Nehru: The Invention of India

7. “A Tryst with Destiny”: 1945–1947

The British had not covered themselves with glory during the war. They had run a military dictatorship in a country that they had claimed to be preparing for democracy. They had presided over one of the worst famines in human history, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, while diverting food (on Churchill’s personal orders) from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies. (Tens of thousands of Bengalis perished, but Churchill’s only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about the famine was to ask peevishly why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.) Even Lord Wavell, who had been rewarded for military failure (in both the deserts of North Africa and the jungles of Burma) by succeeding Linlithgow as viceroy, considered the British government’s attitude to India “negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated.”

Upon his release from prison Jawaharlal gave vent to his rage in such intemperate terms — at one point accusing members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council of corruption — that he was very nearly arrested again. The Labour victory in the British general elections meant that the egregious Churchill was soon to be replaced as prime minister by Attlee, but this did not bring about any change in the anti-Congressism of the British authorities in India. Wavell convened a conference in Simla from late June 1945 (to which Jawaharlal, who held no major post in Congress, was not invited) which the viceroy allowed Jinnah to wreck. In this atmosphere of frustration and despair, the British called elections in India at the end of 1945, with the same franchise arrangements as in 1937, for seats in the central and provincial assemblies.

The Congress was woefully unequipped to contest them. Their blunder in surrendering the reins of power in 1939 and then losing their leadership and cadres to prison from 1942 meant that they went into the campaign tired, dispirited, and ill-organized. The League, on the other hand, had flourished during the war; its political machinery was well-oiled with patronage and pelf, while the Congress’s was rusty from disuse. The electoral fortunes of 1937 were now significantly reversed. The Congress still carried a majority of the provinces. But except for the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress won nineteen Muslim seats to the League’s seventeen, the League swept the reserved seats for Muslims across the board, even in provinces like Bombay and Madras which had seemed immune to the communal contagion. Whatever the explanation — and Jawaharlal could have offered a few — there was no longer any escaping the reality that Jinnah and the Muslim League could now legitimately claim a popular mandate to speak for the majority of India’s Muslims.

Jawaharlal did not believe this to mean that the partition of the country, which he thought totally impractical, was inevitable. In speeches, interviews, and articles throughout late 1945 and early 1946, he expressed the belief that, free of foreign rule, the Muslims of India would relinquish any thought of secession. The Muslims of India, he wrote, “are only technically a minority. They are vast in numbers and powerful in other ways, and it is patent that they cannot be coerced against their will. … This communal question is essentially one of protection of vested interests, and religion has always been a useful stalking horse for this purpose.” He even argued that the Congress should grant the right of secession just to allay any Muslim fears, not in the expectation that the Muslim League — ruled provinces would actually exercise it. But whether, as many Indian analysts have suggested, Jinnah had really meant to establish a separate state or was merely advocating Pakistan to obtain leverage over the Congress, his followers had taken him at his word. A state of their own was what they were determined to have, and by the spring of 1946 Jawaharlal’s idealism appeared naive, even dangerously so.

Divide et impera had worked too well. A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.

The British hold on the country was slipping. Even soldiers and policemen openly expressed their support for the nationalist leaders, heedless of the reaction of their British officers. Mutinies broke out in the air force and the British Indian navy. Violence erupted at political events. The demand for freedom was all but drowned out by the clamor for partition.

In a gesture so counterproductive that it might almost have been an act of expiation, the Raj clumsily gave the warring factions a last chance at unity. It decided to prosecute the defectors of Bose’s Indian National Army. Bose himself had died in a fiery plane crash at war’s end in Formosa, so the Raj sought to find scapegoats among his lieutenants. In a desire to appear even-handed, the British chose to place three INA soldiers on trial in Delhi’s historic Red Fort: a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh. The result was a national outcry that spanned the communal divide. Whatever the errors and misjudgments of the INA men (and Jawaharlal believed freedom could never have come through an alliance with foreigners, let alone foreign Fascists), they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule. Both the Congress and the League rose to the trio’s defense; for the first time in their long careers, Jawaharlal and Jinnah accepted the same brief, Nehru donning a barrister’s gown after twenty-five years.

