Jawahar & Indira

H Y SHARADA PRASAD examines the influence of Jawaharlal Nehru on his daughter, Indira Gandhi, says H Y Sharada Prasad

Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi are easily the most remarkable father-daughter combination in history. They were twin stars, each of no ordinary brilliance. Scholars and biographers will for decades analyse their life and work, pointing out parallels and divergences, comparing and contrasting.

They were alike in their daring, in their high ambitions for their people, in their litheness and energy, in their capacity for taking infinite pains, in their modernity of outlook and freedom from dogma, in the ease with which they combined power with grace, and above all, in their approachability and ability to attract and hold the trust of vast masses of people.

Both were much more than leaders of their country. They were recognised as spokespersons of the array of nations which emerged from the long night of colonialism and imperialism.

If they were adored by the masses, they were also anathema to many. And the same kind of people hated them—communalists, those who were soft on foreign influence and infiltration, and those who could not abide the Congress.

The disapproving used the same pejoratives for them—aloof, ambitious, arrogant, vainglorious, westernised, and talking radical while acting cautious. The admiring responded to their charisma, that vague word which seems to suggest that their victories were won not by setting themselves the toughest of tasks but by some easy miracle.

Both entered politics at the top, and then worked their way downwards. They won ground-level support through their own unerring understanding of the longings of the people, and through the organisational responsibilities they sought out and fulfilled.
For years, Jawaharlal Nehru was referred to as “Motilal’s son”. Being Motilal’s son made it easy for him to become general secretary of the Congress in 1928 and even its president in 1929.

However, it was not Motilal’s son but Jawaharlal who declared at Lahore: “I must
confess that I am socialist and a republican and am no believer in kings and princes or in the order which produces the modern kings of industry, whose methods are as predatory as those of the feudal aristocracy.”

And Jawaharlal said at Lucknow: “Socialism is for me not merely an economic doctrine which I favour; it is a vital creed which I hold with all my head and heart. I work for Indian independence because the nationalist in me cannot tolerate alien domination; I work for it even more because for me it is the inevitable step to social and economic change.”

Being Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter was certainly a major factor in Indira Gandhi becoming Congress president in 1959 and prime minister in 1966. But the battles she fought soon after taking over were won in her own right—whether routing the Syndicate in 1969 or leading the country through the subcontinental crisis in 1971.
Ancestry is an advantage but it also exacts a price. More is demanded of a person who has a political inheritance. The internal audit and external scrutiny are more rigorous.

There is incessant challenge to independent laurels and to justify and add to the legacy.
Certainly, there were differences in emphasis and style between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Otherwise they would not be two different persons. Indira was not Jawaharlal in a sari. The early years of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were spent in wholly different ages and social milieus. Jawaharlal’s father pampered him. Indira’s parents toughened her. Their aim was to make her self-reliant, to develop the physical and emotional stamina to survive the ordeals of the freedom struggle. Jawaharlal’s way of teaching her to swim was to push her into the pool. She was often made to travel by herself even as a child, clutching her ticket in crowded third-class compartments.

Jawaharlal’s intellectual regimen for his daughter was also exacting. The letters that the father wrote to his daughter all through her growing years—not only the published ones which were meant for all children, but the private ones which were intended for an only daughter—are among the most heartwarming records of filial relationships. There is protective solicitousness, to be sure, but the aim is to nurture in her the ability to take her own decisions. The psychological texture of the letters is not one of advising but of journeying together. In the early years, there is some gentle admonition (“You read too fast and too much”) and discourse on the importance of outdoor exercise. Often, the father fusses about details he could have left to her. But considering that he was in prison and denied the opportunity to help, this is understandable. Soon the correspondence is as between equals and fellow-workers who share beliefs and objectives.

Mahatma Gandhi proclaimed that after he was gone, Jawaharlal Nehru would speak his language. With all their differences in background and temperament, Nehru treasured the message of his master. It was more natural that Indira Gandhi would speak her father’s language. There were unmistakable accents and echoes of Jawaharlal Nehru in what she spoke in moments when India’s unity was threatened, when communalism reared its ugly head, or when freedom was imperilled elsewhere in the world. The magnanimity that she showed at the moment of victory over Pakistan in December 1971 was possible only for one who had inherited the principles of Gandhi and Nehru.
Indira Gandhi told interviewers that her dominant feeling as a child was a certain protectiveness towards her parents and unbounded pride in what they were doing for the country. She regarded herself as the continuer of Jawaharlal’s policies. Within a few months of becoming prime minister, she told the All India Congress Committee: “I must be excused for saying that I have all along been associated with my father and imbibed his approach. Persons who used to oppose him during his lifetime now intend to explain his policies to me…To consolidate the country’s freedom, to preserve the secular structure, to enlarge the people’s rights, to carry forward the modernisation of the economy and give it greater technological content, to narrow disparities and remedy social injustices, to endow our foreign policy of non-alignment with the teeth of economic strength—these are my objectives. ”

Indira Gandhi once described her father as a saint in politics. Mahatma Gandhi had remarked on his deep spirituality when someone asked him to comment on Jawaharlal Nehru’s agnosticism. Indira Gandhi’s words should be seen as a sign of her own humility in relation to her father. She herself was often charged with being calculating and manipulative. But even Mahatma Gandhi was called a calculating and manipulative bania by his communal and imperial critics.

