Left at the mercy of the old guard

It is not generally known that in 1945 Jawaharlal Nehru went through a critical moment of rethinking about Gandhism. That experience was confided only to Gandhi himself. However, more is known about another similar critical moment: his departure from the radical and socialistic approach with which young Nehru was identified. As he went up in the party hierarchy he had to negotiate with the Old Guard in the Indian National Congress. 

That was the beginning of Nehru’s departure from the socialistic inclinations associated with the Labour Party in England where Nehru had numerous friends, the Soviet-sponsored League Against Imperialism at the international level where Nehru was quite active till the end of the 1920s, and the All India Trade Union Congress led by communists in his own backyard. That departure came in the mid-1930s, but there were premonitions earlier. There was always some amount of scepticism amongst Nehru’s close acquaintances as to whether he was right in wading into the labour question — for instance accepting the presidentship of the All India Trade Union Congress at the age of 32 in December 1928 when venerable veterans like Muzaffar Ahmad and DB Kulkarni were his vice presidents and SA Dange his assistant secretary. 

A school friend of his, Charles Trevelyan, wrote to Jawaharlal later: “You and I began at Harrow where we were not taught to be champions of the underdog.” That was very true, but at the same time it is an obvious error to assume that the personal class location of an individual will necessarily determine his or her ideological position or the political choices he or she might make. Jawaharlal had made a choice but, as they say in the world of business, ‘conditions apply’. The conditions were revealed in 1934-36.

About that time two events in Nehru’s political career demonstrated the limits of the support he would be willing or able to offer to the spokesmen of the communist or socialist cause. The limits were set by his prioritisation of total support to and dependence on the Congress. The first of these was Nehru’s silence in 1934, soon after the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience movement, when the Congress accepted a resolution denouncing the notion of class war as repugnant to the spirit of non-violence, and recommending “healthier relationship between capital and labour.” There followed Nehru’s presidential address to Lucknow Congress of 1936: he spoke of affiliation of working class trade unions and peasant organisations to the Congress party in a more proactive way. But as GD Birla, cited by Sarvepalli Gopal in his official biography of Nehru, noted: “no new commitments were made by the Congress. Jawaharlal’s speech in a way was thrown into the waste-paper basket, because all the resolutions that were passed were against the spirit of his speech.” Nehru accepted this victory of the Old Guard. Ten of those were nominated to the Working Committee, and only three socialists made it, Narendra Deva, JP Narayan,  and Achyut Patwardhan. 

That caused surprise and disappointment to the Left. In the previous decade Nehru was actively cooperating with the Left, and according to Intelligence Bureau reports he was personally involved in defending workers on strike in the postal employees’ strike in Calcutta in 1921, in the jute mill strike led by Muzaffar Ahmad in Bengal in 1926, in the general strike of Bombay mill workers in 1928-29, and in the Meerut Conspiracy Case in order to defend the communists on trial, apart from being the AICC specialist in labour matters. Thus socialist leanings were more than just a part of the baggage he brought from his days in England associating with Labour Party leaders and future Indian communist leaders. At the same time, a careful reading of his private letters suggest that he was mulling over those limits I have mentioned earlier. For instance, he writes to the trade unionist DB Kulkarni: “Of course everyone knows that the Congress is not a labour organization. It does not pretend to be one. To expect it to act as a pure labour organisation is a mistake”. (AICC Proceedings, file no. 16, 10 Sept., 1929). His sympathy for the labouring classes and his appreciation of the work of the trade union leadership notwithstanding, the scale was swayed by the mass and volume of popular support that the Indian National Congress could garner. Time and again Nehru made this point and he made no effort to hide it even when he was addressing the trade union leadership. When CB Joshi of the GIP Railway Union proposed a labour organisation to be set up under Nehru’s leadership, Nehru decidedly declined: “All my activities must be through the Congress.” (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 4, p. 34). It is no denigration of Nehru to say that he was with the Left and the working classes, but in his thoughts he observed some limits —  and that train of thought coexisted with his socialist sympathies. In the mid-1930s he had to translate his thoughts into public acts, specially when he became the President of the Congress. 

The third turning point I mentioned earlier is well known and readers need to be only reminded of it. That was again a moment of departure from ideas cherished earlier, his vision of Asian and Third World unity, the slogan of Panchsheel and all that, during the border conflict with China in 1962. It was an idea which often found intellectual articulation in modern India and China. A memorable instance was the speech on Pan-Asianism by Sun-Yat Sen at Kobe in 1924. In 1927 Rabindranath Tagore toured south-east Asian countries and his travelogue, Java, repeatedly harped upon the theme of Asian unity. Nehru himself in his Discovery of India (1946) focused upon the history of India and China as two great civilisations which were linked for centuries, specially after the spread of Buddhism from India to the whole of East Asia. In the Cold War era such ideas were invested with new meanings in the context of the predicament of Third World countries. Nasser in Egypt, Tito in Yugoslavia, Sokarno of Indonesia, no doubt took part in the creation of the concept of ‘panchsheel’ but there is no doubt that Nehru along with the Chinese took the lead in that regard. Given this background, one can appreciate the shock the Nehruvian vision of Asian unity suffered with the incursion of Chinese troops across the McMahon line. By all accounts of those times, Nehru was shattered and we have inter alia an eyewitness account of that breakdown in the memoirs of PK Banerjee, India’s ambassador to China. This crisis is well-known in contemporary history and further elaboration is unnecessary. Suffice it to say that this was another critical moment when Nehru had to abandon a position with which he had been identified not only in foreign policy but also in a global world outlook he had propagated widely. Of all the critical moments this perhaps was the most traumatic, but all three we have looked at are laden with historical significance and reveal to us some of the complexities of the intellectual life of Jawaharlal Nehru.

This is the concluding part of a two-part series on Jawaharlal Nehru
The author is formerly professor at JNU, and Chairman, ICHR, New Delhi, and Vice-Chancellor, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. His most recent book is The Defining Moments in Bengal, 1920-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2014)