Vajpayee and Nehru

By Inder Malhotra

The brief drama over the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee's offer of resignation is now generally treated as closed. But in the capital's corridors and salons where politicians, mediapersons, power-brokers, astrologers, lobbyists, hangers-on and busybodies interact, one comment persists.

It is that a solitary threat by Atalji to quit, in order to ``jolt his wayward followers and even more irresponsible allies'', is no big deal. After all, didn't his role model, Jawaharlal Nehru, administer this shock treatment to the Congress and the country routinely?

The parallel is rather far-fetched, the circumstances of the two leaders were vastly different. In any case, several published accounts of Nehru's numerous offers to resign, when not entirely inaccurate, have been torn out of context. This makes it necessary to set the record straight in the interest of both objectivity and the need to educate the younger generation about an era of which it knows precious little.

The period during which Nehru was forced to think of resigning because of a challenge to his authority ended with the death in December 1950 of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the only man who ever shared power with Panditji. But the relationship between them was complex beyond words. Rather than wanting to push the other out each insisted that he would go and leave the other free to run the Government as he liked - a remarkable reversal of the Lucknavi etiquette, pehle app (you first).

The story is well-known and well documented that the Mahatma was martyred hours before he was due to adjudicate the long-standing dispute between Nehru and Patel. Mountbatten took the opportunity to ask the two to promise to work together in accordance with Gandhiji's wishes. They embraced each other and undertook to do so. But problems persisted.

Patel saw to it that Nehru's nominee for the post of Congress president, Acharya Kripalani, was roundly defeated by his own candidate, Purushottam Das Tandon, whom Nehru detested because of the latter's obscurantism. Kripalani resigned from the Congress and formed a separate party of his own. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, a senior minister closer to Nehru than most members of the Cabinet, also wanted to resign. But Nehru dissuaded him.

And yet, only a while later he himself thought of taking the step against which he had advised Kidwai. He was sick and tired of what his official biographer, Dr. S. Gopal, calls the ``intense job-hunting, factional struggles and money-making in Congress ranks''. However, he overcame his ``feelings of defeatism'' as fast as these had apparently overwhelmed him.

This indeed was to become the standard pattern every time he felt like quitting high office and working as a ``private individual''. Exactly the same thing happened even after he wrote to the President, Rajendra Prasad, on March 20, 1950, that he would be sending his own and the Cabinet's resignation as soon as the Budget was passed. The letter ``begged'' of the President ``not to charge me with (the) responsibility of forming a new Council of Ministers!''

This time Nehru was serious about quitting because the crisis was much deeper. The minorities were being butchered in East Pakistan and forced to flee their homes. There were demands for ``retaliatory action'' in West Bengal. Patel openly talked of ``military occupation'' of East Bengal to protect the Hindu minority. Nehru's preference was to assume ``Gandhi's role'' and go to East Bengal as a private person. Once again, however, he changed his mind and expressed his determination to stick to India's basic values. He refused to go to war and invited his Pakistani opposite number, Liaquat Ali Khan, for talks in Delhi.

The Nehru-Liaquat pact, guaranteeing the minorities in both countries equal rights, was signed on April 8, 1950. But there were grave doubts about its acceptability to an enraged Congress party. Nehru decided to stand up and fight. He did not have to do so, however, because Patel rose to the occasion and gave him unstinted support.

Patel had been dead for three years and Tandon had been thrown out when, in 1954, Nehru threatened to resign again. This time around he was being thwarted, in his attempt to include Krishna Menon in his Cabinet, by his most respected colleague, Maulana Azad. Nehru accepted defeat though two years later he persuaded the Maulana to withdraw his objection to Menon.

Shortly after Azad's death in 1958, Nehru again asked to be relieved, for a few months at least. He said he was feeling ``tired and stale'' and hadn't had time even to read a book through, leave alone sit back and reflect. But the party would hear nothing of this. All he could do was to take a short vacation at Manali (also Mr. Vajpayee's favourite hill station) and get back to the grind.

An impulse to shed the burden of office was not one of her father's attributes that India Gandhi inherited. Many have wondered often that India's history and Indira's place in it would have been much different had she had the good sense to step down temporarily after the Allahabad High Court's judgment. But then, as A.J.P. Taylor said, ``it is futile to quarrel with history's ifs and buts''.

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