Nehru: The Invention of India

5. “In Office but Not in Power”: 1931–1937

In concluding the Gandhi-Irwin Pact the viceroy disregarded one of the Mahatma’s pleas, that the lives of the young revolutionary Bhagat Singh and his companions, who had been arrested for throwing bombs into the Legislative Assembly, be spared. Less than three weeks after the agreement, on March 23, the patriots were hanged; angry demonstrators blamed Gandhi’s pact with the British for their deaths. Jawaharlal himself declared that “the corpse of Bhagat Singh shall stand between us and England.” But Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had succeeded him as Congress president, aided the Mahatma in steering the party’s Karachi session toward moderation. Nehru’s major contribution at Karachi was the formulation of a “minimum program” for the Congress, which guaranteed Indians freedom of expression and assembly, equality before the law, universal adult franchise, and a secular state, as well as a number of less easily realizable social and economic rights. The resolution embodying these freedoms passed after some resistance from the right wing, and went on to constitute the nucleus of the Constitution that free India would give itself nearly two decades later.

After a break holidaying in Ceylon with Kamala and Indira for seven weeks, an all-too-rare gesture of attention to his neglected family, Jawaharlal returned to political action. Seeing the unrest amongst the U.P. peasantry, long oppressed by their British-imposed land-lords, or taluqdars, he decided to launch a campaign against the payment of rent. He was careful not to do this as a form of class warfare, instead couching his appeals in anti-British terms, since the government clearly had the capacity to provide relief to the tenant farmers but chose not to do so. Ordered by the government to discontinue his public speaking in favor of the “no-rent” campaign, Jawaharlal refused. He was arrested on December 26, 1931 and, early in the New Year, sentenced to the usual two years’ rigorous imprisonment and a five-hundred-rupee fine. (Once again he refused to pay the fine, and the authorities seized a car registered in Indira’s name, which they subsequently auctioned off for three times the amount of the fine.)

The struggle was already requiring him to draw upon inner resources he had not known he possessed. His sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit would never forget Jawaharlal’s imprisonment this time:

We were permitted to go and say good-bye. He was his usual self, full of assurances … and humorous messages to the younger members of the family. As we walked away, I turned back for a last look. He stood against the sun which was setting in a great orange ball behind his head. He held the bars on either side and the face, so recently full of mirth, was serene and withdrawn, and there was infinite compassion in the eyes, which no longer saw us. He was already deep in his own contemplation.

Mahatma Gandhi was at sea, literally and metaphorically, at the time of Jawaharlal’s arrest. He was returning from the second Round Table Conference, which had proved as infructuous as the first, when the news reached him on board his ship from London. The Conservatives had returned to power in Britain and London was no longer enthused by Irwin’s conciliatory approach. Irwin’s successor, the disagreeable Tory grandee Lord Willingdon, did not consider it part of a viceroy’s brief to mollify law-breaking Indians; indeed he saw himself as “a sort of Mussolini in India.” Under Willingdon the British adopted a general policy of political repression, banning the Congress, seizing its properties, confiscating its assets, destroying its records, and prohibiting political activity. The press was censored and thousands of “subversives” were jailed, among them Jawaharlal, seen as a potential Indian Lenin. He spent most of the next four years in prison, with only two brief spells of freedom.

During the first of these stints behind bars, beginning just after Christmas 1931, his health suffered; unexplained fevers, tooth ailments, and a bout of pleurisy laid him low, and he was unable to maintain his regular exercise. (Later, he mastered yoga and wrote of “standing on his head” in his prison cell.) Conditions were abominable, with bedbugs, mosquitoes, flies, wasps, and even bats his constant companions. The fortnightly visits from his relatives were so closely monitored, and his visitors so badly treated, that he placed a self-imposed ban on them rather than see his family insulted — but not seeing his family only heightened his anxiety about their welfare. (The Mahatma finally persuaded him to end this self-denial after eight months.) In April 1932 his mother was badly beaten about the head and severely injured when a demonstration she was participating in was lathi-charged by the police. “The mother of a brave son is also some-what like him,” she wrote, but Jawaharlal’s despondency was great — a chronically ill wife, a neglected daughter, and now a widowed mother who had nearly died at the hands of the police, in addition to his two sisters also being jailed, all weighed on him. There is a photograph of him in prison at this time, nearly bald, attired in a white dhoti (full-length waistcloth) and kurta (loose-fitting shirt) with a black khadi (homespun) waistcoat buttoned above the navel. He is posing for the camera with his hands behind his back, but there is no hiding the grim pallor of his countenance, the downturned cast of his mouth, the hollowness of the determined expression he has put on. This is a man living in the depths. A year before, he had been dancing around the flagpole in Lahore.

