Among the Viceroys there were two Elgins and two Hardinges, but no English (or Scottish) political family in India or Britain has maintained that degree of individual pre-eminence over three generations. The Nehru feat is the more remarkable because India is much the most disparate country of the three. What also seems to me to be remarkable is that Mrs Gandhi, who was an immensely filial daughter and a somewhat perfunctory wife, did not call herself, and hence her son, Nehru, particularly as the Gandhi has no connection with the Mahatma.
Was the Nehru family feat sufficiently remarkable to call in question India’s democratic credentials? Only superficially so, I think. The intervals, and particularly the Desai intrusion into Mrs Gandhi’s reign, are an answer to that. Indian governments pay the Raj the unfortunate compliment of inheriting from it too great a taste for the use of political imprisonment, but that apart there can be little doubt that by the tests of freedom of expression, freedom of political manoeuvre and freedom of electoral choice, India has astonished the world by showing that a country does not need to be rich to be a liberal democracy.
Nehru was the primary architect of this, which alone would make him one of the great men of the twentieth century. Beyond this pluralism, he gave India in the 1950s a major presence on the world scene - a presence greater than, even with its somewhat more solid economy, it has today. The non-aligned movement, of which, flanked by Tito and Nasser, Nehru was the clear leader, sometimes seemed ‘holier-than-thou’ and needed the resolution of Truman and Eisenhower for there to be something to be non-aligned between. But it gave to fissiparous India a valuable sense of the prestige of nationhood.
Nehru was accused of preaching conciliation abroad and practising ruthlessness at home. But his implacability was largely confined to anything touching the fragmentation of the country which had already lost Pakistan. He liked to think of himself as a Gandhian with Abraham Lincoln’s problems. No doubt there were elements of vanity and double standards in the balance sheet. But the achievement and the sweep of his perceptions were by any standards formidable.
In addition he encapsulated three different and even contradictory strands of India’s relationship with Britain and the West. For his first twenty-five years Nehru lived the slightly parasitical life of a rich Westernized Indian. His father, Motilal Nehru, later a notable Nationalist leader but at this stage an immensely successful, high-living advocate, a sort of F. E. Smith without the swashbuckling, appears in the early part of the book as a more interesting character than Jawaharlal Nehru was himself.
Jawaharlal emerges as a fairly dim Harrow schoolboy, Trinity College, Cambridge, chemistry undergraduate, and Inner Temple pupil barrister. He rather wanted to get away from Indians and recalled disdainfully (of his compatriots) E. M. Forster’s remark that the reason the races could not meet was that the Indians bored the English. If they did I do not think that Nehru was at this stage an exception. He was a silk-shirted hedonist admiring but not really penetrating English life.
Back in India after seven years away he began to undergo a remarkable and forceful metamorphosis. He became Gandhi’s disciple and heir, he converted his devoted father (who threw away - or at any rate suspended use of - his champagne cellar and Western clothes), and together they began lives of alternating agitation and gaol. In Motilal’s case this ended with his death in 1931, but in Jawaharlal’s case it continued until he was released from his last spell in a Raj prison on 15 June 1945.
Of the preceding twenty-three years he had spent almost nine of them incarcerated. There is a too comfortable impression in Britain today that for someone of Nehru’s stature these imprisonments were the equivalent of a reading and writing rest cure on the island in the lake of Udaipur; and that any boredom was made tolerable by the prospect on release of the adulation of the crowds and a no-hard-feelings singing of ‘Forty Years On’ with the provincial governor. Only the adulation of the crowds had reality. For the rest the long gaol sojourns were as depressing as they were unhealthy.
Within fifteen months of the last one, however, Nehru was Prime Minister; within two years he was apparently the lover of the Vicereine (which might be regarded as a more seductive embrace than Harrow songs, although Akbar seemed commend-ably uninterested in this relationship); and within ten he was putting on a remarkably good show as the patronizer of the leaders of the Western world.
He became the arbitrator of the future of the Commonwealth. Churchill, who twenty-five years before had called Gandhi a seditious Middle Temple lawyer posing as a half-naked fakir, took to telling Nehru in private letters that he was ‘the Light of Asia’. And Eisenhower, who had allowed Dulles for most of the 1950s to preach against India’s immoral neutralism, ended the decade by coming on a state visit to Delhi and paying a notable tribute.