How Nehru would handle a communal riot

The insensitive remark of prime minister Narendra Modi about identifying anti-CAA protesters by their clothes; his deafening silence for three days on the recent Delhi violence and thereafter too, his refusal to condemn the violence and just issue a Twitter appeal for calm provides a startling contrast with the approach of the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in similar situation. Nehru’s personal courage in dealing with a tense communal situation has passed into folklore.

“If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion,” Nehru said on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday in 1952, “I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both as the head of government and from outside.” And he almost literally did it on a few occasions!

One is all too familiar with the famous scene in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning film Gandhi in which Nehru is seen alighting from his car amidst a riotous crowd and walking up the open flight of stairs of the house Gandhi is staying at during his fast in Calcutta. Midway up the stairs, he suddenly hears someone exhorting the crowd,” Finish off Gandhi! “. Nehru immediately turns back angrily and rushing down the stairs, shouts at the mob, “who said that? Who is that who said it?” Now face to face with the crowd, he calls out,” Kill me instead if you will! Kill me!” The crowd falls silent. The rioters look down before Nehru in shame. The incident shown in the scene is not apocryphal. There are other examples of Nehru’s courage and his spell over the people of India.

Norman Cousins, American political journalist, professor and world peace advocate alludes to two eyewitness accounts of communal incidents in Delhi in August 1947 as a tribute to Nehru’s personal courage and his intolerance of communal violence, in his essay A Procession Of Men which appeared in the book The Legacy Of Nehru published shortly after Nehru’s death in 1964. The following lines from Cousins’ essay are worth quoting:

August 1947. With national independence and partition of the sub-continent between India and Pakistan, four hundred fifty million people became caught in a vast convulsion.

For a while, the situation was relatively calm in New Delhi, with its large Moslem population. Then, suddenly, the storm broke. Late one night a Hindu mob, inflamed by stories of Moslem terror to the North-West, swept into Connaught Circus, the main shopping area of New Delhi. The rioters smashed their way into Moslem stores, destroying and looting and ready to kill.

Even before the police arrived in force, Jawaharlal Nehru was on the scene. He plunged into the crowd in the darkness, trying to bring people to their senses. He spied a Moslem who had just been seized by Hindus. He interposed himself between the man and his attackers.

Suddenly a cry went up: “Jawaharlal is here! “Don’t hurt Jawaharlal!”

The cry spread through the crowd. It had a magical effect. People stood still and dropped their arms to their sides. Looted merchandise was dropped. The mob psychologically disintegrated. By the time the police arrived people were dispersing. The riot was over.

The next day, says Cousins, friends rushed to Nehru admonishing him for exposing himself to a mob at the height of its frenzy. “You could have been killed,” one of them said, “Then what?”

“That’s for you to determine,” he replied quietly. “Many others could have been killed last night, then what?”

Cousins further writes that the fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond Delhi. He believes that in years to come, the confidence of India’s Muslims in Nehru was to become a major factor in building a nation and holding it together.

Norman Cousins mentions of another communal encounter Nehru had a few weeks after the one referred to above as a testimony to Nehru’s moral courage and the people’s faith in him. This time the mob was Muslim! I quote Cousins own words:

The Prime Minister and a foreign guest were driving in his private car about fifteen miles south of Delhi. The traffic piled up behind a caravan of camels in a village preponderantly populated by Moslems. Only recently this village had figured in mass violence.

The combination of heat, the heavy chalky dust from the dirt road, the temper of the camel drivers, the screams of people in the stalled buses, trucks, wagons and automobiles provided the combustible materials for a communal riot. Young Moslems from the village suddenly appeared with knives. They surrounded Nehru’s car. One of them recognized the Prime Minister and shouted angry words at him.

Nehru stepped out of his car, walked up to the young man and spoke to him quietly. Suddenly, a cheer went up for the Prime Minister. The Moslems surrounded him, expressing their devotion and loyalty. Then some of them began to weep in shame for their actions. Nehru spoke with them, telling them of his hopes.

Communal amity was the cornerstone of Nehru’s idea of India. It was, in his view, fundamental to the unity of the country and its emergence as a great nation. Accordingly, in his words and deeds, during the seventeen long years that he remained Prime Minister, he sought to build, as he said in one of his letters, a united India in the real and inner sense of the word, to bring about what he termed as ‘psychological integration of our people’.

That Nehru could personally confront a frenzied mob, both Hindu and Muslim, speaks volumes about his confidence in the people and his spell over them. Can the present top leader, who is wont to find fault with Nehru, lay claim to such courage as he possessed?