Pt Jawaharlal Nehru
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China
Nehru did not trust the Chinese
Diplomat G Parthasarathi’s notes claim that Indira Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping reached a pact that was ‘sabotaged’
Contrary to the prevalent perception, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was neither soft on China nor trusting of the Chinese. In fact, long before the Sino-Indian war of 1962, Nehru dealt with China only through trusted aides who were sworn to secrecy and bound to communicating with him alone. Nehru was particular that his Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon should not get so much as a whiff of what was going on (vis-à-vis the Chinese), and explicitly said so to his aides.
This is revealed in a new book on G Parthasarathi, the multifaceted diplomat and policy advisor to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had also served under Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi. Nehru sent GP, as he was known, as India’s ambassador to China in 1958.
Securing border with China
Nehru was torn between loving Chinese civilisation & securing Indian border
Tansen Sen
Jawaharlal Nehru's first noteworthy encounter with the Chinese took place at the World Congress of Oppressed Peoples held in Brussels in 1927. The Chinese representatives, which included Sun Yat-sen's wife Soong Ching-ling, greatly impressed Nehru. Influenced by a new pan-Asianist discourse he started forming his views about a civilisational affinity between India and China.
He frequently voiced his sympathies for the Chinese fighting against invading Japanese forces and initiated a medical mission to China that included Dwarkanath Kotnis. He was a key patron of Cheena Bhavan in Shantiniketan and also saw great potential in developing trade and industrial relations; strongly advocating, for example, commerce through the newly built Burma Road.
The watershed moment in Nehru's relationship with China came at the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in March-April 1947, where differences between India and China on Tibet became apparent when the organising committee invited Tibet as an independent country. China launched a strong protest with the interim Indian government. Chiang Kai-shek only agreed to send a delegation after Nehru assured the Chinese that the conference would deal primarily with cultural and economic matters, and that Tibet's status would not be raised.
Nehru's assurances were questioned, however, when the Chinese delegation found a map of Asia depicting Tibet as a separate country and the Tibetan flag displayed at the Conference. The Chinese threatened to withdraw and never trusted Nehru again.
In November-December 1949, the former Kuomintang ambassador in Delhi Lo Chia-lun sug gested to Chiang Kai-shek that the Indian PM might recognise the newly-established Communist regime in China in exchange for their acceptance of the 1914 Simla Agreement. However, the Communist regime was distrustful of Nehru, describing him as a “stooge“ and “running dog“ of British and American imperialists.
During the 1950s Nehru was torn between his love for Chinese civilisation, his empathy towards the Tibetan people, and the need to secure Indian territories. Further, Nehru did not heed Sardar Patel's warning in 1950 about the implications of future Chinese military expansion into Tibet.
Perhaps through the rhetoric of a bhai-bhai relationship, the Panchsheel Agreement of 1954 recognising Tibet as a region of China, and the handholding of Zhou Enlai at the 1955 Bandung Conference, Nehru hoped to convince China of India's stand on border areas. He may even have thought that the dual track of rhetoric and the so-called “forward policy“ were conducive. Indeed, he remained committed to a peaceful relationship, unwaveringly supporting the PRC's entry into the United Nations.
In this context, his decision to intern Chinese migrants in India when the relationship between the two countries deteriorated in 1959 cannot be comprehend ed. The punitive actions against the “Chinese Indians“ suggest an acknowledgement of agonising failure.In 1943, in jail, Nehru wrote, “What is there that draws China to India and India to China?
Something in our subconscious racial selves? Some forgotten memories of a thousand years ago? Or just common misfor tune?“ Right after jotting these lines, he added, “wishful thinking“. These two words must have echoed repeatedly as Nehru tried to come to terms with geopolitical realities ex posed by the 1962 war.
Canards about Nehru
Canards about Nehru
Edwina Mountbatten
‘Edwina, Nehru never alone to be lovers’
My Mother Found 'Companionship' In Pandit Nehru: Mountbatten's Daughter|July 30, 2017
Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten loved and respected each other but their relationship was never physical as they were never alone, says the daughter of India's last vicereine.
Pamela Hicks nee Mountbatten was 17 when her father Lord Louis Mountbatten came to India as the last Viceroy. She saw a "profound relationship" developing between Nehru and her mother Edwina Ashley.
"She found in Panditji the companionship and equality of spirit and intellect that she craved," Pamela says. Pamela was keen to know more about the relationship.
But after reading Nehru's inner thoughts and feelings for her mother in his letters, Pamela "came to realise how deeply he and my mother loved and respected each other".
