NEHRU EB

Tripurdaman Singh, Adeel Hussain

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008463861
• eBook ISBN: 9780008463847
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

'An important contribution … Delving lucidly into the most significant ideological battles of the era, this book deftly outlines the thinking and dialogue that laid the foundations of the Republic – and which remain deeply relevant and contentious today'
Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire

A history of Nehru that dives deep into the debates of his era to understand his ideology – and that of his contemporaries and opponents, asking what India would look like had another bold young mind with fiercely held views led during the country's formative years of independence.

Sixty years after the death of Jawaharal Nehru, the independence activist and first prime minister of India continues to be deified and vilified in equal measure. And still in contemporary political debate, the ideological spectrum remains defined by the degree of divergence from Nehru's ideas. With the Nehruvian ideals increasingly juxtaposed against the positions of Nehru's erstwhile contemporaries and questions asked about what might have happened on the Indian subcontinent had another hero of that era taken leadership, this book explores his encounters with key contemporaries to excavate and evaluate the views that were in circulation.

It examines the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu Mahasabha and his fierce defence of the constitution, the Congress leader Sardar Patel, with whom Nehru often disagreed about the threat of China, and Mohammad Iqbal, the poet and politician whose letters on Muslim solidarity were often issued from a prison cell.

The correspondence and interactions that Nehru had with these key personalities captures the essence of how post-independent India was projected as a nation, and the early directions it took towards self-definition.

1

‘I fear the Pandit’s articles reveal practically no acquaintance with Islam’

Muhammad Iqbal and Jawaharlal Nehru debate Islamic solidarity and religious orthodoxy

Towards the end of his life, in 1938, when he had gone almost entirely blind and was dependent on the help of an assistant even for the most moderate of tasks, Muhammad Iqbal, the great Muslim philosopher, sent for Jawaharlal Nehru upon hearing that the latter was in Lahore. Nehru remembered this meeting fondly in his autobiography, framing his visit to Iqbal’s modest two-storey house in a leafy neighbourhood as a reunification of two old friends bonding over their shared socialist convictions.

As calling Iqbal a socialist was as controversial then as it is now, Nehru went on to justify his belief in Iqbal’s ideological persuasion in some detail. He speculated that it might have been ‘the great progress that Soviet Russia had made’ in the 1930s that had moved Iqbal to abandon Sufi mysticism and embrace plain materialism.¹ Nehru insisted that Iqbal’s shift to socialism was visible in his later poetry and prose, at least for the careful reader. He further claimed that Iqbal had realized that a separate Muslim state on Indian soil was not a viable solution to counter Muslim backwardness. Iqbal was aware of ‘its inherent danger and absurdity’.² However, the most infamous lines of this interaction are the final words that Iqbal uttered just before Nehru left. ‘What is there in common between Jinnah and you? He is a politician, you are a patriot.’³ Nehru understood this comparison as a double-edged compliment. In his self-deprecating manner, he readily acknowledged that he had never been ‘much of a politician’. Being a patriot alone, Nehru continued, would fall way short of his lifelong yearning to solve the problems ‘of the world as a whole’.⁴

Whether or not Iqbal truly shared Nehru’s passion for socialism or at any stage stopped advocating a separate Muslim homeland, he possessed a string of similarities with the Pandit. Both men had a refined taste for Indian and Western literature and philosophy. They were both of Kashmiri descent and never failed to portray the mountainous region in India’s north in the most glowing of terms in their writings and speeches.

Iqbal and Nehru were gifted orators and could keep large crowds enraptured for hours. While both liked to portray themselves as reluctant or even failed politicians, they were remarkably successful in their missions. Both men commanded the respect of their political cadres and were valued negotiators for their parties. When it was still uncommon for Indians to study abroad, Nehru and Iqbal attended the University of Cambridge and trained as barristers in London. They also shared a deep sense of empathy with the impoverished and backward sections of colonized people in India, and devoted their entire lives to stirring change in the material conditions of the poor.

They also saw eye to eye on several pressing questions in the international arena. For instance, both vehemently opposed ‘[t]he idea of a national home for the Jews in Palestine’. Iqbal saw the partition of Palestine as a ‘dangerous experiment’ and a sovereign state for Jewish people as a way for British imperialism to entrench itself ‘in the religious home of the Muslims’.⁵ Nehru, ever the internationalist, regarded the Palestine question as a ‘gross betrayal of the Arabs’ and stood in solidarity with Arab nationalism’s ‘heroic fights for attaining independence’ from British imperialism.⁶

Yet, the list of things that sets them apart runs equally long. Their first difference was their upbringing. Iqbal was raised in the household of a poor hat maker in the hinterland of Lahore. His early education took place in Indian mission schools and the Government College in Lahore. Nehru’s father, Motilal, had risen to be one of India’s most accomplished and wealthy lawyers and sent young Nehru to Harrow, a boarding school in England. While both attended Trinity College in Cambridge in the first decade of the twentieth century, Nehru did so as an undergraduate to read for the natural sciences tripos, entirely aloof from any financial burdens. Iqbal was a non-degree student who had taken leave from his work as an untenured college lecturer in Lahore, funding his stay through a sparse monthly stipend he received from his older brother and leaving his young son and wife behind in Lahore.