But the moment passed: the defense of three patriots was no longer enough to guarantee a common definition of patriotism. The ferment across the country made the result of the trials almost irrelevant. The trials were eventually abandoned, because by the time they had begun it was apparent that the ultimate treason to the British Raj was being contemplated in its own capital. London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of the burdens of its Indian empire. In February 1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India “to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution.” The endgame had begun.

Before the arrival of the Mission, Jawaharlal indulged his internationalist interests with a visit to Singapore and Malaya (with an unscheduled stop in Burma on the way back, where a weather delay enabled him to thwart the British and meet the Burmese nationalist hero Aung San). Permission to visit had initially been denied, then extended with humiliating conditions which he had declined to accept, but these had been overruled by the Supreme Commander for Asia himself, Lord Mountbatten. When he arrived in Singapore in March 1946 Nehru was welcomed with honors worthy of a head of government. Mountbatten received him personally and drove him to a canteen for Indian soldiers, where he was mobbed by the admiring men in uniform. Looking around for his hostess, Jawaharlal found Edwina Mountbatten crawling out from under the crowd; she had been knocked to the floor in the mad rush to greet him. It was, he later recalled, an unusual introduction. It was to become an unusual friendship.

The status Mountbatten chose to accord Jawaharlal was not accidental. It was clear he was India’s man of destiny at a time when India’s destiny was about to be realized. In early 1942 Mahatma Gandhi had told the Congress that there was no truth in the rumors that Nehru and he were estranged or that the more conservative Rajagopalachari, whose daughter had married one of the Mahatma’s sons, was Gandhi’s preferred successor. Jawaharlal liked to claim that he and the Mahatma spoke different languages, but “language,” the Mahatma said, “is no bar to a union of hearts. And … when I am gone, [Nehru] will speak my language.” The shrewd Gandhi had nurtured his protégé’s leadership claims, engineering his ascent three times to the Congress’s presidency. He knew that Jawaharlal had adopted him as a father figure, and if he was not always a faithful Gandhian, he would never fail to be a dutiful son.

In April 1946 Maulana Azad, after an unprecedented six years as Congress president, announced that he would be resigning and handing the reins to Jawaharlal. Sardar Patel and Acharya Kripalani, the Congress’s general secretary, announced their candidacies as well, but the Mahatma intervened swiftly and decisively, and both men withdrew. On May 9, Kripalani announced that Jawaharlal Nehru had been elected unopposed as president of the Congress. Gandhi had managed to arrange his protégé’s triumph at the most crucial time of all, with rumors of an interim Indian government being formed in advance of talks with the Cabinet Mission in Simla in May.

The Mission, a triumvirate of Sir Stafford Cripps (now the president of the Board of Trade), the British secretary of state for India, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, and First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander, had arrived on March 24. The vultures, scenting the dying emanations of the Raj, began gathering for the kill. The negotiations and confabulations, intrigue and maneuvering among and within the various interested parties — the British, the Congress, the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the loyalists, the Communists, the civil servants — became more intense and more convoluted with each passing day. Wavell’s astonishingly candid diaries reveal his distaste for, and distrust of, practically every Indian politician he had to deal with, each (in his eyes) proving more dishonest than the next. Though he was, like most of the British administration, hostile to the Congress and sympathetic to the League his government had helped nurture, he was scathing in his contempt for the mendacity of the League’s leaders, and of their “hymn of hate against Hindus.” (No Congress leader expressed any hatred of Muslims to the viceroy.) Even the idea of Pakistan seemed to take many forms in the minds of its own advocates, with several seeing it as a Muslim state within a united India, and others advocating assorted forms of decentralized confederation rather than outright secession. (The American journalist Phillips Talbot recalls Sir Abdullah Haroon of the League showing him, in 1940, eight separate plans for Pakistan then being debated by the League’s High Command.) Jinnah was steadfast in his demand for a separate state in the northwest and east of the country, but avoided giving specific answers as to how the creation of such a state could serve its declared purpose of protecting Muslims in the Hindu-majority provinces. Jawaharlal, meanwhile, sought nothing less than an Act of Abdication from the British: India’s political arrangements should, he declared, be left to Indians to determine in their own Constituent Assembly, free of British mediation.

