A Suitable Boy

  He got up from his desk and went to the window, from where he had an unimpeded view of the entire garden of Teen Murti House. This used to be the residence of the Commander-in-Chief under the Raj, and it was now his residence as Prime Minister. The garden was green with the monsoons. A little boy of four or five, the child of one of the servants perhaps, was jumping up and down beneath a mango tree, trying to pluck something from a low branch. But surely it was a little late for mangoes?

  Kamala, now—he often felt that his imprisonment had been harder on her than on him. They had been married—married off to each other by their parents—very young, and he had only forced himself to make time for her when her illness was beyond cure. His autobiography had been dedicated to her—too late for her to have known. It was only when she was almost lost to him that he had realized how much he loved her. He recalled his own despairing words: ‘Surely she was not going to leave me now when I needed her most? Why, we had just begun to know and understand each other really; our joint life was only now properly beginning. We relied so much on each other, we had so much to do together.’

  Well—all that had been a long time ago. And if there had been pain and sacrifice and long absence when he had been detained as a guest of the King, at least the battle lines had been clear. Now, everything was muddied. Old companions had turned political rivals. The purposes for which he had fought were being undermined and perhaps he himself was to blame for letting things slide so long. His supporters were leaving the Congress Party, and it had fallen into the hands of conservatives, many of whom saw India as a Hindu state where others would have to adapt or suffer the consequences.

  There was no one to advise him. His father was dead. Gandhiji was dead. Kamala was dead. And the friend whom he might have unburdened himself to, with whom he had celebrated the midnight hour of Independence, was far away. She, so elegant herself, had often teased him about his fastidiousness in dress. He touched the red rose—in this season it came from Kashmir—in the buttonhole of his white cotton achkan, and smiled.

  The naked child, having missed several times, had now got a few bricks from near a flower bed, and was painstakingly building himself a little platform. He stood on it and reached out towards the branch, but again without success. Both he and the bricks came tumbling down.

  Nehru’s smile grew wider.

  ‘Sir?’ said the stenographer, his pencil still poised.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m thinking.’

  Huge crowds and loneliness. Prison and Prime Ministership. Intense activity and a longing for nothingness. ‘We too are tired.’

  He would have to do something, though, and soon. After the elections it would be too late. In a sense this was a sadder battle than he had ever fought before.

  A scene from Allahabad more than fifteen years earlier came before his eyes. He had been out of prison for five months or so, and expected any day to be rearrested on some charge or other. He and Kamala had finished tea, Purushottamdas Tandon had just joined them, and they were standing together talking on the verandah. A car had driven up, a police officer had got out, and they had known immediately what it meant. Tandon had shaken his head and smiled wryly, and Nehru had greeted the apologetic policeman with the ironically hospitable comment: ‘I have been expecting you for a long time.’

  Out on the lawn now, the little boy had piled the bricks on top of each other in a different formation, and was tentatively climbing up again. In an all-or-nothing endeavour, instead of merely reaching out towards the branch, he jumped up to grasp the fruit. But he did not succeed. He fell, hurt himself on the bricks, sat down on the damp grass, and began to cry. Alerted by the sound, the mali emerged, and took in the scene in an instant. Conscious that the Prime Minister was watching from the window of his office, he ran towards the child, shouting angrily, and struck him hard across the face. The child burst into a renewed fit of weeping.

  Pandit Nehru, scowling with anger, rushed into the garden, ran up to the mali, and slapped him several times, furious that he should have attacked the child.

  ‘But, Panditji—’ said the mali, so thunderstruck that he made no attempt to protect himself. He had only been teaching the trespasser a lesson.

  Nehru, still furious, gathered the dirty and terrified little boy into his arms, and, after talking to him gently, put him down. He told the mali to pluck some fruit immediately for the child, and threatened to sack him on the spot.

  ‘Barbarous,’ he muttered to himself as he walked back across the lawn, frowning as he realized that his white achkan was now entirely smeared with mud.

  14.14

  Delhi, August 6, 1951

  Dear Mr. President,

  I beg to tender my resignation from membership of the Congress Working Committee and the Central Election Board. I shall be grateful if you will be good enough to accept these resignations.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  This formal letter of resignation to the President of the Congress Party, Mr Tandon, was accompanied by a letter beginning: ‘My dear Purushottamdas,’ and ending:

  You will forgive me if by resigning I cause you embarrassment. But the embarrassment has been there anyhow for both of us and others and the best way to deal with it is to remove the cause.

  Yours affectionately,

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Mr Tandon replied as soon as he read the letter a couple of days later. In his reply he wrote:

  You have yourself as the leader of the nation appealed to Congressmen and to the country to present a united front to the situation that is facing us both externally and internally. The step that you propose to take, namely, that of resigning from the Working Committee and the Parliamentary Board, goes directly against that appeal for solidarity and is likely to create a schism in the Congress which has greater potentiality for harm to the country than any that the Congress has yet had to face.