His only consolation in prison lay in his continued writing of the letters to Indira on world history — letters that he was not, for a while, allowed to send her. They reveal Jawaharlal’s vision of human progress, advancing through periods of inhumanity and suffering but teleologically moving onward toward better lives for the world’s ordinary people. The Marxian idea that control of the means of production is the key to political dominance, and that history is essentially a tale of class conflict, strongly informs his analysis. But his British liberal education also shows through, as does his syncretic view of Indian nationalism. Jawaharlal was certainly aware that his letters would find a larger public, and in writing about India as well as the world he was careful to articulate views consistent with his political objectives. There is great praise for the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (in particular the Bhagavad Gita), but as works of literature rather than as sacred texts; and he is careful to write about Islam with respect, describing even the depredations of the eleventh-century invader Mahmud of Ghazni as nothing more than the deeds of a warrior of those times rather than as evidence of what Hindu chauvinists were portraying as Muslim barbarism. In these letters there clearly emerge the fundamental convictions of the young statesman: his secularism, his socialism (underscored by the seeming collapse of capitalism with the global depression then at its worst), his detestation of strongmen (linked to the rise of fascism in Europe, which he believed only communism could defeat), and his faith in a “scientific” approach to human history.

Though writing (and eclectic reading, this time without restrictions) warded off some of the tedium of jail, Jawaharlal spent a great deal of his solitude mourning his father. On one occasion he was reading a newspaper article about the unveiling of a bust of Motilal when he suddenly found his eyes full of tears. He had always known how much he was reliant on that strong, protective, and overindulgent paternal force in his life, and he was now suffused with the extent of his loss. The Mahatma was, of course, the closest substitute. When Gandhi undertook a fast-unto-death in September 1932 in protest against a British decision to treat the “Untouchables” as a separate community outside the Hindu fold, Jawaharlal feared he would lose a second father figure. (Gandhi, who had been seeking to reform the discriminatory practices within Hinduism in order to ensure the Untouchables — whom he called Harijans, or “Children of God” — full acceptance within Hindu society, saw the British decision as a further scheme to divide Indians against each other.) That crisis passed, but in 1933 Gandhi undertook another potentially fatal fast and an anxious Jawaharlal cabled him: “I feel lost in a strange country where you are [the] only familiar land-mark and I try to gropeexile in London and made him “permanent my way in [the] dark but I stumble.” Yet politically the two diverged more and more; Jawaharlal’s prison diaries reveal his increasing conviction that Gandhi was too willing to compromise with reactionary social, political, and religious forces which were anathema to the radical Nehru. The Mahatma derived his ethic from God; the author of Glimpses of World History derived his from Man, or at least from his study of mankind. He found Gandhi’s “frequent references to God … most irritating.”

On August 12, 1933, with his mother seriously ill and his sentence having less than two weeks to run, the British released Jawaharlal. Perhaps they expected him to break decisively with Gandhi and split the Congress Party. Indeed, Jawaharlal traveled to Poona to meet the Mahatma in a somewhat rebellious mood. But once again the two men found common ground; his great need for the paternal figure of Gandhi, his admiration for the Mahatma’s common touch with ordinary Indians (which he, as an aristocratic intellectual, felt he could never match), and his conviction that party unity was indispensable for an effective freedom struggle, prompted Jawaharlal to articulate his views in terms that the Mahatma could live with. Gandhi declared the differences between them to be merely those of temperament; he told an interviewer that Jawaharlal’s “communist views … need not frighten anyone.” Some of Nehru’s radical followers in the Congress were disappointed at this seeming gulf between analysis and action, but it was wholly characteristic of Jawaharlal. Rather than attacking the Congress leadership, he turned his anger against the forces of Hindu bigotry which had begun to organize themselves under the Hindu Mahasabha. (In an approach that would lead to him being forever accused of double standards, he was less harsh on Muslim communalism, seeing this as to some degree excusable in a minority afraid for its future.)

