Nehru died at the precise moment we set foot in Muzaffarabad, the capital of PoK.

On the day Jawaharlal Nehru passed into history, I was in Pakistan as a consequence of his last major policy decision. Overruling his senior advisors, he released his old, if estranged friend, Kashmir’s towering leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, from prolonged and unjust imprisonment; withdrew the meandering “Kashmir Conspiracy” case against him; invited him to be his house guest at Teen Murti; and encouraged him to go to Pakistan to explore with its then president Field Marshal Ayub Khan the possibility of a settlement of the Kashmir issue. “Let Sheikh try,” he told his cabinet. Preceded by a large number of us journalists, the Sheikh arrived in Rawalpindi on May 23 and was given a reception reserved for a friendly head of state or a national hero. For three days, he and the field marshal held extensive talks, but on the evening of May 26, he and a Pakistani spokesman announced the failure of the Sheikh’s mission. However, both sides also stated that in the month of June, Nehru and Ayub would meet in Delhi and the Sheikh “would not be far away from the conference table”.

Despite understandable disappointment over the talks’ failure, there was great excitement on the morning of May 27 because Sher-e-Kashmir (as Abdullah was usually hailed) was going to “Azad Kashmir”, and the Pakistan government had reluctantly allowed Indian journalists to accompany him. Our instructions were stern: “Be at the president’s guesthouse by 7.45 am because the Sheikh’s caravan will leave exactly at eight”. We knew better but decided to obey. In the best subcontinental tradition, nothing happened for a couple of hours.
We were saved from boredom, however, by cordial conversations with our hosts and endless rounds of tea, coffee and delectable kebabs.

At one stage, a Pakistani colleague and friend, Asrar Ahmed, asked me whether Ayub and Nehru would be able to work out a compromise on Kashmir. This, he added, was vital because these two were perhaps the last leaders who could “sell” a compromise to their respective peoples. Stressing the obvious, I replied: “Asrar, it depends on how much time Nehru has.” At this, everyone at my table exclaimed: “May Allah prolong his life!” As if on cue, Hafeez Jullundhri, the nearest thing to a poet laureate Pakistan had and a virtual minister-in-waiting during the Sheikh’s stay, walked up to our table and occupied one of the several chairs vacated for him. Then he told me in chaste Punjabi: “Inder Malhotra, both of us on either side of the Wagah border are b*******. You people have had a long ride feeling superior to us because you were lucky to have Nehru to lead you for so long. Our misfortune was that Jinnah died within 13 months after the birth of Pakistan and Liaquat was killed soon afterwards. Now Nehru is not going to last, and then you will descend to our level.” While some tried to remonstrate with the much-respected Hafeez, Sheikh sahib came out and the incident was brushed aside in the excitement of departure.

I don’t know whether Murree’s Lintott’s Restaurant still exists but it was in the midst of a most friendly reception at it that we first heard that Nehru had been taken ill. The exuberant mood was replaced by anxiety. Nehru died at the precise moment we set foot in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. I cursed my fate that I had to be away from Delhi. My second worry was that Muzaffarabad was not the best place to be in because people there were likely to be hostile to Nehru. But as I looked around
I was stunned. The large crowd that had collected to welcome Sheikh Abdullah had turned into a mourning mass. With both hands raised skywards, everyone was praying for Nehru. The epicurean meal the Kashmiris call wazwan remained completely untouched. There was a commotion in a distant part of the gathering. Someone was beating his forehead with both his hands and cursing his “black and evil tongue”. He was also shouting my name. It was Hafeez Jullundhri. He came up to me and apologised profusely.

The Sheikh joined us to calm down Hafeez. Instead, the two tall men embraced and sobbed.

Agha Shaukat, a Pakistani official, whose two brothers held very senior posts in Srinagar, drove Prem Bhatia, my professional guru and then Delhi editor of The Indian Express, and me to foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s house in Rawalpindi. However, on the way, he stopped at a dhaba near a small town and insisted that we have tea and snacks. I don’t know how our presence became known to them but a large number of people came to express condolences to us. Each said: “He was a great and good man.” At Bhutto’s residence, some Delhi-based foreign correspondents were already present and arrangements had been made to fly us to Delhi as soon as possible. The overworked crew of the aircraft could not have been more courteous and helpful to us.

It was late in the night when we landed at Palam. I decided to go home via Teen Murti. But reaching near it, I discovered that the area was so crowded by those assembled to have the departed leader’s last darshan that my driver had to turn back and take a different route. Since Nehru’s funeral had to be delayed for the arrival foreign dignitaries, more and more crowds kept pouring into the Indian capital from different parts of the country. In death, as in life, Nehru’s popularity had to be seen to be believed. After he had been consigned to the flames, the eminent British journalist, James Cameron, reported in The Guardian that on that day Delhi had become the “most overpopulated spot on the hemisphere”.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator


http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-day-he-left-us/99/#sthash.vmJVROXc.dpuf

courtesy : “The Indian Express”, November 14, 2014

When he spoke on the possible consequences of a nuclear conflict, it was visible from the press gallery that not only MPs but evenhis cabinet colleagues were taken aback by his revelations.