Pamela says she had been "curious as to whether or not their affair had been sexual in nature" but after having read the letters, she was utterly convinced it hadn't been.
"Quite apart from the fact that neither my mother nor Panditji had time to indulge in a physical affair, they were rarely alone. They were always surrounded by staff, police and other people," Pamela writes in "Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten".
The book, first published in the UK in 2012, has been brought out in India as a paperback by Hachette.
Lord Mountbatten's ADC Freddie Burnaby Atkins also told Pamela later that it would have been impossible for Nehru and Edwina to have been having an affair, such was the very public nature of their lives.
Pamela also writes that while leaving India, Edwina wanted to give Nehru her emerald ring.
"But she knew he would not accept it. Instead, she handed it to his daughter, Indira, telling her that if he were ever to find himself in financial difficulties - he was well known for giving away all his money - she should sell it for him," the book says.
At a farewell party for the Mountbattens, Nehru said while addressing Edwina directly, "Wherever you have gone, you have brought solace, you have brought hope and encouragement.
Is it surprising, therefore, that the people of India should love you and look up to you as one of themselves and should grieve that you are going?"
Foreign relations
==1950- 51: Schism on refugee and Pakistan policy== Nalin Mehta, Dec 20, 2021: The Times of India
Jawaharlal Nehru is a hate figure for the Hindu right today because of his indelible stamp on India’s early direction — one that Hindu traditionalists did not agree with — in the first 17 years after Independence, when he was India’s first Prime Minister and undisputed Congress supremo. Yet, Nehru’s supremacy within the Congress was not preordained. In the first two years of his premiership, he faced such a challenge from Hindu traditionalists within his own Congress party, who were unhappy with his policies on Pakistan and Hindu refugees, that Nehru was forced to resign.
The dispute started when Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Hindu nationalist ideologue, India’s first minister for industries and later founder of the Akhil Bharatiya Jan Sangh, which preceded the BJP, resigned from Nehru’s cabinet. He quit the Nehru government over the protection of Hindus left behind in East Pakistan, specifically protesting the Nehru-Liaquat Delhi pact. Under the Delhi pact on migrations between East Pakistan and West Bengal, jointly signed by Nehru and Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan on April 8, 1950, both governments agreed to guarantee the safety of religious minorities on their side. Mookerjee, along with another cabinet minister, MC Neogy, resigned from the government in protest the day that Khan was slated to arrive in Delhi.
He argued that Pakistani assurances on minority rights were untrustworthy since it was now an Islamic state. He felt that Nehru had acted weakly on the migrant question and went so far as to imply a military solution to protect Hindu minorities—whom he saw as the remnants of the Hindu nation—in East Pakistan. Rather than trusting Pakistan, Mookerjee felt ‘it would be better to propose an outright exchange of population’, because it was feared Hindus had ‘lost all sense of security in Eastern Pakistan’.
Nehru’s response was based on a different idea of the nature and function of the Indian state, ‘even when those principles were unpopular with the masses’. He told Parliament that ‘protection in Pakistan can only be given by Pakistan. We cannot give protection in Pakistan.’ He argued, ‘There is no other way. So long as there is a government dealing with a situation [on Hindu minorities], you have to deal through that government.’ For Nehru, as the political historian BD Graham summed it up, ‘India could not interfere in the internal affairs of another polity, in this case Pakistan, even when the question at issue was the future of Pakistan’s Hindu minorities’. For Mookerjee, ‘the mere fact that that they were Hindus was sufficient justification for India’s taking action’. A Hindu anywhere, in this conception, was India’s concern. More so if they were in Pakistan.
These disagreements and Mookerjee’s exit from Nehru’s government created a deep schism within the Congress. Mookerjee had, as an early historian of the Jan Sangh noted, ‘acted out what many Congressmen would have liked to have done themselves’. The dispute on Hindu refugees also led to a bitter internal fight within the ruling Congress—between the Nehruvians and the party’s own Hindu traditionalists. It eventually came to constitute the single biggest threat Nehru faced to his leadership from within his party after Gandhi’s death, until the China war.
