India: Man of East & West

Clad in a white sari, Indira Gandhi sat weeping on the floor beside her dead father’s bed. He lay stretched out under a sheet, two crossed lotus blossoms resting above his head. Later, the body was moved to the doorway of the Prime Minister’s white-walled house as a line of weeping, shouting mourners two miles long formed to offer final tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru.

Throughout the land, Indians wept and fasted for the remainder of the day. As the news slowly spread to the remote provinces, some feared that Nehru’s passing would trigger war or natural disasters—and, in fact, Delhi was twice shaken by earth tremors. Many gathered to chant: “May Nehru live long after his death!”

Though it had long been anticipated, Nehru’s passing found India unprepared. Only the week before, clearly enfeebled by the stroke he had suffered in January, he had himself brushed aside a question about his successor with the smiling reply: “My lifetime is not ending so very soon.” Last week he had helicoptered back to Delhi from a four-day vacation in the cool hills surrounding Dehra Dun. He woke as usual at 6:30 a.m., but instead of performing his customary yoga exercises, complained of pains in his back. Within minutes, he collapsed in a coma from which he never recovered. At 2 p.m., he was dead. A Cabinet minister rose in Parliament and announced in a choked voice, “The Prime Minister is no more.”

The world joined in the mourning, less for the international statesman-whose always exaggerated role as mediator between East and West had declined with the decline of the cold war —than for a tireless national leader. Nehru had more or less held together, in all its nagging greatness, Asia’s largest democracy—indeed the largest single mass of unshackled mankind on earth. The true test of his accomplishment might be set by death itself; for it remained to be seen whether Nehru had given his people enough strength and order to go on without him.

Downed Magnum. In his 74 years, Nehru traveled an immense distance—from spoiled child to charismatic leader, from model English gentleman to Oriental father figure. Born in the northern Indian city of Allahabad, he belonged to a wealthy, Westernized family of the highest Brahmin class. When he was 15, the family sailed for England and the boy was entered at Harrow, where, as he put it, “I was never an exact fit.” He moved on to Cambridge and two years of law studies at London’s Inner Temple. He also had the money and appetite for fashionable parties in the West End, and could down a magnum of champagne without losing his poise or equilibrium. He was attracted by the ideas of his time, from the Fabian Socialism of Bernard Shaw to the moral relativism of Bertrand Russell and the welfare economics of John Maynard Keynes.

Nehru was 22 when he returned to his homeland, and he continued to dabble in a gentlemanly way with revolutionary ideas. His first meeting with Mahatma Gandhi left him unimpressed —civil disobedience and nonviolence had little appeal to a young man who saw himself as Byron in Greece or Garibaldi unifying Italy. The great change occurred when Lawyer Nehru was 30 and indulgently visiting an Indian village. “A new picture of India seemed to rise before me, naked, starved, crushed and utterly miserable,” he wrote. “And their faith in us, casual visitors from the distant city, embarrassed me and filled me with a new responsibility that frightened me.”

Midnight Stroke. Nehru joined the fight for Indian independence, and was rewarded by more than ten years in British prisons. Gandhi was the torch that lit the way to freedom and Nehru the organizer who made it possible. In 1947, as British troops left the subcontinent at a slow, half-step march, Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly to declare, “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

From that midnight stroke in 1947 until last week, India’s destiny was in Nehru’s hands. He guided his nation through partition, the horror of communal strife that cost an estimated 200,000 Moslem and Hindu lives, and the shock of Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948. Despite deep poverty, inefficiency and corruption, despite a frightening capacity for violence, despite sharp differences in language, religion and caste, India became a nation and a working democracy.

Abroad, Nehru became the spokesman for the nonaligned Afro-Asian nations that wished to stand aside from the cold war—though it often seemed to embittered Westerners that Nehru’s moralizing neutrality played into Communism’s hands. In part, his policy of nonalignment was based on a shrewdly calculated risk. He recognized that India could not afford both a big military budget and industrialization; his role as a peacemonger offered prospects of aid from both sides.

