Nehru

...Eager to ingratiate themselves with their English masters, the Muslims backed Britain's war effort...

...Even more than his young bride, the fastidious Cambridge aesthete and bon vivant hated himself—for lacking the courage to disobey his imperious father...

...By allowing the heretofore secular Indian National Congress to be hijacked by a Hindu mystic, Motilal had inadvertently laid the groundwork for the terrible communal violence that would soon shake India to its very foundations...

...After Nehru's release at the end of World War II, he began delivering such44 He wrote his father requesting to transfer: 'Cambridge is becoming too full of Indians.' incendiary anti-British speeches that Lord Wavell, the British viceroy, "expected a serious attempt by the Congress, probably in the spring of 1946, to subvert by force the British administration of India...

...had especially picked out for him...

...T hroughout the violence, Nehru's main concern was to prevent his ancestral home state of Kashmir, predominantly Muslim, from falling to Pakistan...

...As for Edwina, "Cheerful, handsome The American Spectator February 1997 73 In Search of the Big Sky Unabomber Militia young Dickie had proved almost as much of a disappointment to [her] as Kamala [now dead] had to Jawaharlal, though not in the same ways, of course...

...and Jawaharlal's embrace of Gandhi's politics was really his declaration of independence from Motilal...

...A massive bloodbath ensued —about a million civilians were butchered, and 14 million became refugees...

...Motilal himself was a leading figure in India's principal nationalist organization, the Indian National Congress, as well as a fabulously successful barrister...

...What a tremendous contrast to the dialectics of Lenin & Co...

...The more he saw of this strange illiterate child," writes UCLA India scholar Stanley Wolpert in this captivating biography of India's first prime minister, "the less he liked her and the more outraged and frustrated he became...

...But Motilal was a devoted family man determined to look out for Jawaharlal...

...It was also thanks to Motilal that Gandhi took control of Bombay's Home Rule League...

...Although Motilal was never convinced of either the wisdom or the rationality of Gandhi's style of politics, he knew that by now Jawaharlal was sufficiently attracted to this radical "saint" and his Satyagraha to fear that he would lose his son unless he played along with the Mahatma...

...To help achieve this, Nehru in 1949 contracted with the Swiss and Belgians to begin developing an atomic warhead...

...As a result, Independence Day celebrations in India and Pakistan went off swimmingly...

...Her name was Kamala, she was ten years his junior, and Jawaharlal found her repellent...

...He therefore felt no need to try to reach an understanding with opposition leaders such as the formidable Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the head of the Muslim League and future founder of Pakistan...

...Being steeped in Leninist dialectics, Jawa72 February 1997 • The American Spectator 0 harlal naturally felt, as Wolpert puts it, "that Hindu-Muslim conflict was caused primarily by economic disparities or clashing 'class interests' rather than dogmatic religious beliefs and incompatible customs...

...His prison letters to his daughter Indira, in particular, reveal him to have been a genuinely cultivated man with a passion for literature—which, along with his socialism and pro-Sovietism, endeared him to Western intellectuals...

...The Nehrus, a Hindu Brahmin family that hailed from the princely Himalayan state of Kashmir, occupied high government posts under the Moghul empire and the British Raj...

...Those disliked countrymen, much to their ruin, would one day be led by Jawaharlal, but first Motilal commanded that his young Anglophile return to live with him in the family home, join his lucrative legal practice, and marry the girl he JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...These tensions meant that efforts by the British to work out some common framework for India's future produced nothing but ill will throughout the interwar period...

...Soon he was confessing to his diary that Gandhi's continual references to God irritate me exceedingly...

...This he accomplished through the simple expedient of withholding all information about the future boundary between India and Pakistan until after both states celebrated their independence on August 4 and 15, 1947...

...But Kashmir is a symptom of India-Pakistan tensions, rather than a cause...

...The army that he sent to occupy the region fifty years ago remains there today, and the plebiscite that he promised would determine its future has yet to be held...

...On the part of both it was love at first sight...

...Had Motilal not tried to win back his son's love by granting Gandhi such a large role in Congress affairs, and had he not insisted that the radical Jawaharlal lead the Congress, Hindu-Muslim relations would likely not have grown so inflamed, and moderates on both sides of the communal divide might well have reached an understanding with Great Britain that granted Muslims autonomy while avoiding partition...

...He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and years later, at Cambridge, Jawaharlal wrote his father asking permission to transfer to Oxford: "Cambridge is becoming too full of Indians...

...Gandhi used his newly acquired prominence to infuse Indian nationalism with Hindu symbolism, Hindu prayers, and Hindu vows — something of a difficulty in a nation a quarter of whose population were Muslims...

...Instead his father, Motilal, prepared him from the very start to go into the family business—the ruling of India...

...Did matters have to turn out so awfully...

...His wife would die of bronchitis because Gandhi would not allow her to be injected with a newfangled Western drug called penicillin...

...but by] his own dear father...

...Mountbatten knew exactly what they were up to, but in gentlemanly fashion absented himself during their trysts...

...Attlee's initial plan was to try for a compromise between the Muslim League—which was now demanding division into two states, one Hindu and one Muslim —and the Congress, which adamantly opposed partition...

