and gone earlier, in the 1930s and perhaps the 1940s. It is possible that
Nehru remained in the Congress and at the head of the government as a
sort of holding operation against right-wing tendencies. ‘Most of my
Ministers are reactionary and scoundrels,’ the scientist, J.D. Bernal,
records Nehru as saying to him when they met in Beijing in 1954, ‘but as
long as they are my Ministers I can keep some check on them. If I were to
resign they would be the Government and they would unleash the forces
that I have tried ever since I came to power to hold in check.’^9 This would
certainly have been an accurate assessment of Nehru’s major triumph
against the anti-Muslim communalism of the Congress right wing. Thus
it is tempting to believe that the Nehruvian coalition was acknowledged
as that between the right and left within the Congress, but that the real
Nehruvian coalition consisted of the left in the Congress and the commu-
nists outside it, with various socialists occasionally weighing in with their
contributions, and Nehru remaining in the Congress to prevent, or at least
retard, a strong move to the right. This could of course never be acknowl-
edged either by Nehru or the CPI, and it is uncertain whether they were
aware of this at any point except during and after the China war, because
if such a coalition had been acknowledged, it would have added fuel to the
fires of both internal and external Cold Warriors, who at any rate already
did their best to keep Nehru honest and away from communism.
Thus it was that Nehru was perhaps at his most perceptive when he
noted that non-alignment would be at the core of independence, and an
internal distance from the CPI was integral to the external distance from
the superpowers. (Those who accused Nehru of being an internationalist
at the expense of the merely domestic tend to miss the point that the
domestic and the international could not be separated.) The leadership of
Nehru instead of anyone from the right or the left can be seen as a cause
of a certain degree of effective independence being maintained by India in
the context of the Cold War and its concomitant pressures: neither West
nor East could find enough faults with the Indian system to justify explicit
intervention. (This does not of course account for the fact of the secret
machinations of organisations such as the CIA in India; it is clear now,
and constantly getting clearer with the emergence of new evidence, that
these interventions strengthened or even brought into being a coherent
right-wing opposition to Nehru in the end. How far Nehru knew of these
activities, and how far he opposed or was in a position to oppose them, we
are not yet in a position to judge.)260 CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY