Nehru: Death of a Democrat
Published in History TodayVolume 64 Issue 5 May 2014
Gyanesh Kudaisya describes the final years of India’s founding prime minister, a period marked by major challenges at home as well as abroad in the aftermath of the 1962 war with China.
On December 17th and 18th, 1961, on Nehru’s orders, Indian troops marched into Goa, an area of about 1,500 square miles on the country’s western coast, to ‘liberate’ it from the Portuguese, who had ruled the territory since 1510. In a brisk operation over 30,000 Indian troops overran this last colonial enclave, overwhelming and capturing about 3,500 Portuguese soldiers. Condemnation was swift, both from critics at home and abroad. C. Rajagopalachari, one of the country’s most respected elder statesmen, said that India had ‘totally lost the moral power to raise her voice against militarism’. Others pointed out that the military adventure in Goa was a ploy to divert the nation’s attention from the increasing Chinese border incursions (since 1959 the Chinese had occupied over 12,000 square miles of formerly Indian territory). Further afield, the action was ‘deeply deplored’ by Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, New Zealand, West Germany and other countries. Nehru was denounced as a hypocrite who preached non-violence and disarmament to the world, yet practised the use of force at home. A UN Security Council resolution against India was almost voted in favour, but for a veto by the Soviet Union.
Just a few weeks earlier, on November 14th, 1961, Nehru had celebrated his 72nd birthday with customary fervour. ‘A miracle of health’ in the words of someone who worked closely with him, Nehru practised yoga regularly, including the headstand. He typically worked a 16-hour day, seven days a week and received about 500 letters and 100 telegrams a day. He travelled widely and wrote and delivered around 25 speeches a month. Then in his 15th year as premier, he held several positions, including Cabinet portfolios of external affairs and atomic energy and chairmanship of the planning commission, exercising unrivalled political authority.
In the election campaign that took place immediately after the invasion Nehru was able to strike a patriotic chord, capitalising on ‘restoring Goa to the Motherland’. His ruling Congress party was re-elected in 361 out of 494 parliamentary seats and was back in power for a third successive term. Yet, in spite of the criticism, no one could foresee that the triumphant note sounded over Goa also marked the countdown to the end of Nehru’s leadership. The military conflict with China that broke out in full force in October 1962 would be momentous for India, bringing about extraordinary tribulations for Nehru. In its aftermath came growing tensions with Pakistan, political unrest in the Kashmir valley and domestic criticism and challenges to his political authority.
Nehru photographed in 1956 by Karsh of Ottowa.
In November 1961, just before the Goa campaign, in response to stinging criticism in parliament, Nehru and his defence minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, had taken steps to reclaim from the Chinese some territory by setting up forward posts. Arguably, this much debated ‘forward policy’ inflamed the situation. In August 1962 Nehru informed parliament that Indian soldiers had re-occupied around 4,000 sq km of some 19,000 sq km of territory that the Chinese had taken. The prospect of war loomed. Later the cabinet secretary, S.S. Khera, recalled: ‘Suspicion, distrust, a mood of general sullenness, seemed to lie like an incubus upon everything and haunted everyone in the defence ministry from Krishna Menon downwards during the critical period before the crisis of 1962.’
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In the spring of 1962 Nehru suffered his first serious illness, due to a kidney affliction known as pyelonephritis. He recovered quickly but his body acquired a slight stoop and he was forced by doctors to cut down his long working days. In September he attended the Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference in London, even as he knew that border tensions with China were getting out of hand.
Yet, when the Chinese strike came on October 19th and 20th, the Indian leadership called it an unprovoked and sudden offensive, a ‘Himalayan Pearl Harbor’. While the Chinese advance was swift and dramatic, beginning with the assault on Namka Chu in Ladakh and the occupation of Tawang in the north-east, the Indian response revealed an utter lack of planning and a failure of leadership. As the Chinese overran the Himalayan frontier, precipitating a full-scale confrontation, the Indian army suffered a virtual rout in both Ladakh and the north-east sectors. In the course of the conflict the Indian casualty figure reached 7,000, with nearly 1,400 dead. A month later, on November 21st, a unilateral ceasefire was called by the Chinese; by then they had wrestled over 23,200 sq km of territory from India, retaining 4,000 sq km in the Ladakh region.
Indian counter-defence was catastro-phic. Over 3,000 ill-equipped, ill-rationed and unacclimatised soldiers were mobilised, with only about 400 of them issued with adequate winter clothing. Gurkha and Rajput units had been made to march in biting cold to Namka Chu in Ladakh with just cotton uniforms, canvas shoes and one blanket per man. Unaccustomed to the altitude and the terrain, the Indians faced over 10,000 well-provisioned Chinese soldiers. Raj Thapar, a member of the army chief Lieutenant General P.M. Thapar’s household, later recalled: ‘The picture in my mind ... was of an ill-equipped army, of generals running around barefoot, trying to sort out matters but not succeeding, a sort of bedlam.’
Reports circulated about deep divisions within the military top brass. General Thapar had advocated caution, but was overruled by Menon, whose protégé, Lieutenant General B.M. Kaul, was made corps commander. Within days of the crisis Kaul, unable to withstand the high-altitude battlefront, was stricken with pleurisy and evacuated to his sickbed in Delhi, from where he continued to direct military operations.
An American plane airlifts supplies and Indian troops near Leh in the Himalayas, 1963. Getty/National Geographic/Wilbur E. GarrettWar led to a declaration of national emergency. Images of poorly armed and ill-shod Indian soldiers fighting desperately across the snow-capped frontier captured the popular imagination. The nation enveloped itself in patriotic sentimentalism. Citizens’ rallies and defence fund collection drives were organised across the country. In the spirit of national unity, criticism was initially muted, but the conduct of the Indian operation badly damaged Nehru’s standing. The perception was widespread that the government had bungled badly. Even President Radhakrishnan, after a visit to the front, publicly acknowledged the government’s ‘credulity and negligence’.
As the blame game began, heads started to roll. The army chief and the chief of staff were both fired. Although Nehru maintained a stoic silence, he could not continue to ignore demands for Menon’s resignation. On October 31st he responded with ‘a half-measure’ by taking charge of defence himself, but allowed Menon to continue in the cabinet as minister for defence production. Menon did not help matters by declaring: ‘Nothing is changed. I’m still a member of cabinet and I am still sitting in the defence ministry.’ While Menon took most of the blame for the appalling state of the nation’s defences and his idiosyncratic handling of the generals, critics attributed India’s defeat to Nehru’s altruistic external policy of non-alignment and his failure to take a realistic stance towards China. Congress party stalwarts closed ranks to force the prime minister’s hand. They told Nehru bluntly: ‘It is Menon today. Tomorrow will be your turn.’
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The Himalayan war was a dramatic turning point for Nehru’s leadership. The premier made a desperate plea for military help to the US president John F. Kennedy and the British prime minister Harold Macmillan. He also approached the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to use his influence to restrain the Chinese. Throughout much of the war the two great powers, the US and the Soviet Union, were caught up in a deadly game of brinksmanship over the Cuban Missile Crisis. The American envoy in New Delhi, J.K. Galbraith, however, managed to persuade the Kennedy administration to dispatch help. By the first week of November over 60 plane loads of ammunition had been flown to India. The British response was more circumspect. However, by late November high-powered US and British delegations were in New Delhi, led by US Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and British Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys. The Chinese ceasefire on November 21st came as a relief, but the greater challenge of defending the long Himalayan frontier remained. Although India and the Soviet Union had signed a deal in August 1962 for MiG-21 fighter planes, these never materialised during the hostilities, leading to speculation that the Soviets would not permit the use of their weapons against another Communist country. A peace conference of African and Asian leaders in Colombo, convened by the Ceylonese premier Sirimavo Bandaranaike, only revealed division among the non-aligned nations and failed to produce tangible results.
Nehru was upset that US and British offers of military help came with strings attached. India was now forced to accept outside mediation and to open a dialogue with Pakistan over the highly contentious issue of Kashmir. Both the US and UK governments had used the Himalayan crisis to put pressure on India to make concessions to Pakistan and to settle the Kashmir issue. Nehru’s carefully nurtured policy of non-alignment suffered a setback and India’s stature on the global stage, which he had worked so hard to build, diminished.
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In April 1963 the Congress party lost three critical parliamentary by-elections. The political undercurrents now came out into the open. Some of Nehru’s most trenchant critics from across the opposition – the elder politician J.B. Kripalani, the socialist firebrand Ram Manohar Lohia and the suave right-wing Swatantra party leader Minoo Masani – returned to parliament ‘to pour scorn on an ageing and disillusioned prime minister’. In parliament’s monsoon session Kripalani moved a motion of no confidence, the first such challenge to his leadership Nehru had faced since 1947. Although defeated, the motion was deeply symbolic of the shifting political dissatisfaction with the government.