Nonetheless his new pact with Gandhi made him a dangerous figure in British eyes. The authorities feared the pair would shortly revive the dormant civil disobedience movement, this time with a communistic tinge. The government sent secret instructions around the country that Jawaharlal was to be closely watched, and arrested at the slightest provocation. Various speeches were examined as suitable candidates for prosecution, before a stinging denunciation of imperialism in Calcutta in January 1934 gave the Bengal government the excuse to arrest and try him. In February he was sentenced to another two years in His Majesty’s prisons.

After three months with no books other than a German grammar, no companion other than a clerk jailed for embezzlement, and severe restrictions on his writing, Jawaharlal was transferred from Calcutta to a prison in the U.P. hills, in Dehra Dun. In April a disillusioned Mahatma Gandhi suspended civil disobedience altogether, to Jawaharlal’s great disappointment. Yet again, Jawaharlal confided to his diary that the time had come for a parting of the ways with his mentor. “I felt with a stab of pain that the cords of allegiance that had bound me to him for many years had snapped.” He said as much in an emotional letter to Gandhi, which the Mahatma chose to regard merely as the letting off of steam rather than the sign of a definitive break. Gandhi was wise: Jawaharlal had no taste for patricide. Briefly released from prison on compassionate grounds — Kamala’s health was worsening by the day — he disassociated himself from public criticism of the Congress leaders, to the dismay of his leftist followers, who had constituted themselves into a Congress Socialist Party and were looking to him for leadership. Jawaharlal kept his disagreements with Gandhi to himself; in any case the British authorities, fearing what he might do if he were left at large, put him back into prison the moment Kamala’s health showed a slight improvement. He had been free for just eleven days.

In June 1934, as much to take his mind off his wife’s deteriorating condition as anything, Jawaharlal Nehru began to write his autobiography, an elegant and fascinating portrait of his life and of his own mind. The 976-page manuscript was completed in nine months. When it was published in 1936, it bore the simple dedication “To Kamala, who is no more.” The brave and long-suffering Mrs. Jawaharlal Nehru, barely older than the century, had succumbed to tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Lausanne on February 28, 1936. Despite (or perhaps because of) the long periods of neglect of the relationship, Jawaharlal was devastated. He had sent her to Europe the previous May in the hope that she would improve, but in September her doctors had cabled him that she was in critical condition, and the British suspended his sentence to enable him to be at her side. He joined her at a clinic in Badenweiler in Nazi Germany (where he made it a point to make his purchases from Jewish shopkeepers), then moved her to Lausanne, but it was all in vain.

Kamala’s had been a deeply unhappy life, marked by a sense of social and intellectual inadequacy, afflicted by severe illness (her tuberculosis had been first diagnosed three years into her marriage, in 1919), punctuated by personal tragedy (the death of her infant son two days after his birth in 1925, a miscarriage in 1928), and undermined by her husband’s overwhelming preoccupation with nationalist politics, which left him little time or inclination to be an attentive husband. Jawaharlal’s prison diaries and correspondence in the 1920s hardly mention her, and even after they grew closer in the last few years of her life, it is clear their mental outlooks and personal values had little in common. But she was a loyal supporter of her husband’s politics, and believed passionately in such issues as the education of girls and the ending of Hindu-Muslim conflict. The marriage was its best in the last half-dozen years of her life. Jawaharlal and Kamala rediscovered their intimacy on holiday in Ceylon in 1931, and their affection grew to such an extent that, toward the end of her life, even British Intelligence concluded that Jawaharlal was a “devoted husband.” Jawaharlal ironically recalled seeing pictures of Kamala and himself being sold on the Indian sidewalks with the caption “Adarsh Jodi” (“Ideal Couple”). After her death Jawaharlal kept a photo of Kamala and a small urn of her ashes with him at all times, even in prison, and in his will he requested that her ashes be mingled with his own.

The book he dedicated to her, his Autobiography, was an astounding success in Britain and the West, and established Jawaharlal Nehru firmly in the world’s imagination as the leader of modern India. Mahatma Gandhi, with his baffling fasts and prayers and penchant for enemas, stood for the spirit of an older tradition that imperialism could not suppress, but Jawaharlal’s book spoke for the free India of the future. Though it was written entirely in a British prison, there is no rancor against the British, only against imperialism and exploitation. His rationality, his breadth of learning, his secular outlook, his moral indignation at the subjugation of his people, and the lucid fluency of his writing, attested to his own, and his country’s, place in the world of the twentieth century that was still taking shape.

