Nehru: The Lotus Eater From Kashmir
by D.F. Karaka
1953
In Greek mythology the lotus-eaters (Greek: λωτοφάγοι), were a race of people living on an island dominated by the Lotus tree, a plant whose botanical identity (if based on a real plant at all) is uncertain. The lotus fruits and flowers were the primary food of the island and were a narcotic, causing the inhabitants to sleep in peaceful apathy. Figuratively, 'lotus-eater' denotes "a person who spends their time indulging in pleasure and luxury rather than dealing with practical concerns".
-- Lotus-eaters, by Wikipedia
To Pita Without Any Fanfare of Trumpets
Table of Contents:
1. Paris Episode
2. Heritage
3. Two Ornamental Pillars
4. ‘Liberation’
5. Manpower
6. Intolerance
7. Spotting Genius
8. The Promised Food
9. The Emperor Himself
10. The Oracle of Delhi
11. In Mountbatten’s Jeep
12. Big Talk
13. Spellbound
14. Imperious
15. The Glamour is Gone
I. PARIS EPISODE
In June of 1952 I was in Paris. At the house of Andre Leleu, the interior decorator, I met an old carpenter, seventy years of age. In his free Bohemian way, Leleu often asked one of his workmen to stay on and share his lunch.
The carpenter was a rigidly orthodox Frenchman, with light blue eyes and an almost transparent complexion. His snow-white hair, well brushed, was carefully parted at the side. His suit, though ancient, was tidily worn. His powder-blue shirt was neatly buttoned up at the collar, but he apparently thought it pointless to wear a tie.
Leleu, who was always stressing ‘basic values’, said this was the ‘real France’. In turn, he told Monsieur Letzichez that I was from India.
'Ah oui,' the carpenter registered, without being unduly impressed.
‘You know about India, ne c'est pas? Leleu went on to drive the point home and also to make Monsieur Letzichez’s dormant reflexes spring to attention. And Monsieur Letzichez oui-oui-ed a few more times.
The ‘real France’ was not responding so well on this occasion, but Leleu was not giving up. With prodding, he was confident Monsieur Letzichez would produce some intelligent observation on my country. Leleu asked him if he knew of Gandhi.
'Mais oui' the carpenter replied with an of-courseness which ruled out any further questioning. Everyone knew Gandhi. ‘Gandhi was a great man,’ he volunteered, but qualified the remark by adding ‘for his country’.
‘For his country?’ Leleu asked, a little surprised.
Monsieur Letzichez repeated himself: ‘Gandhi was a great man -- for his country.’
‘Why only for his country?’ Leleu asked.
Monsieur Letzichez said Gandhi was for his country; and he was great. When he died, it was a great loss -- ‘for his country’.
By now Leleu was not clear, nor was I, what was the particular significance of this phrase ‘for his country’. ‘Would you say he was as great as Churchill was par example -- for his country?’ Leleu asked, in order to clarify the situation and ascertain comparative values.
Monsieur Letzichez said the two were different: Churchill was a politician; Gandhi, he explained, was ‘more religious’.
There was a pause and I chipped in to ask: ‘And what do you think of Nehru?’
The expression on Monsieur Letzichez’s face turned completely blank, as if I was asking him about some obscure Asiatic. ‘Neyrue?’ he said, then, shaking his head, added: ‘Je ne le connais pas.'
He had never heard of the man.
That’s how this book began.
2. HERITAGE
I am no iconoclast. I am just one of the disillusioned. There is a whole generation in India like me, whom Jawaharlal Nehru has let down. We are too old to look for a new hero to worship, but young enough to feel the sting of defeat.
We were the young men who whipped ourselves into a frenzy as our long struggle for freedom showed signs of ending and the goal came within sight. The British were leaving and we were on the threshold of a new life. The path to freedom was lit with our hopes and aspirations. Gandhi was our torch-bearer. Swaraj, that beautiful Indian word which connoted freedom, ‘home-rule’ and democracy rolled up in one, did not mean only the ousting of the British; it was to bring to us the component parts of that larger freedom to which all men of self-respect aspire: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religious belief, freedom of public meeting, freedom from want, fear and hunger.
In Gandhi we believed we had a man of the stature of Lenin, and in Nehru, who was his second-in-command, a democrat of the shape and tone of Abraham Lincoln. Then freedom came. Gandhi retired, leaving Jawaharlal Nehru to crystallise and express in words the pent-up feelings and emotions of the people he had led for a quarter of a century. As Jawaharlal said: ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.’ As we listened to these words on our little radio sets at home, we found in Nehru’s words an echo of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. ‘Freedom and power bring responsibility,’ he said. ‘The past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. That future is not one of ease or resting, but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken . . . The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye . . . Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster, in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments . . .’ I felt goose-flesh creeping over me that night, around the midnight hour. It was August 15th, 1947.
Not many months passed before Mahatma Gandhi disappeared from our midst. He fell at an assassin’s hand with the name of God on his lips. His ashes, symbolic of him, were strewn into our rivers. He had given us a new creed, a new faith, a new religion based on the two cardinal principles of truth and non-violence, and a new name by which we could now call ourselves. We were no longer a little part of a great Empire; we were an entity unto ourselves -- the Republic of India. That was the heritage Gandhi left us. As part of it, he left us his political heir, Jawaharlal Nehru.