Part of the problem at the time may well have lain in a profound miscalculation on Jawaharlal’s part about the true intentions of the British. Cut off by imprisonment from the political realities of world affairs, Nehru came to Simla believing (as he asserted to Phillips Talbot) that perfidious Albion was still trying to hold on to the jewel in her imperial crown by encouraging division among the Indian parties. Talbot felt that Nehru had simply not realized that Britain was exhausted, near-bankrupt, unwilling and unable to dispatch the sixty thousand British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to “cut” the country quite literally before running. Nehru, still imagining an all-powerful adversary seeking to perpetuate its hegemony, and unaware of the extent to which the League had become a popular party among Indian Muslims, dealt with both on erroneous premises. “How differently would Nehru and his colleagues have negotiated,” Talbot wondered, “had they understood Britain’s weakness rather than continuing to be obsessed with its presumed strength?” The question haunts our hindsight.

When the Simla Conference began on May 9, 1946, Jinnah — who was cool but civil to Nehru — refused to shake hands with either of the two Muslim leaders of the Congress party, Azad and Abdul Ghaffar Khan; he wished to be seen as the sole spokesman of Muslim India. Nonetheless, when the Cabinet Mission proposed a three-tier plan for India’s governance, with a weak center (limited to defense, external affairs, and communications), autonomous provinces (with the right of secession after five years), and groups of provinces (at least one of which would be predominantly Muslim), the League accepted the proposal, even though it meant giving up the idea of a sovereign Pakistan. The viceroy, without waiting for the Congress’s formal acceptance of the scheme, invited fourteen Indians to serve as an interim government. While most of the leading Muslim Leaguers and Congressmen were on the list, there was a startling omission: not a single Muslim Congressman had been invited to serve. The Congress replied that it accepted the plan in principle, but could not agree to a government whose Muslim members were all from the League. Jinnah made it clear he could not accept anything else, and the resultant impasse proved intractable. The Cabinet Mission left for London with its plan endorsed but this dispute unresolved, leaving a caretaker Viceroy’s Council in charge of the country. Ironically, its only Indian member (along with seven Englishmen) was a Muslim civil servant, Sir Akbar Hydari, who had made clear his fundamental opposition in principle to the idea of Pakistan.

Typically, Jawaharlal did not wait for the standoff to be resolved before plunging into another political crisis that brought into sharp relief both his opposition to communalism and his fierce republicanism. This was in the “princely state” of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority principality nominally outside the British Raj, whose autocratic and sybaritic Hindu maharajah Jawaharlal despised, and whose indigenous opposition, the noncommunal National Conference, was led by a friend and supporter, the Muslim socialist Sheikh Abdullah. Abdullah was president of the All-India States People’s Conference, the Nehru-inspired assembly of antimonarchical nationalists who sought to merge their destinies with the rest of the Indian people by overthrowing the British puppets who ruled them in their nominally independent “princely states.” Abdullah was on his way to Delhi to meet Jawaharlal in May 1946 when the maharajah had him arrested. Nehru (who nearly stormed out of Simla when he heard the news of Abdullah’s arrest) protested vigorously to the British, and when this seemed to have had no effect, decided in mid-June to travel to Kashmir himself to assist in Abdullah’s defense. On June 19 Jawaharlal was stopped at the border of the state by the Kashmiri authorities and served an “externment order.” Jawaharlal erupted in anger at this treatment and, after five hours of waiting for the order to be reversed, defied it and crossed the state border anyway, whereupon he was promptly arrested. The British refused to press the maharajah to compromise, and the episode only ended when the Abdullah trial was adjourned and the Congress Working Committee asked Jawaharlal to return to Delhi.

