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July 11, 2004
And then the curtain fell
Judith Brown on the last days of Jawaharlal Nehru
AS Nehru resumed the reins of peacetime government in 1963 it seemed superficially as if little had changed. Despite his age and experience of debilitating illness early in 1962 he refused to countenance retirement or to appoint a deputy who might lighten his load. But it was evident that his pace and capacity for work had slowed, while those who were close to him worried at the obvious decline and the way the Chinese invasion had seemed to break his vitality.
Marquis Childs, who had covered so much of Nehru’s relations with America, and had come to know him well through private conversations, met him for the last time in London in 1963, when Nehru was attending a conference of Commonwealth prime ministers. He breakfasted with him at the residence of the Indian High Commissioner and found him a totally different man since the profound disillusion of the Chinese attack. He seemed physically to have shrunk, was withdrawn and spoke probably not more than a dozen words in the course of the meal, and Indira had to keep the conversation going.
The effect of the prime minister’s decreasing capacity began to have its effect on the government and on the political system itself, as people began reluctantly to realize that the end of an era was in sight, and that there was a new urgency about the question of who and what would succeed the man who had led India since independence, endowed with the legitimacy of an impeccable nationalist pedigree. A few were prepared to tell him to his face that urgent problems were not being dealt with.
It was also becoming apparent that Congress itself was a weakening source of power and authority. In May 1963, Congress lost three crucial by-elections in what were considered safe seats — one in Gujarat and two in Nehru’s own Uttar Pradesh. Three prominent opponents of Nehru, one Socialist, one Independent, and one representing the right-wing Swatantra Party, stood against equally prominent Congress candidates, including two members of Nehru’s cabinet. The contests thus took on a national significance, and constituted a profound challenge to the Congress government’s military and economic policies, as Nehru himself had recognized they would...
Moreover, Nehru found that his authority was challenged even within his own government on crucial policy matters, particularly by two ministers on the conservative wing of Congress. Morarji Desai, the finance minister, did not pursue the active policy of price control of essentials required by the planning commission in the post-war economic crisis, while the minister of food and agriculture, S.K. Patil, similarly defied the planning commission’s strategy for dealing with food shortages.
The declining authority of the prime minister and his government in the country and problems of discipline and organization in the Congress party itself lay behind a clever and unprecedented manoeuvre within Congress, which became known as the Kamaraj Plan, after one of its authors, K. Kamaraj, the Congress chief minister of Madras. (The other was the chief minister of Orissa, Biju Patnaik.) It involved the resignation from office of senior Congressmen in government to free them to revitalize the Congress party organization throughout the country. Nehru warmed to the idea when it was put to him in May, and he offered to resign himself, but this was unacceptable to the AICC. The CWC and AICC accepted the plan in August, and Nehru was left with the decision of which resignations to accept among his chief ministers and those in his own government.
The administration of Kashmir and public opinion in the state had been causing him serious concern at a time when Kashmiri loyalty was crucial for strategic reasons and in the aftermath of the failed talks with Ayub Khan. The departure of the chief minister allowed him eventually to secure the release of his old friend Sheikh Abdullah, with whom he was able to mend fences and have a series of talks in the spring of 1964.
However, for Nehru there was not the time left to try to press home these initiatives to reinvigorate the party and to reassert his authority over policy. Late in 1963 he became involved in the preparation of a resolution for the forthcoming meeting of Congress at Bhubaneswar, Orissa, to be held in January and devoted to democracy and socialism. It restated the party’s social goals and supported the economic strategy underlying the five-year plans.
However at the Congress meeting he suffered a slight stroke, just as he was rising to address the party. Indira and then his aides caught him and escorted him out, and put him in bed in the governor’s residence. Although he pulled through he was not well enough to appear again and returned with his daughter to Delhi. His doctors tried to persuade him to rest for a considerable time, but he made a bad patient and was deeply reluctant to accept their advice. He was seriously unwell, and practically confined to bed, for nearly a month, and he only began writing letters again early in February.
Although he admitted that he was recovering more slowly than he hoped, he refused to accept the idea of appointing a deputy prime minister, and while he was out of action his work as prime minister was shared between the home minister and the new finance minister, his old and trusted colleague, T.T. Krishnamachari. He also consented to the return of Lal Bahadur Shastri, a central minister who had left under the Kamaraj plan, but who now returned to assist Nehru as minister without portfolio.
But Mountbatten, passing through Delhi at the end of January, was dismayed at the way his friend’s illness had deprived India of serious leadership, and he wrote to him, pleading with him to delegate responsibility for daily work and to cut out what was not vital. He was saddened to see that Nehru appeared to want to die in harness and to go on working at full stretch. “That is what Edwina did to the great distress of all who loved her whom she left behind... But you owe it to India whose independence and greatness is due to you, the continuation of your overall leadership for as many more years as possible. So please do what is best for India.”
The pleas of one of his few close friends, and the invocation of Edwina’s memory did not sway Nehru. By April he was gradually getting back to work, and feeling much better. To those around him it was clear that he was a changed man; his left leg and foot were obviously weak when he walked and he sometimes appeared sleepy. Senior Congressmen were increasingly convinced that he would not recover any further, and that such recovery as he had made was insufficient to permit him to continue. Nehru, however, insisted that he had no intention of retiring from public office, and was even planning a visit to London.
Indira was deeply involved in trying to look after her father, and was profoundly stressed by his obvious frailty as well as the sense of uncertainty and manoeuvre, which prevailed in Delhi. However, she must have thought his recovery was well established because she left India for the last two weeks of April for a visit to Washington. On her return they both went to Bombay for an AICC meeting, and ten days later they went together to the relative cool of Dehra Dun for a three-day holiday. They returned to Teen Murti on May 26.
In the early hours of the next morning he woke in pain and his personal physician was called. He had suffered a ruptured aorta for which there was no possible medical help. Pain-killing injections eased him into unconsciousness and he died early in the afternoon. The cause of death, together with his earlier stroke, indicates that Nehru had been suffering from hypertension. Although his doctors would have known this, there was little they could advise except rest, as treatment for hypertension with drug therapy, particularly beta-blockers, was in its infancy and still considered experimental. Prolonged rest was precisely what Nehru would not countenance. He thus, in a sense, killed himself rather than lay aside what he had felt was a vocation as well as his life’s work.
Excerpted with permission from
Nehru: A Political Life
By Judith M. Brown
OUP, New Delhi. Available with Oxford University Press, Plot # 38, Sector
15, Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi. Tel: 111-693-673
Email: ouppak@theoffice.net Website: www.oup.com.pk
ISBN 0-19566795-6
407pp. Rs695
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