The Mahatma was India’s liberator and Jawaharlal Nehru, its moderniser as well as founder of its secular and “socialistic” democracy. Assiduously, he shaped and nurtured every institution that underpins the democratic system. Among these, Parliament was of paramount importance. Nehru devoted much of his time and energy to ensure that it functioned smoothly and effectively in both its roles — as the voice of the people and as a keen watcher of the government that could last only as long as it retained the confidence of the Lok Sabha, originally named the House of the People.

For the last several decades, Parliament has been greatly devalued and often made dysfunctional by its own “honourable” members who think nothing of rushing into the well of the House and even using a pepper-spray there. The character of the Rajya Sabha or the Council of States has been distorted to the point of destruction by a joint effort of all political parties, even though some of them detest one another. In Nehru’s time, things were totally different. The British political scientist, W.H. Morris-Jones, already quoted in this series, wrote that India’s Parliament was, in some ways, “Nehru’s sound box or tuning fork”, but it had also become the “Grand National Council” to debate and decide on all national issues, and should therefore be a “role model” for nations that were being liberated from “Western colonial rule”. He deservedly gave Nehru full credit for this.

Illustration by: C R Sasikumar

Having covered Parliament for long years, I have been witness to the great respect Nehru always showed it. He attended it regularly, unlike some prime ministers in later years. He also treated all its members with regard. After the Bandung Conference in 1955, he had invited President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Nehru noted the visitor’s surprise at the number of communist MPs present at a reception in his honour and said to him: “Gamal, you put your communists in prison; I put them in Parliament.” Alas, sometimes, Nehru had to teach many MPs not only parliamentary norms but also elementary manners. For instance, in the spring of 1951, Parliament’s first late-night sitting became necessary because of the urgency to pass a particular bill. All concerned were also promised dinner. The moment the meal began, there was a virtual rain of chicken bones on the grassy plot. Nehru handed his plate to someone and started picking up the discarded bones. In the ensuing shockwave, everyone joined him shamefully.

Several were the occasions when his role was that of a teacher for the whole House. For instance, in an illuminating speech once, he told the MPs that the mere size and bravery of the troops weren’t enough. Technology mattered more. The first invention that had changed the nature of war was that of the stirrup. It gave the Tatars huge superiority over rival horsemen. From this grew the concept of the centaur. On another occasion, when he spoke on the possible consequences of a nuclear conflict, it was visible from the press gallery that not only MPs but even his cabinet colleagues were taken aback by his revelations. They seemed to be unaware of what was at stake until Nehru declared that after a nuclear holocaust the “living would envy the dead”.

At one stage in the mid-50s, Feroze Gandhi, Nehru’s son-in-law and a very hardworking Congress MP, won fame by exposing various scandals. The climax was reached in 1958, when he unveiled what came to be known as the “Mundhra Affair”. It related to the Life Insurance Corporation’s dubious investments in Mundhra’s near-bankrupt firms. Feroze’s performance was devastating and was applauded by both sides of the House. Nehru began his response by welcoming the “majesty of Parliament” and ended it by instituting an inquiry by Justice M.C. Chagla. Consequently, Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari had to resign, and several top officials lost their jobs.

Nehru’s habit of threatening to resign frequently is well known. But the two occasions when he did so in Parliament are noteworthy. One was when he firmly rejected a conservative Congress member’s resolution demanding a complete ban on cow slaughter. The latter had the temerity to claim that a majority of the ruling party backed him, whereupon Nehru thundered: “I would rather resign than accept this futile, silly and ridiculous demand.” The other occasion was much more serious. For the first and last time, he read a written statement to his party to say that he had “grown tired and stale… and had decided to give up his office, even if temporarily”. For a minute there was stunned silence, and then the loudest shouts of “no, no”. Eventually, he was persuaded to stay and take a brief holiday in the hills.

From 1959 until the humiliating defeat in the border war with China in 1962 was the toughest time for Nehru in Parliament. His China policy understandably came under sharp attack. Even his staunch admirers on the treasury benches silently agreed with the opposition’s criticism. However, except for rare occasions, his critics continued to treat him with respect. Even at the height of heated exchanges, there could also be humour. For example, when Acharya Kripalani said that India’s agreement with China on Tibet was “born in sin”, Nehru rose to say: “Come to think of it, all of us are born in sin.” Prolonged laughter and cheers greeted this.

Though he sometimes rambled, Nehru usually dominated the debates. Only once he was beaten by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a powerful orator and founder of the Jana Sangh, which later morphed into the BJP. After a spellbinding speech against the Preventive Detention Bill, he addressed Nehru directly and said: “In my speech there is not one word of mine. I have been quoting what one of our greatest leaders had said in the Central Assembly in 1921 against the Rowlatt Act. His name: Motilal Nehru.”