***
I forget where I saw him first, but the picture still remains vivid in my mind of a handsome aristocrat with well-chiselled features, looking more like a Greek god than a Kashmiri Brahmin. He makes a terrific first impression.
Fate had been kind to this young man, who had had the advantage of being born into a well-to-do Indian home. His father, Motilal, was a wealthy Allahabad lawyer who had already made his mark in India, both in his profession and in politics, and who had gained admission into what may be called the Indian Cliveden set which grouped around the rebel, Gandhi.
Long before Jawaharlal returned from England, the elder Indian politicians had already reserved a place for him on the rostrum of the Indian National Congress. The young Jawahar, with his schooling at Harrow and his polished Cambridge manners, was obviously an asset to the group of khaddar-clad patriots, who struggled in their own way to be the articulate expression of a people’s desire for freedom. It was like throwing Hedy Lamarr into a village fair in order to attract the crowd.
Nehru was undoubtedly that attraction. He was the idol of the younger men. He fired their imagination. He attracted them to the struggle. Unconsciously he played the role of a recruiting officer to the ranks of the Congress, for, wherever he went in the name of the Congress, people flocked to him. Therefore, when he returned to India, Jawaharlal got easy entry into the inner circle of Indian nationals, and overnight he became a leader without having to go through the mill.
Nehru’s early contacts with the West and its political philosophies have left a permanent mark on him. If he cannot translate these philosophies into action, he still faithfully continues to pay lip-service to them. Nehru was never born of the masses and he will never be one of them, though circumstances have forced him to mix with large crowds of our people. Whenever I have seen him, through the years, he has always stood aloof from the crowd: an aristocrat by birth, a well-read, cultured and facile Kashmiri Pandit. Although he has assumed mass leadership, he is uncomfortable in his surroundings. He once seemed impatient with the mediocrity he found around him, but gradually this mediocrity has grown on him, and his resistance to it has worn down. He has always been known to lose his temper; in the initial stages it was only because he was impatient, but now it has become part of the mental make-up of the man. As he becomes more and more aware of his limitations, he tends to become nervous and, at times, even afraid. You can see he dislikes himself for having behaved in that manner, but that is his temperament -- hot-tempered, easily irritated, sometimes unbelievably intolerant.
Nehru once believed that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this is not the way things have worked out for him. Of late he has been seen going around in circles, like a dog trying to catch its tail, and getting increasingly annoyed at his inability to do so. Finally, we have seen him exhaust himself in the process and end up with delivering yet another sermon to the nation, pious, rambling, full of platitudes and good purpose, but achieving nothing in the process.
Non-violence, for instance, only came to him because of his blind and implicit faith in Gandhi. In the hectic days of our struggle he gave us the impression that he would have preferred to pick up a gun and fight his way out of the Bastille which was once India, and lead us to the open Elysian fields of freedom, rather than spend years in offering steady, solid moral resistance which was the essence of satyagraha. But as Gandhi never compromised on this fundamental issue, non-violence prevailed. Today, Nehru is left with the creed on his hands, unable to apply it at home, but content to preach it in the assemblies of the world, even with a world conflict looming on the horizon, and the power blocs rearming for action.
Power, as Nehru said, brought responsibility, and he who was for us an inspiration became overnight the symbol of government and the administration. In the eyes of thousands of Indians, however, the man he succeeded was not Mahatma Gandhi, but Lord Louis Mountbatten, from whom power was transferred. As responsibility weighed on him, the image of the democrat shattered under the strain. The splinters took odd shapes; one little piece resembled a demilitarised General Franco in a Gandhi cap and khaddar kurta,1 [1. Indian shirt of home-spun material.] and yet another shattered fragment was so like the ranting and verbose Ramsay MacDonald, whose latter-day public utterances indicated that he was gradually losing his grip on the problems with which he was faced. Something had always to look Oriental about Nehru, even a tiny piece of him, and as one picked up another broken piece, it bore a close resemblance to a flamboyant Chiang Kai-shek, who moved from the mainland of China to his retreat in Formosa, persisting in the belief that the West was still looking upon him to redeem the East. That is the level at which Pandit Nehru has steadied himself in five years of independence. Naturally, he is somewhat nettled that he, whom everyone in India applauded as the greatest Indian of them all, was able to achieve so little for his people and his country.
All great men have their little weaknesses, which characterise them. Nehru’s weakness is emotion, which rules him much more than his head. He has got away with it through the years, because he has always been able to count on the personal affection the people have for him, which has carried him through every and any opposition. That is his strength. That is also his Achilles heel. The destiny of India cannot perpetually depend on an individual’s emotional appeal, and everyday affairs of administration cannot always be conducted by intuition. Consequently, the planning of Jawaharlal Nehru, whether it is the planning of our nationalism or of our economy, has been chaotic. Figures cannot tally when they are based purely on emotion.
