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‘Years ago we made a tryst with destiny.’ When Jawaharlal Nehru uttered that memorable sentence on the midnight of 14-15 August, it was evident that the pronoun ‘we’ did not include Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi made both his sadness and disapproval evident by not being present in Delhi during the celebrations on 15 August 1947. He stayed in Beliaghata in east Calcutta, declaring the day to be one for fasting and prayer. The Father of the Nation made his point by being absent at the birth of the nation. His absence was perhaps felt most sharply by Jawaharlal, his closest disciple and chosen heir.
Their relationship had been very close but not always smooth. There had been too many differences, the one on Partition being the last. Within five and a half months of India gaining independence, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic. On getting the news of the murder, Jawaharlal had rushed to Birla House where seeing Gandhi’s lifeless body he sobbed like a child.1 The differences had never obliterated the personal bond. That evening when he coined another undying sentence, ‘The light has gone out of our lives’, he was only too conscious that the light had gone out from his own life.
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| Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru Addressing a Press Conference standing in front of a portrait of the late Mahatma Gandhi, in India House, London. |
It was certainly not love at first sight when Jawaharlal first met Gandhi around the time of the Congress session in Lucknow in the winter of 1916. Gandhi had returned to India from South Africa in 1915 and made an entry into Indian politics. Even as he found Gandhi to be different from other political leaders but, to young Jawaharlal, he also appeared distant and unpolitical.2 There is no record of Gandhi’s reaction to this meeting, if at all he had any. This absence of any reaction may have been related to Jawaharlal’s attitudes.
In this phase of his life Jawaharlal was contemptuous of the Indian National Congress. He had gone to the 1912 Congress session held at Bankipore and found it ‘very much an English-knowing upper class affair where morning coats and well pressed trousers were greatly in evidence. Essentially it was a social gathering with no political excitement or tension.’3 This ambience of the Congress was poised to change under the influence of Gandhi. Jawaharlal recorded how Gandhi’s ‘adventures and victory in Champaran on behalf of the tenants of the planters filled us with enthusiasm.’4 Even this enthusiasm has to be read in the context of Jawaharlal’s use of the word ‘adventures’; he was not willing to see the satyagraha in Champaran as a full-blown protest with enduring implications.
This attitude too changed dramatically when Gandhi launched the Rowlatt Satyagraha in 1919. Jawaharlal, in his own words, was ‘afire with enthusiasm’ because he saw in the movement ‘a way out of the tangle, a method of action which was straight and open and possibly effective.’5 He wanted to join the protests immediately. He wrote later, ‘I hardly thought of the consequences – law-breaking, gaol-going, etc – and if I thought of them I did not care.’ His father, however, was not as enthusiastic, and he seems to have persuaded Gandhi to dissuade Jawaharlal from joining the movement which would likely lead the latter to jail. If one were to go by Jawaharlal’s autobiography, this was his first important encounter with Gandhi and he was not happy with the outcome since Gandhi advised him ‘not to precipitate matters or to do anything which might upset father.’ So his father and the future father figure tempered Jawaharlal’s enthusiasm to jump into the nationalist movement. Jawaharlal yielded to Gandhi’s advice in spite of his own feelings. It was the first piece in what would emerge as a pattern. The words ‘future father figure’ is used deliberately since in the very first letter Jawaharlal wrote to Gandhi on 12 March 1924 – the first in a correspondence that lasted till Gandhi’s death – he addressed Gandhi as ‘My dear Bapuji’ and signed off ‘Yours affectionately’. There were no formalities and the ties of affection were apparent.
These ties were the outcome of Jawaharlal’s immersion in the non-cooperation movement that Gandhi launched in 1920. In his autobiography he recalls how he had become ‘wholly absorbed in the movement ...[giving] up all my other associations and contacts, old friends, books, even newspapers... In spite of the strength of my family bonds, I almost forgot my family, my wife, my daughter.’6 He wrote that working for the non-cooperation movement in 1921 under Gandhi’s leadership was like living through ‘a kind of intoxication’. There was ‘excitement and optimism and a buoyant enthusiasm.’7
All this notwithstanding, he had his doubts. He was worried about the emergence of religious feelings in Indian politics, both among Hindus and Muslims. This he felt obfuscated thought. He often found himself out of tune with some of Gandhi’s phrases, especially his frequent references to Ram Rajya as a golden age that would return. He admitted to himself that Gandhi’s language was difficult to comprehend for the average modern person. But he was convinced that Gandhi was ‘a great and unique man and a glorious leader.’ Consequently, he was willing to write for Gandhi ‘an almost blank cheque for the time being at least.’8 Jawaharlal’s allegiance to Gandhi and his doctrine of non-violence was, at this stage of his life, almost unqualified but not without doubts and queries.