On the face of it this was a trivial matter, but it showed Jawaharlal at his best — and his worst. The defense of principle at the risk of his personal freedom, and his loyalty to his friend and comrade, revealed the best of Jawaharlal, but they were accompanied by an impetuousness, and a tendency to fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, which did him less credit. There was also a touch of vainglory in his declaration at the border that That was all very well, but indeed he was arrested, and it is unclear what good his defiance had done either for his cause or his friend. The nationalist movement’s politics of protest had made Jawaharlal a master of the futile gesture — precisely the kind of politics that had led to the resignations of the Congress ministries in 1939 and the Quit India movement in 1942, and thus paved the way for the triumph of the Muslim League.

During the past twenty-five years I have never obeyed a single order of the British Government in India or any Maharajah which came in my way. … When once a course of action is taken Jawaharlal never goes back, he goes forward; if you think otherwise then you don’t know Jawaharlal. No power on earth can prevent me from going anywhere in India unless I am arrested or forcibly removed.

Meanwhile the problem of the Cabinet Mission’s proposed government remained to be addressed. Both Congress and the League had accepted the plan in principle; the details were yet to be agreed upon. Jawaharlal, newly restored to the presidency of the Congress, chaired a meeting of the All-India Congress Committee in Bombay at which he rashly interpreted the Congress’s acceptance of the plan as meaning that “We are not bound by a single thing except that we have decided to go into the Constituent Assembly.” The implications of his statement were still being parsed when he repeated it at a press conference immediately afterward, adding that “we are absolutely free to act.” Nehru stated specifically that he did not think the grouping of provinces, so important to the League, would necessarily survive a free vote. An incensed Jinnah reacted by withdrawing the League’s acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan.

Jawaharlal was widely blamed for his thoughtlessness in provoking the end of the brief hope of Congress-League cooperation in a united Indian government, even on the League’s terms. Patel was scathing, in a private letter, about Jawaharlal’s “acts of emotional insanity” and “childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly.” Nehru “feels lonely and he acts emotionally,” he wrote; “… he is impatient.” Azad himself wrote in his memoirs that Nehru had been “carried away by his feelings” and “is so impressed by theoretical considerations that he is apt to underestimate the realities of a situation.”

Had Jawaharlal held his tongue in July 1946, though, it is by no means clear that a common Congress-League understanding would have survived. Azad had been willing to relinquish the claims of Muslim Congressmen to office in the interests of unity, but the party as a whole was not prepared to concede the point to Jinnah. In stating that the grouping of provinces was not immutable, Jawaharlal was echoing the letter of the plan if not its spirit. (The League could have been accused of doing the same thing when it declared that the plan gave it the basis to work for Pakistan.) To see him as wrecker-inchief of the country’s last chance at avoiding partition is, therefore, to overstate the case. As his biographer M. J. Akbar put it, “Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness,” not by Nehru’s willfulness.

There was another consideration in Jawaharlal’s mind when he spoke. His remarks were aimed at making the point that India’s future as a sovereign independent state would depend on what Indians agreed to in a constituent assembly, not on what proposals the British got them to accept. Once again he had placed the larger principle over the immediate practical circumstance. Another politician might have considered it expedient to inveigle the League into the Constituent Assembly on the basis of the British proposals, but Jawaharlal scorned such tactics as beneath him. He later reacted to the posthumous publication of Azad’s memoirs by suggesting that to blame him was to place too much importance on an individual rather than upon the forces of history. This very comment was, of course, confirmation of what his critics said of him: it was typical of Jawaharlal to dismiss a political argument with a theoretical proposition.