  I beg of you not to precipitate a crisis at the present juncture and not to press your resignation. I cannot accept it. If you insist on it the only course left to me will be to place it before the Working Committee for consideration. I trust that, in any case, you will attend the meeting of the Working Committee on the 11th instant.

  If, to keep you in the Working Committee, it is necessary or desirable that I should resign the presidentship of the Congress I am ready to do so with great pleasure and goodwill.

  Yours affectionately,

  Purushottamdas Tandon

  Pandit Nehru replied the same day, making rather clearer than before what had been on his mind:

  I have been long distressed at the attitude of some persons which indicated that they wished to drive out others from the Congress who did not fit in with their views or their general outlook. . . .

  I feel that the Congress is rapidly drifting away from its moorings and more and more the wrong kind of people, or rather people who have the wrong kind of ideas, are gaining influence in it. The public appeal of the Congress is getting less and less. It may, and probably will, win elections. But, in the process, it may also lose its soul. . . .

  I am fully conscious of the consequences of the step I am taking and even the risks involved. But I think these risks have to be taken, for there is no other way out. . . .

  I am more conscious than anyone else can be of the critical situation which the country has to face today. I have to deal with it from day to day. . . .

  There is no reason why you should resign the presidentship of the Congress. This is not a personal matter.

  I do not think it would be proper for me to attend the meeting of the Working Committee. My presence will embarrass me as well as others. I think it is better that the questions that arise should be discussed in my absence.

  Mr Tandon replied the next day, which was the day before the actual meeting of the Congress Working Committee. He agreed, ‘It is no use winning the elections if, as you say, the Congress is “to lose its soul” in the process.’ But it was clear from his letter tha
t the two men had very different conceptions of the soul of the Congress. Tandon wrote that he would place Nehru’s letter of resignation before the Working Committee the next day. ‘But that need not prevent your taking part in some other matters. May I suggest that you come to the meeting though only for a short time and that the matters which concern you may not be discussed in your presence.’

  Nehru attended the meeting of the Working Committee and explained his letter of resignation; he then withdrew so that the others could discuss it in his absence. The Working Committee, faced with the unimaginable loss of the Prime Minister, attempted to find some way of accommodating him. But all immediate attempts to mediate the conflict failed. One possible means was to reconstitute the Working Committee and appoint new general secretaries of the Congress so that Nehru would feel less ‘out of tune’ with them. But here Tandon put his foot down. He said he would rather resign than allow the office of the Congress President to become subservient to that of the Prime Minister. Appointing the Working Committee was part of the role of the former; it could not be tampered with at the will of the latter. The Working Committee passed a resolution calling upon Nehru and Tandon to confer to solve the crisis, but could do nothing further.

  A few days later, on Independence Day, Maulana Azad resigned from the Congress Working Committee. Just as the resignation from the Congress of the popular Muslim leader Kidwai had stung Nehru into action, the resignation of the scholarly Maulana cemented it. Since it was largely these two leaders at the national level whom the Muslims looked to in their post-Partition uncertainty—Kidwai because of his own great popularity, not only among Muslims but among Hindus, and Azad because of the respect in which he was held and the fact that he had Nehru’s ear—it now appeared that the Congress was in danger of losing its Muslim following entirely.

  S.S. Sharma made every possible effort to dissuade Nehru from what looked increasingly like a collision course between him and Tandon. In this, Sharma was one of many, for leaders like Pant of U.P. and B.C. Roy of West Bengal had attempted to do the same. When they got to Delhi, however, they found Nehru as vaguely adamant as ever. But this time S.S. Sharma’s ego was slightly hurt: Nehru did not suggest that he come to Delhi and join his Cabinet. Presumably he either knew that Sharma would beg off as usual—or he was not pleased with Sharma’s attempts to paper over the cracks in the party—or else the invitation had been displaced by other matters of greater urgency that were on his mind.

  One of these matters was a meeting of the Members of Parliament from the Congress Party, which he had called in order to explain the events that had led to the drastic rift and his resignation. He asked them for a vote of confidence. Whatever their political complexion (and there were, as Nehru was soon to discover when the bill to reform Hindu law was brought up before Parliament, many diehard conservatives among them), most Congress MPs perceived the dispute largely in terms of a conflict between the mass party and the parliamentary party. They were not enamoured of the thought that the Congress President would try to dictate policy to them through resolutions of the Congress, as he had on several occasions stated that he had the right to do. Besides, they knew that without the national image of Nehru they would have a very difficult time getting themselves re-elected in a few months’ time. Whether it was because of the fear that they would lose their soul or their power or the elections, they overwhelmingly passed a motion of confidence in his favour.

  Since confidence in Nehru as such had never been at issue, Tandon’s supporters resented this action, which smacked of the build-up to a showdown. They were also somewhat surprised by Nehru’s most uncharacteristic unwillingness to back down, to understand their point of view, to postpone unpleasantness, to compromise. He was talking now of insisting on a ‘change of outlook’ and a ‘clear-cut verdict’. And rumours had begun to float about of the possibility of Nehru taking on the Congress Presidency together with the Prime Ministership, an onerous—and, in some ways, ominous—combination that he had in the past declared himself against on principle. Indeed, in 1946, he had resigned the Congress Presidency to become the Prime Minister. But now that the main threat to his power came from within the Congress Party itself he had begun to hedge on the issue.