For 15 years, this balancing act worked. But Nehru tarnished his aura of nonviolence when he employed arms in 1961 to seize the tiny colony of Goa from Portugal. And Red China tarnished his policy of nonalignment in 1962, when the Reds streamed across the Himalayas and brushed aside the defending Indian troops, long ill equipped and ill guided by a Nehru favorite, left-winging Defense Minister Krishna Menon. Yet the West moved a little closer to Nehru as neutrality became more acceptable, and Nehru moved a little closer to the West as he belatedly sought arms against Red China.

Paid Homage. At home, Nehru gave himself tirelessly to his 450 million people. He was both a kindly father and a stern schoolmaster, and each morning began with a darshan, a communion with the pilgrims who gathered daily outside his home. They would sit quietly in rows on the ground while Nehru walked among them, exchanging smiles and the palms-together gesture of namaste. Occasionally, a woman would say shyly, “We come to pay homage.” Nehru would answer laughingly, “Well, pay homage then.”

Darshan was more emotional than verbal, which was fortunate, since of India’s many languages Nehru spoke only Urdu with any proficiency. Often his speeches to crowds numbering in the millions were delivered in English and translated into the local dialect by interpreters. The multitudes listened quietly and seemed somehow comforted by Nehru’s presence. He could patiently calm the terrors of superstitious peasants who feared the world was coming to an end, yet scream at a servant because a cup was misplaced. He crusaded tirelessly against the ingrained Indian habits of inefficiency, tardiness and cheerful anarchy, but made no real effort to raise up young leaders to succeed him. He railed against the prevalence of holidays, wandering sacred cows, and often fraudulent holy men, yet did nothing about them. He preached socialism but only partly practiced it, calling on Cabinet ministers who were conservative businessmen to administer a halfplanned economy.

Normal Confusion. Perhaps his most remarkable trait was his devotion to democracy. Nehru could have become dictator of India, and he knew himself well enough to recognize his dictatorial impulses. Yet all that he accomplished was done under a free parliamentary system. Once, halfheartedly, Nehru spoke of resigning, but he allowed himself to be dissuaded by the clamor of his Congress Party followers, who cried, “Panditji, don’t abandon us!”

Nehru abandoned India only by abandoning life itself. His slim, bent-shouldered figure, with the fresh rosebud in a buttonhole and the white Gandhi cap, will be seen no more. There will be no more large family breakfasts, with a watchdog nuzzling his knee beneath the table and grandchildren giggling in the corner; no more long hours in the Foreign Ministry office, where monkeys scamper among the colonnades; no more rides along thronged streets to be pelted by flowers and nearly trampled by the ardent heedlessness of an Indian crowd. Perhaps his people had clung to him too fervently, too long—and he to them.

He had consistently refused to designate a successor; on his death, instead of orderly transition, there was some normal confusion. India’s President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan chose the senior member of the Cabinet, Home Minister Gulzari Lai Nanda, 65, to serve as Acting Prime Minister. At week’s end the Congress Party working committee, in consultation with Indian state ministers, began meetings to select a permanent successor. Leading candidate: La Bahadur Shastri, 59, who served as Nehru’s deputy and is a somewhat obscure political moderate. Among other candidates: Morarji Desai, shrewd, free-enterprising former Finance Minister.

Fanned Ice. After lying in state overnight, cooled against the New Delhi heat by fans blowing across blocks of ice, Nehru’s body was placed upon a gun carriage and, to the funereal beat of muffled drums, drawn six miles through Delhi to the banks of the holy Jumna River. A stampede in the huge crowd killed four persons and injured scores. Although Nehru had been an agnostic, his corpse was placed on a Hindu funeral pyre. An Indian air force band played the hymns, Abide with Me and Lead, Kindly Light. Nehru’s grandchild, Sanjay Gandhi, stepped forward and touched a torch to the pyre.

As the flames spread and sandalwood smoke curled toward the sky, priests in yellow and white robes chanted, “He is free of his earthly bondage.” In response the crowd shouted, “Amar rahe [May he be an immortal]!” But India’s deep and visceral feelings for its dead leader may best be found in his own words, spoken on the occasion of Gandhi’s death: “A light has gone out of our lives. We cannot run to him and seek solace any more.”