On May 27, 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru died at the age of seventy-four. Just five days earlier, the prime minister had told a press conference, in reply to a question about whether he should not settle the issue of a successor in his own lifetime: “My life is not coming to an end so soon.” When he died, Robert Frost's immortal lines were found on his bedside table, written out by him in his own hand: “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.”
An earthquake rocked New Delhi on the day of Nehru's death, and many saw this as a portentous omen. Cynics (at home and abroad) waited for his survivors to fight over the spoils; few predicted the democracy that Nehru had been so proud of would survive. But it did. India kept Nehru's “promises.” There were no succession squabbles around Nehru's funeral pyre. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a modest figure of unimpeachable integrity and considerable political and administrative acumen, was elected India's second prime minister. The Indian people wept, and moved on.
Nehru never doubted that they would. During his seventeen years as prime minister, by his speeches, exhortations, and, above all, by his own personal example, Jawaharlal imparted to the institutions and processes of democracy a dignity that placed it above challenge from would-be tyrants. Democratic values became so entrenched that when his own daughter Indira suspended India's freedoms with a state of emergency for twenty months, she felt compelled to return to the Indian people for vindication, held a free election, and comprehensively lost it.
In 2004, forty years after Nehru's death, another confident government, secure in its assumption of popularity and increasingly accustomed to seeing itself as a natural party of governance, bit the dust. But the graciousness with which Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee immediately accepted the electorate's verdict and used it as an opportunity to affirm the transcendent values of democracy was itself an advertisement of India's democratic maturity. Nothing so much became the Bharatiya Janata Party in office as its leaving of it.
The legacies of the two men marked India's twentieth century. While the world disintegrated into fascism, violence, and war, Gandhi taught the virtues of truth, nonviolence, and peace. He destroyed the credibility of colonialism by opposing principle to force. And he set and attained personal standards of conviction and courage that few will ever match. The principal pillars of Nehru's legacy to India — democratic institution-building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home, and a foreign policy of nonalignment — were all integral to a vision of Indianness that sustained the nation for decades. Today, both legacies are fundamentally contested, and many Indians have strayed from the ideals bequeathed to them by the Mahatma and the Pandit. Yet Gandhi and Nehru, in their very different ways, each represented that rare kind of leader who is not diminished by the inadequacies of his followers.
The American editor Norman Cousins once asked Jawaharlal Nehru what he hoped his legacy to India would be. “Four hundred million people capable of governing themselves,” Nehru replied. The numbers have grown, but the very fact that each day over a billion Indians govern themselves in a pluralist democracy is testimony to the legacy of these two men.
25. The Man Who Saved India
AS A RECENT BIOGRAPHER OF JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, I have been somewhat disconcerted to discover that my admiration for my subject immediately prompts people to assume that I must dislike his formidable deputy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. In fact, I count myself among the doughty Sardar's fans, and am at somewhat of a loss to account for the presumed incompatibility of these two inclinations.
It is true that the two men had their differences, which neither kept particularly secret. Just before independence Patel was privately scathing about Jawaharlal's “acts of emotional insanity” and “childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly.” Nehru, in turn, could not have been unconscious of the fact that the older man (Patel was fourteen years his senior) was seen by many congressmen as more deserving of the country's leadership than the mercurial Jawaharlal. But it was not true, scurrilous rumors notwithstanding, that Nehru had initially omitted Patel from the cabinet list and had been obliged by Mountbatten to include him. Nehru, in inviting Patel to serve as his deputy, called him “the strongest pillar of the cabinet.” Patel replied: “My services will be at your disposal, I hope, for the rest of my life and you will have unquestioned loyalty and devotion from me in the cause for which no man in India has sacrificed as much as you have done. Our combination is unbreakable and therein lies our strength.” The Sardar's assurances were sincere and their “combination” was indispensable as independent India consolidated its unity and found its feet. (Sadly, “the rest of my life” Patel alluded to would extend no more than another three years.)
Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel was the humble fourth son of an impoverished farmer who had fought in the armed forces of the Rani of Jhansi. He had revealed a capacity for hard work at school and also for political organization when, as a high school student, he successfully conducted the election campaign of one of his teachers for a seat on the municipal council, defeating the overwhelming favorite, a rich businessman. Married at sixteen, he worked to support his family, including his elder brother's legal studies in England. Patel was self-employed from the start, working as a largely self-taught lawyer in Godhra, a town that was to assume tragic importance at a later stage of our history. But when his wife died sadly young in 1909 (while Patel was arguing a case), he too traveled to England to study law, financing his education entirely out of his own savings. Patel did well; he was admitted to the bar in 1913 and returned immediately to Ahmedabad to set up what soon became a flourishing and highly lucrative legal practice. England had Westernized him. Vallabhbhai Patel came back a bit of a dandy, fond of Savile Row suits and comfortable living, exemplified in his joining the Gujarat Club, a bastion of Anglicized attitudes. In 1916, when Mahatma Gandhi returned to India, both Nehru and Patel were living well, practicing law, and well on the way to becoming top-of-the-line brown sahibs.
It was satyagraha that first bound Patel and Nehru to Gandhi. Patel first became impressed with the Mahatma on hearing him speak particularly about the principles of truth that lay behind satyagraha. In late 1917 Gandhi was elected president of the Gujarat Sabha and Patel was elected secretary, marking the first formal association between the two men, which would last their lifetimes. Patel, a fellow Gujarati lawyer, was among Gandhi's first and most devoted followers, working closely with him on his efforts to obtain decent wages for Ahmedabad's mill workers. The Savile Row suits went onto a bonfire as he took to the Mahatma's taste for simpler dressing, though he wore a bit more than Gandhi, donning dhoti and kurta.