majority was enforcing anything on the Muslim minority led to a fossil-
isation of that category of ‘personal law’: as late as 1959, Nehru refused to
touch Muslim personal law, and would not place monogamy on the
agenda, at a par with the Hindu Code Bill that had made polygamy illegal
for Hindus (both ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ personal law were legacies of the
colonial imagination). In both cases, what his reluctance achieved was
that women’s representation was left in male hands: the custodians of the
rights of a ‘community’ were its ‘leaders’, self-appointed and male. In most
arenas, a few elite women appointed to or earning high office – among the
most prominent such examples being Nehru’s sister, Vijayalakshmi
Pandit – stood as token representatives of the wider agenda of liberation
for women.
In the end, the greatest betrayal of Nehru’s policies came from
Nehru himself, in compromising non-alignment and becoming the
‘American stooge’ of his own rhetoric and his Chinese interlocutors’ acid
pronouncements. To Nehru, the rationalisation was simple: the Chinese
had ‘betrayed’ him: he had been their friend, recognising the People’s
Republic, pushing for its international recognition, providing it with its
first international forum at Bandung and continuously backing its right
to a place in the United Nations. Yet for all his acuteness in understanding
Cold War pressures and politics, he appears to have been quite unable
to understand the pressures and imperatives of Chinese foreign policy:
it was impossible for China to accept the Indian refusal to negotiate on
the borders without the Chinese themselves appearing as if they had
given in to ‘unequal treaties’-style blackmail: there was no point in
negotiations where one side had already declared that there was nothing
on which to negotiate. There is therefore a good case for arguing that
Nehru betrayed China rather than the other way round; it is impossible to
understand why Nehru and other seasoned Indian policy-makers believed
Indian troops’ border brinkmanship would be tolerated in the spirit of
‘peaceful co-existence’. As Nehru became trapped in an Indian nationalism
that he refused to disown even in its nastiest and most illogical form,
he was forced away from his principles into a disastrous war, and saw his
policies collapse around him.
The tale of the sabotage of the Nehruvian project is a predictable
one for which Nehru’s 1930s avatar might have written the outline:
progressive intentions in the absence of the realignment of class relations
and in the presence of imperialist interventions are bound to fail to achieve264 CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY