LEADERS IN PROFILE Nehru Building A Socialist India

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28154, 18 December 1956, Page 9

LEADERS IN PROFILE Nehru Building A Socialist India

(By LES ARMOUR)

Mr Nehru is bad-tempered, autocratic, uncompromising, inclined to preach at others, and not particularly concerned when his actions shatter his principles. He is, in short, just about everything his enemies call him. But he is a good deal more than that. He has built India into a powerful industrial nation, he has slashed through centuries of prejudice and hatred and begun to build a society founded on something near social justice. He has managed to preserve the framework of parliamentary democracy in the midst of almost overwhelming chaos. For he is, too, most of the things his friends call, him. He could hardly have been—considering his history—anything but a study in contradictions. On the other hand, there are those who think that the contradictions are becoming ever more irreconcilable —and see in that fact enormous dangers. Mr Nehru’ was born 67 years ago in Allahabad, the son of a distinguished local lawyer. His father, Motilal Nehru, had no illusions. He was later to become a leader in nationalist politics and an implacable enemy of British rule; but he realised that his son, to succeed, must have a British education. Harrow and Cambridge So it was that Jawaharalal went to Harrow and then to Trinity College, Cambridge. It was at Trinity that the young Nehru acquired the hard-headed rationalist outlook on life which tfas dominated him ever since. The college in those days had xtussell, Moore, McTaggart, Whitehead and Broad—a list not only of the men who dominated British philosophy for a

quarter of a century, but a list of the most hard-headed, 1 luntest, most uncompromising thinkers ever amassed by any educational institution in history. The very atmosphere was electric and Mr Nehru’s subsequent career has shown its influence. His contempt for the incoherent mysticism which held—or which he thought held—his countrymen in its sway was unconcealable. Not even Gandhi, whom he almost idolised, ever shook his rationalist outlook Gandhi, he once explained, “is the great peasant, with a peasant’s outlook on affairs, and with a peasant’s blindness to some aspects of life.” At the same time, Mr Nehru has never forgotten that he is an Indian and he is acutely conscious of his people’s history, of their aspirations, and of their potentialities. He never for a moment thought that Indians could find salvation by becoming imitation Englishmen. It was the belief that British rule produced only imitation Englishmen which more than anything else, turned him against the British. When he returned home to practise law he soon found himself bound up with Indian grievances and then, gradually, in nationalist politics. He was imprisoned and was to go back to prison nine times. At the same time, he kept a certain reserve. He did not much like the hurly burly of democratic politics. He never ran for pubic office. He confessed once to “a wholly undemocratic dislike of elections.” “Mixture of East and West” I And he admitted: “I have become a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nol where.” He has never been able to see why it is that men who think less clearly than he does should have a voice in public affairs. Nor has he ever had any use for Ghandi’s dream of a return to “a Golden Age” in which his countrymen could revel in the joys of the simple life. He knew that India must have factories, efficient administration, and a hew society in which much of the trapping of the Hindu religion with its entailed caste system must go. It was these aims which led him to socialism —a practical socialism designed to get specific jobs done rather than a theoretical socialism. Unlike many Socialists, he has never for a moment believed socialism was something that could be had without a price or that that price did not involve some sacrifice of human freedom. “I am too much of an individualist and believer in personal freedom to like over-much regimentation. Yet it seems to me obvious that that in a complex social structure individual freedom has to be limited. The lesser

liberties may often need limitation in the interest of the larger freedom. ’ He described himself as “a repentant bourgeois” and made no bones about the fact that his Congress Party was a “bourgeois” organisation financed by middle-class ’ money and run by middle-class brains. Mr Nehru has never claimed for himself the role of the “man of the people.”

At times he has been refreshingly blunt. At the outset of World War II he said that no-one in India could doubt that Britain’s cause was right and just and that Britain could have India's wholehearted support for the asking. But he said that, at the same time, unless India were granted her freedom he would go on fighting the British as hard as he could—in spite of the justice of the British war cause. He did and he spent much of the war in gaol. At the same time he is acutely aware of political realities. He hhs forced his middle-class party to introduce the necessary social reforms by leaving them in no doubt that the alternative is to be forced out of existence. He knows that, in India, communism must remain a very serious challenge so long as the country remains poor, and though he courts Communists in the outside world, he imprisons them as often as he. can in India. Rallying Points He is aware that he could, for instance, take Goa at the drop of a hat and be cheered by all India. But he has not done it for all his talk and for all the disturbances he has connived at. And one of the reasons that he has not acted seems to be that he is acutely aware of the unifying force of anti-colonialism in a country never very far from chaos. Goa provides a focal point for that force. If it ever goes, that point will no longer exist. Kashmir, too, serves to rally antiPakistani feeling, and that is another unifying force. There is no doubt that Mr Nehru sometimes sees these issues for what they are—dodges and issues which undermine India’s claim to moral leadership. At the same time he knows that he is badly in need of unifying forces. His assaults on the caste system have split the country badly. His social reforms have split his own party. Better, he may think, a few dodges than a greater chaos. Some day, perhaps, he will be able to afford a tidy up. At the same time, he is utterly intolerant of anybody else’s dodges and sins, great and small. He lives to preach. Yet his preaching is usually in favour of the status quo. Truce lines are a favourite of his and so, of course, is peaceful co-existence. He prefers everyone to stand his ground. That way, at least, lies peace. Peace India must have. He has made her . self-sufficient in food—and even produced a paper surplus. But there is a long way to go yet. The trouble with his policy is that, above all else, he is a one-man show. Who could ever take over the maze of contradictions and stay ,in office? Who. indeed, knows where the policies are supposed to lead and what each is calculated to achieve? Perhaps Mr Menon. But perhaps not even he. For, if it is true that. Mr Nehru can see no reason why those who think less clearly than he should have a say in affairs, it also seems to be true that he has never found anyone who seems to him to think as clearly. . . .