On August 8, 1946, the Congress Working Committee, bolstered by the admission of fresh faces appointed by the new president (including two relatively youthful women), declared that it accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan with its own interpretations on issues of detail. But this was not enough to bring Jinnah back into the game. Jawaharlal met with him (at Jinnah’s home in Bombay) to seek agreement on an interim government, but Jinnah proved obdurate: he was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared August 16, 1946, as “Direct Action Day” to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting, and mayhem, and sixteen thousand innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta. The police and army stood idly by: it seemed the British had decided to leave Calcutta to the mobs. Three days of communal rioting in the city left death and destruction in their wake before the army finally stepped in. But the carnage and hatred had also ripped apart something indefinable in the national psyche. Reconciliation now seemed impossible.

Yet a week later Wavell and Nehru were discussing the composition of an interim government for India, to consist of five “Caste Hindus,” five Muslims, a “Scheduled Caste” member (one of those formerly known as “Untouchables”), and three minority representatives. They agreed that Jinnah could nominate his representatives but could have no say in the Congress’s nominations — including, in principle, of a nationalist Muslim. Though the League was still deliberating about whether to join, an interim government of India was named, and its Congress members sworn in, on September 2, 1946. Jawaharlal was vice president of the Executive Council (presided over by the viceroy himself) and was assigned the portfolios of external and Commonwealth relations. In a broadcast on September 7 he seemed to view this as the culmination of a long struggle: “Too long have we been passive spectators of events, the playthings of others. The initiative comes to our people now and we shall make the history of our choice.”

Jawaharlal was quick to assert his authority and that of his ministers, speaking out both on issues of procedure (sharply restricting the viceroy’s authority to deal directly with matters that now belonged to the interim government) and substance (the situation in the princely states and the conduct of the British governors in the provinces). But the British remained supportive of the League and of its government in Bengal, which had allowed the horrors of Direct Action Day to occur. “What is the good of our forming the Interim Government of India,” Nehru wrote indignantly to Wavell about conditions in Bengal in the wake of the Calcutta killings, “if all that we can do is to watch helplessly and do nothing else when thousands of people are being butchered …?” But he went too far in insisting upon visiting the overwhelmingly Muslim, though Congress-ruled, North-West Frontier Province. The British connived in League-organized demonstrations against him at which stones were flung and Nehru was bruised. More important, the fiasco suggested that Nehru, as a Hindu, could never be acceptable to the province’s Muslims as a national leader.

Meanwhile, British pressure on the Congress to make more concessions to Jinnah in order to secure the League’s entry into the interim government prompted Gandhi and Nehru to relinquish voluntarily their right to nominate a Muslim member. This had been a deal-breaker for Jinnah, and he now seemed ready, in discussions with Jawaharlal, to find a compromise. But after their talks had made headway, Jinnah once again insisted that the Congress recognize the League as the sole representative of Indian Muslims. Jawaharlal refused to do this, saying it would be tantamount to a betrayal of the many nationalist Muslims in the Congress, and a stain on his own as well as the country’s honor. The viceroy thereupon went behind the Congress’s back and negotiated directly with Jinnah, accepting his nominations of Muslims as well as of a Scheduled Caste member. On October 15 the Muslim League formally announced that it would join the interim government.

But the League had done so only to wreck it from within. Even before its nominees were sworn in on October 26, they had made speeches declaring their real intention to be to work for the creation of Pakistan. The League’s members met by themselves separately prior to each cabinet meeting and functioned in cabinet as an opposition group rather than as part of a governing coalition. On every issue, from the most trivial to the most important, the League members sought to obstruct the government’s functioning, opposing every Congress initiative or proposal. Meanwhile, the League continued to instigate violence across the country; as riots broke out in Bihar in early November (with the Mahatma walking through the strife-torn province single-handedly restoring calm), Jinnah declared on November 14 that the killing would not stop unless Pakistan was created. The British convened talks in London in December to press the Congress to make further concessions to the League in order to persuade it to attend the Constituent Assembly. Jawaharlal, still burned by the reaction to his Bombay press conference, was at his most conciliatory, but Jinnah saw in the British position confirmation that his party’s fortunes were in the ascendant, and escalated his demands. To Jawaharlal it seemed the British had learned nothing from the failure of the policy of appeasement in Europe in the 1930s.