It was often said, both in praise and in dispraise, that Indira was more practical, even ‘pragmatic’, that she was a doer while her father was a dreamer. This kind of facile explanation ignores the times and circumstances in which each had to work and the forces in support and opposition at those times. The differences between father and daughter were more in style than in substance.

Fighting imperialism and colonialism, Nehru was vitally involved in delineating an alternative vision and providing it with a valid conceptual framework. As a builder of a new nation, the first and largest to overthrow an Empire, he had perforce to concern himself with blueprints.

Indira Gandhi’s task was to build the superstructure rather than lay the foundation, to implement rather than to formulate. Her aim was to not to demonstrate the doctrinal superiority of a socialist democracy but to prove that it could work and produce results in the Indian set up. Being a generation further removed from the European debates of the 1920s and 1930s, her vocabulary was more indigenous.

Jawaharlal was the great explainer, arguer, persuader. He and Mahatma Gandhi did more than the media and the entire educational system to make the people of India, so largely illiterate, understand and appreciate the forces at work in the world, and develop their capacity to judge and choose.

It could rightly be said of Jawaharlal that for over 35 years, he set the tone for national debate. It was as if his own thought processes were projected on to the giant screen of the nation. Above all, he pointed out that the choice was not between a plain white and a deep black but among several shades of grey. His interior dialogues became the moral and intellectual debates of a whole people. In the process, he had to suffer being accused of the Hamletian complex. It was not that he did not know what to choose—he wanted the people to understand the ‘why’.

Jawaharlal Nehru was accused, wrongly in my view, of being Hamlet. M N Roy was more right when he spoke of Nehru’s will to power. It was this will to power, matched with his intellect, which enabled him to dominate his great contemporaries, so many of whom were his match in daring, capacity and sacrifice.

Jawaharlal moulded his personality in such a way that there was little difference between his public face and his private face. This was true of Indira Gandhi as well. There was an unreachable inner core in both, which is not merely explicable by the fact that in all governments there is what can be called a prime ministerial distance which is not sought to be crossed by colleagues. Both father and daughter were examples of the maxim that the peak of a mountain is not a crowded place. It was difficult to draw Jawaharlal out on some subjects, especially on his own personal estimates of others. His own manner was not of inviting confidences from others. Indira Gandhi was even more reticent. It was not that she did not speak in public about the national and international policies that she intended to follow. Her public speaking manner was very reminiscent of both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru—open, conversational, wholly uncondescending, giving the listeners the feeling that nothing has been kept back and that they had been made party to policymaking. She was also careful to consult her cabinet colleagues and observe formalities. But she used her private meetings to listen, to draw people out, rather than to expound. By this habit, in spite of her reserve, she managed to become the recipient of even more information. Her cryptic style was a tremendous asset to her, for it led her opponents persistently to underestimate her, unlike her father, who was never underestimated by his adversaries.

When Jawaharlal assumed office as prime minister, he was exactly the same age as Indira Gandhi was when she proclaimed the Emergency. By that time, he had written and published so copiously that not only the outlines but even the details of his thoughts were deeply etched in the minds of the Indian people. He also spent much more time than Indira Gandhi did on writing notes and memos. One cannot imagine her writing “Fortnightly Letters to Chief Ministers”. Like Churchill and other contemporaries, Nehru believed in ‘Government by Record’. Often, he gave drafts to his secretaries and officials instead of waiting for them to give him their drafts.

It could be said of Nehru that even if he had never become prime minister, his position in modern Indian history would have been very much the same—as the most influential person after the Mahatma. It was a curious case of a completeness added to a completeness.

Indira Gandhi entered history for all practical purposes only after she became prime minister. She also spoke and wrote extensively—with spontaneous fire and expansive force in her larger public speeches and election rallies, and with careful economy and controlled power in her more formal addresses in the international arena. Few heads of government took as much pains over their speeches.

Even though her outlook and the reasons underlying her views had been exhaustively
documented, yet none of these appeared to have prepared her colleagues as well as her adversaries for the surprises she sprang and the speed with which she followed them up. Besides the element of surprise, the care she took to guard the rear and the flanks and the power she packed into her punches made her one of the greatest generals in politics.

In contrast, surprise was not part of Jawaharlal’s make up. He was predictable like the morning. There was one other important difference between the two. Jawaharlal was luckier in his colleagues—and in his opponents—than Indira Gandhi had been.