India Today Editorial Director M J Akbar India Today Editorial Director M J Akbar

One morning at breakfast, in 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru, then 69, told his private secretary M.O. Mathai, quite out of the blue, that he would not live beyond the age of 74. Mathai notes in his autobiography My Days with Nehru that he wondered if the modern and scientific prime minister had finally succumbed to the lure of astrologers. Nehru replied, perhaps with an unreported chuckle, that he had merely calculated the average age of men in his family and found that it was 74 years, six months and 13 days. Intimations of mortality had begun to seep into the consciousness of the leader who would be memorably remembered after his death, in a tribute in Parliament, by the CPI MP Hiren Mukherjee as "the gentle colossus".

Nehru sits at the doorway of the Banteay Srei temple in Cambodia, 1954. Nehru sits at the doorway of the Banteay Srei temple in Cambodia, 1954.

Nehru was among the leaders through most of his public life, which began in 1919 when he joined Mahatma Gandhi's first and most impressive challenge to the British Empire, the satyagraha movement. He grew gradually into a hero when, as free India's first prime minister through the dream decade of the 1950s, he transformed a country into a democratic and modern nation, winning the love of his people and admiration of the world. Pakistan, interestingly, offered a template of what could go wrong as its politicians destroyed one another and finally surrendered to their armed forces in the grey gloom of constitutional anarchy. Nehru, in contrast, had piloted, along with Dr B.R. Ambedkar, a model Constitution, led his party to triumph in two exemplary general elections and then announced that power was not his only ambition in life. On April 29, 1958, the Congress Parliamentary Party met in an environment of unprecedented crisis. Nehru wanted permission from his party to resign. He had already told president Rajendra Prasad his reasons. Fatigue. Forty years of public service had been exhilarating, he told his fellow MPs, but he now wanted a respite from "this daily burden" to do "some quiet thinking" and return to "myself as an individual citizen of India and not as prime minister". This colossus was human.

Pandit Nehru and grandchildren Sanjay and Rajiv looking into a pool, 1948. Pandit Nehru and grandchildren Sanjay and Rajiv looking into a pool, 1948.

And human enough to be persuaded to change his mind. As one Congress MP archly remarked, Jawaharlal wanted time to think about how to save the world from the hydrogen bomb, but had no compunctions about dropping a hydrogen bomb on the Congress. When the Congress rejected his offer to resign, letters of congratulation and relief came from both Dwight Eisenhower in Washington and Nikita Krushchev in Moscow. Nonalignment was working somewhere!

Thirteen years of Nehru's transition from youth to middle age were spent in British jails, many of them ratinfested and all of them depressing. His anger was restricted to British rule, never to the British; his friendship with the last viceroy and his wife, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, which flowered in the Fifties, is the stuff of history and gossip. When India became free of viceroys, he placed a gold statuette of Gandhi and a model of the hand of Lincoln on his desk, and set to work. On January 30, 1948, the light went out of his, and India's, life when the Mahatma was assassinated. By 1950, the pillar of his administration, Sardar Patel, was gone as well. Maulana Azad (Nehru translated the Maulana's stirring presidential address at the Ramgarh Congress session in 1940) seemed to have lost heart after he lost the war within his own community to preserve the unity of India. Nehru was alone. Nehru may have been only the first among equals when he became prime minister, but after 1952 there was no equal in his Cabinet.

Albert Einstein, Princeton University professor, bids goodbye to his guest Nehru, 1949. Albert Einstein, Princeton University professor, bids goodbye to his guest Nehru, 1949.

In 1937 Nehru wondered, in a self-parody that was not quite a parody, whether he would ever mutate from democrat to Caesar, perhaps even a fascist who had used socialism to fatten his ambition and then abandoned his avowed principles. He remembered some famous lines: "I drew these tides of men into my hands/And wrote my will across the sky in stars..." All over the post-colonial world, famous peers abandoned accountability and set themselves up as lifelong dictators. But Nehru wrote the will of his nation across the sky and anchored India to tides of world peace, not world war.

Nehru with Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House, 1961. Nehru with Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House, 1961.

During the Fifties Nehru laid the framework of domestic and foreign policy through the core of his concerns and substance of his passions. He calmed the Hindu-Muslim conflagration that had sliced India with a scalpel, even as he confronted and reversed Pakistan's invasion of Kashmir. His economic programme was socialist without being Marxist: in the heat of an election campaign in Kerala he could question both the patriotism and intelligence of communists.

He committed Government and Congress to planned development that had elimination of poverty and industrialisation of India as its primary objectives. He was also the intellectual fountainhead of a post-colonial concept in international relations that established equality and peace as basic principles and institutionalised a coalition of countries into the Non-Aligned Movement. He was what no Indian had ever become, a world leader. Norman Cousins, the famous American editor of the Saturday Review, reported that at the historic Bandung conference in 1956, delegates might have been impressed by Chou en Lai, but they believed in Nehru.

Nehru addressing a crowd during a visit to Colombo, 1957. Nehru addressing a crowd during a visit to Colombo, 1957.

After the Suez war that same year, a Pakistani poet, Rais Amrohvi, wrote in the Urdu paper Jung: "Jap raha hai aaj mala ek Hindu ki Arab/Barhamanzade mein shaan-e dilbari aisi to ho. Hikmate-e Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ki kasam/Mar mitey Islam jis par kafiri aisi to ho." Nehru challenged the language of tradition, calling steel mills and dams the temples of modern India. It is fashionable now to sneer at the public sector, but the private sector in the Fifties had not matured to the point where it could raise and risk the capital needed for collaborations of the size of Bhilai or Durgapur. These were new cities being created, not just factories. Tata's private steel plant at Jamshedpur was an exception created by the genius of Jamsetji. Nehru created IITs to provide the intellectual ballast for forward momentum; the silhouette of 21st century India began to emerge on the near horizon.

