But for the tempering impact of Sanatana Bharatavarsha’s civilizational heritage, Nawab Nehru would have perhaps become a hardcore Communist dictator. Since his return to India from Soviet Russia after being brain-addled by the Communist drug, Nehru increasingly became convinced that his own party, the Indian National Congress badly needed the vital injection of Communism. In his view, that was the sure-shot method to achieve independence. When we read his own words in this regard, we realise how far gone down the deep Communist hole he was.
Almost immediately after returning to India, Nawab Nehru pompously declared that the Congress was a "party of the Indian bourgeois" and was "bound to become an instrument of imperialism." His solution? It had to be "radicalised" by imbuing it with "revolutionary labour and peasant movements."
Thus began Nawab Nehru’s lifelong love affair with the Communist Party of India and its various fronts.
When the Communists heard this, they initially kept a shrewd distance from Nehru because they knew that the looming leadership of Mohandas Gandhi would prevent any effective infiltration of the Congress.
Which brings us to another chapter of Nehru’s practised duplicity. As a highly visible and active member of the Indian National Congress, Nehru accepted the presidentship of the All India Trade Union Congress Session (AITUC) of 1928 convened at Jharia in Bihar. The AITUC was a sister concern of the CPI, the declared enemy of the Congress. And here was Nawab Nehru, a leading Congress light openly sleeping with the enemy.
This was sweet music to the ears of the Communists who were then being guided by the leadership of the far Left fanatic, Philip Spratt. Nehru’s election as President elated him. This is what he wrote:
My recollection is that though the communist group put up a worker, or rather a railway clerk, against [Nehru], we were not displeased at his election. We did not regard him as one of us, but we recognised him as one who could be useful. The term was not yet current, or we should have called him a fellow-traveller. [Emphasis added]
In more impolite terms, this was the origin of how Nawab Nehru became a prized, useful idiot who the Communists manipulated to the hilt till the ghastly humiliating end at the hands of China in 1962.
Indeed, Philip Spratt was bang on target. In 1929, the very next year, Nawab Nehru found the perfect opportunity and position of power to radicalise the Congress: he was elected its President. He wrote exultingly:
The All India Trade Union Congress was meeting at Nagpur and, as president for the year, I had to preside over it. It was very unusual for the same person to preside over both the National Congress and the Trade Union Congress… I had hoped that I might be a link between the two and bring them closer to each other…the Congress to become more socialistic, more proletarian and organised Labour to join the national struggle…nationalism can only go far in a socialistic or proletarian direction by ceasing to be nationalism. Yet I felt that, bourgeois as the outlook of the National Congress was, it did represent the only effective revolutionary force in the country…I hoped that the course of events and the participation in direct action would inevitably drive the Congress to a more radical ideology…in this this matter, as in many others, my sympathies were with the Left. [Emphasis added]
Naturally, this was sweet music to the Communist International (Comintern) masterminded from Soviet Russia, which ordered its cadre in India to support the Congress. A significant outcome of this and many other factors eventually led to the creation of something called the Congress Socialist Party, a separate wing inside the Congress to eat it from within. Nawab Nehru was its unofficial leader.
In fact, this unofficial status suited him immensely: on the one hand, he could maintain the charade that he was a truly nationalist freedom fighter devoted to “Mahatma” Gandhi’s principles and on the other, he could promote socialists and Communists inside the Congress with little hindrance or suspicion. This double-dealing greatly endeared him to the Communists and soon enough, he went to Europe in 1936 and once again met various leaders, thinkers and intellectuals of international Communism. It was a truly watershed tour because Nehru’s brain had now irreversibly sunk into the un-rescuable morass of Marxism.
The history of the Indian freedom struggle shows that except for Nawab Nehru, no other Congress leader traveled to Europe so often and at such critical junctures. This also evokes that other fundamental question: what “freedom struggle” was he waging on these highly expensive foreign tours?
