Nehru: The Invention of India

9. “Free Myself from this Daily Burden”: 1957–1964

In April 29, 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru announced his wish to resign. He did so in a public statement to the Congress parliamentary party, in which he pleaded fatigue and staleness. “The work of a prime minister,” he said, “allows no respite, it is continuous and unceasing. … There is little time for quiet thinking. I feel now that I must … free myself from this daily burden and think of myself as an individual citizen of India and not as prime minister.” He was not quite halfway between sixty-eight and sixty-nine; he had been head of the government for almost a dozen of those years, but he was as fit and vigorous as many half his age, practicing yoga daily and working late into the night. Had his offer been accepted, it would have set a democratic precedent around the developing world, none of whose first independence leaders had ever resigned voluntarily, nor would until the 1970s. The Congress parliamentary party, though, refused to entertain the thought; taken aback by the statement, they held an emergency meeting to urge Nehru to stay on. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev wrote expressing their hope that Jawaharlal would not leave. In the end, he settled for a long holiday in his beloved mountains instead, where he climbed with all the ardor of his youth until stopped by his doctors at 13,600 feet.

His daughter, Indira, accompanied him on the holiday. Through the 1950s she had been his official hostess and constant companion, to the detriment of her marriage. When she moved into the prime ministerial residence, Teen Murti House, to assume a full-time role by her father’s side, her husband stayed away. Feroze Gandhi was a Congress member of Parliament, with something of a reputation for brashly taking on his own party’s government. But he was loudly resentful of his wife’s decision to support her father rather than her husband, and though the two never formally separated, their marriage was reduced to a shell, their old love desiccated into ritual. In 1958 Feroze suffered a stroke, and in September 1960 he died of a heart attack. Indira became physically ill upon hearing the news. But if Jawaharlal ever reproached himself for having deprived his daughter of the consolations of a normal married life — something he himself had hardly enjoyed — he never made it known.

Some critics, mostly with the benefit of hindsight, have suggested that Nehru was grooming his daughter to succeed him. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a thought crossed his mind. Of course, being his official hostess provided Indira with a unique political education at close quarters, and she soon revealed a taste for affairs of state, both domestic and international. But Jawaharlal took no steps to promote her as a possible successor; he did not appoint her to his cabinet, despite public calls from partymen for him to do so, and she rates as an also-ran in Welles Hangen’s famous speculative 1963 book, After Nehru, Who? The worst that can be said is that Nehru did not object when others in the Congress Party pushed his daughter into politics, at first as organizer of the party’s women’s wing in 1953 and most notably when they elected her president of the Congress Party nationally for 1959. She proved a fierce and partisan official, leading the Congress into the streets against the elected Communist government in the state of Kerala and pressuring the government of India to dismiss the state authorities for failing to maintain law and order. But she did not seek (and Jawaharlal did not encourage) reelection.

Nehru, ever the democrat, confronted the issue of succession directly in a 1961 interview: “I am not trying to start a dynasty. I am not capable of ruling from the grave. How terrible it would be if I, after all I have said about the processes of democratic government, were to attempt to handpick a successor. The best I can do for India is to help our people as a whole to generate new leadership as it may be needed.” But by 1961, despite visible exhaustion, he had given up all thought of retirement. When Norman Cousins asked him about it, Nehru “looked as though nothing would be more unwelcome. … More than ever, we realized that Nehru loved his job and had no thought of leaving it.” Sadly, he had done little to encourage and groom credible alternative leadership.

But it was never easy to imagine an alternative. Jawaharlal was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy who put in sixteen- or seventeen-hour workdays throughout his life. Punctual and courteous to a fault, a man of regular habits, sustained by a simple diet and daily yogic exercise, he always demanded more of himself than of others. His first Principal Private Secretary, H. V. R. Iengar, recounted how, after an exhausting and dispiriting day touring riot-racked Punjab in August 1947,

round about midnight, we all dispersed, with another program, equally heavy and tragic, to start at six the next morning. I went to bed exhausted, both physically and in spirit. When, with some difficulty, I got ready early that morning to go to the airport, the P.A. [personal assistant] showed me a pile of letters, telegrams and memoranda which the prime minister had dictated after everybody had dispersed. The P.M. had gone to bed at 2 a.m. but was ready at 5:30 to start another day.

Iengar saw this punishing pace as “a case of the utter triumph of the spirit over the body, of a consuming passion for public work overcoming the normal mechanics of the human frame.”

The negative side of this capacity lay in Nehru’s obsession with detail — not merely in spending his time on matters unworthy of the attention of a head of government, but on trivialities like a painting improperly hung on a wall, or an untidy room, which would upset him to the point that he could not work if it was not redressed. As prime minister and external affairs minister he obsessed about the details of his files as few other ministers did. “Panditji liked to do much of his civil servants’ work for them,” one diplomat recalled ruefully. “I suppose it gave him vicarious satisfaction to beat them at their own game — noting, drafting, replying to every kind of letter. … His love for the quick disposal of paper also inevitably led to dispensing with a basic rule of the civil servant, the requirement of consulting previous papers on the subject.” Added to this was a tendency to enjoy conversation for its own sake, oblivious to the far greater priorities demanding the prime minister’s attention. One British official assigned to the Defense Ministry in the late 1950s noted that Jawaharlal “liked chatting about the world in general. … When I was with him, he just chatted. It was curious. I was surprised. He chatted.”

The roots of this may have lain in Jawaharlal’s youth. The domineering Motilal adored and spoiled his son, but may well have instilled in him a tragic flaw for a leader — an instinctive sense that the ultimate responsibility for decision lay elsewhere than in himself. Knowing that his father, and later the Mahatma, were there encouraged in Jawaharlal a tendency to temporize and vacillate, to indulge in reflection and thinking aloud, and yet not commit to a concrete decision. During the nationalist struggle Subhas Bose bitterly reproached Jawaharlal for this. In the later years of his rule this tendency had unfortunate consequences. His close friend Syed Mahmud suggested that Jawaharlal was “not temperamentally made for pursuing decisions to their ultimate execution at the lowest levels.”

Indira and Jawaharlal presided over an unusual household for a busy prime minister. The official residence overflowed with animals — dogs of assorted breeds (including not a few mongrels), a pair of Himalayan pandas, peacocks and parrots, squirrels and deer, and (until they became too large to keep safely at home) three tiger cubs. Indira’s two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, had the run of the place (sometimes literally on their grandfather’s back). Teen Murti was also constantly full of house guests, including, once a year, Edwina Mountbatten. Friends would drop in for dinner, where the table manners of Cambridge were applied to the cuisine of Allahabad. The gardens of Teen Murti were full every morning with ordinary people who came for an “open house,” where they could petition, talk with, or simply receive a “darshan” (a regal sight) of their prime minister.

Jawaharlal’s personality was mercurial. He could be utterly charming to total strangers, witty, engaging, and even (in the right mood) frivolous: there are accounts of his dinnertime impersonations of world leaders that had his guests in splits, and he would often oblige casual dinner guests to don one of the foreign national costumes he had been presented with on his travels. Many foreigners who met him in the 1930s and well into the 1950s speak of a captivating figure, with great intellectual breadth, blessed with intelligence and curiosity as well as impeccable manners, who disarmed his interlocutors with his warmth, wit, courtesy, and grace. (Phillips Talbot, who first met him as a visiting student in 1939 and over the next twenty-five years as journalist, scholar, and diplomat, declared more than six decades after that first encounter: “I still find it difficult to be objective about Nehru. He was enormously captivating, warm, intelligent, brilliant; inspiring even when angry.”) The actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin recounted in his autobiography a marvelous story of Nehru in 1953 chattering away animatedly to the movie legend in the back of his car while his driver, to Chaplin’s consternation, careened through Swiss mountain roads at a death-defying seventy miles per hour.

Nehru’s close friend Syed Mahmud was immediately struck, upon first meeting Jawaharlal, by his manners, which were those of “an upper-class English gentleman”; but his level of courtesy and consideration was extravagantly Indian. When Mahmud explained his reliance on a traveling servant by saying how much he hated folding and spreading his bedding on the bunk of the train, Jawaharlal took on the chore himself, and continued to make and unmake Mahmud’s bed whenever the two traveled together over a period of decades. The Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah told the story of how, on a winter visit to India, he was about to leave by train for the cold north when

Nehru unexpectedly arrived at the station looking rather extraordinary in an oversized overcoat. … “I know it is too big for me, but I think it should be just right for you. … Try it on.” I tried it on and it was, as he had said, just right. I put my hands proudly in the pockets and discovered fresh surprises. In one there was a warm wool scarf and in the other a pair of warm gloves.

This courtesy was not only for VIPs: discovering on a visit to Kashmir that his stenographer’s suitcase had been mislaid and that the poor man was shivering in a thin cotton shirt, the prime minister personally ensured that a sweater and jacket were provided to him. Jawaharlal never forgot a sibling’s birthday, even when in prison. He was also so good with children (who knew him as “Chacha,” or Uncle Nehru) that his birthday began to be celebrated across India, even while he was alive, as Children’s Day.

Yet the same Jawaharlal could also be imperious and short-tempered. He would often lash out publicly at some unfortunate official who was in no position to defend himself. The Ceylonese leader Solomon Bandaranaike described him as “a delicately nurtured aristocrat with high-strung nerves. … He often uses up his nervous energy and that makes him sometimes short-tempered and irritable.” Bandaranaike recounted with wry amusement lunching with Nehru as an admiring crowd gathered and Jawaharlal erupted, “I just cannot eat in public.” The crowd was dispersed and Bandaranaike mused, “There speaks the sensitive aristocrat.” Nehru was also capable of behaving in a manner so remote and brooding that he seemed to be thinking of anyone but his interlocutor, and (particularly in his later years) retreating into lengthy and impenetrable silences even when receiving visitors. He was not just moody; many felt a barrier existed between him and even those closest to him. He was often described as the loneliest man in India.

Despite (or perhaps because of) these paradoxical qualities, Jawaharlal enjoyed the attentions of several distinguished women, many of whom, at least if Stanley Wolpert’s speculations are to be believed, may have become his lovers. Through much of the 1950s Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal exchanged annual visits; the French author Catherine Clément has spun an elaborate romance out of these twice-yearly encounters (Edwina staying with him at Teen Murti, Jawaharlal with her at the Mountbatten estate in England, Broadlands). Others suggest that though the opportunity certainly existed, and the two exchanged intimate letters testifying to the intensity of their friendship, there is no proof the relationship was ever consummated. In 1960 Edwina died in Borneo with letters from Jawaharlal scattered about her bed. He was an ardent and prolific correspondent to a number of women: his letters to Padmaja Naidu, Sarojini’s daughter and herself a frequent overnight guest at his house, are perhaps among the most exquisite love letters ever written by an Indian public figure. But the speculation is largely irrelevant: Jawaharlal’s major aphrodisiac, as Talbot put it, was clearly politics.

Perhaps the most interesting description of Nehru at this time (when he had, so to speak, just crested the peak of his success but not yet begun to sense his own decline) comes from the account of another who combined the burdens of governmental office with the acuity of the writer-philosopher, the Frenchman André Malraux, who called on Jawaharlal in 1958. Nehru had “a Roman face with a slight heaviness about the lower lip which gave his apparently ‘posed’ smile the seductiveness which a suggestion of innocence imparts to a great man,” wrote Malraux. Nehru’s voice and bearing revealed “beneath the patrician intellectual the English gentleman’s ease and self-possession which he had doubtless learned to emulate in his youth. … His hand gestures, once so expansive, were now turned inward toward his body, the fingers almost closed. And … these chilly gestures … gave his authority a charm such as I have never since encountered.” Malraux noted delightfully that Nehru “meant what he said, like the few great statesmen I have met, and like most of the painters.”

Critics have painted an unedifying picture of a Jawaharlal increasingly out of touch with reality in his last years in office, prone to public expressions of self-doubt, drifting into decisions delayed by his own tendency to see both sides of every question, an intellectual dreamer who gave expression to ideas but not to their implementation. Though much of that is true, it paints a simplistic picture. There were both triumphs and setbacks in his life and work, many challenges successfully surmounted and one crushing defeat.

Domestic issues continued to press in upon him — a Naga tribal insurgency in the northeast, Master Tara Singh’s demands for a Sikh-majority state in the Punjab, anti-Hindi agitation in Madras (where the avowedly secessionist Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party was gaining ground in its attacks on north Indian domination). Nehru dealt with these through a combination of shrewdness (postponing the proposed adoption of Hindi as the official national language until 1965), democracy (insisting that the Sikhs could flourish in free India without needing a Sikh-majority state, while backing a tough Sikh Congressman, Pratap Singh Kairon, as chief minister of Punjab), and repression (turning the army on the Nagas). All three came into play over Kashmir, where he explored every hope of a settlement, only to be thwarted each time. Just before his death he released Sheikh Abdullah from jail and sent him to Pakistan to negotiate a new accommodation. (It was at a press conference in Muzaffarabad that the Sheikh learned the news of Jawaharlal’s passing; he wept openly at the loss of his former comrade-in-arms, who had sadly become his jailer.)