The Constituent Assembly met as scheduled on December 9, without League participation, but was careful not to take any decisions that might alienate Jinnah. Nonetheless, on January 29, 1947, the Muslim League Working Committee passed a resolution asking the British government to declare that the Cabinet Mission Plan had failed, and to dissolve the Assembly. The Congress members of the interim government in turn demanded that the League members, having rejected the plan, resign. Amid the shambles of their policy, the British government announced that they would withdraw from India, come what may, no later than June 1948, and that to execute the transfer of power, Wavell would be replaced by the blue-blooded former Supreme Commander for Asia, Lord Mountbatten.

It was now increasingly apparent even to Jawaharlal that Pakistan, in some form, would have to be created; the League was simply not going to work with the Congress in a united government of India. He nonetheless tried to prod leaders of the League into discussions on the new arrangements, which he still hoped would fall short of an absolute partition. By early March, as communal rioting continued across northern India, even this hope had faded. Both Patel and Nehru agreed that, despite the Mahatma’s refusal to contemplate such a prospect, the Congress had no alternative but to agree to partition Punjab and Bengal; the option of a loose Indian union including a quasi-sovereign Pakistan would neither be acceptable to the League nor result in a viable government for the rest of India. By the time Mountbatten arrived on March 24, 1947 the die had been cast. It was he, however, who rapidly ended the game altogether.

Mountbatten later claimed he governed by personality, and indeed both his positive and negative attributes would prove decisive. On the one hand he was focused, energetic, charming, and free of racial bias, unlike almost every one of his predecessors; on the other, he was astonishingly vain, alarmingly impatient, and easily swayed by personal likes and dislikes. His vicereine, Edwina, was a vital partner, one who took a genuine interest in Indian affairs. Theirs was a curious marriage, marked by her frequent infidelities, which he condoned, and it has been suggested that her affection for Jawaharlal played a part in some of his (and Mountbatten’s) decisions relating to Indian independence. There is no question that Jawaharlal and Edwina indeed became close, and some circumstantial evidence that they may well have become closer at a later stage in their lives, but it does not seem likely that this occurred early enough to have any political impact (or indeed that, if it did, it would have had any political impact). Nehru was certainly no celibate; particularly after the death of Kamala when he was only forty-seven, he enjoyed close relations with a number of women friends, though he never contemplated marriage again. Nehru’s biographer Frank Moraes wrote that Edwina “sensed that what Nehru most wanted and did not know how to achieve was to relax.” This she was able to get him to do, at a time of great tension. But while he enjoyed Edwina’s company, he had far more on his mind in 1947 than a dalliance with the viceroy’s spouse.

For one thing, India was aflame; for another, it stood on the brink of a new dawn, one that would, in Jawaharlal’s view, enable it to play a great role in world affairs. Nehru was therefore instrumental in convening the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947, attended by delegates, officials, and scholars of almost every conceivable shade of Asian opinion, including representatives of the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang, of Soviet Central Asia and British Malaya, of the Arab League and the Hebrew University (and even of Egypt, despite the geographical anomaly of its presence at an Asian gathering), but not of Japan, whose invitees were denied exit permits by the American occupying forces. The USA, the USSR, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain sent observers, who heard Jawaharlal declaim at the opening: “Standing on this watershed which divides two epochs of human history and endeavor, we can look back on our long past and look forward to the future that is taking shape before our eyes…. For too long we of Asia have been petitioners in Western courts and chancelleries. That story must now belong to the past. We propose to stand on our own feet and to co-operate with all others who are prepared to cooperate with us.” But even as he spoke, the country around him was consumed by violence, as the freedom struggle crumbled toward partition.

