The Hindu Business Line : Fresh handle for Nehru-bashing

Nehru-bashing is a favourite pastime in certain circles in India and abroad that feel his domestic and foreign policies are responsible for whatever is wrong with the Indian polity. It has got a fillip with the publication of the book, India Remembered : A Personal Account of the Mountbattens during the Transfer of Power by Lady Pamela Hicks, daughter of Lady Edwina Mountbatten, wife of India’s last Viceroy and Governor-General, Earl Mountbatten.

The direct provocation this time is the statement made by Lady Hicks on a TV channel. It is to the effect that the influence her mother had over Nehru because of the intimate relationship between them was helpful to her father, the Viceroy, in getting his advice accepted by Nehru in ‘tricky situations like Kashmir’.

She seemed willing to concede in the interview that her mother might have played a role on behalf of her husband in prevailing upon Nehru to seek the UN’s intervention to deal with the situation created by Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in 1947.

Nehru-bashers have long been propagating that after the State’s accession to India, there should have been no question of allowing any outside body to meddle in its affairs.

In their view, Nehru’s decision led to a tragic foul-up of the whole issue causing irreparable damage to India’s interests and security by three fallouts.

The first was India’s acceptance of a cease-fire imposed by the UN Security Council. But for this, the country’s armed forces would have routed the Pakistani raiders and the regulars backing them, and India would have regained possession of the entire State, including the portion now under Pakistan’s occupation.

The second was India agreeing to hold a plebiscite under the supervision of UN observers. Of course, this was contingent on Pakistan pulling back all its troops and other vestiges of aggression from the territory of J&K covered by the Maharaja’s accession.

Non-compliance with this pre-condition by Pakistan made plebiscite a non-starter, but the offer is still there in UN documents, buttressed by Nehru’s repeated declarations that accession was subject to the ascertaining of the will of the people of the State.

The third, and the most hurtful, according to Nehru-bashers, was what has flowed from these two blunders: J&K has turned out to be a festering sore leading to human suffering and loss of thousands of lives, a breeding ground of terrorism, an arena of upheavals with the potential of erupting any time into a war between India and Pakistan and a perennial drain on resources which could have otherwise contributed to economic development.

Heavy toll

There is no denying the heavy toll the Kashmir dispute has been taking, but it will be a monstrous perversion to construe the reference of the issue to the UN as some kind of a Machiavellian ruse by Mountbatten (leveraging his wife’s emotional hold over Nehru).

It is equally monstrous to suggest that a freedom hero like Nehru who sacrificed his all and was jailed cumulatively for more than 12 years fighting foreign domination could be lured by whatever means into harming the nation’s interests.

The matter has to be judged in its time and context, and not by hindsight. Nehru was both an idealist and a citizen of the world by temperament and upbringing, and believed in principles of self-determination and ‘open covenants openly arrived at’.

He saw the UN as a fountainhead of peace, harmony and goodwill among nations. Being barely two years old, it had not yet become the cockpit of realpolitik and enjoyed a measure of trust.

It is only fair to conclude that seeking its good offices was a natural and logical outcome of the nobility of mind of both Nehru and Mountbatten.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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