When he returned to India the same year, he was elected Congress President once again. This time, he openly declared that he would be putting the Congress Party on the path of socialism and Communism. The irredeemable toady, Pattabhi Sitaramaiah confirms this: “Jawaharlal came to India full of communistic and Marxian ideas. The… Congress disappointed him.” [Emphasis added]
An alarmed Congress wasted no time in condemning these dangerous plans and declared its overwhelming opposition to Nehru who felt cornered. Continues Sitaramaiah:
[Nehru’s] address pleaded for pure communism in a country which had had its traditions built up through at least a hundred and thirty centuries of progress, and a social structure which had, through these long ages, withstood the buffets of time…” [Emphasis added]
Indeed, the Congress thought Nehru was insane to promote communism in an ancient and Dharmic country like India whose soul and life was informed by far gentler and profounder tenets than an Asuric world-conquering cult like Communism.
The end result: Nawab Nehru’s grand propositions of socialism were a grand flop.
And so, isolated and pushed to a corner, Nawab Nehru did what knew best: high school-boy blackmail. As always, he ran whining to Mohandas Gandhi and said, “Bapu I am going to resign.” Bapu of course, needed his favourite minion. Therefore, Nehru’s resignation was “not accepted.” However, the public reason given for retracting his resignation was this: General Franco of Spain had revolted and Nehru’s resignation would weaken the Congress in the international view!
Read that again.
This is the other glaring theme of Nehru’s character and political career both before and after independence: he never resigned from any position of power and influence. Like a cheap bully, he never carried out his threat even once in his entire life. Indeed, after “Independence,” each time Nawab Nehru faced intense and hostile criticism, his patented response was the same: I will resign. And it worked each time because by then he had monopolized power both within the party and Government by surrounding himself with weaklings. The most shameless instance of his attachment to absolute power was in the aftermath of India’s humiliation at the hands of China of which he was the ignoble author. In spite of the nationwide outrage and demands for his resignation, Nawab Nehru, instead of doing the honourable thing, chose to stick to power by sacrificing his most trusted lieutenant and long-time comrade-in-communist crime, V.K. Krishna Menon.
The same hunger for power also made Nehru accept the Congress Presidentship for a consecutive term in 1937. There was no election: the wily Mohandas Gandhi ordered Sardar Patel to withdraw his candidature. Nehru was “elected” unopposed. Simultaneously, he began to plant his Communist friends in key positions in the Congress especially regarding foreign policy. Needless, they drafted their policy positions under direct orders from Moscow.
And when Subhash Chandra Bose contested and won the Congress Presidentship in 1938, Nawab Nehru’s fury knew no bounds. He proclaimed that the Congress was in the danger of becoming a “fascist organisation.”
Cut to 1942-45 when the Communists vastly overestimated their power and collaborated with the British to sabotage the freedom struggle. Next, cut to their role in supporting Jinnah and his Muslim League in demanding and supporting the partition of India. In essence, the 1942-1948 period was perhaps the worst phase in Nawab Nehru’s lifelong career of supporting Communism. Even worse was the fact that the selfsame Congress Socialists, that is, his own coterie of followers, deserted him and joined Sardar Patel because they at least had the sense and decency to place national interest above an imperialist political cult like Communism.
The next phase is the war the Communists waged against the newly independent Indian state in 1948. From the savage terrorism they wreaked in Telangana to various barbarisms in West Bengal, parts of Punjab, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, they ran riot for nearly two full years. However, Sardar Patel crushed all these with his iron-fisted action, and it is quite a tragedy that a full account of his decisive action is yet to be written. The numbers speak for themselves. The Communist Party had a membership of about 90,000 between 1948-50. Sardar Patel had blasted it down to just about 20,000 before his death.
Nawab Nehru never forgave Patel for this.
But then, cruel fate snatched Patel away at a crucial juncture, and after his death, Nehru championed the Communist cause with unbridled haste. Again, the numbers speak for themselves. In 1954, the membership of the Communist Party had swelled to 75,000 and in 1956, to 125,000. Thanks to the protection and patronage given by the Prime Minister himself, they were able to form the first-ever Communist Government in Kerala in 1957 on their own merit.
Then there is the small matter of nuance here. While Nawab Nehru was a Communist at heart, he was, like all Communists, a dictator who could not tolerate any challenge to his power. Which is why he inaugurated the corrupt precedent of dismissing constitutionally-elected Governments using Article 356. That was how E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s government was summarily dismissed by Nawab Nehru in 1959.