Of that place, Jawaharlal had no doubt, and the integrity of his convictions remained unwavering. On his way back by air from Switzerland with Kamala’s ashes he was obliged to transit through the airport in Rome. Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, sent a message of condolence and asked to meet with the Indian nationalist hero. A man of lesser principle might have seen this as an opportunity to win some international prominence for himself and his cause, but Jawaharlal, whose abhorrence of fascism was, if anything, even greater than his distaste of imperialism, firmly refused the invitation. At a time when many right-wing British politicians, a certain Winston Churchill included, had been, to say the least, ambivalent about the Fascist rulers of Germany, Italy, and Spain, Nehru’s stubborn adherence to principle in the face of Italian persistence marked him as an uncommon figure of the age.

His stature had been diminished neither by imprisonment nor absence abroad; indeed, while he was in Europe the Congress elected him once more as its president for 1936. This was again Gandhi’s doing; he saw Jawaharlal as a vital bridge to the radical left within the nationalist movement. In 1934, the Congress Socialist Party had been formed and the Mahatma had made clear his disagreement with its platform. Jawaharlal, whom the Socialists hoped would lead them in a revolt against Gandhi, had stayed within the establishment’s fold, helping forestall an irrevocable split. Once again now, at Lucknow in April 1936, he delivered a presidential address that was strongly leftist in both tone and content, while presiding over a session whose resolutions were anything but. The Indian capitalist and benefactor of Gandhi, G. D. Birla, wrote that Nehru’s speech “was thrown into the waste paper basket. … Jawaharlalji seems to be like a typical English democrat who takes defeat in a sporting spirit. He seems to be [keen on] giving expression to his ideology, but he realizes that action is impossible and so does not press for it.” Under Gandhi’s influence, Jawaharlal even appointed a Working Committee for the party packed with moderates and conservatives.

Jawaharlal’s personal finances were in poor shape for much of the 1930s; until supplemented by royalties from his best-selling autobiography, he could barely make ends meet after Motilal’s death, having to maintain the large establishment at Anand Bhavan in Allahabad and support his extended family. He gave his sister Krishna (Betty) away during a brief spell out of jail in October 1933, but could not afford the traditional trousseau, let alone the “Nehru wedding camp” that Motilal had arranged for his own wedding in 1916. “You do not much look like a bride,” Jawaharlal is said to have observed ruefully as he went to collect his sister for the ceremony. (Typically, he redressed matters by picking a red rose out of a vase and tucking it into her hair.) And yet he refused all offers of help, even when doing so might have eased the living conditions of his ailing wife. Birla, at whose home Mahatma Gandhi could often be found, discreetly offered Jawaharlal a monthly stipend to free his mind of financial worries. Jawaharlal turned it down, furious that any capitalist could presume to place him on his payroll.

The British had declared that elections would be held to form new provincial assemblies under the Government of India Act of 1935 (which was to come into effect on April Fool’s Day 1937 as the new Constitution of British India). Jawaharlal wanted to settle for nothing short of full independence, but was outmaneuvered by his party elders into a collective decision to contest the elections. Indeed, as party president he had to lead the campaign, a task for which, with the adulation he excited among the masses, he was ideally suited. He roused the crowds as no one but the Mahatma could. He was initially less successful with his own party leaders, whose complaints against his style of functioning led the Mahatma to send him a confidential but severe rebuke for his “magisterial manner” and his arrogance to his senior colleagues:

You are in office by their unanimous choice but you are not in power yet. To put you in office was an attempt to find you in power quicker than you would otherwise have been.

Thus reminded of whom he owed his position to, a chastened Jawaharlal mended his ways.

Electioneering brought out the best in Jawaharlal. He pounded tirelessly through the country on foot, by bicycle, in the back of a cart or the front of a car, by tonga, ekka, and even more exotic forms of locomotion (horseback, elephant, and camel), by canoe, paddleboat, steamship, train, and plane. By his own calculation he covered some 50,000 miles in 130 days of campaigning, with only 1,600 of these by air (his campaign plane was itself a first in India). The crowds turned out in their tens of thousands to greet him, and on one occasion they were packed so thick that he could only reach the rostrum by walking on their shoulders, which he did to general good cheer (though he realized only later that he should have taken off his shoes first). The reserved aristocrat came alive before a large audience; his speeches, whether in Hindi or English, were always clear, direct, easily understood if somewhat lecturing (the Communists’ nickname for him was “the Professor”). His stamina was astonishing, accommodating innumerable engagements and several twenty-four-hour days. Somewhat remote and yet so palpably engaging, obviously well-bred yet capable of losing his temper in incandescent rages that passed as quickly as they came, handsome as no other Indian politician was, Jawaharlal Nehru at forty-six was the glamorous face of Indian nationalism just as Gandhi was its otherworldly deity. About him there was a presence that went beyond mere charisma; people who could understand neither English nor Hindi came just to catch a glimpse of him, and a British official reported in surprisingly generous terms to his superiors that “there is no doubt that his manliness, frankness and reputation for sacrifice attracts a large public.” His reelection to a second consecutive presidential term for 1937 (after the conservative Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel withdrew his challenge) underscored the extent to which he had out-stripped his rivals within the party. The Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore hailed Jawaharlal as the embodiment of spring itself, “representing the season of youth and triumphant joy.”

The campaign marked his rediscovery of India and of the Indian masses — till then, he said, “I had not fully realized what they were and what they meant to India” — and confirmed him as Gandhi’s most likely successor at the head of the Congress Party. Yet Jawaharlal was always conscious of the risk that power, and in particular mass adulation, could turn one’s head. Within a year of the election this unusual democrat pseudonymously authored a remarkable attack upon himself in the Modern Review:

[Nehru] has all the makings of a dictator in him — vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organizational capacity, ability, hardness, and, with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt of the weak and the inefficient…. From the far north to Cape Comorin he has gone like some triumphant Caesar, leaving a trail of glory and legend behind him…. [I]s it his will to power that is driving him from crowd to crowd? His conceit is already formidable. He must be checked. We want no Caesars.

The election campaign inevitably crystallized the implicit choice Jawaharlal had consistently made each time he was confronted with it — nationalism above socialism. His first campaign speech in Bombay, an assault on capitalism, won him cheers from the sans-culottes and such opprobrium from businessmen that the British thought his leadership would divide the party irrevocably and lead it to electoral disaster. Once again, they were proved wrong; but this was at least partly because Jawaharlal chose not to go so far as to damage the party.

The Congress election manifesto made no mention of socialism. What it did focus on was the constitutional system built into the Government of India Act, in particular the pernicious Communal Award, under which the British had again sought to divide Indians by creating seventeen separate electorates for different communities. The principal purpose of seeking election, the Congress declared, was to undo this British perfidy by wrecking the constitutional system from within and demanding full freedom and unfettered democracy rather than political half-measures.

The allocation of seats under the Act was deliberately stacked against the Congress, in particular by arrangements giving the Muslims and other minorities (and therefore the parties seeking to represent such narrower identities) a larger number of seats than their proportion of the population would have warranted; and the rural poor, Gandhi’s natural base (and to a great extent Jawaharlal’s), were denied the vote altogether. Yet the election results exceeded the expectations of even the most optimistic Congressman. The Congress Party contested 1,161 of the 1,585 seats at stake; it won 716, an astonishing 62 percent of the seats contested. This was despite restrictions on the franchise, which gave disproportionate influence to the educated and the well-off by granting the vote to only 36 million out of India’s 300 million population, and the active hostility of the governmental machinery. Further, the Congress emerged as the largest single party in nine of the eleven provinces; in six of them it had an outright majority. Jawaharlal interpreted this as a mandate to reject the Government of India Act and demand a Constituent Assembly instead, but his partymen preferred immediate office to future freedom — jam today rather than bread tomorrow. They accepted his draft resolution describing the election results as a repudiation of the Act, but added a clause (dictated by Gandhi) authorizing Congressmen to take office in each province if they were satisfied that they could rule without interference by the British-appointed governor. Once again Jawaharlal came close to resigning. Once again, he chose to put party unity ahead of his own convictions. (“Just as the King can do no wrong,” he said after having been outvoted by his colleagues, “the Working Committee can do no wrong.”) In July 1937, Congress ministries were formed in six provinces.