Anxious stirrings within the Congress party reflected the mood. Over 80 members of its national committee petitioned for a special session to discuss the slide in the party’s political fortunes. Held on August 9th and 10th, 1963, the special Congress began innocuously with the party delegates deliberating ways to revive the organisation. Behind the scenes, though, a far-reaching purge was being conceived by the party chiefs to refurbish its image and to reinforce Nehru’s standing. The session triggered a political earthquake, the largest reshuffle, both in government and party, in India’s political history. Known as the ‘Kamaraj Plan’ after its author K. Kamaraj Nadar, the influential chief minister of Madras, it called upon Congress leaders holding ministerial office at the centre and in the states to relinquish their positions and devote themselves to organisational work to revive and strengthen the party. A game of musical chairs was played out over who would stay in office and who would be forced to quit. Nehru, working closely with Kamaraj, pondered the political chess board. Finally, after two weeks of suspense, over half of the central Cabinet and the chief ministers of six states were made to take the ‘path of renunciation’. Those eliminated from cabinet posts included the Bombay MP S.K. Patil and Morarji Desai, whose personality and ideology Nehru found distasteful. He was also able to get rid of Bakshi Gulam Mohammad, the controversial chief minister of Kashmir. It appeared that Nehru, the consummate politician, had succeeded in regaining his authority over party and government. However, the Congress party heavyweights realised that they had to face up to the inevitable question: ‘After Nehru Who?’ The party had to survive, take care of its electoral interests and move on in uncertain times. Some of these men, including Kamaraj, met quietly in October 1963 in the temple town of Tirupati in southern India to form what came to be known as the ‘Syndicate’, an informal leadership collective to manage the question of political succession.
The outbreak of war with China brought another hopelessly tangled issue to Nehru’s urgent attention, that of Kashmir. During the 1962 war Pakistan’s president, Ayub Khan, had protested vehemently against US and British military aid to India, declaring that it ‘may enlarge and prolong the conflict’ and warning that the arms might be used against Pakistan over the Kashmir dispute. To assuage Pakistani fears, Averell Harriman and Duncan Sandys travelled to Rawalpindi soon after visiting New Delhi. The outcome of their visit was a joint statement by Nehru and Ayub Khan issued on November 29th, 1962 agreeing to renew efforts to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Nehru’s hands were tied due to the circumstances but in private he strongly resented this interference in what he considered was a bilateral dispute.
Talks began between the Indian minister Swaran Singh and the Pakistani foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. However, in January 1963, even as discussions were underway, Pakistan announced a provisional agreement under which it ceded over 10,000 sq kms of territory in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir to China – territory over which India made claims. New Delhi saw this gesture as adding insult to injury. Held over six prolonged rounds between December 1962 and May 1963, the talks proved unproductive and only hardened attitudes on both sides. American and British diplomatic efforts now turned to getting Nehru and Ayub Khan to accept third party international mediation to solve the Kashmir deadlock, a proposal that went against the grain of Nehru’s creed of non-alignment.
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Meanwhile, in Kashmir – from where Nehru’s ancestors came and a region with which he identified strongly – the political crisis deepened. Resentment against the unpopular regime of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, who had replaced the charismatic Sheikh Abdullah as chief minister, was rife, even though Bakshi had resigned under the Kamaraj Plan and one of his cronies had succeeded him. People regarded the detention of Abdullah, imprisoned for 11 years without trial, as being part of a political vendetta. To aggravate the situation, on December 26th, 1963 a crisis arose due to the mysterious theft of a relic of the Prophet Muhammad from the shrine of Hazratbal in Srinagar. The relic, a three-inch strand of the Prophet’s hair kept in a silver-capped glass phial, had been brought to Srinagar by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in the 17th century. Violent disorder broke out as thousands of Kashmiri Muslims took to the streets to express their distress and Nehru had to make a radio broadcast to calm the situation. Although the relic was returned surreptitiously to the shrine on January 2nd, 1964, rumours circulated that it was not authentic and popular protests continued for several weeks. Mass demonstrations also occurred across cities in Pakistan at Karachi, Rawalpindi, Dhaka and Lahore against this ‘Indian conspiracy’. On January 30th Nehru sent Lal Bahadur Shastri, his trusted Congress party lieutenant and political troubleshooter, to Srinagar to deal with the crisis. Shastri ordered that Islamic clerics examine the relic. On February 2nd, in scenes of high drama, the clerics pronounced it to be genuine. A public exhibition followed and anger thereafter subsided.
Nonetheless the Hazratbal incident had far-reaching consequences. Sectarian violence broke out in the Khulna and Jessore districts of East Pakistan. Thousands of displaced Hindu families fleeing the rioting took refuge in the Indian State of West Bengal. In retaliation, violence against Muslim minorities was reported from the Indian cities of Calcutta, Jamshedpur and Rourkela. Nehru dreaded the vicious cycle of Hindu-Muslim violence, with its inevitable displacement of people from their homes. He had lived through the horrors of Partition. To his distress it had begun once again.