The other marked aspect of Nehru’s incurable addiction to Communism was the pride he took in calling himself an “internationalist.” He spent a substantial portion of his Prime Ministership to self-righteously lecture the world about the virtues of peace and tolerance and ranting against colonialism and imperialism. However, nobody was fooled because they knew his heartfelt sympathies firmly lay with Stalin’s Russia.
This had its other side in the realm of domestic politics. Nawab Nehru’s professed passion to rebuild India was in reality a sham because he did not understand nor cared to understand India’s masses in whose name he sought votes and ruled. If he had indeed understood them, he would have destroyed the Communists root and branch. As Sita Ram Goel noted with great accuracy and foresight,
All along, the root of Nehru’s fear was that the CPI would poison the ears of the USSR against him. On this, we have his own admission in a letter he wrote to his sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, then the Ambassador to Russia:
the Communist Party of India has recently changed its policy again and is now against the Government which is dubbed as just a camp-follower of Anglo-Americans… many people in Russia may form their opinions from reports of the Communist Party of India. [Emphasis added]
Little did he know that the CPI was merely following the script authored in Russia. Indeed, few things terrified Nehru as much as the disapproval of Moscow and its Great World Leader, “Marshal” Stalin. Nehru kissed the ground that “Marshal” Stalin walked on.
Apart from Soviet Russia, England was the other country whose opinion that Nawab Nehru was paranoid about. One reason was perhaps his…ahem…attachment to Edwina Mountbatten. An alarmed Nawab Nehru returned from a Commonwealth conference in London held in September 1948 and quickly wrote a letter to Sardar Patel:
we are criticized considerably for our detention without trial and other repressive activities of the state, in so far as trade unions…are concerned… even Lady Mountbatten told me that she was worried about it. [Emphasis added]
The aforementioned “repressive activities” referred to Patel’s decisive action against Communist terrorism. His deference to Lady Mountbatten would eerily echo seven decades later in the form of the dreaded line, “Madam is unhappy.” From one White foreign woman to another. The depraved history of the Congress dynasty is remarkably consistent.
We shall write about Edwina Mountbatten in a separate piece.
As we have noted elsewhere, the 1955 Avadi Session was the pivotal event that directly hurtled the Congress Party into the hungry jaws of the Communists. By this time, Nawab Nehru had surrounded himself with hardcore Communists and fanatical Muslims both in his inner and outer circles. And in one stroke, the Avadi Session opened the floodgates into which Communists of all hues came rushing in a tidal sweep. Indeed, Benegal Shiva Rao, who was part of the Constituent Assembly, remarked that after the Third General Elections, “we may have a Government which shall be Congress in name but Communist in content.”
Shiva Rao was indeed prophetic. The Third General Elections were held in 1962, the precise year in which Communist China invaded Nehruvian India. And Nehru’s Communist comrades were preparing to welcome what they thought would be a complete invasion.
However, the Communist poison that Nawab Nehru had injected in our national and political life proved to be enduring. His daughter accelerated the work he had begun. As Nehru’s private secretary M.O. Mathai remarked much later in an interview with a journalist:
But Asoka Mehta, a lateral entrant into the Congress from the Praja Socialist Party, was far blunter and direct. He had been a Cabinet Minister and a confidant before Indira Gandhi split the Congress. And after she split it, he became one of her most vocal opponents. Asoka Mehta’s frank assessment of Indira Gandhi is recorded in former Karnataka Chief Minister, S. Nijalingappa’s diary:
Equally, the influential and brazen Maharashtra Congress strongman, S.K. Patil had this to say on numerous occasions:
This opens up an entirely separate chapter, which is a story we will narrate some other day.
The seeds of selling India to Communist Russia were originally sown by Nawab Nehru.
The more I read, the more I am amazed, stunned, appalled and repelled by the colossal damage done to this ancient and gentle civilization by just one dynasty after an alleged Independence. I am simultaneously grateful for the centuries of the penance of our Rishis that chiseled our profoundly enduring Sanatana foundations which is why Bharatavarsha did not become a Communist hellhole like Czechoslovakia, China, and North Korea.
But then, the Nehru dynasty’s criminal patronage to Communists has undoubtedly caused untold civilizational destruction in the short term from which we’re still to recover.
Concluded
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