A Malayali scholar-statesman-soldier born some three centuries before Christ, named Vishnugupta but more familiar to us as Chanakya, would have been content with the achievements of this son of India. Nehru always aspired to the "best qualities of the king" as enumerated in the Arthashastra: "Born of a high family, godly, possessed of valour, seeing through the medium of aged persons, virtuous, truthful, not of a contradictory nature, grateful, having large aims, highly enthusiastic, not addicted to procrastination, powerful to control his neighbouring kings, of resolute mind, having an assembly of ministers of no mean quality and possessed of a taste for discipline-these are the qualities of an inviting nature." He even met a subsidiary Chanakya demand, the ability to make "jokes with no loss of dignity or secrecy". He enjoyed fancy dress parties, and once told Mridula Sarabhai, who wore handspun unisex clothes like salwar-kameez, to "come dressed like a woman, for a change!" Former president S. Radhakrishnan commented that it was very good for the country that Nehru could laugh.

Nehru releases a dove on his 65th birthday in Delhi, 1954. Nehru releases a dove on his 65th birthday in Delhi, 1954.

But Jawaharlal ignored one Chanakya warning: the threat from neighbouring kings. Perhaps he forgot that India had two neighbours who could turn hostile. Nehru was ready for Pakistan's war. In a remarkable letter to Sardar Patel in September 1947, he detailed Pakistan's plans for Kashmir as if he had been briefed by Karachi. Nehru's brilliant decision to invite Mountbatten to stay on as governor-general and then make him chairman of the Cabinet's defence committee, paid off handsomely when Pakistan tried to seize the Valley through armed raiders in October 1947. India and Pakistan had been given Dominion status, and British officers in their armies continued to check with London.

They were ready to obey Mountbatten in India, but not Jinnah in Pakistan in the first and decisive phase of the Kashmir war. The merits of the ceasefire line established on January 1, 1949, will continue to invite controversy, but time has proved beyond doubt that this Nehru line is a strategic marker that has been accepted internationally as the real border. Over six decades that line has not shifted, in material terms, by six inches. Neither did Nehru permit sentiment to interfere with national security when he dismissed Sheikh Abdullah in 1953.

Experience taught him to limit his trust in the Muslim League; his vaulting idealism persuaded Nehru that he could trust China beyond the prudence offered by evidence. Perhaps Nehru should have resigned in 1958; his chapter would have glistened in the history of India. His Himalayan blunder shattered Indian self-confidence; he himself never recovered, even physically. He aged. Caesars, I have written in my biography of Nehru, should die suddenly. A slow death hypnotises them. They cannot fight the inevitable, but will not surrender easily either. Within 15 months of October 1962, Nehru suffered a massive stroke at the Bhubaneswar AICC; five months later, the end came. He was just over 74.

Nehru was not totally immune from astrologers. In 1959, after much persistence, his Cabinet colleague Gulzarilal Nanda introduced him to a certain Haveli Ram Joshi, a refugee from Gujranwala. Joshi explained that he had obtained a copy of the Arun Samhita from a Pathan on the Frontier who was selling it as junk, and amazed Nehru with political forecasts based on the ancient text, including the war with China. Haveli Ram told Nehru that there was one prediction he could do nothing about: the prime minister would die on May 27, 1964.



Nehru is now public property to be remembered when convenient and forgotten when expedient.The laboured litanies of homage on their anniversaries are supremely ironic: modern India is guilty not of forgetting its founders but of not remembering them well and correctly.The issue discusses Nehru's ideas, vision and legacy.What has been the fate of his institutions and his ideas, his programmes and his policies? Has India moved ahead on the path he charted? Have his ideas stood the test of two decades without him? These are not questions that can any longer be left to the future, for only their answers,a stocktaking, no less, will pull India back from the wilderness into which it seems headed.

Twenty Years After: A Troubled Legacy

By Suman Dubey, June 15, 1984

Six months before the China war Nehru gave an interview to Taya Zinkin, correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. When asked what he considered his greatest achievement, Nehru did not mention the freedom of India. It was the Hindu Code Bill, which freed Hindu women from the shackles of a law that permitted polygamy and denied inheritance. Nehru had overcome opposition from his own President to pass that legislation, in stages, through a difficult Parliament. Taya Zinkin asked why Nehru had not ensured similar legislation for Muslim women. The political climate, said Nehru, was not right. The climate has not changed.

As his life entered the shadows, succession became a talking point. Norman Cousins posed the question for an interview published in the May 27, 1961 issue of the Saturday Review. Nehru's reply was crisp: "This business of picking an individual successor is something I find quite alien to my way of thinking. I am not trying to start a dynasty." Death is not without its ironies.

Mathai narrates a wonderful anecdote. Nehru's favourite tailor was Muhammad Umar, whose shops were destroyed in the Partition riots. The prime minister helped restore his business and a grateful Umar put up a proud sign: "Tailor to the Prime Minister". Umar's son, who had migrated to Karachi, put up exactly the same sign in his establishment. Mathai asked Umar whether such a claim helped in Pakistan. Umar retorted, "Sahib, Panditji is a bestseller anywhere."

No colossus could ask for a finer epitaph.

- The author is the editorial director of INDIA TODAY