Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (93 page)

Nehru drifted into politics in the wake of Gandhi’s campaign, and in 1929 the Mahatma made him Congress president. He dabbled in peasant life: ‘I have had the privilege of working for them, of mixing with them, of living in their mud-huts and partaking in all reverence of their lowly fare’, as he put it. He was in gaol for agitation at the same time as Hitler’s spell in Landsberg: it will be a new experience, and in this blasé world it is something to have a new experience.’ India, he thought, might be saved by ‘a course of study of Bertrand Russell’s books’. In many ways he was a Bloomsbury figure, a politicized Lytton Strachey, transplanted to an exotic clime. ‘An intellectual of the intellectuals’, wrote Leonard Woolf. ‘The last
word in aristocratic refinement and culture dedicated to the salvation of the underdog’, enthused Mrs Webb.
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He swallowed the European Left pharmacopoeia whole, enthusing for Republican Spain, accepting Stalin’s show-trials at their face-value, an Appeaser and a unilateral disarmer. He spent most of the war in gaol, following a putative revolt in 1942 which received very little support, and thus acquired an extensive knowledge of Indian penology. But of the process of wealth-creation and administration, by which 400 million people were fed and governed, he knew nothing, Until the end of the 1940s he seems to have thought that India was underpopulated.
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Almost until the last minute he refused to believe – because he knew so little about the real India – that if the British Raj handed over power to Congress the Muslims would demand a separate state. Even more astounding was his view that violent sectarianism, which had been endemic before the nineteenth century and had begun again only after the Gandhi movement and Amritsar, had been essentially created by British rule. He told Jacques Marcuse in 1946: ‘When the British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India.’
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In fact the post-war Indian elections, in which the Muslim League captured virtually all the seats reserved for Muslims with its programme of partition, indicated that division was inevitable and large-scale violence probable. The transfer of power has been presented as a skilful exercise in Anglo—Indian statesmanship. The reality is that the British government simply lost control. Lord Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy on 20 February 1947, with the British economy on the verge of collapse, and told to do what he liked
(’carte blanche’
as he told the King) provided he stuck to the June 1948 deadline for independence.
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The massacres had begun even before he reached India. Churchill took the view that ‘a fourteen-month time interval is fatal to an orderly transfer of power’ since it gave extremists on both sides time to organize. Lord Wavell, the previous Viceroy, felt Britain should hand over a united country, leaving it to the Indians themselves to divide it if they wished. General Sir Francis Tuker, who had prepared a contingency plan for division, judged that partition was inevitable if the transfer was rushed. Mountbatten rushed the transfer. He made a decision in favour of partition within a fortnight of his arrival. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who headed the boundary commission, had to make the awards alone as the Hindu and Muslim members were too terrified to make independent decisions.

The result was like the break-up of the Habsburg Empire in 1918–19: the unifying principle was removed and the result created more problems than it solved. The princes were abandoned. The minority sects and clans were simply forgotten. The untouchables
were ignored. All the real difficulties – the Punjab, Bengal, Kashmir, the North-West Frontier, Sind, British Baluchistan – were left to resolve themselves. Mountbatten had a genius for public relations and kept up a brave front. But the transfer and partition were catastrophic shambles, an ignominious end to two centuries of highly successful rule based on bluff. Some 5 to 6 million people ran for their lives in each direction. A procession of terrified Hindus and Sikhs, for instance, stretched for fifty-seven miles from the West Punjab. The boundary force of 23,000 was too weak and some of its troops may have joined the killing themselves.
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The carnage reached even into Lutyens’s incomparable palace, for many of Lady Mount-batten’s Muslim staff were murdered; she helped to move their corpses into the mortuary. Gandhi, who had made it all possible, confessed to her: ‘Such a happening is unparalleled in the history of the world and it makes me hang my head in shame.’
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Nehru, who had seen liberated Indians as so many Bloomsberries, now admitted to Lady Ismay: ‘People have lost their reason completely and are behaving worse than brutes.’
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Gandhi was among the victims, murdered in January 1948 by one of the fanatics whose hour had come. How many went with him will never be known. Estimates of the dead at the time ranged from 1 to 2 million. More modern calculations are in the 200,000 to 600,000 range.
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But there has been a general desire to minimize and forget the event for fear of repeating it. In the anarchy, other great injustices took place. In Kashmir, Nehru’s home state, he used troops to enforce Indian rule, despite the fact that most Kashmiris were Muslims, on the grounds that the ruler was a Hindu: the Muslims there were ‘barbarians’. In Hyderabad, where the majority were Hindus and the ruler a Muslim, he reversed the principle and again used troops on the grounds that ‘madmen are in charge of Hyderabad’s destinies’.
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Thus Kashmir, the most beautiful province of India, was itself partitioned and remains so more than thirty years later; and the ground was prepared for two wars between India and Pakistan.