Jawaharlal — the man who had in his younger days been known to leap off the stage and physically attack hecklers in his audience — became an Olympian presence at public meetings around the country. Nehru made magnificent speeches, usually without notes, but he was not a great orator. The British statesman Lord Pethick-Lawrence described Jawaharlal’s style as prime minister:

Unlike a European or American orator he does not commence on a bold or emphatic note or end with a carefully prepared rhetorical peroration. His voice begins quietly; almost imperceptibly, like a piece of Indian music, it rises to a height of passionate pleading and fades away at the end into silence. And his listeners are greatly moved alike by his sincerity and his restraint.

Sometimes they were not; even an admirer, the industrialist S. P. Jain, conceded that “occasionally his speeches are rambling, sometimes trite, sometimes reflective and unrelated to the immediate subject of the debate.” But “it is the personality of the man rather than his oratory that holds attention.” And through the strength of his personality Jawaharlal held the country together and nurtured its democracy. But his sense of mass public opinion became increasingly suspect: as one historian put it, “Nehru addressed the Indian masses as a democrat, but the Indian masses revered him as a demigod. … In his last years he had no means of feeling the pulse of the people he wanted to serve. The masses were either mute or would throw him their acclaim at crowded meetings.”

Nor could Jawaharlal prevent the growth of the corruption which his own statist policies facilitated. The image of the self-sacrificing Congressmen in homespun gave way to that of the professional politicians the educated middle classes came to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and unaccountable) riches by manipulating governmental favors. With licenses and quotas for every business activity, petty politicians grew rich by profiting from the power to permit. In 1959, in a birthday tribute, no less, Jawaharlal’s sister Krishna (Betty) wrote sadly: “Nehru the Prime Minister no longer remembers or adheres to the ideals or dreams that Jawahar the Rebel had. … [H]e can no longer arouse his people as he did in years gone by, for he has allowed himself to be surrounded by those who are known to be opportunists and the entire Government machinery, corrupt and heavy with intrigue, rules the land with no hope of an honest hearing from any quarter.” A sympathetic biographer, Frank Moraes, wrote that “in India today there is no one to restrain or guide Nehru. He is Caesar, and from Caesar one can appeal only to Caesar.”

The stench of corruption reached Jawaharlal’s own circles three times in the later years of his rule: when his finance minister, T. T. Krishnamachari, was obliged to resign in 1958 over improprieties in a life insurance scandal (it was Feroze Gandhi’s muckraking that brought about Krishnamachari’s downfall); when his friend Jayanti Dharma Teja, whom Nehru had helped set up a major shipping line, defaulted on loans and skipped the country; and when Jawaharlal’s own private secretary since 1946, M. O. Mathai, who was accused both of spying for the CIA and of accumulating an ill-gotten fortune, was forced to resign in 1959. In none of these cases was there the slightest suggestion that Jawaharlal had profited personally in any way from the actions of his associates, but they again confirmed that Nehru’s loyalty exceeded his judgment. (And in dozens of other cases where corruption was not an issue, he picked unsuitable aides and persisted in his support for them well after their ineptitude had been revealed.) By the late 1950s he was widely considered a poor judge of men, and not merely by his critics. An admirer and former cabinet colleague, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, put it bluntly:

He is not a good judge of character and is therefore easily deceived. He is not averse to flattery and there is a conceit in him which makes him at once intolerant of criticism and may even warp his better judgment. His very loyalty to friends blinds him to their faults. For this very reason he is not ruthless enough as a leader and his leadership is weakened thereby.

But Nehru’s own conduct was exemplary; when in 1957 the city of Allahabad levied a trivial wealth tax on his property there, Nehru insisted it be assessed five times higher.

