EXCERPTS
The Good Man
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An extract from Walter Crocker’s Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate, a classic biography of Jawaharlal Nehru by a man who had the opportunity to observe both the man and the Prime Minister at close quarters.
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From the ambassador’s desk: Walter Crocker.
Nehru was that rare man who is both clever and good. He was that very rare person, the clever man wielding power who remained good. No wonder Nehru wrote somewhere of the tempests raging around him being nothing to ‘the storms within’ him!
Syed Mahmud, one of the leaders of the anti-Jinnah Muslims and of Congress, who had known and lived with the Nehru family for years, who had been with Nehru at Cambridge and then with him in prison off and on, and who in recent years disliked some of Nehru’s policies as prime minister, always ended any talk on Nehru with some such phrase as ‘But Jawaharlal is a good man, a pure man. I am still in love with him.’ ...
*An Indian of my acquaintance who had worked with Nehru off and on in the independence movement but had got separated from him over policy differences, would always praise his quality of ‘never making a fetish of his own prestige’, and of his always being ready to forgive and as far as possible to forget. Like many others, this person used to touch on another quality in Nehru, namely, the lifelong dedication to schooling himself, and to hardening his will, though he regretted that this was at the cost of light-heartedness and geniality. But think of nine years in prison without cracking or without deteriorating!...
*
His personal kindness, and the trouble to which so overcharged a man gave himself, never failed. Some of his too innocent judgements on individuals, as also his allowing unimportant foreign visitors to encroach upon his time, were due to his kindness as much as to the politician in him. His kindness to people of worth who also had humility was without limit. An old Scotch Australian scientist had somehow got interested in Nehru and out of this interest he came to India several times at his own expense. He had little money, lived and travelled cheaply, and never thrust himself forward. In due course Nehru came upon him. Savouring his virtue and his mind Nehru arranged tours for him, put transport at his disposal, and spared nothing for the old man and his wife...
*It is hardly known, even in India, that though his government kept Sheikh Abdullah in prison, he arranged payment for the Sheikh’s son to do his studies for medicine in London and that the young man used to spend part of his vacations in Nehru’s house.
I once asked an Indian politician, of better social class and education than the average, who had been one of Nehru’s parliamentary private secretaries for some years, what was the main impression Nehru left on him. He replied: ‘Kindness, fatherliness.’
Nehru’s temper was a fact. He could be petulant too. He was not always an easy man to work for. His temper was sometimes said to be due to his vanity; rather it was the release required by a highly strung man who was overburdened. When one thinks of the wordiness all around him, and the fussiness, and the ineffectuality, and the begging, and the prevarication, and the corruption, the wonder is that the outbursts were not more frequent.
*Nehru might have been ignorant or misguided about some matters, and about some persons, but he was always disinterested, always concerned with what he thought would help Indians or mankind. We can be certain that there will be no revelations to make about him of the kind which are often made about celebrities; not even revelations like those of Churchill’s disagreeableness. Nehru’s private face differed scarcely at all from his public face.
The book, first published in 1966, has been reissued by Random House recently.
Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate; Walter Crocker, With a Foreword by Ramachandra Guha, Random House, Rs. 250.
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