GANDHI’S SUCCESSOR

Southland Times, Issue 23793, 15 April 1939, Page 13

GANDHI’S SUCCESSOR

Pandit Nehru Is Cultured Indian

By

JOHN GUNTHER

TIE remarkable human being whose name is Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is, next to Mr Gandhi, the most important Indian in India. This handsome, cultivated and exceptionally fastidious and sensitive Kashmiri Brahmin, who is generally accepted as the Mahatma’s successor in the nationalist movement, is not so baffling a creature as. Mr Gandhi, but he has complexities

The struggle in Nehru is triple. He is an Indian who became a Westerner; an aristocrat who became a Socialist; an individualist who became a great mass leader. More than that, he is a man with a modern mind, a man of reason—a rationalist. Nehru the agnostic, Nehru the modern man, faces the colossal medievalism of India. He fights the British, but he fights the entrenched conventions and ritualism of his own people, too. His struggle is that of a ,20th century mind trying to make a revolution of material going back beyond the middle ages. Nehru was born in Allahabad on November 14y 1889, the son of Motilal Nehru, one of the greatest lawyers and richest men in India. He comes not only of the bluest blood in India, with a tremendous pride of race and heritage, but of a family with a deep tradition of public service.

Young Nehru had an English tutor from his earliest years; in 1905, at sixteen, he went to England, where he studied at Harrow and Cambridge and read for the bar. In 1912, when he was 23, he returned to India. The coalition between the Indian National Congress and Muslim League in 1916 was made in his father’s house—and presently he was identifying ' himself with the nationalistic movement and making speeches. Soon a turning-point in Nehru’s life occurred. He took his mother and wife, both of whom were ill, to Mussoorie in the north. It happened that an Afghan delegation, negotiating peace with Britain after the 1919 Afghan war, was housed in the same hotel. Nehru never talked to any of the Afghan plenipotentiaries, but after a month he was suddenly served with an order from the local police forbidding him to have any dealings with them. This struck him as ridiculously arbitrary; he had no intention of talking to the Afghans, but —a young man of fibre—he refused on principle to obey the order. Thereupon he was formally “externed” from the Mussoorie district. This was his first conflict with British authority. In the next two weeks he had nothing much to do and then he became aware of the Kisans, peasants, and their grievances. Gaol Terms

MEHRU first went to gaol during the DI 1921 non-co-operation campaign. Altogether he has served seven terms. Gaol alone did not make him a socialist but it gave him the time and opportunity for exhaustive political study and introspection.

Presently his socialism took concrete form, and merged gradually with the nationalist side of his nature. He began to see the Indian problem as more than a struggle between rebel nationalists and British nationalists. He became convinced that British imperialism as a capitalistic growth was the real enemy, and that it must' be fought from the socialist as well as from the nationalist point of view. British imperialism rests on capitalist exploitation as well as on political demands of empire; therefore, a logical opponent of British imperialism must be not merely a nationalist but a socialist, too. This is .the root of Nehru’s creed. In every way he has tried to hammer it home to the Indian people. . Today, at 49, Nehru is strikingly handsome. He is tall for an Indian, about five feet ten, with excellent bearing and a sound hale constitution. He exercises methodically and loves winter sports and swimming. His travels are formidable. He lives on the railway trains, and by choice travels third class. Anyone who has been in India knows what an ordeal this is.

The Working Committee of Congress —its executive body—meets once every six weeks. The committee members are incessantly unendingly travelling. The trains roar across dusty India, bringing them together. Links With Britain NEHRU’S wife, Kamala, who came of a Kashmiri Brahmin family like his own, died in 1936. She had been in ill-health for many years, and he was

Author Of “Inside Europe”

John Gunther was from 1924 to 1937 foreign correspondent for The Chicago Daily News in London, Europe and the Near East: his own. story of these years is told in Inside Europe. Mr Gunther’s forthcoming book, Inside Asia, deals in part with India, which, he visited last year.

released from his most recent term of imprisonment in order to visit her in Switzerland. Previously, when she was in India, the British volunteered to free him so that he might see her if he would pledge himself to give up politics for the period corresponding to the term. He refused. She begged him to refuse. Their only child, twenty-year-old Indira, is in school in England. Nehru has two sisters; one Lakshmi,

married Ranjit S. Pandit and is the thoroughly competent minister for local self-government and health in the United Provinces government—the first Congresswoman to reach minister rank. Nehru keeps closely in touch with the outside world. He subscribes to The New Statesman, The Manchester Guardian Weekly, Time and Tide, The New York Nation, The New Republic, The Living Age and Vendredi and L’Europe from Paris. His knowledge of English poetry is profound, and his love for it passionate. Incessantly he quotes classic verse. Few Friends