Men often call themselves progressive when they only mean that they are not reactionary. Progressive men start and lead progressive movements like the many we have seen spring up around us all over the world in the last two decades. Some of these progressive movements have had a great fascination for Nehru. He always likes to be looked upon as a modern; he wants to be a Picasso hung up in the Royal Academy, looking upon the classical forms around him with a supercilious air. He is easily moved by the righteousness of a cause and by anything that smacks of a crusade. He always comes back from his trips abroad full of admiration for some other people in some other part of the world who may be fighting their battle for freedom, whether that battle is to achieve freedom or to retain it. He is fond of reading literature which speaks the language of freedom. All this has endeared him to our people, to whom he is more a legend than a practical leader. In terms of folklore, he could be likened to a prince, ready with his sword to defend the unarmed, to guard the rights of man, to fight for human justice. But all this Tennysonian allegory of the days of King Arthur and Lancelot does not sit so well at the desk of the Prime Minister of India, more especially when this knight with the shining piece of steel has constantly got to dip it in ordinary blue-black ink to append his signature to executive actions, some of which could be likened to those of a small-town dictator in a neo-fascist state. That new streak, perceptible in Jawaharlal Nehru, some say has come with responsibility; others strongly suspect it has come with power.
To understand this, one has to go back fifteen years, when, in the staid Modern Review1 [1. November 1937.] of Calcutta, a magazine which circulates among ‘highbrows’ only, there appeared an article, anonymously written, entitled ‘Jawaharlal Nehru’. Readers of the Modern Review were disturbed by the appearance of this ridiculously melodramatic article in an otherwise weighty publication. The author was obviously an enthusiastic college student whom the editor was trying desperately hard to encourage. Nehru was at that time President of the Indian National Congress, and he had indicated his unwillingness to carry on the appointment for another term. The young writer was trying to dissuade the Congress from reelecting him, on the grounds that in Jawaharlal was the germ of a fascist, and that if he were pampered too much, the pampering would go to his head. Of course, he wrote in glowing terms about Jawaharlal all the way through the article, as some of the passages quoted below will indicate:
‘ . . . The Rashtrapati2 [2. Sanskrit word for President.] looked up as he passed swiftly through the waiting crowds, his hands went up and were joined together in salute and his pale hard face was lit up by a smile. It was a warm personal smile, and the people who saw it responded to it immediately and smiled and cheered in return.
‘The smile passed away and again the face became stern and sad, impassive in the midst of the emotion that it had roused in the multitude. Almost it seemed that the smile and the gesture accompanying it had little reality behind them; they were just tricks of the trade to gain the goodwill of the crowds whose darling he had become. Was it so?
‘Watch him again. There is a great procession, and tens of thousands of persons surround his car and cheer him in an ecstasy of abandonment. He stands on the seat of the car, balancing himself rather well, straight and seemingly tall, like a god, serene and unmoved by the seething multitude. Suddenly there is that smile again, or even a merry laugh, and the tension seems to break and the crowd laughs with him, not knowing what he is laughing at. He is god-like no longer but a human being, claiming kinship and comradeship with the thousands who surround him, and the crowd feels happy and friendly and takes him to its heart. But the smile is gone and the pale stern face is there again . . .
Jawaharlal is a personality which compels interest and attention. But they have a vital significance for us, for he is bound up with the present in India, and probably the future and he has the power in him to do great good to India or great injury ....
‘ . . . From the far north to Cape Comorin he has gone like some triumphant Caesar passing by, leaving a trail of glory and a legend behind him. Is all this for him just a passing fancy which amuses him, or some deep design or the play of some force which he himself does not know? Is it his will to power of which he speaks in his autobiography that is driving him from crowd to crowd and making him whisper to himself: “I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars”?’
Then came the young writer’s warning:
‘. . . Men like Jawaharlal with all their capacity for great and good work are unsafe in a democracy. He calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and that logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of man. A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn into a dictator, sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy. He might still use the language and slogans of democracy and socialism, but we all know how fascism has fattened on this language and then cast it away as useless lumber.' (The italics are mine.)
On the other hand, the writer went on to say, ‘Jawaharlal is certainly not fascist either by conviction or by temperament. He is far too much of an aristocrat for the crudity and vulgarity of fascism ...’ Since when has aristocracy been a bar to fascism? In fact, history proves that it has fostered it. But when an editor decides to encourage a young man who fancies he has a flair for writing, it would be pointless to mutilate the script on grounds of historical accuracy. So the Modern Review printed this effusion, obviously without any sub-editing.
Soon the young writer was becoming wobbly. He could not make up his mind about Jawaharlal, and ended by proving that Jawarharlal could not become a fascist but that he would! The passages in the article that followed read:
‘Jawaharlal cannot become a fascist. And yet he has all the makings of a dictator in him -- vast popularity, strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity, ability, hardness, and, with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and certain contempt for the weak and inefficient. His flashes of temper are well known, and even when they are controlled, the curling of the lips betrays him. His overmastering desire to get things done, to sweep away what he dislikes and build anew, will hardly brook for long the slow process of democracy. He may keep the husk but he will see to it that it bends to his will. In normal times he would just be an efficient and successful executive, but in this revolutionary epoch, Caesarism is always at the door, and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?
‘Therein lies danger for Jawaharlal and for India. For it is not through Caesarism that India will attain freedom, and though she may prosper a little under a benevolent and efficient despotism she will remain stunted, and the day of emancipation of her people will be delayed . . .
‘Let us not . . . spoil him by too much adulation and praise. His conceit, if any, is already formidable. It must be checked. We want no Caesars.’
This quite incredible article, which read like a rough shooting script for a Cecil B. De Mille version of an Indian Quo Vadis, was obviously not taken seriously by anyone except the author himself. It certainly made no difference whatsoever to the Indian National Congress, which voted Jawaharlal as President despite all warnings.
Imagine our surprise when some years later it was revealed that the author of this anonymous absurdity was none other than Jawaharlal Nehru himself.
Nehru has never contradicted the attribution of the authorship of the article to him. It has been reproduced again and again, the last known occasion being August 31st, 1951, when the New Delhi weekly Thought reproduced it under the title ‘Jawaharlal NEHRU -- By Jawaharlal Nehru’. Nor is Pandit Nehru careless about contradictions. The meticulous care with which he scrutinises every remark affecting him even remotely, and the frequent occasions on which he sets the whole machinery of the government of India, now at his command, into action to contradict even a single inaccurate or unfavourable comment in the Indian press about his regime, his ministers, his government, his policy or himself, make it certain that the frequent attributions could not possibly have escaped him.
Aristocracy was no bar to Jawaharlal’s metamorphosis. We spoiled him with too much adulation and praise, despite his own warning. His conceit, which he said was already formidable, grew with power until it became chronic with what he called responsibility. No one could check it, not even Nehru himself. In time he became Caesar, as he said he would -- or would he prefer Pandit Caesar? How could we ever drop that scholastic prefix which distinguished him from the ordinary Indians over whom he held undisputed sway after we were freed from the British?
Nehru has always lived, even during the days he spent in jail, somewhere in the clouds. Like some of the Russian princes who have remotely stemmed from the late Tsar, he refuses to come down to earth. Drama must always surround him; not the light comedy of the foibles of everyday life, such as you would see in any little bourgeois theatre, but the heavier variety, something like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, accompanied by the music of Wagner, preferably the Funeral March, at the end of which Nehru could rise to rhetorical heights such as when he said on Gandhi’s death: ‘The light that shone in this world was no ordinary light ... for that light represented something more than the immediate present; it represented the living, the eternal truths . . .’
Something like that must always happen around Jawaharlal Nehru to bring out the greatness in the man. He is not just a steady plodder.
Robert Bernays, that brilliant young M.P. who was killed in an air crash during the war, once told me that Churchill was a man who wanted life to be one great tragedy and that he should always be in the centre of it. When I ran into Bernays accidentally in Rome, the fateful night before his plane crashed on its way back to the United Kingdom, I reminded him about this little epigram he had produced in Oxford many years ago. ‘Well, of course,’ Bernays said, ‘he has got the right part now, and he is certainly playing it brilliantly.’ In recent months I have often thought that this description of Churchill fits Nehru in the setting of India and Asia. Nehru has been at his best fighting for the liberation of our people, and, as the territorial limits of his crusade have expanded, he has been privately rehearsing to play the role of Liberator of Asia. But, as Asia is not likely to be ‘liberated’ except by communism. Pandit Nehru would find the role of a Soviet satellite somewhat irksome to his Caesarian susceptibilities.
But at home there are no such great and dramatic roles to play. Instead, innumerable little details keep cropping up in Nehru’s India. There is the Congress party machine continually in the process of being overhauled; there is the Planning Commission, which has been incessantly planning and producing blue-prints, apparently too impractical or expensive to be translated into action; there is the food problem, which Nehru has tried to solve with grandiose speeches on self-sufficiency and with the mass planting of trees, Vanamahotsava, which never grew, leaving our people dependent on the charity of nations we had antagonised; there is the acute shortage of foreign exchange; cloth is periodically rationed and then released overnight because of a glut due to under-consumption. These little things need the attention of Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and once again President of the Congress.
But to our three hundred and sixty million people these little things are as important as freedom; they are freedom itself. The greatness that is in Nehru unfortunately does not come out in rationing coupons or at economic conferences. It wants vivid colours to portray it; it needs to be painted on the broad canvas of suffering humanity. The canvas has, moreover, to be of pure khaddar, or, at least, hand-woven and hand-spun somewhere in Asia. It required a world war to bring out the genius of Winston Churchill; that of Jawaharlal Nehru will likewise have to wait its turn to express itself. The failure of a local monsoon does not bring it out, even though this is how all our famines begin.
3. TWO ORNAMENTAL PILLARS
Nehru’s over-preoccupation with Asia, which he regards as his beat and orbit of protection, is due to a constant fear within him of the possibility of the white man returning, or at least of his ability to achieve remote control over Asian affairs. Nehru is very sensitive about anything that savours of Western patronage; he will not brook even a charitable gesture, however genuine, and even when he agrees to take an occasional loan or any form of material help from the West, whether in the shape of food-grains or capital, he will not take it as a gift, but insists on regarding it as a loan, given unconditionally and ‘with no strings attached’. The only deviation from strict international financing he allows himself is to accept an indefinite date for its redemption. The obligation to pay is therefore always there and negatives any presumption of foreign patronage.
