THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING JAWAHARLAL
A combination of factors brought Jawaharlal Nehru into political
prominence. He belonged to a well-connected, affluent and important
political family, high in the ranks of the emerging Indian middle class.
Through his father, Motilal Nehru, a successful lawyer and moderate
nationalist, he had connections with the Indian National Congress
even before he had articulated any of his own political ideas. When he
entered the political scene in the late 1910s, and through his personal
battles with his father, he found a mentor and an alternative father figure
in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who not only nurtured the young
Jawaharlal politically, but encouraged him to assert his independence
against his father. Jawaharlal, therefore, by virtue of his class and his
family tradition as much as by virtue of political conviction, had been
inducted into politics at a reasonably high level.
Later on, Jawaharlal’s professed left-wing ideas made him the focal
point of various groups within the Congress searching for an alternative
model of leadership to the Gandhian, which many believed limited and
controlled political struggle, fed into the legitimising of Indian capitalists
(Gandhi believed that the wealthy held property as ‘trustees’ for the
community and the nation), and failed to serve the interests of the masses.
Nehru was, they thought, ideally suited to this role because he was already
an important member of the Congress. Those on the left who believed
that the anti-imperialist struggle ought not to be split prematurely into
a left and a right wing, and therefore ought to be carried out through
the Congress as a single unified organisation, felt that Nehru was ideally
suited to be their spokesman. But he consistently let them down; and
soon the right wing of the Congress came to recognise that they could live
with Nehru. Gandhi himself assured the right and the business interests
that supported it that Nehru’s socialist bark was worse than his bite,
setting the stage for peaceful, or semi-peaceful, co-existence broken by
periods of disagreement that often had more of a rhetorical impact than a
real one.
Nehru owed his emergence to pre-eminence in Indian politics as
much to his political allies as to his acceptability to political opponents.
Much of British political opinion, certainly from the 1930s onwards,
regarded Nehru as a desirable leader for an eventual post-independence
India. In what was to them a turbulent and increasingly incomprehensible
INTRODUCTION 3