Nehru’s Letters to His Chief Ministers
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
India’s first prime minister, Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, in his autobiography written in prison and first published in 1936, related the story of his childhood while growing up in Allahabad. Whenever he felt miserable or downcast he sought refuge and comfort in the arms of one of the two people he trusted. The first was his mother, a very gentle, traditional Indian lady, and the other his father’s clerk, Munshi Mubarak Ali, who came from a respectable family in Budaun, UP. Mubarak Ali who with his long, white beard looked like a person from ancient times to the child’s eye, was able to pacify and entertain him by telling riveting stories from Arabian nights.
Growing up in a family that had easy interactions with people from different faiths and ethnicities and having forefathers who were scholars of Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian made a lasting impression on young Nehru’s mind. He developed a broad, syncreatic outlook at a young age. Nehru’s education at Harrow and Cambridge University also influenced his thinking, while European writers and philosophers, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, exponents of the liberal, humanist philosophies, helped shape his ideas.
As its first prime minister, his vision for India was a modern, secular nation state. He became a figure of international stature, one of the leaders of the non-alligned movement at the height of the Cold War. India benefitted by Nehru’s global standing, enabling the country to play a role on the world stage above and beyond its modest economic or military might. Domestically, he planted the seeds of parliamentary democracy and lived long enough to see it take firm roots.
Nehru authored several books before independence; the most popular was the Discovery of India (1946), written during his incarceration at the Ahmednagar Fort. However, he left no written account of the time he served as the chief executive of the country. It has been a singular failing of the founding fathers of both India and Pakistan, the giants of their era, that none found time to tell the story from their perspective, as politicians commonly do these days. Such narrative would have been a treasure trove for future historians as many important details of that turbulent era they lived through will now never be known. Importantly, the ongoing debates in Pakistan, for example, about Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah’s vision of the future character of the Pakistani state might not have started.
Although Nehru did not write any books after independence, we have a window into his thinking through letters he left behind. Early on in his tenure as the prime minister, he adopted the practice of writing fortnightly letters to the chief ministers of the Indian states reviewing the contemporaneous developments, both within and outside India, and proffering his own analyses. He religiously followed this practice until just a few months before his death. These letters exceeding four hundred in numbers compiled in three volumes and organized in chronological order were first published some thirty years ago. They, however, have long been out of print and inaccessible to public. Now, a new collection of letters, Letters for a Nation, their contents judiciously selected and edited by Madhav Khosla, has been published on the late prime minister’s 125th birth anniversary. The book covers the period from 1947 to 1963, as Nehru did not write during the few months of 1964 while he was terminally ill.
The letters offer no bombshells or titillating revelations, nor are there any personal or derogatory comments about those who worked with him. Unlike the previous version, the current collection has been organized according to a broad array of subjects, such as The Citizen and the Nation, The Institutions of Democracy and War and Peace. While the new organization makes it easy to follow Nehru’s thought related to specific issues, it makes it difficult to appreciate his thinking as it evolved over time.
Nehru was fiercely loyal to his friends and had special affection for Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, a family friend and an influential nationalist leader, who served in his cabinet. On his death in October 1954, he wrote, “The death of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai has been a great blow.” Highlighting his generosity, Nehru remarked, “He (Kidwai) helped innumerable people, but for himself he did little. The land he possessed, he gave away to his tenants. His house in his village in Masauli , continued to be a dilapidated structure, in some parts even lacking a roof. He had no time or money to look after it.”
Perhaps Nehru’s greatest disappointment during his time in office emanated from India’s humiliating defeat in the October 1962 conflict with China. It is said that he never recovered from the trauma and was constantly troubled by his share in framing the failed China policy. In his letter written on December 22, 1962, he sought to rationalize India’s defeat, attributing it to high-altitude warfare to which the Indian army was unaccustomed and the lack of land routes to supply the army with ammunition and other needs. He asserted that “China has repudiated the doctrine of peaceful coexistence. It believes in the inevitability of war and does not want the tensions in the world to lessen.” Clearly, viewed in hindsight, Nehru’s assessment, colored with the proximity in time of the Sino-Indian war, was greatly mistaken. China has not initiated any major conflicts.
Unfortunately, Nehru failed to resolve the contentious issue of Kashmir that has bedeviled the relations of India and Pakistan for over half a century. All his objectivity and foresight notwithstanding, he could not accept the dissonance of his arguments about the Kashmir dispute. Having promised a plebiscite to determine the fate of the princely state, he attempted to find various excuses not to honor it, perhaps fearing that the verdict would go against India. In a letter dated February 1948, he bemoaned about the attitude of the great powers, especially Britain and the US, whom he saw as favoring Pakistan in the Security Council. The specter of an Indo-Pakistan war, however, was unacceptable to him. He held the view that “we may do a great deal of injury to Pakistan and might defeat it in a war. But both countries will in effect be ruined.” Significantly, there was no war between the two countries as long as he lived.
Nehru was known for his visceral distaste of communal politics. In a letter dated 16th August 1948, he lamented that “The Hindu Mahasabha intends to embark again into politics. That is to say that Government or Government officers should have no dealings with the Hindu Mahasabha as such or any other body that is obviously communal, whatever different garb it may wear.” In another letter, he excoriated the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), equating it with the “type of organizations that grew up in various parts of Europe in support of fascism.”
Nehru’s personality was so towering that while he lived no effective opposition, especially that based on sectarianism or religious exclusion, could flourish. But much has changed in India recently. If he were to return today, the founding prime minister of India would hardly recognize the political contours of the land he loved, not so much because of all the progress it has made, but rather because of the ascendency of communal, religion-based politics and the growth of parochial ideologies that were anathema to him.