Chiang Kai-shek used to take the assistance and be thankful for it, but Nehru’s intense national pride and his highly-strung sense of self-respect make it necessary for the loan to appear almost forced upon him. Never before has a nation shown such determination to stand on its dignity at such a chronic stage of its helplessness. It is nevertheless determination that counts; all things done under the shadow of the Asoka pillar appear to have a sanctity which they did not have under the Royal Crown. In the old days, the offer of foreign aid would have been construed as an attempt to dominate the East and to enslave its people. Today the far greater assistance which we receive from those quarters is regarded only as friendly gestures of fellow democracies. In the old days, too, we would have boycotted this help from others; today we accept it, but nullify the danger of patronage by saying there will be ‘no strings attached’. Just as the ideals of administration weigh more with Nehru than administration itself, so, too, practicality takes second place to the greater value we attach to the gaining of a position in the comity of nations where, despite our recent entry, our representatives often behave as if they own the place. This innocence in flaunting our new status is a passing phase; not only India but the whole East, Near to Far, is passing through it as a rebound from the years of servitude. In Iran, Mussadiq believes the oil-taps of the Middle East can be switched on and off from his bedside, and Nehru, with equal Oriental charm, appears to be under the impression that India virtually has a casting vote on most of the important problems discussed by the United Nations.
Our attitude to the powers of the West has, therefore, been conditioned by the personal complexes of Pandit Nehru. The translation of these complexes into action has become our foreign policy.
This policy is based on two ornamental pillars: the one is the enhancement of our prestige abroad; the other, neutrality.
The first pillar has been raised brick by brick with Nehru’s own hands. It is he who has worked out the intricate details of how our prestige abroad should be enhanced. The belief is widespread among his still-constant followers that were he to be spared from his arduous duties at home, and allowed to roam the cities of the world as a pedlar of goodwill, he would promote enough understanding to last us a lifetime. Others do not think that Nehru’s personal presence is necessary in view of the whole host of celebrities who represent us abroad, occasionally or permanently.
Nor is the privilege of enhancing our prestige abroad the sole prerogative of the star turns of the diplomatic corps. The whole story can best be read in the report of the Auditor-General, Narahari Rao, who was sent out to check on our missions abroad, and who reported, to Pandit Nehru’s dismay, that accounting was by no means the forte of the corps. The Auditor-General’s report revealed inter alia that in one instance an equivalent of twenty-seven thousand rupees1 [1. Approx. £2,000.] was withdrawn from the bank account of the mission for the private use of the Minister, who credited the amount to his bank account a few weeks later. The irregularities did not stop with mere private and unauthorised borrowings from the official cash, which at least were restored after long periods. The report disclosed that there were also instances of purchases being made without proper sanction, which were prima facie objectionable and extravagant. Some of these purchases were said to be of a private nature, such as cigarettes, theatre tickets, flowers, etc., required by the officials of the mission. A subsequent thorough inquiry confirmed that there had been misuse of government money and falsification of accounts, and that some of the officers of the legation had employed highly improper and high-handed methods.
‘It is a pity,’ our correspondent1 [1. Thakorelal M. Desai in The Current, November 7th, 1951] said, breaking the story of the contents of this startling report, ‘that the identity of those who were responsible for these objectionable practices, especially those who are still members of the diplomatic service, has been shrouded in mystery and left to the people to guess. Such finicky regard for the niceties of official etiquette and considerations of our prestige in the foreign capitals is clearly out of place in matters of such gravity.’
Personalities, though regarded as important at the time of selection to our newly formed diplomatic service -- in which the selectors have paid more attention to breeding than to form -- have to be discarded in any criticism of this corps. Otherwise we are accused of bad taste.
Nehru resents any kind of personal criticism or any pin-pointing or documentation, even in a question in Parliament, with regard to his pet service, which he once proudly announced was ‘hand-picked’ by him. The Indian taxpayer still finds it difficult to understand why, in the state of poverty in which we perpetually proclaim ourselves to be, there was such urgent need for one of our diplomatic representatives to re-condition his bathroom at the cost of fifteen hundred pounds, or for Pandit Nehru to sanction yet another large sum for the opening of yet another diplomatic branch office, when the head office has so little to do. But on these little points, which affect any department under Pandit Nehru’s personal supervision, inquisitive people, however highly placed, find themselves often clashing with the Pandit, to the latter’s irritation and the former’s eventual disillusion.
It was one such incident that resulted in the resignation of Dr John Matthai, whose services as Finance Minister Pandit Nehru had requested on lend-lease from the Tata billion-dollar industrial empire. The situation became intolerable for the Finance Minister when, every time he effected an economy, the cabinet over which Pandit Nehru presided ‘adopted proposals for expenditure either without or in anticipation of their [the Standing Finance Committee’s] approval’.1 [1. From Dr Matthai’s statement following his resignation.] Dr Matthai had resigned quietly, without stating any specific reasons whatsoever, but Nehru, in a speech he made in the South, without any warning to the Minister who had silently resigned, provoked a contradiction which spoke for itself. Dr Matthai said: ‘Some of the greatest offenders in this respect have been the ministries functioning under the immediate control of the Prime Minister. It has been for me a difficult uphill task, and a definite weakening of our campaign for economy has naturally resulted.’
‘The last case of this kind I had to deal with’, the former Finance Minister continued, ‘is typical of what is happening. When it was decided that our High Commissioner in the United Kingdom should be our Ambassador in Ireland, the Standing Finance Committee agreed to the proposal on the distinct understanding that no expenditure other than the travelling expenses of the High Commissioner should be incurred. There was to be no building or staff for the Embassy.