Although he was now seriously unwell, Nehru knew that a turnaround was needed in Kashmir. In April 1964 Sheikh Abdullah was released from prison. After a ten-day triumphant procession across the Kashmir valley, Abdullah addressed an ecstatic crowd of over 250,000 people at a rally in Srinagar, where he strongly reaffirmed the right of Kashmiri people to self-determination. He then visited New Delhi, staying as Nehru’s guest in his house. It appeared that a major initiative was underway to find a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem centred around Abdullah. The Kashmiri leader held wide-ranging talks with Nehru and several important figures. He also received an invitation from Ayub Khan to visit Pakistan, which Nehru encouraged him to accept.
Through these turbulent months, Nehru kept his nerve. Even in the gloomiest moments of the war he did not seek scapegoats. Neither did he conceal his grief for the loss of Indian soldiers. In January 1963 he is said to have been moved to tears before more than 50,000 people when the singer Lata Mangeshkar performed the patriotic Hindi elegy ‘Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon!’ (Oh The People of My Country!). During this time he continued to seek the counsel of President Radhakrishnan and of close Cabinet colleagues such as Shastri, T.T. Krishnamachari and Y.B. Chavan, who took over the defence portfolio from Menon.
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On January 7th, 1964 Nehru suffered a mild stroke at Bhubaneswar in eastern India, where he had gone to attend the annual session of the Congress party. He recovered after a few days and returned to the capital but his left limbs were affected. Recalling those days Harivanshrai Bachchan, Hindi poet and a friend of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, wrote: ‘When Induji [Indira] brought Panditji [Nehru] home from Bhubaneshwar, I went to visit him early one morning, and found her walking with him hand-in-hand in the Teen Murti garden. The paralysis had affected the left side of Panditji’s body; the lawn was still wet with dew, and while Panditji’s right footprints were distinct and separate, a long continuous trail in the damp grass indicated the dragging of his left foot. It was a most pathetic sight.’
Arrangements were now made to lighten Nehru’s responsibilities. Lal Bahadur Shastri was appointed to the Cabinet as minister without portfolio. Shastri was to ‘look after’ Nehru’s work relating to foreign affairs, planning and atomic energy, besides handling all important matters requiring the prime minister’s attention. Nehru soon recovered and from March onwards resumed attending parliament. In May he travelled to the India-Nepal border to meet the king of Nepal and then to Bombay for a Congress party meeting. At the same time Abdullah arrived in Rawalpindi, where he met Pakistani leaders.
On the morning of May 27th after returning in apparently good health from a few days’ holiday at Dehra Dun, Nehru suffered a sudden heart attack. He died later that afternoon. The following day his funeral procession started from Teen Murti House, as an estimated three million people lined the route. Nehru was cremated on the bank of the River Jamuna, about 300 yards from where Gandhi’s funeral pyre had been in 1948. Those present included the British prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, the US Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the Soviet vice-premier Alexei Kosygin.
Crowds at Nehru's funeral in New Delhi on May 28th, 1964.
Among the mourners was a tearful Sheikh Abdullah, who, on learning of Nehru’s death, had cancelled his tour of the Pakistani-held ‘Azad Kashmir’ and rushed back to Delhi. Twelve days of national mourning were observed, culminating in the immersion of a portion of Nehru’s ashes at the confluence of the holy rivers, the Yamuna and the Ganges, at Allahabad, his birthplace. In a will made in 1954 Nehru had requested that the ‘major portion of my ashes … be carried high up into the air in an aeroplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India’.
Deeply respectful of the norms and processes of a young democracy, Nehru always believed that the question of succession should be decided by the party and the people after he was gone. The political transition that followed his death was remarkably smooth. With the support of the Syndicate, Lal Bahadur Shastri was unanimously elected Nehru’s successor. In his inaugural address Shastri emphasised continuity: ‘There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go. But for us there need be no difficulty or hesitation, no looking to right or left. Our way is straight and clear – the building up of a socialist democracy at home with freedom and prosperity for all … and friendship with all nations.’ However Shastri also inherited many of the challenges of the Nehru era, including building up defence capabilities, political unrest in Kashmir and worsening relations with Pakistan, which erupted in full-scale war in September 1965. Shastri’s unexpected death in January 1966 brought about yet another political succession. This propelled to the fore Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi – the beginning of a political dynasty, of which Nehru would have strongly disapproved for a democratic country such as India.
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