audiences – he was unembarrassed about his lack of oratory skills and
found he could address them in Hindustani in a conversational style rather
than a declamatory one – although he feared that his language or his
thoughts might not have been ‘simple enough for them’.^18 Having discov-
ered the peasantry, his job was to enforce the Gandhian line. To do this, he
had to run down the alternative leadership; in effect, to wean the peasants
from men like Ramchandra – in his speeches he insisted that Gandhi was
the true holy man, and all others, including Ramchandra, were fakes.^19
This phase of his political career should have been embarrassing
for Jawaharlal’s later socialist self. Gandhi was clearly the less radical of
the holy men, it had to be said, as Ramchandra was willing to back far
more effective and relevant measures for the kisansthan Gandhi was
- Gandhi notably refused to back the non-payment of rent to landlords as
legitimate protest. But at the time, Jawaharlal faithfully put forward the
party line. At one meeting, in Faizabad district, he denounced the looting
of a taluqdar’s property, and called upon the guilty persons to confess their
misdeeds by raising their hands. Several did so, in the presence of police,
and Jawaharlal later suffered some guilt at ‘having exposed these foolish
and simple folk to long terms of imprisonment’ and having inadvertently
contributed to the government’s repression of the movement – attributing
his actions to his allegiance to ‘what I conceived to be the spirit of
Gandhiji’s satyagraha’.^20 The language of his discovery of the peasantry
was extraordinarily patronising: ‘simple’, ‘ignorant’ peasants who had to
be told what to do. Jawaharlal continued to be surprised at the kisans’
capacity for autonomous action, but this was not enough for him to
rethink his paternalist attitude.
These were exhilarating times for the Nehrus, father and son, providing
them with an excitement far in excess of anything they had experienced
before. It had to end. On December 6, 1921, Motilal and Jawaharlal were
arrested at Anand Bhavan by a rather nervous police officer, who was
obviously aware of the importance of the people he had been sent to take
into custody. The next day they were sentenced to six months in jail
each. They had been in jail for about three months when they heard that
Gandhi had called off the movement at the peak of its success, on February
12, 1922. They were aghast – this was a movement that should have
culminated in swaraj. Gandhi was then, on March 10, himself arrested –
a good move by the government, who had feared aggravating civil unrest
had they arrested him at the height of Non-Cooperation.
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 49