NEHRU AS A PRO-SOVIET COMMUNIST CRONY

He was fascinated by the revolution

It is well known that Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister wore a political red hat. S Gopal, in his biography of Nehru, has described how Nehru was pressurised by the Soviet communist leader Leonid Brezhnev to withdraw his resignation, following the failed adventure with China in 1962. Nehru had gone to the Himalayas, seeking peace, when Brezhnev intervened.

But Nehru's tryst with the Bolsheviks dates back to 1927 when he visited Moscow for the first time.

Announcing the arrival of Nehru, on November 5, 1927, Pravda, the communist Daily of the Soviet Union, said: "Pandit Motilal Nehru, one of the outstanding leaders of the Indian National Movement is expected here, today or tomorrow. He will come to Moscow with his son Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the left wing of the National Congress." (1)

Pravda, the central organ of the Bolshevik Party, in the same issue, reported how invitations to Indian democrats had been sent and the reaction of the British colonial authorities to them. In a special article devoted to India, Pravda said that the invitations had been dispatched in good time to Indian political organisations like the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties of Bengal, Bombay, Madras and Rajputana. These invitations had been intercepted by the British Government. (2)

Nehru at Brussels, 1927

Invitations were also sent to prominent politicians and public leaders and leaders of the national liberation movement. The delivery of telegrams with these individual invitations had been allowed by the British censor. Published in the Indian press, they caused a “sensation”. But as soon as some of the invitees expressed their desire to avail themselves of the invitations, Pravda said, the British Government refused them exit visas.

And yet, in spite of the prohibitory orders of the British colonialists, a few more Indians, besides Jawaharlal and Motilal, managed to reach Moscow. There were three members of the Anti-Imperialist League, and the well-known Indian revolutionary, S J Saklatwala, who had arrived in the Soviet Union a few days earlier than Nehru and who, according to Nehru, was at the Moscow station to meet him. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the revolutionary brother of Sarojini Naidu, was there from Germany.

Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala (1874 – 1936) was a communist and British politician of Indian Parsi heritage. He was the first person of Indian heritage to become a British Member of Parliament (MP) for the UK Labour Party and was also among the few members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to serve as an MP.

On arrival in Moscow, the Nehrus were greeted by officials of the reception committee and Saklatwala, whom Jawaharlal had met in Brussels, during the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities or the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism.

In March 1926, Nehru sailed from Bombay with his wife Kamala and daughter Indira to Geneva, where Kamala was admitted for treatment, at a TB sanatorium in Montana. From his vantage point in Switzerland, Nehru "began to see the limitations of a purely political approach" to India's problems; a brand-new constitution alone could not carry India far without those social and economic changes which had been arrested by the natural conservatism of a foreign bureaucracy and its anxiety not to antagonize vested interests. Stimulated by his left-oriented son, Motilal began to show a keener appreciation of the economic factor in Indian politics. (3)

Motilal wrote to Nehru on January 27, 1927: "The present controversy on the current currency question has revealed the fact that many hundreds of crores (of rupees) have been taken out of the country by the simple process of manipulating the exchange and adjusting the tariff to suit the British manufacturer and merchant." (4)

In Brussels

Nehru attended the Soviet-sponsored Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels on February 10, 1927. At his suggestion, the Gauhati Congress in December 1926 decided to participate in the Brussels Conference and nominated him as a delegate. Jawaharlal wrote to S Srinivasa Iyengar, the Congress President, to ask whether he might define the political goal of the Congress as independence. Motilal wrote back: "We ask for Swaraj and you can interpret it to mean independence, as indeed it is." (5)

The Indian National Congress was determining its position towards international problems against the background of a grim struggle being waged by the anti-imperialist forces headed by the Soviet Union against the forces of reaction. (6) The Hunter Commission, which officially investigated the events which led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, had even picturised the Satyagraha movement headed by Gandhi as a “Conspiracy originated or supported from outside”. This absurd assertion served only as a pretext for pointing at the “Bolshevik intrigues”. From the documents of the sixth volume of the Hunter Commission, one can see an obvious fear of penetration into India of Bolshevik ideas. This fear determined much of the policy of the colonialists.

The organization was founded with the support of the Comintern. Since 1924, the Comintern advocated support of colonial and semi-colonial countries and tried, with difficulties, to find convergences with the left-wing of the Labour and Socialist International and with bourgeois anti-colonial nationalist parties from the colonized world. Another stimulus to create cross-political cooperation was the revolutionary surge in China since 1923 in which the nationalist Kuomintang was in a united front with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Toying the Soviet line, Nehru attacked Britain at the Brussels Conference and described the early history of British rule in India as "an epoch of predatory war-a period in which freebooters prowled about and committed plunders and robberies in an unbridled manner." He used communist jargon and accused British imperialism of encouraging India's communal divisions, uprooting her educational system and undermining her economy." (7)

He was hopeful that the liberation of his homeland would lead to the liberation of Asia and Africa. There was nothing Gandhian in the resolution on India, drafted and moved by him, which resonated with the communist dependence on the proletariat: "This Congress accords its warm support to the Indian National Movement for the complete freedom of India, and is of the opinion that the liberation of India from foreign domination is an essential step in the full emancipation of the peoples of the world. This Congress trusts that peoples and workers of other countries will fully cooperate in this task; this Congress further trusts that the Indian National Movement will base its programme on the full emancipation of the peasants and workers of India, without which there can be no real freedom". (8)

It has all the nuances of a communist communique.