If Jawaharlal had his doubts about Gandhi’s message, the latter used his influence to rein in Jawaharlal’s growing radicalism. This radicalism was leavened by what Jawaharlal had seen in Europe during his visit in 1926. He was already leaning towards socialism. Jawaharlal noted this transformation: ‘My outlook was wider, and nationalism by itself seemed to me definitely a narrow and insufficient creed. Political freedom, independence, were no doubt essential, but they were steps only in the right direction; without social freedom and a socialistic structure of society and the State, neither the country nor the individual could develop much.’9
In keeping with this new found radicalism, Jawaharlal felt that the Congress should commit itself to the goal of independence. In the Congress session in Madras in 1927, he had a resolution passed that declared ‘the goal of the Indian people to be complete independence.’10 Regarding the resolution, Gandhi commented in Young India that, ‘We [the Congress] have almost sunk to the level of the schoolboys’ debating society’ and described the resolution demanding independence to be a ‘tragedy’; he also condemned the resolution as being ‘hastily conceived’ and ‘thoughtlessly passed’.11 Gandhi warned Jawaharlal, ‘You are going too fast. You should have taken time to think. Most of the resolutions you framed and got carried could have been delayed for one year.’12
Jawaharlal resented these comments from Gandhi and in his reply he was very forthright: ‘It passes my comprehension how a national organization can have as its ideal and goal Dominion Status. The very idea suffocates and strangles me.’13 Jawaharlal used the occasion to express to Gandhi for the first time his fundamental differences with some of Gandhi’s views and opinions. He wrote that while he admired Gandhi and believed in him as ‘a leader who can lead this country to victory and freedom’, he ‘hardly agreed with anything that some of your previous publications – Indian Home Rule, etc – contained. I felt and feel that you were and are infinitely greater than your little books... And I felt instinctively that however much I may disagree with you, your great personality and your possession of these qualities [‘action and daring and courage’] would carry us to our goal.’
Jawaharlal told Gandhi that ‘during the non-cooperation period you were supreme’ but also noted that since coming out of prison, Gandhi had changed and had been ‘very obviously ill at ease.’ Jawaharlal, like many others, had been bewildered by this and Gandhi’s proneness to change his attitudes at short notice. Jawaharlal went on to express his reservations about Gandhi’s emphasis on khadi. He wrote, ‘I do not see how freedom is coming in its [khadi’s] train.’ Gandhi, according to Jawaharlal, offered no way forward but only criticized.
In this letter Jawaharlal moved on to spell out his deeper differences with Gandhi. ‘Reading many of your articles in Young India – your autobiography etc – I have often felt how very different my ideals were from yours. And I have felt that you were very hasty in your judgements, or rather having arrived at certain conclusions you were over eager to justify them by any scrap of evidence you might get... You misjudge greatly I think the civilization of the West and attach too great an importance to its many failings. You have stated somewhere that India has nothing to learn from the West and that she has reached a pinnacle of wisdom in the past. I entirely disagree with this viewpoint and I neither think that the so-called Rama Raj was very good in the past, nor do I want it back. I think the western or industrial civilization is bound to conquer India, maybe with many changes and adaptations, but nonetheless in the main based on industrialism. You have criticized strongly the many obvious defects of industrialism and hardly paid any attention to its merits. Everyone knows these defects... It is the opinion of most thinkers in the West that these defects are not due to industrialism as such but to the capitalist system which is based on the exploitation of others. I believe you have stated that in your opinion there is no necessary conflict between Capital and Labour. I think that under the capitalist system this conflict is unavoidable.’14
Gandhi did not directly address the issues raised by Jawaharlal. Instead he was relieved that the latter had been released from ‘self-suppression’ and had been able to articulate his differences. He added: ‘I see quite clearly that you must carry on open warfare against me and my views... The differences between you and me appear so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us. I can’t conceal from you my grief that I should lose a comrade so valiant, so faithful, so able and so honest as you have always been...’ But he hoped that in spite of ‘grave political differences’ Jawaharlal and he would continue their personal intimacy.15 Jawaharlal was pained by this response from Gandhi and he confessed that he had not ‘thought of the possibility of any warfare between you and me.’ He told Gandhi, ‘No one has moved me and inspired me more than you and I can never forget your exceeding kindness to me.’ And proceeded to ask him, ‘Am I not your child in politics, though perhaps a truant and errant child?’16