The task of nation-building remained a vital preoccupation for Jawaharlal. India’s freedom from colonial rule was not complete with the adoption of the republican Constitution on January 26, 1950. France and Portugal still maintained territories on Indian soil. The French negotiated an amicable withdrawal from their comptoirs in 1954, but the Portuguese, under the Salazar dictatorship, insisted their territory of Goa was a full-fledged province of Portugal, and enjoyed the overt support of Britain and the United States for their claim. The international dimension prompted Jawaharlal not to opt for the “police action” that had overrun Hyderabad and Junagadh, but domestic outrage over the continuation of the foreign enclave spilled over into the colony as nonviolent satyagrahis crossed the border in protest and were shot by Portuguese border guards. After more than a decade of vacillation, during which he agonized over Gandhi’s injunctions not to use force even in the pursuit of just ends, Nehru ordered the Army to move at the end of 1961. Goa fell within twenty-six hours; the hopelessly outgunned Portuguese governor surrendered without a fight. India weathered international opprobrium easily enough, though President Kennedy tartly suggested to the Indian ambassador in Washington that India might now consider delivering fewer self-righteous sermons on nonviolence. The victory in Goa gave Jawaharlal a great surge of domestic popularity, which helped carry him and the Congress to another resounding victory in the general elections of 1962. It would be his last.

His final visit to the United States occurred in November 1961, during the presidency of a man who had long admired him, John F. Kennedy. But Nehru was at his worst, moody and sullen at times, didactic and superior at others. The two statesmen failed to hit it off; JFK was later quoted as saying this was the worst state visit he had suffered. Nehru no longer attracted uncritical admiration. His positions, both domestic and international, were seen by many as hypocritical. A satirical view of Nehru’s inconsistencies came in the words of the American poet Ogden Nash, who published a savage piece of doggerel, “The Pandit”:

Just how shall we define a Pandit?

It’s not a panda, nor a bandit.

But rather a Pandora’s box

Of sophistry and paradox.

Though Oxford [sic] gave it a degree

It maintains its neutrality

By quietly hating General Clive

As hard as if he were alive.

On weighty international questions

It’s far more Christian than most Christians;

It’s ever eager, being meek

To turn someone else’s cheek.

Oft has it said all men are brothers,

And set that standard up for others,

Yet as it spoke it gerrymandered

Proclaiming its private Pakistandard.

The neutral pandit walks alone,

And if abroad, it casts a stone,

It walks impartial to the last, Ready at home to stone a caste.

Abandon I for now the pandit, I fear I do not understand it.

A few months before Goa, in September 1961, Nehru, Nasser, and Tito had met in Belgrade to complete the task they had begun in Brioni five years earlier — the formal creation of the Nonaligned movement. The occasion saw the passage of various resolutions condemning war and calling for nuclear disarmament, of which Nehru was inordinately proud. It was a telling indication of the gulf between his view of the world and the international realities with which he had to deal.

It is sometimes true that one’s greatest failures emerge from one’s greatest passions. Foreign policy was Jawaharlal Nehru’s favorite subject, his area of unchallenged expertise. China had been a source of intense fascination since his youth, a country he frequently sought to visit and for whose leaders he had expressed great admiration ever since his speech at the Anti-Imperialist Congress in Brussels in 1927. Yet it was his failure to manage India’s relationship with China that, more than anything else, blighted his last years of office and contributed to his final decline.

After signing the Panch Sheel agreement with China in 1954 and helping Chou Enlai emerge into the limelight in Bandung in 1955, Jawaharlal embarked on a starry-eyed phase of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” which seemed willfully blind to the real divergence of interests between the two countries at that time. Bandung marked the beginning of Sino-Pakistani contacts that would soon flower into a vital alliance, for Beijing was more conscious of its geopolitical place in the world than Nehru’s New Delhi was. China’s reestablishment of its authority over Tibet in 1950 brought the People’s Liberation Army to the frontiers of India along a British-demarcated boundary (the McMahon Line) that Beijing had never recognized. This should have prompted a certain amount of realism about national security in New Delhi; but Nehru, anxious to avoid any rupture of the anticolonial solidarity he felt with China, resisted Patel’s demands that India set out a clear (and by implication assertive) position on the border issue. His policy instead became an uneasy amalgam of idealist rhetoric about Sino-Indian relations on the one hand and firm assurances to Parliament that India would hold its border at the Mc- Mahon Line. Nehru did not, however, press Beijing to come to a negotiated agreement on the border, preferring to take at face value a statement by Chou in 1952 that China had no border dispute with India. In April 1954 Nehru formally recognized Tibet as a full-fledged part of China, giving up assorted British-era rights India had acquired there, without seizing the opportunity to obtain a border agreement in return.

