lines:

“This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.”