For Jawaharlal the conference marked “the beginnings of a new era in Asian history,” though it is difficult, with hindsight, to see how. Certainly there were no follow-up conferences held, no pan-Asian institutions established. But perhaps it signaled the first articulation of a postcolonial consciousness which was later to find expression in the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 and the Nonaligned movement. Asia as a political idea remained Jawaharlal’s alone.

Meanwhile events at home were deteriorating. Communal violence and killings were a daily feature; so was Jinnah’s complete unwillingness to cooperate with the Congress on any basis other than that it represented the Hindus and he the Muslims of India. The British gave him much encouragement to pursue this position: the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, the pro-League Sir Olaf Caroe, was unconscionably pressing the Congress government of this Muslim-majority state to make way for the League, since its continuation would have made Pakistan impossible. As the impasse in the interim government continued, Mountbatten and his advisers drew up a “Plan Balkan” that would have transferred power to the provinces rather than to a central government, leaving them free to join a larger union (or not). The British kept Nehru in the dark while “Plan Balkan” was reviewed (and revised) in London. When he was finally shown the text by Mountbatten at Simla on the night of May 10, Jawaharlal erupted in indignation, storming into his friend Krishna Menon’s⁷ room at 2 a.m. to sputter his outrage. Had the plan been implemented, the idea of India that Jawaharlal had so brilliantly evoked in his writings would have been sundered even more comprehensively than Jinnah was proposing. Balkanization would have unleashed civil war and disorder on an unimaginable scale, as provinces, princely states, and motley political forces contended for power upon the departure of the Raj.

A long, passionate, and occasionally incoherent note of protest from Jawaharlal to Mountbatten killed the plan. But the only alternative was partition. In May Jawaharlal saw the unrest in the country as “volcanic”: the time had come for making hard and unpleasant choices, and he was prepared to make them. Reluctantly, he agreed to Mountbatten’s proposal for a referendum in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Muslim-majority district of Sylhet, gave in on a Congress counterproposal for a similar approach in regard to Hindu-majority districts of Sind, and, most surprisingly, agreed to Dominion status for India. The Jawaharlal who agreed to Dominion status was the same man who had moved the independence resolution in Madras in 1927 and danced around the flagpole in Lahore two years later. In December 1946 he had proposed in the Constituent Assembly that India should be a sovereign democratic republic. Yet six months later he was willing to accept Dominion status for India within the British Commonwealth.

Some critics see in all this an exhausted Jawaharlal’s anxiety to end the tension once and for all; others suggest that he allowed his regard for the Mountbattens to trump his own principles (and some wonder whether Edwina played a part in bringing about the series of concessions). Such arguments do a great disservice to Jawaharlal Nehru. His correspondence at the time shows a statesman in great anguish trying to do the best for his country when all other options had failed. As long as the British gave Jinnah a veto over every proposal he found uncongenial, there was little else Nehru could do. Nor is there evidence in the writings and reflections of the other leading Indian nationalists of the time that any of them had any better ideas. The only exception was Gandhi: the Mahatma went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept united if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Jawaharlal and Patel both gave that idea short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously.

There is no doubt that Mountbatten seemed to proceed with unseemly haste, and that in so doing he swept the Indian leaders along. Nehru was convinced that Jinnah was capable of setting the country ablaze and destroying all that the nationalist movement had worked for: a division of India was preferable to its destruction. “It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals,” Nehru told his party, “though I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right course.” The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling. On June 3, Jawaharlal, Jinnah, and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh broadcast news of their acceptance of partition to the country. The occasion again brought out the best in Jawaharlal:

We are little men serving a great cause, but because that cause is great something of that greatness falls upon us also. Mighty forces are at work in the world today and in India…. [It is my hope] that in this way we shall reach that united India sooner than otherwise and that she will have a stronger and more secure foundation…. The India of geography, of history and tradition, the India of our minds and hearts, cannot change.

But of course it could change: geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied, minds and hearts torn apart. Jawaharlal imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League’s demand for Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the “right” side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland. Over a million people died in the savagery that bookended the freedom of India and Pakistan; some seventeen million were displaced, and countless properties destroyed and looted. Lines meant lives. What Jawaharlal had thought of as a temporary secession of certain parts of India hardened into the creation of two separate and hostile states that would fight three wars with each other over the next twenty-four years.

