colleague and blood brother’,^2 but this sounded a little hollow. With
Nehru’s consent – even if he had occasionally protested at the lack of
respect for legal procedures – Abdullah had been imprisoned without trial
for the better part of a decade, with a brief respite for three and a half
months from January to April 1958, while the state of Kashmir had been
ruled by a corrupt Indian loyalist who was comfortable with rigging
elections, of whom even Nehru had said that if he ‘lost a few more seats to
bona fide opponents’ it would be to his advantage.^3 Nehru understood
Abdullah’s fears that India had alienated Kashmir, and he blessed his
forthcoming trip to Pakistan, expressing the hope for better relations
between Pakistan and India as well. All that remained was for the two
old comrades divided by Realpolitik, to Nehru’s mind, was that they
should find the equivalent symbolic act to Nehru and Churchill singing
the Harrow School Song together at an old boys’ reunion, less than a
decade after Churchill had had his schoolfellow incarcerated in an imperial
prison.
At his last press conference on May 22, those present remember
his slow and deliberate words in response to the inevitable question: was
it not time to name a successor? ‘That,’ said Nehru, ‘is a leading question.’
‘It is on everybody’s lips,’ the journalist replied. There was a long pause
and then Nehru’s voice cut through the silence: ‘They may be talking like
that. My lifetime is not ending so very soon.’^4 On May 26, he completed
his correspondence for the day and cleared his desk of pending papers. In
the early morning hours of May 27, he suffered a rupture of the abdominal
aorta; pain-killing injections enabled him to sleep until two o’clock in the
afternoon, and then he died. On his bedside table, on a small notepad, was
found scrawled in his own rather shaky hand the last stanza of Robert
Frost’s ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’:The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.^5SUCCESSION MANOEUVRES
Symbolic of the isolation of the man in his last days, Nehru lost control
even of his last request. Nehru’s funeral was a public pageant and a256 CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY