There was no one to advise him. His father was dead. Gandhiji was dead. Kamala was dead. And the friend whom he might have unburdened himself to, with whom he had celebrated the midnight hour of Independence, was far away. She, so elegant herself, had often teased him about his fastidiousness in dress. He touched the red rose – in this season it came from Kashmir – in the buttonhole of his white cotton achkan, and smiled.
The naked child, having missed several times, had now got a few bricks from near a flowerbed, and was painstakingly building himself a little platform. He stood on it and reached out towards the branch, but again without success. Both he and the bricks came tumbling down.
Nehru’s smile grew wider.
‘Sir?’ said the stenographer, his pencil still poised.
‘Yes, yes, I’m thinking.’
Huge crowds and loneliness. Prison and Prime Ministership. Intense activity and a longing for nothingness. ‘We too are tired.’
He would have to do something, though, and soon. After the elections it would be too late. In a sense this was a sadder battle than he had ever fought before.
A scene from Allahabad more than fifteen years earlier came before his eyes. He had been out of prison for five months or so, and expected any day to be re-arrested on some charge or other. He and Kamala had finished tea, Purushottamdas Tandon had just joined them, and they were standing together talking on the verandah. A car had driven up, a police officer had got out, and they had known immediately what it meant. Tandon had shaken his head and smiled wryly, and Nehru had greeted the apologetic policeman with the ironically hospitable comment: ‘I have been expecting you for a long time.’
Out on the lawn now, the little boy had piled the bricks on top of each other in a different formation, and was tentatively climbing up again. In an all-or-nothing endeavour, instead of merely reaching out towards the branch, he jumped up to grasp the fruit. But he did not succeed. He fell, hurt himself on the bricks, sat down on the damp grass, and began to cry. Alerted by the sound, the mali emerged, and took in the scene in an instant. Conscious that the Prime Minister was watching from the window of his office, he ran towards the child, shouting angrily, and struck him hard across the face. The child burst into a renewed fit of weeping.
Pandit Nehru, scowling with anger, rushed into the garden, ran up to the mali, and slapped him several times, furious that he should have attacked the child.
‘But, Panditji –’ said the mali, so thunderstruck that he made no attempt to protect himself. He had only been teaching the trespasser a lesson.
Nehru, still furious, gathered the dirty and terrified little boy into his arms, and, after talking to him gently, put him down. He told the mali to pluck some fruit immediately for the child, and threatened to sack him on the spot.
‘Barbarous,’ he muttered to himself as he walked back across the lawn, frowning as he realized that his white achkan was now entirely smeared with mud.
14.14
Delhi, August 6, 1951
Dear Mr. President,
I beg to tender my resignation from membership of the Congress Working Committee and the Central Election Board. I shall be grateful if you will be good enough to accept these resignations.
Yours sincerely,
Jawaharlal Nehru
This formal letter of resignation to the President of the Congress Party, Mr Tandon, was accompanied by a letter beginning: ‘My dear Purushottamdas,’ and ending:
You will forgive me if by resigning I cause you embarrassment. But the embarrassment has been there anyhow for both of us and others and the best way to deal with it is to remove the cause.
Yours affectionately,
Jawaharlal Nehru
Mr Tandon replied as soon as he read the letter a couple of days later. In his reply he wrote:
You have yourself as the leader of the nation appealed to Congressmen and to the country to present a united front to the situation that is facing us both externally and internally. The step that you propose to take, namely, that of resigning from the Working Committee and the Parliamentary Board, goes directly against that appeal for solidarity and is likely to create a schism in the Congress which has greater potentiality for harm to the country than any that the Congress has yet had to face.
I beg of you not to precipitate a crisis at the present juncture and not to press your resignation. I cannot accept it. If you insist on it the only course left to me will be to place it before the Working Committee for consideration. I trust that, in any case, you will attend the meeting of the Working Committee on the 11th instant.
If, to keep you in the Working Committee, it is necessary or desirable that I should resign the presidentship of the Congress I am ready to do so with great pleasure and goodwill.