The Mahatma was not the only one to be assailed by a sense of betrayal. The Congress government in the North-West Frontier Province, let down by the national party, chose to boycott the referendum there, which passed with the votes of just 50.49 percent of the electorate (but nearly 99 percent of those who voted). Mountbatten, who had seen himself serving for a while as a bridge between the two new Dominions by holding the governor-generalship of both, was brusquely told by Jinnah that the League leader himself would hold that office in Pakistan. The outgoing viceroy would therefore have to content himself with the titular overlordship of India alone.

On August 4 Jawaharlal sent Mountbatten the list of fourteen names he proposed for independent India’s first cabinet. Patel would be his deputy and in charge of home affairs, bringing his considerable organizational skills to the calamitous law-and-order situation and to the integration of the princely states. The rest of the list was a remarkably impressive distillation of the best and the brightest of India’s political elite, while ensuring regional and religious representation: four “Caste Hindus,” including the Hindu Mahasabha leader Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerji; two Muslims, Azad and Kidwai; the Sikh leader Baldev Singh; two Christians, one of whom was a princess of Sikh origin; two Scheduled Caste leaders, including the radical Ambedkar, who had so often been the Congress’s nemesis; and a Parsi. The south of India had two representatives to the north’s twelve — Rajagopalachari, a notable omission, was to be dispatched to strife-torn Bengal as governor — but this imbalance apart, Jawaharlal Nehru’s first cabinet list set a standard that would never again be matched, while establishing a precedent for diversity that all his successors would strive to emulate.

A scurrilous rumor did the rounds that Nehru had initially omitted his main rival in the Congress, Sardar Patel, from the list and had been obliged by Mountbatten to include him. This was completely untrue. Though Patel had sought to challenge Jawaharlal’s ascent in 1946, he understood why the Mahatma saw in the younger man a more plausible leader for all of India. In turn, Nehru, in inviting Patel to serve as his deputy, called him “the strongest pillar of the Cabinet.” Patel replied: “My services will be at your disposal, I hope, for the rest of my life and you will have unquestioned loyalty and devotion from me in the cause for which no man in India has sacrificed as much as you have done. Our combination is unbreakable and therein lies our strength.” The Sardar’s assurances proved completely true, and their “combination” was indispensable as independent India found its feet. Sadly, though, the “rest of my life” that Patel alluded to would extend no more than another three years.

The man who, as Congress president in Lahore in 1929, had first demanded purna swaraj (full independence), now stood ready to claim it, even if the city in which he had moved his famous resolution was no longer to be part of the newly free country. Amid the rioting and carnage that consumed large sections of northern India, Jawaharlal Nehru found the time to ensure that no pettiness marred the moment: he dropped the formal lowering of the Union Jack from the independence ceremony in order not to hurt British sensibilities. The Indian tricolor was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens. Just before midnight, Jawaharlal Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly to deliver the most famous speech ever made by an Indian:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. 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.

“This is no time … for ill-will or blaming others,” he added. “We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.” And typically he ended this immortal passage with a sentence that combined both humility and ambition, looking beyond the tragedy besieging his moment of triumph to India’s larger place in the world: “It is fitting,” he said, “that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.”

There would be challenges enough ahead, but Jawaharlal Nehru would never cease, even at the moment of his greatest victory, to look above the suffering around him and fix his gaze upon a distant dream.

7 V. K. Krishna Menon, an acerbic south Indian intellectual and longtime London resident, had helped publish Jawaharlal in England and led the pro-Congress India League since 1929. Jawaharlal met Menon for the first time in London in 1935 and was greatly impressed with his intelligence, his energy, and his left-wing credentials, but observed: “he has the virtues and failings of the intellectual.” Their friendship was deep, abiding, and, as we shall see, ultimately ill-starred.