...Had Nehru been able to appreciate just how much India and Congress would have gained by working closely with Jinnah and his own father...to draft a constitution acceptable both to Muslims and moderate Hindus," Wolpert argues, "the tragedy of partition and its dreadful toll might have been averted...

...Men such as Jinnah were to Nehru merely cynical reactionaries who would be swept from power by the coming socialist revolution...

...The English Gentleman Who Came to Ruin India Nehru: A Tryst With Destiny Stanley Wolpert Oxford University Press 546 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan H ad he been allowed to pursue the literary life he was so obviously meant for, Jawaharlal Nehru might well have become an Anglo-Indian writer of note...

...in turn, Edwina ignored Dickie's infidelities...

...Though in total disagreement with his son's admiration for the "Soviet experiment," an ailing and soonto-die Motilal expended his remaining political capital in 1929 to ensure that Jawaharlal would succeed him as president of the Congress...

...Pakistan has since developed a nuclear device, as well, leaving the sub-continent poised on the edge of the nuclear abyss...

...He was also, in Macaulay's famous phrase, "Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and iri intellect...

...Wolpert thinks not...

...He wore Savile Row suits, loved to hunt, stocked an excellent wine cellar, acquired English governesses and tutors for his son, and even flirted briefly with theosophy...

...One bright spot in this tragedy was that Nehru, now installed as prime minister, found his true love at last in Dickie's wife Edwina...

...j awaharlal's leadership of the Indian National Congress turned out to be an unmitigated disaster...

...His political actions are often enough guided by an unerring instinct but he does not encourage others to think...

...More and more I feel drawn to their dialectics, more and more I realize the gulf between [Gandhi] and me and I begin to doubt if this way of faith is the right way to train a nation...

...The tension has continued in recent years, and what Kissinger said of Indira Gandhi in his memoirs—that she desired to "destroy" Pakistan—applies equally to the distinguished father who carefully groomed her for leadership...

...Gandhi, true to the bizarre promptings of his "inner voice," urged the British to "fight Nazism without arms...invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of your beautiful island...If these gentlemen...do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered...

...There being no vacancies at Eton, in 1905 he packed 15-year-old Jawaharlal off to Harrow, determined that the boy grow up a proper English gentleman...

...But England was exhausted by her efforts in the war, and Clement Attlee, who had replaced Churchill as prime minister, had no desire to maintain British rule...

...Thus it happened that, "in the viceroy's retreat beyond Simla, strolling arm in arm around those lush and glorious floral paths, [Jawaharlal and Edwina] finally found each other, while India lay smoldering far below...

...Dickie, as Mountbatten was known to friends, took it as his mission to arrange a graceful British exit from India...

...When these efforts failed, Attlee accepted Muslim demands and replaced Wavell with Lord Louis Mountbatten...

...The fate of many Indian women, kidnapped and raped during the fighting, was especially cruel, particularly since Indian custom regarded such women as "damaged goods," whose families would often have nothing more to do with them...

...Jawaharlal's growing radicalism should have disqualified him from playing a leading role in the Indian National Congress, which was rooted in moderate nineteenth-century liberalism, but once again, Motilal intervened...

...Gandhi, on the other hand, wanted India to avoid industrialization altogether and rely instead on village handicrafts for its economic development...

...Nehru and his successors considered Pakistan a part of India wrongly severed from the homeland, and sought to end the existence of this "artificial state...

...As for Jawaharlal and the Congress, they agreed to support Britain against Germany and Japan, but only after England granted India full independence...

...Clearly, family values can have the most pernicious consequences...

...Only through protracted struggle (Satyagraha) could the British be induced to leave India, he believed...

...He soon enough found a way to regain his self-respect, however, in the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, the Hindu mystic and political agitator...

...Edwina, writes Wolpert, "was the perfect English lady, the countess he had always dreamed of having, holding, keeping locked away in a secret chamber of his heart, all to himself...

...When this demand was rejected, Nehru urged Indians not to cooperate with the British, prompting the authorities to arrest him...

...To demand the vivisection of a living organism," declared Gandhi, "is to ask for its very life...

...Jawaharlal, meanwhile, was quickly tiring of his Hindu saint...

...Yet, as Wolpert reports, his father eventually came to support his son: Without Motilal's support, Gandhi could never have come so swiftly to a position of such prominence and power in the National Congress...

...The British were themselves deeply divided over India, and the onset of World War II only complicated matters further...

...The period immediately following was not so pleasant: Millions of hapless Hindus and Sikhs found themselves trapped in what they suddenly learned was Pakistan, while millions of equally hapless Muslims found themselves trapped in what was now India...

...Motilal and his colleagues in the Congress trusted the British ("I firmly believe John Bull means well," Motilal liked to say) and favored industrialization...

...Nehru used his time in jail to read and write extensively...

...At last," writes Wolpert, "he had found a reason to rebel...

...It was, observes Wolpert, "a bitter pill for him to swallow, finding himself pushed into the presidency not by the masses or the workers of whom he spoke, for there were no peasants in that politically smoke-filled caucus...

...Instead of working to close the rift between Hindus and Muslims that Gandhi had opened, Nehru exacerbated communal tensions...

...His friend, the Communist-leaning Krishna Menon, had introduced him to the writings of Lenin, and at last, Jawaharlal found his true guru...