Unwittingly, Jawaharlal had taken the first steps towards setting a pattern for the future regarding his own relationship with Gandhi. Time and again Jawaharlal would express in clear terms his differences with Gandhi – on occasions such expressions would border on defiance or even rebellion – but would pull back remembering his ties of affection with Gandhi and his recognition of the unique position that Gandhi enjoyed in the Indian national movement. As Subhas Bose once correctly noted, ‘His [Jawaharlal’s] head pulls one way and his heart in another direction. His heart is with Gandhi.’17 Gandhi, in his turn, was patient with Jawaharlal’s periodic outbursts. He was fond of Jawaharlal and recognized and valued the latter’s dependence on him especially after the death of Motilal Nehru. At the end of 1946, Gandhi wrote to Jawaharlal, ‘I claim to be like a wise father to you, having no less love towards you than Motilalji.’ He described Jawaharlal’s affection for him to be ‘extraordinary and so natural!’18
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| Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, at Sevagram a village in Maharashtra |
The twin pulls of difference and dependence surfaced most poignantly in Jawaharlal’s reactions in the aftermath of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, Gandhi’s fast and the withdrawal of civil disobedience movement. In his autobiography, Jawaharlal recalled his mood of disillusionment and resignation when he learnt of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in March 1931. He remembered how on that March night he had asked himself, ‘Was it for this that our people had behaved so gallantly for a year? Were all our brave words and deeds to end in this?’ And he summed up his mood with the famous lines from T.S. Eliot: ‘This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang, but a whimper.’19
He took his feelings to Gandhi the day after the pact had been signed and found Gandhi’s justification of the pact ‘to be a forced one, and I was not convinced, but I was somewhat soothed by his talk.’20 But all his reservations evaporated when he heard in prison that in January 1932 Gandhi had begun a fast unto death to protest against Ramsay MacDonald’s proposal to have separate electorates for the ‘Depressed Classes’. He recorded in his prison diary, ‘I cried and wept.’ He was distraught that Gandhi had chosen a side issue for ‘his final sacrifice’21 and was confused about what this meant for the freedom movement.
These political considerations were, however, set aside by his sense of personal loss. To his daughter, Indira, he wrote, ‘I am shaken up completely and I know not what to do. News has come, terrible news, that Bapu has determined to starve himself to death. My little world in which he has occupied such a big place shakes and totters, and there seems to be darkness and emptiness everywhere... Shall I not see him again? And whom shall I go to when I am in doubt and require wise counsel, or am afflicted and in sorrow and need loving comfort.’22 Overcoming his personal feelings, Jawaharlal sent a telegram expressing his agony to Gandhi, but ended it with the words, ‘How can I presume to advise a magician.’23 By using the word ‘magician’, Jawaharlal was perhaps admitting that Gandhi had that rare gift of feeling the mood of the people and leading them in a campaign.
Similar sentiments of despair and disappointment overwhelmed him when in prison in 1933, he heard that Gandhi had withdrawn the civil disobedience movement. He experienced an inner emptiness and felt frightened by Gandhi’s statement that Congressmen should turn to social work. ‘A vast distance’, he wrote, ‘seemed to separate him [Gandhi] from me. With a stab of pain I felt that the chords of allegiance that had bound me to him for many years had snapped.’24 About a month after Gandhi began his self-purificatory fast on 8 May 1933, Jawaharlal noted in his prison diary, ‘As I watched the emotional upheaval during the fast I wondered more and more if this was the right method in politics. It is sheer revivalism and clear thinking has not a ghost of a chance against it...I am afraid I am drifting further and further away from him mentally, in spite of my strong emotional attachment to him.’25 A month later, his noting in his diary was more definitive: ‘I am getting more and more certain that there can be no further political cooperation between Bapu and me. At least not of the kind that has existed. We had better go our different ways.’26
The break never came and the first diary entry quoted above provides a clue to understanding why it never happened. Jawaharlal wrote about his ‘strong emotional attachment’ to Gandhi. That this was reciprocated is revealed by the letter Gandhi wrote to Jawaharlal as he commenced his fast: ‘As I was struggling against the coming fast, you were before me as it were in flesh and blood... How I wish I could feel that you had understood the absolute necessity of it. The Harijan movement is too big for mere intellectual effort. There is nothing so bad in all the world. And yet I cannot leave religion and therefore Hinduism. My religion would be a burden to me, if Hinduism failed me. I love Christianity, Islam and many other faiths through Hinduism. Take it away and nothing remains for me. But then I cannot tolerate it with untouchability... But I won’t convince you by argument, if you did not see the truth intuitively. I know that even if I do not carry your approval with me, I shall retain your precious love during all those days of ordeal.’27
Jawaharlal was deeply touched by this letter and described it as a ‘typical cry from the heart’ and responded to it thus by telegram: ‘What can I say about matters I do not understand. I feel lost in a strange country where you are the only familiar landmark and I try to grope my way in dark but I stumble.’28 Gandhi was Jawaharlal’s personal anchor.