‘This proposal was agreed to in November last by the External Affairs Ministry as part of our economy campaign. But the High Commissioner would not accept the suggestion made by us and the matter was, therefore, brought before the cabinet, at the Prime Minister’s instance. The cabinet has now agreed that our Embassy in Dublin should be provided with a building and also staff, not merely without the approval of the Standing Finance Committee, but against its recommendations.’2 [2. Ibid.]
So this fetish of enhancing prestige abroad is a personal weakness of Nehru, resulting from his complex that his India — Nehru’s India — must be made to look as great a land as any in the world. If only the outward show were backed by inner substance, the expenditure on this count would be worth our while. But this object cannot be achieved by putting fifth-rate diplomats into first-class motor-cars.
All this goodwill promotion and this exchange of understanding would have no meaning, according to Nehru, were it not to promote peace between the nations involved. Therefore, as a natural corollary to this, our foreign policy is based on the idea of maintaining the status quo as at the end of the second world war. Altering this balance of power would be permissible only if it were done by means short of war. Thus, the sliding of the whole of China behind the Iron Curtain is not regarded as an act of aggression by the U.S.S.R., or even an infiltration move. It should rather be regarded as the legitimate exercise of the Chinese people’s right of self-determination, expressed spontaneously under the indigenous leadership of the great triumvirate: Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai and Chu Teh. Presumably the old Generalissimo, Chiang, was moved from the Chinese mainland to his new retreat in Formosa by a constitutionally conducted referendum. It, however, becomes our duty, so Pandit Nehru’s mind runs, to recognise this de facto change in the constitution of China from a Republic under Chiang to a People’s Republic under the tutelage of the U.S.S.R. Yet the same Pandit Nehru was, but a few years ago, strolling in the gardens of Viceregal House, to Lord Linlithgow’s discomfort, with none other than the Chiangs whom Nehru phrased as ‘our valiant neighbours’. And when, on my return from China, I respectfully indicated to Nehru that Chiang’s days appeared to be numbered and that the Reds were doing a terrific job, he merely smiled at me in a knowing sort of way. Britain, too, has recognised Red China, but not with the pious platitudes in which our spokesmen glorified the event.
Not to recognise China would be to displease her, and, after all, the British had really no tangible right on Chinese soil. Even the cities which the British claim to have developed, admittedly with their capital, were built with cheap Chinese labour, and that falls under exploitation which Nehru will not tolerate. China for the Chinese, as India is now for the Indians. Conquest by arms never established a claim which an upright democrat, pledged to non-violence, can recognise; the subtle conquest by infiltration was, however, on a different footing. Thus the foundation was laid for the policy of neutrality which was to revolutionise the mind of Asia, and which was to be a forging-house for promoting understanding with the West. The sweeping changes over the map were only the manifestations of a natural evolution of an awakened Asia. All this was plausible, except for the strange coincidence that Asia was being stirred to life in a dawn which was noticeably red.
Neutrality implied staying aloof from all forms of controversy which could not be settled without recourse to arms. Therefore, it also implied the denial of any moral support to one side which would provoke action by the other side. It implied the denial of any form of preparation for any eventuality, or any training for participation in any future conflict, other than that required for the guarding of our frontier with Pakistan. Militarily, India’s prime concern is to be a little stronger than Pakistan, but no more. That is the official outlook. The question of defending ourselves in the event of China waging a secondary war on India to support the U.S.S.R. in the coming world conflict does not arise, because Pandit Nehru has been convinced of China’s goodwill towards us.
It is now officially accepted in India that Mao has no territorial ambitions outside his own frontiers. The highly militarised manoeuvres of Chinese troops along and behind the Brahmaputra river, which the Chinese prefer to call the Tsangpo, have to be written off as P.T. exercises. Pandit Nehru is said to have been further impressed by Chinese good intentions because, when the Chinese accidentally crossed our border some time in 1950, they were polite enough to apologise for their mistake, and their erring soldiers were made to return every little item which they had pilfered or pillaged from our northern villages. After all, what is a little fraternisation between understanding neighbours?
The Sino-Indian War, also known as the Indo-China War and Sino-Indian Border Conflict, was a war between China and India that occurred in 1962. A disputed Himalayan border was the main pretext for war, but other issues played a role. There had been a series of violent border incidents after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, when India had granted asylum to the Dalai Lama. India initiated a Forward Policy in which it placed outposts along the border, including several north of the McMahon Line, the eastern portion of the Line of Actual Control proclaimed by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1959.
Unable to reach political accommodation on disputed territory along the 3,225 kilometre- (2,000 mile-) long Himalayan border, the Chinese launched simultaneous offensives in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line on 20 October 1962. Chinese troops advanced over Indian forces in both theatres, capturing Rezang La in Chushul in the western theatre, as well as Tawang in the eastern theatre. The war ended when China declared a ceasefire on 20 November 1962, and simultaneously announced its withdrawal to its claimed 'line of actual control'.
-- Sino-Indian War, by Wikipedia
4. ‘LIBERATION'
Things took a somewhat different shape when the new Chinese war-lords kept paying far too much attention to their cultural affinities on the Indian borders while they too easily ignored those dubious regions which divided them from the U.S.S.R. For instance, the somewhat strange similarity between the Tibetan and the Chinese Mongol brought, overnight, whole garrisons into Tibet to proclaim a suzerainty which, although we did not dispute it, we never knew the Chinese were so keen on emphasising. As a result, our own military mission in Gyangtse, the outpost on our trade route to the North, disappeared, without our Foreign Minister, who was Nehru himself, being able to account in Parliament for this vanishing act.
