Nehru’s smile grew wider.
‘Sir?’ said the stenographer, his pencil still poised.
‘Yes, yes, I’m thinking.’
Huge crowds and loneliness. Prison and Prime Ministership. Intense activity and a longing for nothingness. ‘We too are tired.’
He would have to do something, though, and soon. After the elections it would be too late. In a sense this was a sadder battle than he had ever fought before.
A scene from Allahabad more than fifteen years earlier came before his eyes. He had been out of prison for five months or so, and expected any day to be rearrested on some charge or other. He and Kamala had finished tea, Purushottamdas Tandon had just joined them, and they were standing together talking on the verandah. A car had driven up, a police officer had got out, and they had known immediately what it meant. Tandon had shaken his head and smiled wryly, and Nehru had greeted the apologetic policeman with the ironically hospitable comment: ‘I have been expecting you for a long time.’
Out on the lawn now, the little boy had piled the bricks on top of each other in a different formation, and was tentatively climbing up again. In an all-or-nothing endeavour, instead of merely reaching out towards the branch, he jumped up to grasp the fruit. But he did not succeed. He fell, hurt himself on the bricks, sat down on the damp grass, and began to cry. Alerted by the sound, the mali emerged, and took in the scene in an instant. Conscious that the Prime Minister was watching from the window of his office, he ran towards the child, shouting angrily, and struck him hard across the face. The child burst into a renewed fit of weeping.
Pandit Nehru, scowling with anger, rushed into the garden, ran up to the mali, and slapped him several times, furious that he should have attacked the child.
‘But, Panditji—’ said the mali, so thunderstruck that he made no attempt to protect himself. He had only been teaching the trespasser a lesson.
Nehru, still furious, gathered the dirty and terrified little boy into his arms, and, after talking to him gently, put him down. He told the mali to pluck some fruit immediately for the child, and threatened to sack him on the spot.
‘Barbarous,’ he muttered to himself as he walked back across the lawn, frowning as he realized that his white achkan was now entirely smeared with mud.
14.14
Delhi, August 6, 1951
Dear Mr. President,
I beg to tender my resignation from membership of the Congress Working Committee and the Central Election Board. I shall be grateful if you will be good enough to accept these resignations.
Yours sincerely,
Jawaharlal Nehru
This formal letter of resignation to the President of the Congress Party, Mr Tandon, was accompanied by a letter beginning: ‘My dear Purushottamdas,’ and ending:
You will forgive me if by resigning I cause you embarrassment. But the embarrassment has been there anyhow for both of us and others and the best way to deal with it is to remove the cause.
Yours affectionately,
Jawaharlal Nehru
Mr Tandon replied as soon as he read the letter a couple of days later. In his reply he wrote:
You have yourself as the leader of the nation appealed to Congressmen and to the country to present a united front to the situation that is facing us both externally and internally. The step that you propose to take, namely, that of resigning from the Working Committee and the Parliamentary Board, goes directly against that appeal for solidarity and is likely to create a schism in the Congress which has greater potentiality for harm to the country than any that the Congress has yet had to face.
I beg of you not to precipitate a crisis at the present juncture and not to press your resignation. I cannot accept it. If you insist on it the only course left to me will be to place it before the Working Committee for consideration. I trust that, in any case, you will attend the meeting of the Working Committee on the 11th instant.
If, to keep you in the Working Committee, it is necessary or desirable that I should resign the presidentship of the Congress I am ready to do so with great pleasure and goodwill.
Yours affectionately,
Purushottamdas Tandon
Pandit Nehru replied the same day, making rather clearer than before what had been on his mind:
I have been long distressed at the attitude of some persons which indicated that they wished to drive out others from the Congress who did not fit in with their views or their general outlook. .
I feel that the Congress is rapidly drifting away from its moorings and more and more the wrong kind of people, or rather people who have the wrong kind of ideas, are gaining influence in it. The public appeal of the Congress is getting less and less. It may, and probably will, win elections. But, in the process, it may also lose its soul. .
I am fully conscious of the consequences of the step I am taking and even the risks involved. But I think these risks have to be taken, for there is no other way out. .
I am more conscious than anyone else can be of the critical situation which the country has to face today. I have to deal with it from day to day. .
There is no reason why you should resign the presidentship of the Congress. This is not a personal matter.
I do not think it would be proper for me to attend the meeting of the Working Committee. My presence will embarrass me as well as others. I think it is better that the questions that arise should be discussed in my absence.
Mr Tandon replied the next day, which was the day before the actual meeting of the Congress Working Committee. He agreed, ‘It is no use winning the elections if, as you say, the Congress is “to lose its soul” in the process.’ But it was clear from his letter that the two men had very different conceptions of the soul of the Congress. Tandon wrote that he would place Nehru’s letter of resignation before the Working Committee the next day. ‘But that need not prevent your taking part in some other matters. May I suggest that you come to the meeting though only for a short time and that the matters which concern you may not be discussed in your presence.’
Nehru attended the meeting of the Working Committee and explained his letter of resignation; he then withdrew so that the others could discuss it in his absence. The Working Committee, faced with the unimaginable loss of the Prime Minister, attempted to find some way of accommodating him. But all immediate attempts to mediate the conflict failed. One possible means was to reconstitute the Working Committee and appoint new general secretaries of the Congress so that Nehru would feel less ‘out of tune’ with them. But here Tandon put his foot down. He said he would rather resign than allow the office of the Congress President to become subservient to that of the Prime Minister. Appointing the Working Committee was part of the role of the former; it could not be tampered with at the will of the latter. The Working Committee passed a resolution calling upon Nehru and Tandon to confer to solve the crisis, but could do nothing further.
A few days later, on Independence Day, Maulana Azad resigned from the Congress Working Committee. Just as the resignation from the Congress of the popular Muslim leader Kidwai had stung Nehru into action, the resignation of the scholarly Maulana cemented it. Since it was largely these two leaders at the national level whom the Muslims looked to in their post-Partition uncertainty — Kidwai because of his own great popularity, not only among Muslims but among Hindus, and Azad because of the respect in which he was held and the fact that he had Nehru’s ear — it now appeared that the Congress was in danger of losing its Muslim following entirely.