Through the mid-1950s, and particularly after Bandung, Jawaharlal seemed to see himself as virtually a patron of China, a position hardly likely to be well received in Beijing. Jawaharlal saw it as India’s duty to sponsor China’s arrival on the world scene and to lead the demand for Beijing to assume its rightful place at the United Nations. An escalating series of disputes and mutual protests over territorial issues were treated in New Delhi as minor misunderstandings that should not be allowed to cloud the larger picture. So self-delusion compounded arrogance. Nehru was also impervious to China’s increasing irritation with what its leaders saw as Indian pretensions to Great Power standing globally and specifically in Asia, a position which by size and strength Beijing viewed as more naturally China’s. By 1959 Beijing openly declared that the Sino-Indian boundary had never been formally delineated and that China had never recognized the McMahon Line drawn by British imperialists. When China cracked down on a Tibetan rebellion that year, New Delhi’s grant of asylum to the fleeing Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers in March 1959 further embittered relations.

But by that point Nehru had given away all of India’s cards. When the shooting started with a series of border incidents later that year, India was found woefully unprepared. Yet Nehru refused to believe China would ever embark on war with India, and did unconscionably little to prepare his forces for one. His defense minister from 1957 on was the leftist ideologue Krishna Menon, a votary of self-reliance who refused to import defense equipment and turned the military factories into production lines for hairpins and pressure-cookers. In 1959 Menon clashed publicly with the army chief, General Thimayya, who had to be persuaded by Nehru to withdraw his resignation after being denounced as pro-West by his own minister. In the next couple of years the warnings from the armed forces about their inability to protect Indian positions without additional resources proliferated, but were largely ignored by Nehru and Menon. As late as August 1961 Jawaharlal told Parliament that India did not believe in war, and would not act “in a huff” but behave with “wisdom and strength,” complacent banalities that revealed neither wisdom nor strength. In November that year, on the basis of a flawed intelligence estimate from another trusted acolyte, the head of the Intelligence Bureau, B. N. Mullick, Nehru instructed the army “to patrol as far forward as possible from our present positions … without getting involved in a clash with the Chinese.” But the patrols moved without adequate logistical support, and the troops were at their most vulnerable just as clashes became inevitable. On September 8, 1962, the Chinese crossed the McMahon Line, claiming self-defense against Indian “aggression,” then stopped. Nehru and Menon persuaded themselves that the incident was only a skirmish, and each traveled on planned visits abroad. But neither seemed to have realized the extent of the Chinese mobilization. On October 20 waves of Chinese troops poured across the border. Fullfledged war had broken out.

It was a rout. The war lasted a month, with only ten days of actual fighting; brave Indian troops, underequipped and understrength, without firewood or adequate tentage, many wearing canvas shoes in the Himalayan snows, and short of ammunition for their antiquated Lee Enfield rifles, were simply overwhelmed. On November 21 China, with its forces seemingly unstoppable, unilaterally declared a cease-fire and then withdrew from much of the territory it had captured, retaining some 2,500 square miles in the western sector. It had, in the words of Liu Shao-chi, taught India a lesson. Nehru’s grand international pretensions had been cut down to size.

A calamitous military defeat was only the most evident of Nehru’s setbacks. His foreign policy lay in a shambles, as the Soviet Union and most of the nonaligned world remained neutral in the conflict and India turned to the United States (itself in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis) for help — including, to the astonishment of Jawaharlal’s ambassador in Washington, his cousin B. K. Nehru, American military aircraft. Nehru’s stature as the leader of the newly liberated colonial peoples and his authority to speak for the “Third World” had been dealt a major blow. But this time Jawaharlal did not offer to resign. The public and Parliament turned on Menon instead; not even the loyal support of Nehru could save him, and on November 7 Menon was forced out of the government. Nehru, let down by those in whom he had placed such trust, betrayed by his own idealism, was a broken man. In April 1963 he suffered the first of a series of serious illnesses that would mark his rapid downward spiral toward death.