To understand what was happening in these parts, it is necessary to review in fuller detail these recent events which transformed large tracts of sleepy areas into active communist pockets.
With the ‘liberation’ of Tibet by the Chinese, this once autonomous province, which at one time could exchange diplomatic missions with other nations, found its foreign affairs controlled directly from Peking. This was announced one fine day over Radio Peking, and no one in India was in any position to question Peking’s decision. Possession is ten-tenths of international law.
Below Tibet lie the two kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan, stretching over the top of our provinces of Bihar and north-west Assam. Tibet was too easily liberated. At first the Chinese had planned to enter Tibet from their provinces of Chinghai and Sikang, to the east, but in this process some of Red China’s reconnaissance units strayed into Indian territory, violating the McMahon Line, which is the recognised territorial demarcation between India and China. It was then that Nehru protested and the Chinese promptly withdrew, admonishing their troops. The Chinese then swung the whole operation north-west and proceeded to carry out their ‘liberation’ movement from Sinkiang, north-west of Tibet, to avoid the risk of clashing with India and offending our so-called neutrality.
It was as the Chinese rolled along the Brahmaputra, or the Tsangpo, that our mission at Gyangtse tactfully withdrew along with the garrison battalion of the Indian army which had been placed there to guard our lines of communication.
In November of 1950 there appeared on the front page of The Current an article over my name, entitled ‘Nehru’s neutrality brings Mao to our frontier’. It dealt with Nehru’s reactions to the invasion of Tibet.
Relying always on his ‘hand-picked’ men, Nehru had refused on more than one occasion to take the advice of seasoned experts on their subjects. Our representative in Lhasa at the time was an Englishman by the name of Richardson, who had continually warned the Indian government against the recognition of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. Richardson was accepted as a competent authority on Tibetan affairs. Pandit Nehru, however, did not relish taking advice on Asian affairs from an Englishman. The government of India recalled Richardson from Lhasa. In his place, Pandit Nehru appointed an Indian, Dr Sinha. Dr Sinha was from the new Indian diplomatic service; he was formerly in Peking. The learned doctor was credited with a deep understanding of Mao Tse-tung.
It is now an open secret that the Chinese invasion of Tibet came as a complete surprise to the Indian government. Comment is superfluous on the fact that neither Sardar Pannikar, who was our former Ambassador at Peking, nor our new representative in Tibet, Dr Sinha, had any information to communicate to New Delhi on Chinese troop movements and manoeuvres which preceded the coup d’etat. They had apparently no knowledge of Chinese intentions with regard to Tibet. Pandit Nehru, when he heard of the invasion, was furious; he sent a frantic cable to Ambassador Pannikar in Peking. The message is said to have read somewhat as follows: ‘Either you did not explain our point of view to the Chinese, or you did not understand what the Chinese told you.’ Two days later, a cool and collected Ambassador replied that he knew nothing of the invasion until he heard about it over All-India Radio!
It is no secret that at the last Pacific conference at Lucknow, high level Americans present told the Indian representatives in very specific terms that they did not understand from where India got its information about China, but that American Intelligence reports were very clear on the point that China was shortly to invade Tibet. Surely this must have reached the ears of the Prime Minister, but Pandit Nehru often closes his ears to anything that he does not wish to hear.
Nor was this the only occasion on which Nehru has ignored advice given to him on Tibet. He had been told, we understand, that we should increase our representation at Kashgar, the vital key-point where Tibet touches the Chinese province of Sinkiang. Kashgar is on the direct caravan route, and we had only one trade representative there. Pandit Nehru disregarded this advice. He probably feared that our keeping an eye on this vital spot would offend the Chinese government. He went further; he recalled our sole representative, Mr Sathe, on the eve of the invasion. Mr Sathe returned, ostensibly for consultation, and while he was in New Delhi the Chinese army struck at Tibet. The Chinese came from two places, and one of them was Sinkiang.
The invasion of Tibet has had momentous consequences for the defence of India, which neither our government nor our people wish to appreciate. The border of Tibet runs along the Indian frontier for approximately two thousand miles. Hitherto, the Himalayas have been our silent sentinels, separating us from the Chinese, but now it has been realised that this mighty mountain barrier is no longer impregnable. Moreover, the Indian army and the other defence services, in which we all naturally take great pride, are hardly equipped to fight the first-rate power which China has become under Soviet influence. It was different when the Chinese were only limp, knock-kneed soldiers, as in the days of Chiang Kai-shek, but the army of Mao is a very different proposition. In the event of a clash, Mao can always fall back on the U.S.S.R., whereas we, by our neutrality, have alienated all our friends.
Our deliberate unpreparedness is unforgivable. So eminent an historian as Professor Arnold Toynbee has said in his Civilization on Trial that there would be two theatres of war in World War III, and that one of them would be Tibet. Tibet touches not only the disturbed area of Nepal, but also the disputed portion of Kashmir; important trade routes pass through Ladakh. Tibet also borders on Assam, which has been for some time in a restless state due to perpetual communist activities of which our government is aware, but not poignantly. Attempts to point out to our government the danger of underestimating the communist menace in these areas have been dismissed by the remark that the communists are ‘not unduly unmanageable’.
