Nehru, hero or villain?
Zareer Masani
Jawaharlal Nehru. Volume One: 1889-1947 Sarvepalli Gopal (Jonathan Cape E10.00) Nehru's criticism of Indian biographical writing, Dr Gopal tells us, was that "it tended to be eulogistic and failed to assess the historical and impersonal forces at work". Gopal is too balanced a historian to indulge in eulogy. If in spite of this he fails to attain his biographical ideal and explain the operation of objective forces, it is because he concentrates on Nehru the agent of political change at the expense of Nehru the product of social pressures and institutions. Perhaps this is inevitable in an essentially political biography. But it is a pity all the same, because Nehru epitomised more than any other individual the contradictions of the socio-political elite which continues to govern India under his daughter. An outstanding representative of his class, he was also its prisoner; and his political role cannot be fully comprehended without a wider analysis of his ambivalent social, cultural and _ religious attitudes.
Despite these limitations, Gopal's biography has strong advantages over its predecessors. The author is one of India's leading historians and has been closely associated with Nehru and his daughter. More important, he is the only biographer to received unrestricted access to the Nehru papers and he also gathered an impressive amount of new evidence from government archives. His biography is 'official', in that it has the approval of Nehru's daughter; but he assures us that Indira Gandhi placed no restrictions on his freedom of interpretation.
Gopal frankly concedes his own personal devotion to Nehru and the difficulty of objective interpretation. But if his view of Nehru is over-generous, it does not lead him, as it might a lesser historian, to brush inconvenient facts under the carpet. All the more controversial episodes in Nehru's career are faced squarely and the case for both sides freely aired. Where the evidence is ambiguous, Gopal gives Nehru the benefit of the doubt. But the more sceptical reader will find enough evidence in this book to support less charitable explanations.
Nehru's political development is traced from his dilettante youth, through his apprenticeship under Gandhi, to his emergence as the charismatic hero of the Congress Left, and finally his arrival at the summit of power as the pragmatic leader of India's first National Government. The narrative is concise and closely argued; the author wisely refrains from dwelling too long on familiar ground and concentrates instead on areas for which fresh evidence has become available. He tries hard, but without success, to enliven the mediocrity of Nehru's undergraduate years at Cambridge. Occasionally, he tries too hard, as when he attributes Jawaharlal's curiosity about waitresses to "his awareness of the class issue". The real interest of the biography begins with Jawaharlal's return to India and his gradual absorption into the nationalist movement. "A missionary without a mission," he is an easy convert to Gandhi's semi-religious, non-violent nationalism. The early 'twenties find him one of the Mahatma's most orthodox disciples, condemning Communism in the, same breath as fascism, and moderating peasant militancy in his home province.
One is given a revealing insight into the deeply-rooted dynasticism of the Nehrus, with Motilal Nehru, himself an eminent Congressman, promoting his son's career with even greater ardour than Jawaharlal later displayed on behalf of his daughter. Emotionally volatile and incapable of 'hard' decisions, Jawaharlal remained dependent on his father, whose protective and moderating role was later taken over by Gandhi.
His conversion to' Socialism in 1927 proves less of a turning-point than one might expect. While Nehru accepts the Marxist view of the inter-relationship of capitalism and imperialism and acquires an enduring international perspective, his socialism is more an emotional sympathy de haut en bas with the masses than a coherent ideology, and it does not shake his overriding faith in liberal values. His socialism expresses itself in the safe confines of his writings and in pious resolutions for the future; but it does not materially alter his role in Indian politics. He continues to occupy the middle ground in the Congress and uses his mass popularity to act as "the best shield of the Congress against left-wing groups". When the middle ground becomes untenable and he has to take sides, he chooses invariably to abandon his radical principles and followers rather than sacrifice his position in the Congress leadership.
Nehru's political compromises and surrenders are numerous, and it is to Gopal's credit that he does not flinch from recording them — his signature to the Delhi Manifesto of 1929 accepting Dominion Status, his support of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 1931, his acceptance of Gandhi's termination of civil disobedience in 1933, his meek surrender in 1937 on the question of accepting office under the 1935 constitution, and his jettisoning of Subhas Bose, a potential rival on the Left, in 1939, While Gopal dismisses "the simple, personal, petty answer of consistent opportunism", he is unable to provide a less personalised explana tion of these frequent lapses, ascribing them instead to Nehru's "firm sense of discipline" and party loyalty. It is a justification which is no more convincing than Nehru's own feeble attempts to rationalise the compromise of his most basic principles. By 1942 even Nehru's "parlour socialism" wears thin and one finds him returning to the emotional nationalism of his youth and rediscovering India's traditional Vedic heritage.
This first volume concludes with the negotiations for Partition and Independence. It is impossible to accept entirely the official Congress view, to which Gopal seems to subscribe,that Muslim separatism was the result of an alliance between Muslim vested interests and British imperialism. The Congress, surely, cannot escape responsibility for its failure either to accommodate Muslim elites or to attract the Muslim masses. Nehru himself contributed little to a solution of the Muslim problem, even if one discounts — as Gopal does — the view that he exacerbated it by his arrogant handling of the Muslim League. His role in the constitutional bargaining of 1946-47 reveals a capacity for emotionalism, vagueness and vacillation which made him an easy prey both to Jinnah's hard-headed rea/politilz and Mountbatten's persuasiveness. Gopal is too polite to say so, but Nehru was badly out-manoeuvred.
The Nehru that emerges from these pages is a man of remarkable intellectual and emo tional sensitivity, a leader whose high intentions were consistently thwarted by temperamental and ideological weaknesses that he was unable to confront and overcome.
The pattern of his next seventeen years as Prime Minister has already been set — the gap between theory and practice, between inten tion and achievement, will continue to be blurred by the evasive and misleading rhetoric of self-justification. Even if one cannot agree with Gopal's view of his subject, his careful scholarship and perceptive handling of fresh material merit eager anticipation of the next volume.
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