Nehru by Shashi Tharoor Page B

sure would follow. At Gandhi’s urging, he traveled throughout the country organizing and reviving the local units of the party. Unimpressed by the far from businesslike way in which they conducted their work, he poured a great deal of energy (and much of his own money, which was hardly plentiful) into the party organization. He paid particular attention to creating teams of volunteers, who in turn were to raise the consciousness of workers and peasants about the coming struggle for freedom. Jawaharlal was also president, though not a very active one, of the All-India Trade Union Congress, seeking to rally organized labor to the nationalist cause. The British government regarded his activities with growing concern; the Home Secretary wrote to his subordinates in the provinces that “[t]here is a tendency for the political and the Communist revolutionaries to join hands, and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, an extreme nationalist who is at the same time genuinely attracted by some of the Communist doctrines, stands at about the meeting point.”
    Seeking to drive a wedge between the Communists and the nationalists, the British prosecuted thirty-one Communist leaders at Meerut in April 1929, and the Congress chose to defend them. The trial dragged on for three and a half years. It was widely expected that Jawaharlal himself would be arrested and prosecuted on the same grounds, but though some of his statements were cited, and a forged letter attributed to the Indian Communist M. N. Roy was produced which purported to describe Jawaharlal as a “liaison agent” with the Soviets, the British concluded they did not have enough credible evidence to support the charge that he was a Communist. In fact the Communist leader Muzaffar Ahmed privately thought of Jawaharlal as a “timid reformist.” Indian and foreign Communists saw him as one who uttered Communist slogans but took no steps to achieve them; his rhetoric, they argued, aimed not at revolution but at “getting support from the proletariat” for his nationalist goals. Yet the threat of arrest did have one positive result. It prompted Jawaharlal to give up smoking in preparation for jail, a decision with long-term benefits for his health (though subsequent lapses were not unknown).
    In the meantime Gandhi began preparing the ground for a political earthquake: he wanted Motilal to be succeeded as president of the Congress Party by his son. Jawaharlal was reluctant, pleading with the Mahatma that his “personal inclination always is not to be shack-led down to any office. I prefer to be free and to have the time to act according to my own inclinations.” He was also conscious that he would not be the genuinely democratic choice of the party; any support he got, he argued, would largely be aimed at keeping others out. But Gandhi would not be deterred. He cajoled and cudgeled Jawaharlal into submission, overcoming the objections even of Motilal himself, who feared that imposing his son on the party would not be fair either to the party or to Jawaharlal. (Ironically, it was Motilal who had first suggested to the Mahatma that “the need of the hour is the head of Gandhi and the voice of Jawahar.”) Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, fifteen years older than Jawaharlal and a doughty organizer who was already being thought of as the “Iron Man” of the Congress, had more support than Nehru for the top job. But though the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) was not enthusiastic about Gandhi’s announcement that Jawaharlal would lead it, the party could not repudiate the Mahatma. On September 29, 1929, two months before his fortieth birthday, Jawaharlal Nehru was elected to preside over the Congress at its December session in Lahore.
    Though his father’s presumptuous notation on that old postcard to Harrow had come true, the election of Jawaharlal as Congress president was hardly the great triumph it has since been portrayed as being. The