Meanwhile, the Muslim League had awoken from a long slumber. After years of inactivity crowned by political success (since the British government tended to grant the League’s princely leaders everything they asked for, and in the Communal Award actually exceeded the League’s own requests) the party’s grandees began to take note with concern of the mass mobilization led by the Congress. In response, they invited Jinnah back from his long self-exile in London and made him “permanent president” of the League in April 1936.

The British government was not averse to this development. As early as 1888, the Congress’s founder, Allan Octavian Hume, felt obliged to denounce British attempts to promote Hindu-Muslim division by fostering “the devil’s doctrine of discord and disunion.” The strategy was hardly surprising for an imperial power. “Divide et impera was the old Roman motto,” wrote Lord

Elphinstone after the 1857 Mutiny, “and it should be ours.” Promoting communal discord became conscious British policy. In December 1887 — at a time when the Congress’s first Muslim president, Badruddin Tyabji, was striving to unite Hindus and Muslims in a common cause — the pro-British judge and Muslim educationist Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was arguing in a speech in Lucknow that the departure of the British would inevitably lead to civil war. The numerical advantage of Hindus over Muslims, he argued, would give them unfair advantage in a democratic India; imperial rule by the Christian British, fellow “people of the book,” was therefore preferable. In 1906, a deputation of Muslim notables led by the Aga Khan and seeking separate privileges for Muslims was received by the British viceroy, and the Muslim League was born.

But in its thirty years of existence, the League had failed to become a potent force in national politics. Jinnah formulated an effective strategy to raise the League to political prominence as the “third party” in a struggle involving the British and the Congress. He argued that he too was an Indian nationalist who sought greater rights from the British, but he aimed to achieve these by constitutional means, while protecting the interests of the Muslim community. In his public speeches he portrayed the Congress as a Hindu-dominated party whose triumph would threaten the religious identity of Indian Muslims and displace their preferred language, Urdu. More privately, he was not averse to suggesting to the League’s affluent patrons that Jawaharlal Nehru’s dangerous socialism was a threat to the economic interests of the Muslim landed and commercial elites. Nehru bridled at what he saw as Jinnah’s pretensions, challenging the representativeness of the League’s leadership: “I come into greater touch with the Muslim masses,” he declared acidly, “than most of the members of the Muslim League.” Asserting the Congress’s claim to speak for all Indians of whatever faith, he rejected the notion that the League (a “drawing-room party”) had any valid place: “There are only two forces in the country, the Congress and the Government. Those who are standing midway shall have to choose between the two.”

Jawaharlal’s contempt was based both on his distaste for communal bigotry (he often condemned the Hindu Mahasabha, the principal political vehicle of Hindu chauvinism, in the same breath) and his political judgment. The latter was borne out by the 1937 election results. Under the British provisions for separate communal electorates, 7,319,445 votes were cast by Muslim voters for Muslim candidates; only 4.4 percent of these, 321,772, went to the Muslim League. In other words, the League had been overwhelmingly repudiated by the very community in whose name it claimed to speak. Instead Muslim voters had voted for a wide variety of other parties, from the landholding Unionists in the Punjab to a peasants and tenants’ party in Bengal, and even for the Congress, which foolishly had run very few Muslim candidates (it put up 58 candidates in the 482 seats reserved for Muslims and won 26 of those races). Victorious Muslim politicians were more interested in securing power in their provinces than in supporting Jinnah’s advocacy of a pan-Indian Muslim identity.

In mid-1937, therefore, the League was not a serious threat to Congress ascendancy. Defeated in his wish to keep his party out of British-supervised ministerial office (under a Constitution that did not even grant Dominion status, let alone independence), Jawaharlal stayed president of the Congress but went into the political equivalent of a sulk. He was in fact away on a tour of Burma and Malaya when the decision to accept office was taken by his colleagues. He refused to serve on the Congress Parliamentary Board which was set up to give party guidance to the provincial ministries. Yet he became caught up in one of the most controversial episodes of his political career — the failure of the Congress to accept the offer of the Muslim League to form a coalition government in Jawaharlal’s own province, U.P.

The League had won twenty-seven of the sixty-four Muslim seats in the U.P. legislature; the Congress, which had only run nine Muslim candidates, had won none, but it had enjoyed overwhelming success in the “general” seats (those not reserved for any particular community) and, with a majority in the legislature as a whole, was in a position to form a ministry on its own. As party president, Nehru initiated a “mass contact” program for Congress workers with the Muslim population, in order to bring more of them into the nationalist movement. The League saw this as a threat; its political success depended on its being able to credibly claim that it was the sole spokesman for India’s Muslims. The two visions were clearly incompatible, yet the League began negotiating with the Congress to form a joint government in which the League would nominate two Muslim ministers. The lead Congress negotiator was a Muslim, Maulana Azad; the lead League negotiator was Chaudhuri Khaliquzzaman, formerly a close friend of Jawaharlal’s who had often enjoyed his hospitality, staying at Anand Bhavan whenever he visited Allahabad. The two negotiators came close to an agreement. The League was even willing to merge its identity in the provincial legislature with that of the Congress, but the deal finally foundered on the League’s insistence that its legislators would be free to vote differently on “communal issues.”

This could never be acceptable to Nehru. Jawaharlal saw the communal card as rank political opportunism. In a passionate letter to his old friend Khaliquzzaman, he asked: “Why should I accept it [the League] as the representatives of the Muslims of India when I know it represents [only] the handful of Muslims at the top who deliberately seek refuge in the name of religion to avoid discussing mass problems?” The Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru was committed to land reform; the League was in thrall to big Muslim landowners. Jawaharlal was also conscious that, as his Muslim colleague Abdul Walli wrote to him, “once the Congress enters into a pact with the Muslim League it loses the right to ask the Muslims to join it.” Jawaharlal believed at the very core of his being that the nationalist movement had to be a movement of the masses, animated by political and economic considerations, not religious ones. In his Autobiography, he had already written of being “troubled … at the growth of this religious element in our politics, both on the Hindu and Muslim side”:

I did not like it at all. Much that Moulvies and Maulanas and Swamis and the like said in their public addresses seemed to me unfortunate. Their history and sociology and economics appeared to me all wrong, and the religious twist that was given to everything prevented all clear thinking. Even some of Gandhiji’s phrases sometimes jarred upon me — thus his frequent reference to Ram Raj as a golden age which was to return.

It is telling that Jawaharlal denounced the use of religious imagery in politics quite impartially, even reproaching the Mahatma for evoking Hindu mythology in painting a vision of post-British India. To Jinnah’s communal politics Jawaharlal opposed his secular and rationalist beliefs; there would be no question of allowing the Congress to become the party of any one community. From such a perspective, giving the Muslim League the respectability of holding ministerial office in U.P. as the representative of the province’s Muslims stuck in Jawaharlal’s craw.

Some — most notably Maulana Azad himself, in his posthumous memoir — have suggested that Jawaharlal’s implacable opposition scuttled a possible deal and set the seal on the widening divergence between the parties that would ultimately culminate in the partition of India. There is no doubt that Jawaharlal was not in favor of a deal with the Muslim League, but the negotiations appear to have collapsed because of the intractability of the conditions posed by both sides, rather than solely because of his opposition to them. In any case, other political developments at the time do not suggest that this episode deserves to be given quite so much weight in the history of the freedom struggle. Strikingly, a Muslim League legislator in U.P., Hafiz Ibrahim, resigned from his party and ran again for his own seat as a Congress candidate. Despite virulent opposition from the League, Ibrahim was elected, giving the Congress an elected “Muslim” seat in the provincial assembly. The Congress also formed the government in the overwhelmingly Muslim North-West Frontier Province, where the “Frontier Gandhi,” Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, had led his red-shirted nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgars (“Servants of God”) into the party. At that stage Jawaharlal’s (and the Congress’s) claim to speak for Indians of all communities, and his refusal to concede the Muslims of India to the League, remained entirely tenable.

In July 1937 Jinnah issued a statement deploring the Congress’s “mass contact” policy with Muslims: “There is plenty of scope for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to improve his own people, the Hindus,” he declared. Nehru replied immediately: “Not being religiously or communally inclined, I venture to think of my people as the Indian people as a whole.” Two months earlier he had confessed to the press: “Personally I find it difficult to think of any question on communal lines. I think on political and economic lines.” In those fundamentally irreconcilable attitudes lay the seeds of a divide that would, over the next decade, tear the country apart.