And yet one should not overlook the transcendent irony of 1962, the reawakening of an Indian nationalism that Jawaharlal had once incarnated but had since sought to subsume in idealist internationalism. For the first time since that midnight moment of independence, the country rallied together as one: housewives knit sweaters for the soldiers on the Himalayan front and donated their gold jewelry to the servicemen’s fund, moviegoers stood respectfully to attention as the national anthem played in theaters after the film, schoolchildren discovered a sense of patriotism that had nothing to do with overthrowing the English. In the moment of his greatest failure, the preeminent voice of Indian freedom unwittingly gave a new boost to a nationalist resurgence. War, and defeat, destroyed illusions but nurtured resolve, tightening the bonds Nehru had helped put in place to hold his disparate country together.

The eighteen months left to him after the Chinese debacle added little to Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation. In August 1963, forty opposition members of Parliament sponsored a no-confidence motion against his government. The Congress’s crushing majority meant that it was easily defeated, but a new slogan was heard in the House: “Quit, Nehru, quit!” Three months later, in November 1963, Jawaharlal launched India’s own space program, a moment immortalized in a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson showing a rocket part being carried on the back of a bicycle. Six years earlier Jawaharlal had inaugurated India’s first atomic research reactor. Nuclear power and space technology: there was no limit to his scientific aspirations for India, and yet the country was moored in the bicycle age at least partly because of his unwillingness to open up its economy to the world.

By 1964 the signs of mortality were impossible to ignore. Jawaharlal was visibly ailing; the puffy face, the sunken eyes, the shuffling gait were of a man in irreversible decline. His visits to Parliament were, in the words of a senior opposition member, those of “an old man, looking frail and fatigued … with a marked stoop in his gait … [and] slow, faltering steps, clutching the backrests of benches for support as he descended.” Nehru suffered a cerebral stroke at the annual Congress session in January and missed most of it, but within days was back in New Delhi trying to manage his usual routine. Work was his lifeblood. “If I lie down in bed for even a week,” he declared, “I know I will not get up!” That moment was not long in arriving. A second stroke felled him on May 17, but he resumed his schedule within days. On May 22 he told a press conference, in response to a question about whether he should not settle the question of his successor in his own lifetime: “My life is not coming to an end so soon.” On May 27, 1964 — a date astonishingly foretold five years earlier by one of his ministers’ favorite astrologers, Haveli Ram Joshi — Jawaharlal Nehru passed away in his sleep after a massive aortic rupture. On his bedside table were found, jotted down in his own hand, the immortal lines from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

Sleep had come to Nehru at the age of seventy-four. The nation was plunged into mourning; tributes poured in from around the world. An earthquake rocked the capital on the day of his death, a portentous omen to some. Cynics waited for the survivors to fight over the spoils; many predicted India’s inevitable disintegration. But Jawaharlal had prepared his people well, instilling in them the habits of democracy, a respect for parliamentary procedure, and faith in the constitutional system. There were no succession squabbles. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a modest figure of unimpeachable integrity and considerable political and administrative acumen, was elected India’s second prime minister. The country wept, and moved on.

Years earlier Jawaharlal had repeated a question posed to him by an American interviewer: “My legacy to India? Hopefully, it is 400 million people capable of governing themselves.” The numbers had grown, but in the peaceful transfer of power that followed his death, Jawaharlal Nehru had left his most important legacy.

His last will and testament, written in 1954 when he was not yet sixty-five, was released to the nation upon his death. In it he spoke of his gratitude for the love and affection of the Indian people and his hope that he would not prove unworthy of them. He asked that his body be cremated and the ashes transported to Allahabad, his birthplace, where a “small handful” was to be “thrown in the Ganga.” This last request would not have been surprising from a devout man, but from India’s most famous agnostic, a man who openly despised temples and was never known to have worshipped at any Hindu shrine in his long life, it came as a surprise. Nehru’s reasons, spelled out in his will, had little to do with religion:

The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall, a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter and a vast, roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea’s power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future. And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, … I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.

This was Jawaharlal at his finest: lyrical, sentimental, passionately combining a reverence for the past with his aspirations for the future, making the most sacred river of Hinduism into a force for cultural unity, a torrent that unites history with hope. There is nothing in Nehru’s use of the Ganga as symbol that could alienate an Indian Muslim or Christian. Here was the magic of Indian nationalism as no one else could express it, capped by a concluding request:

The major portion of my ashes should … be carried high up into the air in an airplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil … and become an indistinguishable part of India.

During his years as prime minister, many at home and abroad could not distinguish Jawaharlal Nehru from the country he so unchallengeably led. That task would now become literally impossible. In death, as in life, Jawaharlal would become India.***