Nehru vs Hindu traditionalists within Congress Soon after leaving the Nehru government, Mookerjee attended a large meeting of refugee groups in Delhi on July 29, 1950. He was welcomed at the Old Delhi railway station by crowds of Hindu nationalist young men holding up banners like, ‘We Do Not Want Nehru’s Anti-Hindu and Cowardly Government’ and ‘Nehru-Liaquat Pact Murdabad’(Death to the Nehru-Liaquat Pact). The anti-Nehru tenor of the conference, which brought together 5,000 delegates and 15,000 visitors from across the country, could not be clearer. Yet, Purshottam Das Tandon, a close confidant of Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, chose to ‘preside’ over the refugee conference. In a 90 minute speech, he made it clear that the Nehru–Liaquat pact had ‘failed to stop the migration of Hindus’ from East Pakistan. ‘Reports of dacoities in Hindu homes, molestation of women’ and ‘requisitioning of Hindu houses’ were received ‘even after the Pact’, he added. This was precisely why Mookerjee had walked out of Nehru’s government. Now a major Congress leader was publicly challenging the Prime Minister’s flagship initiative. The conference concluded with a resolution on the ‘Indo-Pakistan Agreement’, which declared that Pakistan had failed to implement the Delhi Pact in its territory.
Within two months, the 68-year-old Tandon defeated JB Kripalani, better known as Acharya Kripalani, in a contest for Congress presidency at the party’s Nagpur session on September 2, 1950. Tandon’s victory, by 1,306 of 2,618 votes, showed how deeply divided the Congress was on Nehru’s refugee and Pakistan policy. The victory was construed in Congress circles as the ‘most significant pointer to the government as to the direction in which popular opinion in the country would like their policies and programmes to be reoriented in the coming years, particularly in regard to Indo-Pakistan relations, rehabilitation of refugees, propagation of Hindi and development of cottage industries’. Kripalani later said that Patel had personally called several Congress chief ministers and solicited their support for Tandon’s election. Nehru, on the other hand, reportedly wrote a letter on the eve of the election to G Ramachandran in which he ‘strongly disapproved Tandon’s candidature’.
When Tandon won, Nehru saw the election result for what it was: a direct challenge to his writ by the Hindu traditionalist wing of the Congress. ‘Communal and reactionary forces had openly expressed their joy at the result,’ he responded in a bitter public statement, demanding a mandate for his policies from his party at its upcoming Nasik session on September 20-21, 1950. The importance of this showdown can be gauged by how Tandon framed it on his way to Nasik. Speaking to reporters at Jhansi railway station, Tandon declared that he and other party leaders were ‘going to Nasik to decide finally the question of whether the Congress must live or die at this stage’ [emphasis added]. The fact that this statement was uttered in the presence of another Hindu traditionalist, UP chief minister Govind Ballabh Pant, underscored the nature of the rift. Another UP Congress leader put this in context, saying that ‘contradictions within the Congress, artificially suppressed so far’, between the forces of ‘reaction and progress’ were now coming to a head.
As both Nehru and Tandon headed to Nasik for a show of strength, newspapers openly wrote about the possibility of a ‘split’ in the Congress, which in turn could ‘possibly result in another exodus of Muslims from India and accelerate the migration of Hindus from Pakistan’. Interestingly, Tandon seems to have met both Nehru and Patel after his election to have a ‘free and frank exchange of views’ on Nehru’s policies. Old friends from UP, now divided by ideas, Nehru and Tandon had agreed to continue working together. Yet, the divide was so deep that the possibility of Nehru resigning from the government and the Congress Working Committee was discussed in these meetings. The prime minister had been persuaded not to do so for the moment, but a newspaper reported that he had ‘not made up his mind’ on resigning.
Amidst a heavy downpour that practically turned the Nasik meeting into a swamp, Nehru took the stage. He went straight for the jugular: a threat to resign. ‘I am prime minister,’ he told the Congress’s delegates, ‘because you have chosen me.’ As he put it: If you want me as Prime Minister you have to follow my lead unequivocally. If you do not want me as Prime Minister, you tell me so and I shall go. I will not hesitate. I will not argue. I will go out and fight for the ideals of the Congress as I have done all these years. Speaking specifically on the ‘Hindu-Muslim’ refugee question and the internal party critique of his policies, Nehru drew a distinction between democratic principles and mob rule. The bottomline was that he was not prepared ‘to accept for a single moment the theory trotted out by certain sections of Congressmen and others that democracy means that whatever people feel regarding any matter is to be accepted.’ The prime minister thundered: ‘If that is called democracy then I say, hell with such a democracy.’ And then he questioned, ‘What has happened to the minds of Congressmen? Do they want today to bow before what a mob says and compromise their principles?... I do not agree that Congressmen should do what the large majority of people ask to be done.’ Nehru’s emotional and hard-hitting speech won him a standing ovation. The same Congress leaders who earlier that month had voted Tandon in, passed Nehru’s ‘Resolution on Communalism’ with an overwhelming majority. At least one newspaper noted that Sardar Patel had sat in silence through the entire proceedings as Nehru’s resolutions got passed. The Sardar’s ‘complete silence’ was ‘much commented upon’, but ‘perhaps there was nothing to it apart from his ill health’.