On more doctrinal points, Nehru promoted an inclusive nationalism and a democratic future with joint electorates. In contrast, Iqbal squarely focused on Muslim rights and their place in India’s political and cultural landscape, which led him to endorse separate electorates and reserved seats for Muslims.⁷ Iqbal also received and never returned a knighthood. Even at the height of anti-British sentiments among Indians, he preferred to be addressed as Sir Muhammad. As president of the Muslim League in 1930, Iqbal also proposed grouping Muslim majority provinces in India’s north-west together, an idea that was later spun forward, albeit in very different shape and form, by proponents of the Pakistan movement.

In 1933, during their first brief spat, Iqbal had sharply criticized Nehru in a public statement for ascribing the failure of the Round Table Conferences, where India’s constitutional future was discussed, to the conservative political outlook of the Muslim delegation and their lack of nationalism. Partly embracing this criticism, Iqbal retorted that ‘if by “nationalism” he [Nehru] means a fusion of the communities in a biological sense, I should personally plead guilty to the charge of anti-nationalism’.⁸ In Iqbal’s understanding of nationalism, rejecting the fusion of communities into a single nation was not anti-national. Nationalism in India had to be reimagined as something different than the mere blending of divergent communities into a singular whole.

The best path to make India hospitable for all religious groups would therefore require ‘Indian leaders of political thought [to] get rid of the idea of a unitary Indian nation based on something like a biological fusion of the communities’.⁹ Iqbal further corrected Nehru that it was not democracy that Indian Muslims feared, as the latter had insinuated in an earlier speech. What Muslims feared was ‘communal [Hindu] oligarchy in the garb of democracy’.¹⁰ Iqbal grimly predicted that if Nehru continued to prop up nationalism as the catch-all solution for India’s communal and constitutional woes, ‘the country will have to be redistributed on the basis of religious, historical and cultural affinities’.¹¹

Iqbal would have also accepted Nehru’s socialist brotherhood only on the condition of divorcing classical Marxist theory from atheism and making the entire redistributive justice argument more amiable to religion.¹² Only ‘Bolshevism plus God’, Iqbal wrote to a British admirer, would come close to the Islamic notions of justice he cherished.¹³ Perhaps consequentially, this ‘plus God’ part brought Iqbal into a heated exchange with Nehru in 1935.

Iqbal first entered the national limelight in 1905. During a lecture for the Young Men’s Indian Association, a student group loosely modelled on the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Iqbal had skipped his formal speech and decided to sing a hymn he had recently written instead. A few years later, those words would be chanted loudly at anti-colonial rallies all over British India: ‘Saare jahaan se acche, yeh Hindustan hamaara […] Hindi hain ham, watan hai Hindustan hamara [Better than the entire world, is our Hindustan (…) We are of Hind, our homeland is Hindustan].’¹⁴ More than any of his rather abstract philosophical writings or his politically charged poetry, it was this hymn that turned Iqbal into a known entity on India’s cultural scene.

Already in 1899, as a young graduate student, Iqbal had caught the attention of the historian Sir Thomas Arnold, who was teaching at Government College, Lahore, at the time. Iqbal had received a gold medal in philosophy for reaching the highest grade in the final examination. In fairness, he was the only student taking the philosophy paper that year. Immediately after graduating, Iqbal was hired as a lecturer in economics. A recent graduate of Arabic and philosophy, Iqbal was an unusual appointment. But he made up for his lack of econometrics by writing an undergraduate textbook that approached the discipline from the broad lens of political economy, the Ilm-ul-Iqtisad – his first scholarly publication, and the first modern economics textbook in Urdu.¹⁵ In this work, Iqbal keenly distinguished between the logic behind normative moral sciences, ‘good and bad’ and the logic of the marketplace, ‘profitable and non-profitable’. He offered a balanced view of prevalent economic models at the turn of the century. After Arnold took up a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, Iqbal swapped faculties and taught Arabic in Arnold’s place for three years, a role for which he was much more suited.

A few years later, Arnold invited Iqbal to pursue further studies at Cambridge. Iqbal applied for leave from Punjab University and, aged twenty-eight, ventured on a steamship to Dover, where he docked in 1905. As an advanced student, Iqbal was not required to go through the rigours of tripos examinations. Instead, the academic labour of his stay was a short thesis on Persian metaphysics. Since Cambridge did not award doctorate degrees in 1907, Arnold advised Iqbal to hand in the same dissertation at Munich University to secure a PhD. Iqbal’s first choice, Heidelberg University, had refused to accept a thesis written in English as they held the language unsuitable for academic pursuits and worried that it might dilute examination standards.