Nehru ruled India for seventeen years and founded a parliamentary dynasty. He was a popular ruler, though not an effective one. He did his best to make India’s parliament, the Lok Sabha, work and spent much time there. But he was too autocratic to allow cabinet government to flourish: his rule was a one-man show – ‘I think my leaving might well be in the nature of a disaster’, he admitted complacently.
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The view was generally shared abroad: ‘The greatest figure in Asia’, wrote Walter Lippmann. ‘If he did not exist,’ said Dean Acheson, ‘he would have to be invented.’ ‘A world titan’, pronounced the
Christian Science Monitor.
‘Mr Nehru, without
boasting, may say that Delhi is the School of Asia’, echoed the
Guardian.
Adlai Stevenson thought him one of the few men entitled ‘to wear a halo in their own lifetimes’.
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Privately Nehru came to doubt it all. ‘It is terrible to think that we may be losing all our values and sinking into the sordidness of opportunist polities’, he wrote in 1948. He put through a land reform but it benefited only a few richer peasants and did nothing for agricultural productivity. As for planning, he thought it would ‘change the picture of the country so completely that the world will be amazed’. But nothing much happened. In 1953 he confessed that on economics ‘I am completely out of touch’. At one time he liked to open a dam or two; later his interest waned. In general: ‘We function more and more as the old British government did,’ he wrote to Governor-General Rajagopalachari, ‘only with less efficiency.’
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Nehru did not seem to know how to rule. He spent four to five hours every day just dictating to as many as eight typists answers to the 2,000 letters which Indians with grievances wrote daily to his office.
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What Nehru really enjoyed was holding forth about international morality on the world stage. In the 1950s he became the leading exponent of the higher humbug. At home he practised acquisitiveness. In 1952 he subdued the Naga tribesmen by using the army (though he vetoed machine-gunning them from the air). When the Portuguese Goans obstinately refused to rise and unite themselves with India, he sent in ‘volunteers’ and liberated them by force. Abroad, however, he denounced ‘imperialism’, at any rate when practised by the West. He thought that their behaviour in Korea showed the Americans to be ‘more hysterical as a people than almost any others, except perhaps the Bengalis’ (who continued to massacre each other into the 1950s). The Anglo—French operations against Egypt in 1956 were ‘a reversal of history which none of us can tolerate’, ‘I cannot imagine a worse case of aggression.’
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But for the Communist world he adopted a quite different standard. To the end, his bible on Russia remained the Webbs’ mendacious volumes: ‘the great work’, as he termed it. Visiting the country in 1955 he found the people ‘happy and cheerful … well fed’. He thought civil liberty was not missed. There was a ‘general impression’ of ‘contentment’, with everyone ‘occupied and busy’; and ‘if there are complaints they are about relatively minor matters’.
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He never showed the slightest interest in Soviet colonialism or even recognized that it existed. When Sir John Kotelawala, Prime Minister of Ceylon, criticized the Soviet system of puppet-states in Eastern Europe, Nehru turned on him furiously. He refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, pleading ‘lack of information’, and contented his conscience with a tiny private complaint.
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Of course there was nothing Nehru could do about Hungary. But he might have saved Tibet from invasion and
absorption by China, whose claims were purely imperialistic. Many Indians wanted him to take action but he did nothing. He thought the aggression had to be understood in terms of ‘Chinese psychology’ with its ‘background of prolonged suffering’.
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He did not explain why the suffering Chinese needed to take it out on the helpless Tibetans, whose ancient society was smashed like a matchbox and whose people were hustled off into central China, being replaced by Chinese ‘settlers’. The arguments Nehru used to defend China were identical with those used on Hitler’s behalf in the mid-1930s: Nehru was not only the last of the Viceroys, he was also the last of the Appeasers.

At the time Nehru was anxious to act as impresario and introduce the new China to the international community. He basked in Chou En-lai’s oily flattery (’Your Excellency has more knowledge of the world and Asia than I have’). He hero-worshipped the virile and militaristic Mao, and was quite taken by his fierce and sinister neighbour, Ho Chi Minh (’Fine, frank face, gentle and benign’). In China, he was ‘amazed’ by the ‘tremendous emotional response from the Chinese people’ to his visit.
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It does not seem to have occurred to him that China and India had fundamental conflicts of interest and that in building up Chinese prestige he was knotting an almighty scourge. The first punishment came in 1959 when the Chinese, having got everything they needed out of the Pandit, started to rectify their Himalayan frontier and build military roads. Nehru was hoist with his own petard of respecting China’s ‘rights’ in Tibet. The big crisis came in 1962 when the harassed Nehru, misled by the overconfidence of his own generals, blundered into war and was badly beaten. He was then driven to the humiliation of asking for immediate American aid, for in his panic he feared a Chinese paratroop drop on Calcutta. So the ‘neo-colonialist’ C130s were provided by Washington, and the ‘imperialist’ Seventh Fleet moved to his succour up the Bay of Bengal. Then, mysteriously, the Chinese steamroller halted and Nehru, mopping his anxious brow, was glad to take US advice and accept a ceasefire.
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But by then he was an old man who had ceased to count much.

Up to the mid-1950s, however, he was the cynosure of a new entity which progressive French journalists were already terming
le tiers monde.
The concept was based upon verbal prestidigitation, the supposition that by inventing new words and phrases one could change (and improve) unwelcome and intractable facts. There was the first world of the West, with its rapacious capitalism; the second world of totalitarian socialism, with its slave-camps; both with their hideous arsenals of mass-destruction. Why should there not come into existence a third world, arising like a phoenix from the ashes of
empire, free, pacific, non-aligned, industrious, purged of capitalist and Stalinist vice, radiant with public virtue, today saving itself by its exertions, tomorrow the world by its example? Just as, in the nineteenth century, idealists had seen the oppressed proletariat as the repository of moral excellence – and a prospective proletarian state as Utopia – so now the very fact of a colonial past, and a non-white skin, were seen as title-deeds to international esteem. An ex-colonial state was righteous by definition. A gathering of such states would be a senate of wisdom.

The concept was made flesh at the Afro—Asian Conference held 18–24 April 1955 in Bandung, at the instigation of Indonesia’s President Sukarno. Some twenty-three independent states from Asia and four from Africa were present, plus the Gold Coast and the Sudan, both soon to be free. The occasion was the apogee of Nehru’s world celebrity and he chose it as a brilliant opportunity to introduce Chou En-lai to the world. But the many other stars included U Nu of Burma, Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, Mohammed Ali of Pakistan, Kwame Nkrumah, Africa’s first black president-to-be, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, the black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
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It was calculated that 1,700 secret police were in attendance. Some of those present were subsequently to plot to murder each other; others to end their lives in gaol, disgrace or exile. But at the time the Third World had not yet publicly besmirched itself by invasions, annexations, massacres and dictatorial cruelty. It was still in the age of innocence when it was confidently believed that the abstract power of numbers, and still more of words, would transform the world. This is the first inter-continental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind’, said Sukarno in his opening oration. ‘Sisters and brothers! How terrifically dynamic is our time! … Nations and states have awoken from a sleep of centuries!’ The old age of the white man, which had ravaged the planet with its wars, was dying; a better one was dawning, which would dissolve the Cold War and introduce a new multi-racial, multi-religious brotherhood, for ‘All great religions are one in their message of tolerance.’ The coloured races would introduce the new morality: ‘We, the people of Asia and Africa … far more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilize what I have called the
Moral Violence of Nations
in favour of peace.’
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After this striking phrase, a Lucullan feast of oratory followed. Among those overwhelmed by it all was the black American writer Richard Wright: ‘This is the human race speaking’, he wrote.
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