Nehru’s speech won him the immediate battle, but tensions between the ‘secularists’ and the ‘Hindu nationalists’ continued to simmer. He left Nasik with a ‘disturbing suspicion’ that, while his party-men may have been shamed into siding with him, they may not really have bought his argument. He was ‘deeply troubled,’ he said, by a ‘feeling of different pools in the country and different pools and ideas within the Congress’. The Congress’s Hindu traditionalists hit back within a year by forcing Communications Minister Rafi Ahmad Kidwai’s exit from Nehru’s cabinet on August 2, 1951. Kidwai, a key Nehru confidant, resigned as a Union government minister after months of feeling sidelined in internal party decision-making by Tandon and his group, whom he accused of working in an “undemocratic manner" against the principles of the Congress. In a strong statement against the Congress president, Kidwai publicly asked, ‘Is there a parallel in the world where the executive head i.e. the President of an organisation is the very antithesis of everything that the organisation stands for? What is there in common between Shri Purshottamdas Tandon and the policies of the Congress—economic, communal, international and on refugees?’. This was when Nehru decided to take the bull by the horns.
In a sudden ‘bombshell’ move, the prime minister formally resigned from the Congress Working Committee and the party’s Central Election Board. This was the first time he had ever done so. It was also the last. He was throwing down the gauntlet. A full year of ‘controversy between him and the Congress president’ led to this ultimatum on 7 August 1951. The PM had spent a year in bruising battles with the Hindu traditionalists, but he was now in a stronger position within his party. Patel’s death in December 1950 had also deprived the Hindu traditionalists of a powerful supporter.
By resigning, Nehru had forced the party’s hand. He first won a vote of confidence in the Congress Parliamentary Party on 21 August. By September 8, he was also elected Congress president, forcing Tandon to resign from the position. Independent India’s first election was just a month away. With this victory within his own party, Nehru was now ‘monarch of all that he surveys in this country’, as summed up by a newspaper report. It had been nothing short of a battle for the control of the party machinery. The Congress’s Hindu traditionalists agreed with Mookerjee’s critique of Nehru’s Pakistan policy but when push came to shove, they chose not to split the party and failed to oust Nehru. As PM, Nehru had largely ‘kept away’ from organisational matters until his decisions were publicly challenged. It was Patel who had largely managed the party machine until his death. Now, Nehru wrested control.
The bitter war ‘between two forces within Congress—the secular nationalists and the Hindu traditionalists’ was closely watched by both the R S S and the Hindu Mahasabha. ‘Nehru’s victory was by no means certain even as late as August 1951, and until the outcome of the struggle was clear, the Hindu traditionalists hesitated to form a strong party to challenge the party,’ Graham observed. If Nehru had lost the leadership, it is not inconceivable that both Mookerjee and the R S S would have been comfortable with a Congress that could have turned Hindu nationalist. Nehru’s triumph meant that such an option was out of reach. The Jan Sangh had become inevitable: it was launched nationally the very next month.
China
Indulgent approach?
Indrani Bagchi, August 2, 2021: The Times of India
NEW DELHI: Was Nehru too indulgent of China to work out a sensible policy on Tibet and on the border question? Was he misguided? Or were Indian diplomats merely poorly prepared, which led to not only a disastrous war with China but also an intractable border question. Two new books by former foreign service officers, Avtar Singh Bhasin and former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale delve into the details of India's policies towards China.
Bhasin’s latest book, “Nehru, Tibet and China” using official documents, shows the bumbling and naivete that accompanied Indian policymaking on Tibet and China in the run-up to 1962. Speaking to TOI about Nehru’s campaign to get China a UNSC membership, Avtar Singh Bhasin said, “In the early years that India went out of its way to woo China for the larger objective of achieving Asian solidarity. No threat was as yet perceived from it. Nehru’s desire for China to replace Kuomintang China in the UN Security Council reflected his sense of fairness, since communist China controlled the whole mainland and India too had recognised it.”