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-teacher-for-the-house/99/

courtesy : “The Indian Express”, November 12, 2014

In the 1967 election, the first without Nehru, the Congress tally plummeted

On Jawaharlal Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary, rather than write a comprehensive article on the life and leadership of independent India’s first and incomparable prime minister yet again, I intend to give readers, especially the young ones, some glimpses of the personality of the second greatest Indian of our times, after the Mahatma. So here goes the first of the series, focused on Nehru’s phenomenal and matchless popularity with the masses.

In November 1937, in the Calcutta-based and highly respected magazine Modern Review, appeared an anonymous article on Nehru, arguing that men like him were “dangerous” and potential “dictators”. “From the North to Cape Comorin,” said the article, “he has gone like some triumphant Caesar, leaving a trail of glory and a legend behind him. Is it just a passing fancy or is it his will to power that is driving him from crowd to crowd… He calls himself a democrat and a socialist and no doubt he does so in all seriousness… but a little twist and he might turn into a dictator… His conceit is already formidable. It must be checked. We want no Caesars”. It soon became known that the author of this denunciatory article was none other than Jawaharlal, and the matter was laughed out. Indeed, he was soon re-elected Congress president for the third time.

Even as a schoolboy then I used to hear my father and his friends discuss “Panditji’s astonishing popularity”. By the time I joined college, I also joined all those who would travel scores of miles to hear Nehru if he was speaking or simply to catch a glimpse of him, if he was merely passing through. After a long but unsuccessful search for a job in journalism barely two years after Independence and Partition, I had a stroke of luck. A rather impecunious news agency, the United Press of India, gave me a job after making sure that I could report not only Nehru’s speeches in Hindi but also those of Maulana Azad in Urdu. No break could have been better than this because, for over five years, I travelled with or ahead of the prime minister across the country and watched the magical mutual relationship between him and the large crowds that waited for him patiently for hours, regardless of how inclement the weather was.

Often I wondered why he chose to speak on subjects that were way above the heads of his huge and adoring audiences: the need for planning; the newly built dams being the temples of the new age; his reasons for pleading for China’s admission to the UN and so on.

Perhaps he believed that, in a largely illiterate country, the spoken word was the best medium to convey his message to his people.

However, only during the last decade, when no one in the UPA government thought it necessary to explain anything to the people at large, did I realise how right Nehru was.

By the time the Constitution came into force on January 26, 1950, Nehru had totally disproved his self-analysis in Modern Review. Far from becoming a dictator — which he could have done easily, like his two contemporary leaders of freedom movements, Sukarno in Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana — he built India up as the world’s largest democracy. This process took a huge leap forward with the first general elections in this country in 1952, when his contact with and appeal to his people also took a big stride. He won the first three general elections hands down, almost single-handedly, as a famous cartoon by the country’s premier cartoonist, R.K. Laxman, depicted at the height of the campaign for the first poll. In the 1967 election, the first without Nehru, the Congress tally plummeted.

Interestingly, in his book India After Gandhi, published in 2007, Ramachandra Guha wrote that the “extraordinary popular appeal of the prime minister” could be best captured “in the testimony of the confirmed Nehru-baiter D.F. Karaka, editor of a popular Bombay weekly, the Current”. Guha has then quoted at some length how Karaka had reported Nehru’s first election speech in Bombay at Chowpatty beach to an enormous and enthusiastic crowd. Karaka first noted — “no doubt to his regret” — the “instant affinity between the speaker and his audience” and then went on calculating how many votes had been swung to Nehru’s favour by his every sentence. The climax was reached, in Karaka’s view, at the twilight hour, when Nehru told the gathering that he had taken upon himself the “role of a mendicant beggar”. Amidst wild cheers he added, “If at all I am a beggar, I am begging for your love, your affection and your enlightened cooperation in solving the problems facing the country.” The crowds were deeply moved and he, in turn, was moved by them. For Karaka, however, the election was over.

At an elite meeting in the national capital, Nehru had once said: “Delhi is a static city with a dead atmosphere. I therefore go out and see masses of people, my people, your people and derive inspiration from them. There is something dynamic and growing with them and I grow with them. I also enthuse with them.” What he wrote to Lady Edwina Mountbatten after the meeting in Bombay is even more eloquent: “Wherever I have been, vast multitudes gather at my meetings and I love to compare them, their faces, their dress, their reactions to me and what I say… I rather enjoy these fresh contacts with the Indian people… The effort to explain to them in simple language our problems and our difficulties, and to reach the minds of these simple folk, is both exhausting and exhilarating. As I wander about, the past and the present merge into one another, and this merger leads me to think of the future.”

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.

courtesy : http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-most-wanted-man/#sthash.mB7xvpiU.dpuf

“The Indian Express”, November 10, 2014