These expressions of difference remained the subject of discussion and debate between Jawaharlal and Gandhi. But it was not in the nature of either individual to keep such fundamental differences only in the private domain. Jawaharlal stated his position in his autobiography when he wrote that he considered Gandhi’s views as presented in Hind Swaraj to be an ‘utterly wrong and harmful doctrine, and impossible of achievement... This desire to get away from the mind of man to primitive conditions where mind does not count, seems to me quite incomprehensible. The very thing that is the glory and triumph of man is decried and discouraged, and a physical environment which will oppress the mind and prevent its growth is considered desirable. Present-day civilization is full of evils, but it is also full of good: and it has the capacity in it to rid itself of those evils. To destroy it root and branch is to remove that capacity from it and revert to a dull, sunless and miserable existence.’29
Gandhi never resented the expression of these differences; neither did these expressions prevent him from declaring on 15 January 1942 that Jawaharlal was his chosen heir. On that day at the AICC session in Wardha, Gandhi said, ‘Somebody suggested that Pandit Jawaharlal and I were estranged. It will require much more than differences of opinion to estrange us. We have had differences from the moment we became co-workers, yet I have said for some years and say it now that not Rajaji, nor Sardar Vallabhbhai, but Jawaharlal will be my successor. You cannot divide water by repeatedly striking it with a stick. It is just as difficult to divide us... when I am gone, he will speak my language.’30 The reasons that influenced the choice is revealed in what Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Jawaharlal on 3 July 1939: ‘I don’t think that he loves anybody more than he loves you and when he finds that any action of his has made you unhappy he broods over it and feels miserable.’31
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| Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru watches the cremation of Mahatma Gandhi |
FOOTNOTES:
1. S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Vol 2. Jonathan Cape, London, 1979, p. 25.
2. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography. The Bodley Head, London, 1936, p. 35.
3. Ibid., p. 27.
4. Ibid., p. 35.
5. Ibid., p. 41.
6. Ibid., p. 77.
7. Ibid., p. 69.
8. Ibid., pp. 72-3.
9. Ibid., p. 166.
10. S. Gopal (ed.), The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol 3. Orient Longman, Delhi, 1972, p. 5.
11. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 35, p. 456 and 438.
12. Uma Iyengar and Lalitha Zackariah (eds.), Together They Fought: Gandhi-Nehru Correspondence, 1921-1948. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011, p. 44.
13. Ibid., p. 48.
14. Ibid., pp. 50-52.
15. Ibid., p. 56.
16. Ibid., pp. 57-58.
17. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Nehru and Bose: Parallel Lives. Viking, New Delhi, 2014, p. 105.
18. Together They Fought, p. 471.
19. Nehru, Autobiography, p. 259.
20. Ibid., p. 260.
21. Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 407-8.
22. Nehru, Glimpses of World History. Delhi, 2004 (repr.), p. 379.
23. Together They Fought, p. 168.
24. Nehru, Autobiography, p. 506.
25. Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 5, p. 478.
26. Ibid., p. 489.
27. Together They Fought, p. 180.
28. Ibid., p. 181.
29. Nehru, Autobiography, pp. 510-11.
30. Collected Works of Gandhi, Vol. 75, p. 224.
31. Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Vol. 81.
By Rudrangshu Mukherjee, eminent historian and Chancellor of Ashoka University.