Pandit Nehru has always had faith in the Asiatic, however treacherous certain Asiatics can be. An indication of this is to be seen in the exchange of official correspondence between India and China, released to the press on November 3rd, 1950. The correspondence was on the subject of the delay of the departure of the Tibetan delegation from New Delhi, on the personnel of which China had said foreign influence was being brought to bear. India said; ‘Owing to lack of knowledge on the part of the Tibetan delegation in dealing with other countries, and the necessity of obtaining instructions from their government who in turn had to consult their assemblies, certain further delay took place. The government of India do not believe that any foreign influence hostile to China has been responsible for the delay in the delegation’s departure.’
There was nothing apologetic about China’s reply. China said: ‘The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China would like to make it clear; Tibet is an integral part of China’s territory. The problem of Tibet is entirely a domestic problem of China. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army must enter Tibet, liberate the Tibetan people and defend the frontiers of China. This is the resolved policy of the Central People’s Government.’ When this correspondence was released, I knew it was pointless kidding ourselves that the leadership of Asia was ever likely to rest with us. Mao was way ahead of the Pandit.
But Nehru’s ‘neutrality’ was in no way disturbed by this major operation in Tibet, whereby a huge territory, situated among formidable mountains and stretching thirteen hundred kilometres from south to north and two thousand kilometres from east to west, virtually slipped behind the ever-expanding Iron Curtain. The directive issued by Peking to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army for this offensive said; ‘This attack is to liberate three million inhabitants of Tibet from the imperialist yoke and to strengthen the defence of western frontiers’. We swallowed this pious platitude. Tibet may be essential to China’s defence; it can also be dangerous to India in the event of our being attacked.
The ‘liberation’ was confined to Tibet, but its effect overflowed farther south. Nepal, where the Gurkha soldiers come from, began to show signs of becoming unstable.
Nepal had long been an almost feudal state, lorded over by the handle-bar moustachioed military chiefs, the Ranas. In the name of democracy the Ranas were deposed, and a grim three-cornered struggle ensued for political power, in which the two Koirala brothers vied with each other. The one was Chief Minister of Nepal, the other controlled the Nepal Congress party. While these two brothers were sparring, a third factor cropped up on the scene. A small band of insurgents attempted to blast their way to power; but beaten by the government forces, who called themselves loyalists, their leader crossed the frontier into Tibet and escaped to China, where, it is reliably learned, he is being trained to ‘liberate’ Nepal in due course. Communists everywhere, after liberating themselves, always seem anxious to liberate everyone else around them.
No one had paid much attention to Nepal during all these years. Life in Nepal was controlled by a primitive economy which fitted into the feudal pattern. Its international finance transactions were confined to receiving tributes from the British and the Indian governments, in return for which Nepal allowed its Gurkhas to be recruited into the armies of these two governments, virtually as mercenaries. On the outgoing side, it used to pay money tribute to China because of some obscure historical war which Nepal had lost. The modern term for this sort of payment would be reparations.
Today Nepal has become a focal point of the world’s attention because of its strategic position. It is below the Himalayan range, and therefore a vital defence position which India cannot afford to lose. The cultural war now going on, between China on one side and India and the Western democracies on the other, for Nepalese understanding and goodwill is only a cover for a future military position which these two sides hope to acquire in Nepal. Point Four aid to the Nepalese cannot have been prompted entirely by humanitarian motives. Even the stray Americans in the hotels of Kalimpong, who maintain they are interested only in rare fauna, are hardly sufficiently convincing as naturalists. It is said that the Americans wanted a consulate there and that Nehru turned down the suggestion. He was probably afraid the Russians would make a similar request which he would then not be in a position to refuse. So that all this area of and around Nepal is loaded with dynamite which India is doing its best to dampen with neutrality.
Coming eastwards and south-east from our northern borders, we run into the Naga territory of the Abor and the Mishmi tribes, north of Assam. On this primitive terrain has sprung up a strange character, an educated Naga whose name is Phizo. Into his head-hunting compatriots, who would change sides overnight for the gift of a blanket and whose most tasty dish is dog cooked in rice, Phizo tries to inculcate an ancestral affinity with the Chinese. Admittedly the Nagas look more Chinese than Indian, but strategically the Naga land is too important for us to be finicky about facial resemblances.
The influence of the new Chinese and the restlessness which accompanies it flow farther south, down the Lushai Hill range, till they reach the tea-plantations of Assam, owned by British and Indian interests in the proportion of nearly three to one. Several of these once-prosperous plantations are having to close down due to the rise in the cost of labour. Unemployment has spread among the plantation workers, and the ground has gradually been prepared for further affinity with the doctrines of communism.
Mr C. Rajagopalachari, former Governor-General of India and now Chief Minister of Madras in South India, sounded a note of warning only recently when he said: ‘The British have gone. But my trouble is with China and Russia . . . From outside there is some influence creeping into this country. It is good to make the poor govern the country. It is one thing if we do it, but quite another when others do it for us here.’1 [1. Speech at Tirupati, October 1952.]
That is how Nehru’s neutrality has worked for us. It has brought one of the most dangerous enemies of democracy right on to our northern gates, while Pandit Nehru sleeps the soft slumber of innocence, exchanging goodwill missions with the Chinese.