HE has, as his father had, a tremendous number, of acquaintances, but very few intimate friends. He speaks often of his loneliness. He hates promiscuous effusiveness; he is moody and ingrown, and finds it hard to meet people halfway. When he talks, he deliberately -understates his case; he sounds like a lecturer at Oxford, even at a political meeting. Frequently he confesses his failings; he is sometimes bored _ by politics; he is the victim of competitive emotions; occasionally he is unsure of himself and divided in judgment. Far cry from the brassy dogmatism and self-assurance of most national leaders. Much in India disgusts him and he confesses to “retreating into his shell” to avoid it. He detests ritualism and mysticism, except perhaps in poetry. .Religion he calls a kill-joy. He is all for modernization, westernization. “The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India an’d elsewhere has filled me with horror, and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it.” This—from an Indian leader! And there are many to say that this hatred of religion will keep him from supreme heights in India, because it is inconceivable that India should surrender herself finally to an agnostic. “Too Honourable” HE has no faddisms, like the Mahatma; he is appalled at Gandhi’s dictum that sexual intercourse is evil and must never be practised except to create offsprings He ate meat from childhood, but gave it up under Gandhi’s influence in 1920. He reverted to meat again in Europe, though he felt that it “coarsened him”; and now (like Hitler, whom he in no other way resembles) he is “more or less” a vegetarian.

He gets no salary for political work, and the great family fortune has gone mostly to the cause. What little money he needs he gets from writing. One of his defects, people say, is that he is too decent, too honourable, to be a good politician. He is a gentleman. Worse, he is an English gentleman.

He has devoted his life to freeing India from Britain, but the British imprint is deep upon him. The old school tie has turned to homespun cheesecloth, and he still follows a code of chivalry. Another defect is, of course, his ingrownness, his hatred of give-and-take and political hurly-burly. The sources of his power are numerous. Consider his courage and obvious strength of character. Then, there is his technical competence at a job; he was, for instance, a highly successful Mayor of Allahabad in his early years. Consider, too, his industry, both intellectual and physical. In gaol he wrote not only most of a closely printed 617-page autobiography but a history of the world in the form of letters to his daughter which runs to 1569 pages. During the most recent election campaign he travelled 110,000 miles in 22 months, in vehicles ranging from bullock carts to aeroplanes. Once he made 150 speeches in a week. Modest And Fair

THEN again there is his modesty and complete honesty with himself. By 1929 he was a hero, almost inundated by the applause and enthusiasm of the masses; by 1930 he had to face hero worship such as no man in India, Gandhi alone excepted, had ever known. He was distrustful of his popularity, but he could not help being exhilarated and impressed by it. His family quickly chastened him with raillery; his wife and sisters, even his small daughter, began to call him in the home the names he was given by the crowd. They would say, “Oh, Jewel of India, what time is it?” or “Oh, Embodiment of Sacrifice, please pass me the bread.” His political integrity is unshakeable. Nothing can deflect him from the path he has chosen if he believes it to be right; nothing can make him compromise an issue if it is turning out badly; he has nothing of the occasional slipperiness of Mr Gandhi. He. makes definitions scrupulously and abides by them. He has great detachment. Recently—this is a-curious oblique sidelight on his character—he wrote a character sketch of himself and carefully arranged so that it was published in a magazine anonymously. No one knew that he was the author until he let the secret out to a few friends months later. The article describes in somewhat indignant detail his manner as a conqueror of the multitude, and ends with a stirring appeal that he be defeated if he runs again for Congress President. It attacks his “Caesarism,” and says that he must not be spoiled by more success. “His conceit is already formidable. It must be checked. We want no Caesars ... It is not through Caesarism that India will attain freedom, and though she might prosper a little under a benevolent and efficient despotism, she will remain stunted and the day of the emancipation of her people will be delayed.” Gandhi

THE lessons of this document are obvious. Jawaharlal was outlining possible remote dangers of the future quite unconnected with himself. As for himself, he was desperately anxious not to be President of the Congress for another term.

Jawaharlal’s relations to Gandhi are more complex than those of a disciple to a master. Poles apart as they are mentally and emotionally, they are devoted to each other. Nehru needs Gandhi because Gandhi alone can carry the mass of the Indian people. Gandhi needs Nehru because Nehru is his indispensable second-in-command. Nehru differs basically from Gandhi in that he cannot follow his leader all the way on non-violence. 'He admits the political value of non-violence, but says frankly that non-violence alone cannot carry India to the final goal. Nehru does not hate the British. He dislikes British imperialism and its exploitation of India, but he freely , admits his intellectual debt to, British culture. When he takes a holiday, he heads straight for England. , Nor do the British, a few retired Colonel Blimps aside, really hate Nehru. But they fear him deeply. The British should realize that the fact that he is a socialist—and a gentleman—is a great asset on their, side. Nehru, since he is a socialist, is impeded from any projection of the Indian struggle internationally for the reason that the only countries which could help him are fascist states, and he will have nothing to do with them. The British are enormously curious about Nehru. Everywhere you go in India, the first political question is, “Have you seen Jawaharlal? What’s he like—what’s he doing—what’s he up to now?”