If, in the UN, Nehru was intent on getting China into the UNSC, on the other side, India appeared unprepared and reluctant in their boundary negotiations with China. Bhasin says, India “somehow felt that the talks would not lead to any results. Nehru had even told Premier Zhou before the talks that ‘respective view points of our two governments ...were so wide apart and opposed to each other that there was little ground left for useful talks’. A week before the talks began, he had taken the Nepalese prime minister into confidence at the prospects of the talks, and said ‘as far as I can see, there will be no real approach to any kind of agreement between India and China in the course of my meeting with Premier Chou En lai next week’. Evidently India’s half-hearted approach did not help. The border dispute leading to the possibility of conflict remained present.”
In his masterful account, The Long Game: How China Negotiates with India”, former foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, writes that Nehru accepted Zhou En Lai’s proposal to convert the Indian mission in Lhasa into a consular post “without apparently realizing either its legal of political implications.” India, he writes, “went about the negotiations in an ad hoc fashion and without adequate internal consultation, leave alone proper research on facts.” China’s negotiating strategy, on the other hand, was methodical and practical. They “persuaded” India into withdrawing its military escorts from Gyantse and Yadong, leverage he says, India gave up in 1953. “Ignoring inputs from Lhasa that the Chinese were studying all documents relating to the India-China boundary in Tibet, a policy note from the prime minister on 3 December 1953 decided once and for all that the question of the frontier would not be raised or discussed during the forthcoming India-China talks about Tibet, because it was already a settled issue.”
India, he writes, brought more pressure on itself by becoming anxious about concluding a settlement before the Geneva Conference began in May 1954… the primary consideration for this was not national security but India’s international image.” China stretched out the negotiations, forcing more Indian concessions.
Bhasin writes about India glossing over the importance of China’s road-building exercise in Aksai Chin in the 1950s. Talking about it, he says, “If we look at Nehru’s attitude towards China at this time, he appeared too indulgent towards it. His note to the defence minister KN Katju on 28 July 1956 says it all. He had said that he was more worried about the Naga trouble... ‘than about anything the Chinese may do’. In his perception the Chinese were friends and he expected no trouble from them. Even when making a “protest” on the road, the wording of the note was so weird that it lacked even an iota of seriousness giving the Chinese impression that India was not seriously concerned about their road.”
Are there any lessons India of 2021 can learn from Nehru’s dealings with China in the 1950s and 1960s? Bhasin says, “The situation over the years has become too complicated. The past has ceased to be relevant to the present. In my opinion, the people need to be educated of the correct position of the borders that existed in the past so that the vested interest, which indulges in motivated debates and leaves the T.V driven public more confused than ever, making the settlement of even smaller issues impossible, are enabled to take an informed and independent view of the situation. A people fully armed with facts are an asset otherwise they are a liability and force the government’s hands into directions that often are unwarranted. Throw open all the archives and let the truth come out.”
Ideology
Nehru, Iqbal on secularism, nationalism
Nov 6, 2021: The Times of India
Nehru, Iqbal, cricket and the question of Muslim identity
…the illuminating debate that Jawaharlal Nehru engaged in with the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who believed that national loyalty was religious rather than territorial. Writing in 1933, after the failed attempt to think about India’s constitutional future at the Round Table Conferences, Iqbal criticised Nehru’s nationalism for its incessant drive to blend India’s divergent communities in a singular whole. Such a fusion, Iqbal cautioned, would always burden existing communities to purge their past and with it their religious particularities. He predicted that this erasure, in turn, would quickly spill over into violence as the old ethical framework of co-existence would evaporate. Pointing to Europe, where he identified secularism and nationalism for having eroded the principles of universal ethics and caused violence on an unprecedented scale during the First World War, Iqbal concluded that large-scale violence would erupt by adopting the same principles in India.
Even if one took Nehru’s India of an inclusive nationalism that accommodated all groups with a government that treated all groups equally, Iqbal found it hard to believe that a Hindu majority would be conducive to an egalitarian ideal. With Hinduism fractured along multiple lines of caste, creed and language, he thought it more likely that a Hindu oligarchy would put on the garb of democracy to push through a majoritarian agenda. Strengthening a Muslim political identity could serve as an antidote, in Iqbal’s eyes, to his gloomy prediction of a future Indian Republic — because it axiomatically entailed the syncretic ethical ideals that had made the co-habitation of Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent possible. For Iqbal, the attempt to overcome religion through secularism or socialism would necessarily splinter the subcontinent along religious lines and trigger a civil war.