Had Iqbal returned to Trinity College in 1907 and not sailed back to Lahore after his brief stay in Germany, his relationship with Nehru may have turned out very differently. From mere distant but polite observers of each other’s political gestures, the two may well have developed a friendship, whether over complaining about the unseasoned food in Trinity’s dining hall, sharpening their rhetorical skills at Cambridge Majlis, a debating club for Indian students, or listening to the speeches of Indian freedom fighters on their visits to London. Yet, it took almost three decades for their first real intellectual encounter to happen.

In the summer of 1935, Nehru and Iqbal debated over the constitutional exclusion of Ahmadis, a fringe Messianic sect founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in the 1890s in a remote village in Punjab called Qadian.¹⁶ Mirza Ghulam Ahmad saw his mission in cleansing Islam and preparing it for the modern age. Judging purely by his outward ritualistic behaviour, he seemed to follow his puritanical vision faithfully. However, troubles ensued over his eclectic theological claims. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed that he was the reincarnation of Jesus and an avatar of Vishnu, a claim that upset many orthodox scholars.

Around the turn of the century, until he died in 1908, his movement, the Ahmadiyya of Qadian, grew considerably in size when north India was repeatedly hit by the plague. Hard-pressed for options to survive the ravaging black death, thousands of Muslims adopted Mirza as their saviour. He promised that none of his followers would fall victim to the plague. He also asserted that God spoke to him directly and that He had asked him to take on the mantle of a zilli (shadowy) prophet. This unique relationship with God, Mirza claimed, gave him glimpses into the near future that often entailed prophecies about the sudden death of his opponents.¹⁷

In his youth, Iqbal was mighty impressed with the boldness of such overtly prophetic claims. He even called Mirza Ghulam Ahmad ‘the profound theologian among modern Indian Muhammadans’ in his earliest scholarly writings.¹⁸ Towards the mid-1930s, his views on the Ahmadiyya community had cooled considerably. Where Iqbal had once invited the members of the Ahmadiyya community to participate in the political struggle for securing the constitutional rights of Kashmiri Muslims, he now abandoned the very organization he had helped set up for this cause, with the argument that Ahmadi influence had turned it into an ‘an instrument of a specific [Ahmadiyya] propaganda even though it seeks to cover itself with a thin veneer of non-sectarianism’.¹⁹ Iqbal expanded his criticism in a short pamphlet with the title Qadianis and Orthodox Muslims, where he developed the idea that claims to prophethood were severe threats to Islam’s solidarity. Modern liberalism had given free rein to such ‘religious adventurers’ as Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Iqbal moaned. If this liberalism would continue to force Muslims to tolerate such false prophets, ‘[t]he Indian mind will then seek some other substitute for religion, which is likely to be nothing less than a form of atheistic materialism which has appeared in Russia’.²⁰

It was, however, not just atheism going mainstream as a consequence of liberal toleration that worried Iqbal but the dissolution of Islam itself. For Iqbal, Islam had come directly under threat from Mirza’s claims of Divine revelation, as this claim entailed constructing a new spiritual authority. In Iqbal’s reading of Islam, the revelation-authority nexus had conclusively come to an end with the revelations the Prophet Muhammad received. Iqbal saw this theological principle firmly established in Islamic doctrine, in what he found to be ‘perhaps the most original idea in the cultural history of mankind’, the finality of prophethood.²¹

Invoking the authority of the Leiden-based Orientalist Arent Jan Wensinck, Iqbal also sought to establish that the very concept of a returning Messiah had no backing in the earliest sources of Islam. Instead, its origins could be found ‘in the pre-Islamic Magian outlook’.²² Much of the backlash against the Ahmadiyya from groups like the Ahrar was justified in Iqbal’s eyes. Such Muslim groups were merely following their ‘instinct of self-preservation’.²³ But as their emotionally driven responses could not furnish a permanent solution to the ‘Qadiani problem’, Iqbal lobbied the British Government to constitutionally ‘declare the Qadianis a separate community’ as their theological convictions had put them outside the pale of the Muslim fold.

