Nehru, A contemperary's Estimate

The notion of Nehru spending halcyon hours relaxing with the peasants or Nehru's affection for children are comically off the mark, claims Walter Crocker, the Australian high commissioner to India in his biography of India's first and longest serving Prime Minister, written shortly after his death. Of the dozen or so biographies written on Nehru (the man himself wrote not one but three autobiographies! An Autobiography in 1936, Glimpses of World history and Letters from a father to his daughter in 1940s), none is more critical of him (although the affection and respect for the man shines through the book), which is remarkable considering the book was vetted by the Australian Foreign ministry and a few inflammatory references were apparently removed in the best interests of India-Australian relations.

The book sometimes smacks sarcasm ('typical Indian attitudes') to being downright critical, but is nonetheless engaging. It is even funny occasionally, like the reference that senility had gotten the best of even a balanced man like Nehru.During the Jalianwala memorial day, at a time when Russians had recently sent astronauts to space, Nehru spoke glowingly of weightlessness of space and his vision of Man's conquest of nature to an audience of illiterate peasants concerned about their next square meal. It harps on his famously short temper; During an occasion of modernization of villages through self help which quickly turned into a 'typical Indian function' of speech making starting with the President's speech being telecast from the Rashtrapathi Bhavan. He went on and on; irreproachable platitude following irreproachable platitude till Nehru grew restive. After the President's speech, Nehru stood up angrily, denounced speech making, vetoed further speeches and led the crowd to a place and asked then to dig a drain.

But the book is mostly about the main issues of the day. On Kashmir, Crocker minces no words saying India went back on its promise of holding a plebiscite to decide whether Kashmir accession would be whether to India or Pakistan, just after 1947 war. This, Crocker suggests was perhaps due to suspicions that such a plebiscite may result in Pakistan's favor.

On Goa (then Portuguese colony), the author charges India of unprovoked attack on a region which had no military power worth its name, under tenuous logic of the peninsula being integral part of India (he says Spain could use the same argument against Portugal, for example). Here too, he says a plebiscite could have gone against India, mainly because of the prosperity and more efficient administration of Portuguese.

On China, however, he is more forgiving of, even sympathizing with Nehru, as he wonders why China, in spite of the support it received from India on a host of issues (India gave up the special position it inherited in Tibet from the British and acknowledged Tibet as a integral part of China; India was the first to recognize the nacent communist regime; India actively lobbied for a permanent position for China in the Security council) chose to go into war with India over a petty boundary dispute.

Walter Crocker is prescient on a host of things. Like his forecast that when dust has settled, Nehru's achievements would be scaled down (Even he would be surprised at how far it has fallen). Or his prediction that Nehru's zest for equality for the masses with such haste has made it impossible for a higher caste Kashmiri Brahmin to ever become a Prime Minister of India (Nehru destroyed the Nehrus), and that the future would be dominated by members of the lower castes who would be voting majority as against the detached-majority-upper-castes.

But he was wrong in predicting the demise of India's democracy. The author while acknowledging that India's capacity to survive says chances are in favor of tyranny and oligarchy (an suspicion voiced by even the ardent optimists of the time). India's chaotic stability has endured till date.

While it is impossible to compress the life of a man in about a couple of hundred pages, much less a complicated man like Nehru (There were two men in Dr.Jeckyll and Mr.Hyde; there were more like twenty in Nehru), the author presents a riveting account a man who is done great injustice by a one-sided portrayal by his hagiographers