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By Root 4558 0

anniversaries first of Gandhi’s assassination and next of Subhas Chandra Bose’s birthday punctuated his heavy workload. Linked by an accident of chronology, the memories of India’s apostle of non-violence and the warrior martyr were to march in unlikely companionship into India’s future. Nehru’s education as a world statesman had been brutal. Less than five years earlier he had been writing Indian history in a British jail. On his release he had plunged into a final vigorous campaign to push the British out. Cripps and Attlee had assented and he mended battered personal friendships with them, but the price of independence and political stability was partition and the bloodletting that accompanied it. Although by 1949 the worst massacres had ceased and the flood of refugees into India had abated, the subcontinent remained tense. Thousands still crossed the borders of East Pakistan and West Bengal as poverty and communal tension drove people to seek security with their co-religionists. In the west, fighting with Pakistan over the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir had reached a deadlock. Pakistani fighters had clawed their way to unofficial rule over half of the state, which they called Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir), but they could make no further headway. Neither country was prepared to give way, even though internal food and financial crises meant that neither could afford the burden of war.

Historians sometimes write as if a sturdy and reliable British Raj had been transformed overnight into an equally dominant Indian secular state. Nothing can be further from the truth. Like the Raj, the Indian Union had feet of clay and that clay was only hardening as troubles poured down on the new state in 1947 and 1948. In April Thakin Nu wrote to Nehru to plead for financial and military aid to halt his country’s disintegration; already Rangoon was in control of only little more than a third of the old British Burma. Nehru replied frankly: India was itself on the rack. Partition, the influx of refugees and war with Pakistan had reduced India’s military competence drastically. There was no way in which India could equip ten battalions of Burmese troops to fight the rebels. Military supply, communications and control had all been compromised by the division of the old colonial army. It was no longer the great fighting force it had once been. India itself was scouring the world for military spare parts at knockdown rates. So great was the military and financial burden, Nehru wrote, that ‘it would not have been surprising if that new state [India] collapsed under the burden’.12 The international scene was now even more dangerous: ‘The whole of Asia is in a state of turmoil and revolution.’ Nehru insisted that he did not fear revolution but he worried that constant war would irrevocably diminish the people’s standard of living, which it had been the main aim of the national movements to improve: ‘We have barely escaped disaster ourselves in the last year and a half.’ This was why India had stayed in the Commonwealth and was about to renew its membership, despite the political taint of association with the British. This was also why Lord Mountbatten had been asked to stay on as Governor General and the ‘steel frame’ of the old Indian Civil Service had largely been maintained.

Nehru had good cause for concern. The Dutch had only just begun to pull back from their ‘police action’ against Indonesian nationalists, influenced by the stance of the US government and perhaps marginally by the fierce denunciations of Dutch policy at the Asian summit in New Delhi in March. About the same time, Chiang Kai Shek was driven from power in China and the French launched a massive attack against the Viet Minh forces in their ‘liberated zones’ west of Hanoi. It was not clear whether revived imperialism or rogue communism was the greater danger to the new Asia. With all the naivety of a refined left-wing academic, Nehru had admired the scientific and social progress of Stalin’s Soviet Union, oblivious of the mass murder which had sustained it. But he was much