When Nehru received a copy of Iqbal’s pamphlet on the Qadianis in Almora jail, where the colonial state had locked him away for seditious activities throughout much of 1935, his primary association with the Ahmadiyya must have been their participation at the All Parties National Convention in 1928. An Ahmadiyya delegation participated in the proceedings as one of two Muslim social reform organizations and wholeheartedly supported Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It would not have escaped Nehru’s notice that only Ahmadiyya delegates stood by Jinnah’s proposals to bolster constitutional safeguards for Indian Muslims in the Nehru Report.²⁴

Several theological and political moves in Iqbal’s blistering deconstruction of the Ahmadiyya movement must have struck Nehru as unusual. From Nehru’s perspective, the Ahmadiyya support for Jinnah’s proposals seemed to align them well within the reactionary spectrum of Muslim political opinion. Iqbal was also departing from conventional political practice with his call for the British Government to step in and ban Ahmadis from labelling themselves as Muslims. This step would violate the principles of non-interference in religious matters that Indians had fought hard for to allow for a sphere of unregulated cultural activity, a sphere that conservatives and liberals cherished.²⁵ In Nehru’s view, Iqbal’s invitation for the colonial state to step in to ban a religious reform movement would disadvantage the progressive and moderate sections of each community. Orthodox Hindus, or Sanatanists, as Nehru used to call them interchangeably, for instance, would undoubtedly rely on such a measure to throttle much-needed social-reform efforts in their community, bringing them startlingly close to conservative Muslim opinion.

An inkling of such a pan-orthodox resistance against progressive legislative reform had already become visible with the implementation of the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929, also known as the Sarda Act, where fixing the age of marriage for girls to fourteen caused a storm of outrage in conservative quarters across religious communities.²⁶ Nehru was also baffled that Iqbal would willingly risk losing the thin Muslim-majority margin by excluding the small but critical Ahmadiyya population in the district of Gurdaspur, where many of them resided. Especially after the Government of India Act, 1935, which underlined the importance of numerical strength for voting purposes, Iqbal’s proposal for Ahmadiyya exclusion seemed to weaken Muslim chances for electoral success.

Above all, however, Nehru questioned the political wisdom of establishing unity within Islam by excluding groups on theological grounds. For lifting economically backward Muslims out of abject poverty, Iqbal’s exclusionary measures to cement Islamic solidarity seemed of little to no relief. According to Nehru, Iqbal’s arguments could also easily be levelled against several other Islamic sects. Applying the principles of the finality of revelations strictly to all Muslim denominations, for instance, would undoubtedly lead to the exclusion of other groups as well. If connecting revelation to spiritual authority was to be taken as a guideline to restrict the fold of Islam, Nehru presciently analysed, the Aga Khan and his followers, the Ismailis, would have to suffer the same fate that Iqbal had meted out to the Ahmadis.

Nehru found that the Ismaili concept of a perpetual imamate, which entailed the idea of continuous revelation, and their excessive venerating practices of the Aga Khan, made them appear to follow the same Magian thinking Iqbal had identified in the Ahmadis. While teasing the Aga Khan for possessing the curious quality of bridging ‘Mecca and Newmarket, this world and the next, spirituality and racing, politics and pleasure’, Nehru’s main criticism returned to the fact that Muslim solidarity of the Iqbalian variety meshed seamlessly with ‘Anglo-Moslem unity’.²⁷ Despite Iqbal’s repeated vows that he wanted to see British imperialism fade, Nehru pointed out that Iqbal was equally comfortable occupying a seat at the ‘Council of Peers and Moslem Leaders’ that cooperated directly with the British government.²⁸

In June 1936, a year after they had engaged in their public spat on the pages of Indian magazines and newspapers, Iqbal wrote a conciliatory note to Nehru in which he assured him that his responses were ‘written with the best of intentions for Islam and India’. Had it not been for the Ahmadi press and their jubilation over the unexpected support that they received from Nehru’s writings, their encounter would have remained much more civil. Yet, Iqbal remained firm in his belief that Ahmadis were ‘traitors both to Islam and to India’.²⁹

Nehru’s sober prediction that the exclusion of a group on theological grounds would lead to stagnation in the social and political sphere turned out prescient. Materializing Iqbal’s vision would entail a perpetual cycle of ‘heresy hunts, excommunication, punishment for apostasy, and a general suppression of so-called “enlightened” Muslims’.³⁰ For much of its history, Pakistan has been plagued by many of these issues. The question if Ahmadis could legitimately call themselves Muslims tossed the state into its first state of emergency in 1953, led to the constitutional exclusion of Ahmadis to count as Muslims in 1974 and brought about more stringent criminalization against them under the martial rule of Zia-ul-Haq. On the other hand, Iqbal’s prediction that Nehru’s egalitarian nationalism would ultimately fail to satisfy the Muslim minority proved accurate as well and culminated in the violent Partition of India along religious lines in 194...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. ‘I fear the Pandit’s articles reveal practically no acquaintance with Islam’
• 2. ‘Safeguarding the rights and interests of the Mussalmans’
• 3. ‘Communism is no shield against imperialism’
• 4. ‘You are treating this Constitution like a scrap of paper’
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Authors
• About the Publisher