Listen up, pupils

The very title of this book is indicative of how the Delhi ‘darbar’ has viewed the Nehrus. Nehru’s letters to his chief ministers?! Many chief ministers of the time were tall political leaders in their own right. They respected Nehru, but it is difficult to imagine that any one of them thought of himself as ‘Nehru’s chief minister’. Rather, they were elected heads of large provincial governments with a lifetime of political experience.

What most of them lacked was Nehru’s education, erudition and felicity of expression in the English language. All this comes through all of Nehru’s writings, including these letters written over 16 years.

India, it is said, is administered by three governmental functionaries — PM, CM and DM (district magistrate, also called the district collector in some states). Communication between a CM and a DM is almost daily and focused on developmental problem-solving, project implementation, district politics and such like. I am not aware of any CM who has devoted any time at all to writing lengthy and thoughtful letters to DMs. But, it is a symbol of the federal nature of the Indian governance system that PMs do not deal with CMs on such a daily basis. Their interaction is formal and episodic. Hence, the urge to write letters.

What does this collection of letters tell us about Nehru? For one, many of them do not read like letters of a PM to a CM. Rather, they read like the ruminations of a teacher, the author of Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India . Perhaps the editor has chosen a subset that focuses on big-picture issues like nation building, development, planning, land reform and food supply, defence and foreign policy, etc. But the fact that there are so few letters dealing with the developmental challenges facing a post-colonial economy and the nitty-gritty of state and district administration tells us that Nehru, born with a silver spoon and having lived a charmed life, despite being very much a part of the rough and tumble of the freedom movement, rarely focused on issues that ‘his’ CMs would have been pre-occupied with. The closest he comes to grappling with such issues is in his letters on food policy and land reform.

The editor has divided the book into six sections — The Citizen and the Nation, The Institutions of Democracy, National Planning and Development, War and Peace, India and the World, and Eulogies. In most of these letters, Nehru is either being the Teacher, lecturing to his pupils or sharing his thoughts with them, or he is doing a good reporter’s job of educating the CMs about what is happening in the world.

That Nehru’s commitment to socialism, secularism, national development and world peace should come through these letters would be stating the obvious. The question is, does his honesty also come through them or does he remain shy and secretive, not opening up his heart to his political peers?

As we move from the letters of the late 1940s and early ’50s to the late ’50s and, surely, the early ’60s, we see a less-guarded, more-candid and, indeed, a more-distraught Nehru sharing his concerns with ‘his’ CMs.

Nowhere does this honesty and frankness come through more than in the letters in which he agonises about the quality of education, communal tension and India’s response to the Chinese invasion in 1962. Nehru admits that India was not doing enough to invest in education and maintain the quality inherited from the late British era. Free India was not doing enough to maintain the educational standards that colonial Britain had ensured.

Equally distraught is Nehru about Hindu-Muslim relations, and his commitment to secular values shines through these letters written to CMs, many of whom may not have shared Nehru’s views and values.

For all his education, experience and political shrewdness (after all, he won the prime ministership of India away from such formidable contenders as Netaji, Sardar Patel, Rajagopalachari and many others and retained it for 16 years), Nehru feels completely cheated by the lesson China taught him.

He was far too much in awe of China, trusting its leadership more than necessary, not realising that they never trusted him as much. The ‘stab in the back’ from China undid Nehru, and may well have hastened his end. In a letter dated February 2, 1963 he writes, “It is possible to live peacefully with the Soviet Union. But it does not appear to be possible to do that with China.” A lesson learnt too late.

(Sanjaya Baru is the author of The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh, 2014)

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