  ‘I definitely think that it is a wrong thing practically and even otherwise, for the Prime Minister to be the Congress President,’ he declared at the end of August, just a week before the decisive meeting of the All-India Congress Committee in Delhi. ‘But that being the general rule, I cannot say what necessity might compel one to do in special circumstances when a hiatus is created or something like that.’

  The typically floppy Nehruvian tail to that sentence could not entirely counter the surprising inflexibility of the body.

  14.15

  With every passing day, however, it became increasingly clear that the month-long deadlock could not be resolved except by some desperate expedient. Tandon refused to reconstitute the Working Committee at Nehru’s dictation, and Nehru rejected anything less if he was to rejoin it.

  On the 6th of September, the entire Working Committee dramatically submitted their resignations to Tandon, hoping thereby to retrieve what would otherwise have been, in an open conflict, an irretrievable position for both him and them. The idea was that the much larger body of the All-India Congress Committee (due to meet two days later) should now pass a resolution asking Nehru to withdraw his resignation, expressing confidence in Tandon, and requesting Tandon to reconstitute the Working Committee by election. Nehru and Tandon could then draw up a slate of candidates jointly. Tandon could remain President; he would not have surrendered any presidential prerogatives to the Prime Minister; he would merely have implemented, as he was bound to, a resolution of the AICC.

  This should have been, the Working Committee thought, agreeable to both Nehru and Tandon. In fact it was agreeable to neither.

  That evening Nehru told a public meeting that he wanted the All-India Congress Committee to make it entirely clear which way the Congress should go and who should hold its reins. He was in a fighting mood.

  The next evening Tandon too, at a press conference, refused the face-saving formula proffered by his Working Committee. He said: ‘If I am asked by the All-India Congress Committee to reconstitute the Working Committee in consultation with A, B, or C, I would beg the AICC not to press that request but to relieve me.’

  He placed the responsibility for the crisis squarely on Nehru’s shoulders. Nehru had tendered his resignation over the issue of the reconstitution of the Working Committee; and, by so doing, he had forced its members to tender their own.

  Tandon stated that he could not accept these forced resignations. He repudiated any suggestion by Nehru that the Congress Working Committee had failed to implement Congress resolutions. He made a few references to Pandit Nehru as ‘my old friend and brother’ and added: ‘Nehru is not an ordinary member of the Working Committee; he represents the nation more today than any other individual does.’ But he reaffirmed the inflexibility of his own stand, which was one based on principle; and he announced that if no acceptable formula could be reached by mediators, he would resign from the Congress Presidency the next day.

  And this was what, the next day, with good grace—despite the many personal attacks against him in the press, despite what he saw as the impropriety of Nehru’s tactics, and despite the bitterness and length of the battle—he did.

  In a noble gesture, which did much to assuage any residual bitterness, he joined the Working Committee under the newly elected Congress President, Jawaharlal Nehru.

  It was in effect a coup; and Nehru had won.

  Apparently.

  14.16

  The jeep had hardly arrived at Baitar Fort than Maan and Firoz got horses saddled and rode off to hunt. The oily munshi was all smiles when he saw them, and brusquely ordered Waris to make the necessary preparations. Maan swallowed his gorge with difficulty.

  ‘I’ll go with them,’ said Waris, who was looking even more rough-
hewn than before, perhaps because he appeared not to have shaved for a few days.

  ‘But have a bit of lunch before you disappear,’ said the Nawab Sahib.

  The two impatient young men refused.

  ‘We’ve been eating all along the way,’ said Firoz. ‘We’ll be back before dark.’

  The Nawab Sahib turned to Mahesh Kapoor and shrugged.

  The munshi showed Mahesh Kapoor to his rooms, almost frantic with solicitude. That the great Mahesh Kapoor, who by a stroke of the pen had wiped vast estates off the map of the future, was here in person was a matter of incalculable significance. Perhaps he would be in power again and might threaten to do worse. And the Nawab Sahib had not merely invited him here, but was behaving towards him with great cordiality. The munshi licked the edge of his walrus-like moustache and puffed up the three flights of steep stairs, murmuring platitudes of intense geniality. Mahesh Kapoor said nothing in reply.

  ‘Now, Minister Sahib, I was given instructions that you were to stay in the best suite in the Fort. As you see, it overlooks the mango orchard and then the jungle—there is no sign of disturbance, none of the hubbub of Baitar town, nothing to disturb your contemplation. And there, Minister Sahib, as you can see, are your son and the Nawabzada riding through the orchard. How well your son rides. I had the opportunity of making his acquaintance when he was last at the Fort. What an upright, decent young man. The moment I set eyes on him I knew that he must come from a remarkable family.’

  ‘Who is the third?’