Nehru remained unconvinced, partly due to his general disdain of religion and his reluctance to mix religion with politics. Nehru saw religion as a diversion from the far worthier goal of economically uplifting India’s poor masses. Iqbal’s concrete suggestion of how a Muslim community could be safeguarded through constitutional reform only fuelled Nehru’s doubts further. Iqbal had proposed that the colonial government should constitutionally exclude the Ahmadiyya, a tiny Muslim reformist movement, as he saw them violating the integrity of Islam through their theological beliefs. For Nehru, following this debate from Almora jail, inviting the colonial government to step into the terrain of religion — to define who was or was not a Muslim — appeared like a path for religious conservatism to employ constitutional means to shield itself from critique and reform.
Nehru worried that if Iqbal’s proposal for constitutional exclusion of this Muslim sect was implemented, then demands of orthodox Hindus to shield Hinduism from much-needed social reform efforts would be next on the agenda. A pan-orthodox resistance against progressive reforms, for instance, fixing the age of marriage for girls to 14 in 1929 in the so-called Sarda Act, had already alerted Nehru that the conservative faction had a large spectrum of political overlap.
Both Nehru and Iqbal were partly right in their prediction of India’s future. Nehru foresaw that following Iqbal’s suggestions for constitutional transformation to preserve religious doctrines would kickstart a cycle of “heresy hunts, ex-communication, punishment for apostasy, and a general suppression”. On the other hand, Iqbal may have raised a valid point that secular nationalism of the Nehruvian variety would ultimately fail to satisfy India’s minorities — or indeed its other communities either. Instead, it would lead to continuous bouts of violence and eventually, for better or worse, to separation.
Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain are co-authors of the forthcoming book Nehru: The Debates that Defined India
Religion
Scientific, Rational Humanism
Ashok Vohra, August 31, 2019: The Times of India
Many view the agnosticism / atheism of Nehru as a serious shortcoming of his persona. They feel that “the greatest lack in him was his inability to believe in God.” Nehru remained a hardcore rationalist throughout his life. Nehru found the concept of God itself unintelligible and incomprehensible. In The Discovery of India, he said, “I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal god seems very odd to me.”
However, he always wondered about the sway that the concept of God had on the inner craving of humankind, which “brought peace and comfort to innumerable tortured souls”.
Countering the argument of those who upheld the necessity of God, Nehru maintained that, “even if God exists, it may be desirable not to look up to Him or to rely upon Him.” He argued that “too much dependence on supernatural factors may lead, and has often led, to a loss of self-reliance in man.” It would, according to him, ultimately result in “blunting of his (man’s) capacity and creative ability”.
Though Nehru rejected the traditional notion of God, he argued, that, “some reliance on moral, spiritual and idealistic conceptions is necessary,” for without such a belief “we have no anchorage, no objectives or purpose in life.”
Nehru had immense faith in the human spirit that overcomes nature and brings about great human convulsions. He advocated ‘scientific humanism’ – the synthesis of humanism and scientific spirit. Scientific humanism advocated by Nehru “is practical and pragmatic, ethical and social, altruistic and humanitarian. It is governed by a practical idealism for social betterment”.
Scientific humanism treats humanity as its god, and social service as its religion. It recognises the fact that “every culture has certain values attached to it, limited and conditioned by that culture.” It also recognises that human nature is such that “every generation and every people suffer from the illusion that their way of looking at things is the only right way” to knowing and realising the truth to which they accord permanent validity.
Scientific humanism upholds a radically opposite view, namely, that “the values of our present day culture may not be permanent and final; nevertheless, they have an essential importance for us, for they represent the thought and spirit of the age we live in.”
He had almost the ‘devotion of a faith’ in human virtues and his unlimited capacity to struggle and emerge victorious in any kind of adverse situation. The virtues of man which impressed Nehru most, were man’s indomitable and undaunted spirit which seeks to mount higher and higher, his “gallant fight against the elements, his courage that overcomes nature itself, his limitless endurance, his high endeavour and loyalty to comrades and forgetfulness of self, and his good humour in the face of every conceivable misfortune”.
Like Sartre, Nehru, too, upholds the view that man continually accepts the challenges faced by him in achieving the targets and goals chosen by him. “Life,” according to him “is a principle of growth, not of standing still, a continuous becoming, which does not permit static conditions.” For man, life is a long adventure and an opportunity to test his will and worth. He does not rest till goals are reached. From every disappointment and defeat, the spirit of man “emerges with new strength and wider vision”.