During and after the Conference, Nehru took a keen interest in mobilizing public opinion against the despatch of British troops to China. In a joint resolution of the British, Indian (read Nehru) and Chinese delegates, the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities demanded the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Chinese territory and waters and urged ''the need of direct action, including strikes and imposition of the embargo to prevent the movement of munitions and troops either in India or China and from India to China." (9)

The Brussels Conference was funded by the Mexican Government, which resented US intervention in Latin America, and by the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, which resented British intervention in China. The Soviet Government was quick to see the propaganda value of the conference, and Marxist phrases were bandied about freely in communiques. (10)

George Lansbury, the British Labour leader presided over the conference and was also elected President of the League Against Imperialism, the permanent organization to which the conference gave birth. Jawaharlal was elected to the nine-member executive committee of the League, which included Madam Sun Yat-Sen.

The inclusion of the word 'league' in the organization's name was a direct attack on the League of Nations, which perpetuated colonialism through the mandate system.

Gandhi not impressed

In his reports to India, Nehru recommended that the Indian National Congress should maintain links with the League Against Imperialism. Gandhi was not impressed. Gandhi wrote to Motilal on May 14, 1927: "I read the public printed report of the (Brussels Conference) from beginning to end and I have now read the confidential report. Both are worthy of Jawaharlal. I appreciate the view he presents about foreign propaganda. But somehow or other, I still feel that our way lies differently. I feel that we will not get the support of Europe beyond a certain point, because after all most of the European states are partners in our exploitation. And if my proposition is correct, we shall not retain European sympathy during the final heat of the struggle." (11)

Gandhi, in a note to Nehru, warned against reliance upon external support. Nehru was in touch with the Indian revolutionaries based in Germany. On April 23, 1927, Nehru wrote back to Gandhi: "I do not think it is desirable, nor indeed is it possible for India to plough a lonely furrow now or in the future. It is solely with a view to self-education and self-improvement that I desire external contacts. I am afraid we are terribly narrow in our outlook and the sooner we get rid of this narrowness, the better. " (12)

Gandhi's thinking, to Nehru, was very narrow. Before long, the League Against Imperialism branded Gandhi as a 'reactionary'. (13) When in November 1929, Gandhi and the Congress welcomed Lord Irwin's declaration on Dominion status for India, the League Against Imperialism hurled abuse in stereo-typed Marxist phrases at Gandhi and the Congress: "Chronic reformism", the betrayal of the cause of workers and peasants." (14) This came just before the launch of the civil disobedience movement. Nehru had no other option than to leave the League in April 1930. 

In India, some revolution-minded Indian patriots gained inspiration from Gorky’s fiction and publicist works. 

From the early days of the October Revolution, Nehru closely followed the socialist transformations in Soviet Russia, studied her experience, and strove to use it in the interests of the freedom movement in India. Nehru studied the works of Marx and Lenin which, by his own admission, substantially influenced his views on the ways and laws of global social development. In doing so, as Nehru pointed out in one of his articles, he was deeply impressed in those years by Lenin’s work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and the book written by the American journalist, John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World. (15)

Later, Nehru wrote about that period: “We began a new phase in our struggle for freedom in India at about the same time as the October Revolution led by the great Lenin. We admired Lenin whose example influenced us greatly.”

In Moscow

So, Nehru was elated when he, together with his father Motilal Nehru, was invited by the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to attend the celebrations of the Tenth Anniversary of the October Revolution. On November 7, 1927, Jawaharlal Nehru together with his father, wife and sister set his foot on Soviet soil for the first time.

In September 1927, Motilal was on a vacation in Europe and in October, he was in Berlin. At Jawaharlal's suggestion, it was decided to attend the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution. They travelled 28 hours from Berlin on an uncomfortable train to reach the small town of Niegerloje, on the Polish-Russian border. 

The Nehrus arrived a day too late to witness the parade in Red Square but spent four hectic days in Moscow. 

The Soviet press gave much coverage to the visit of the Nehrus. On the eve of their arrival, Pravda published their biographies. The newspaper described them as the most prominent leaders of the Indian national liberation movement. Pravda also gave an account of the activities of Nehru in his capacity as an official representative of the Indian National Congress at the first conference of the Anti-imperialist League, held in Brussels. During the stay of the Nehrus in Moscow, the Soviet media reported the meetings they had and the speeches they made.

Nehru was received in the Kremlin by Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Nehru visited several factories and plants, attended Moscow court proceedings, went to the Museum of the October Revolution, and the Bolshoi Theatre, and saw V. Pudovkin’s film, “The End of Saint-Petersburg”.

On November 8, Nehru took part in a festive meeting devoted to the Tenth Anniversary of the October Revolution, held in the Trade Union House. Professor Vladimir Balabushevich, a famous Indologist reminisced later: “Nehru was a little late for the meeting. Nevertheless, when Nehru and his father, Motilal, made their appearance in the hall and were introduced to the audience by the Chairman of the meeting, all those present in the hall rose and gave them a warm welcoming ovation. Already at that time, Nehru was regarded as an outstanding fighter against imperialism and colonialism.”  (16)

Besides calling on Mikhail Kalinin, Nehru met A. Lunacharsky, the First Commissar of Education, V. Kuibyshev, Chairman of the Supreme National Economic Council, the Health Minister Semashko, the French writer Henri Barbusse and the German internationalist Clara Zetkin, Sun Yat-sen’s widow Soong Ching-ling, and the Mexican writer Diego Rivera.

Nehru described later all these meetings and impressions on returning to India in his detailed articles on the Soviet Union, which came out shortly after. Most of the articles appeared in the Hindu, and only one in Gandhi's Young India. The articles were published later as a book, Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (1929). 

In the foreword of the book Nehru admits that he is publishing it as a book with "considerable hesitation." "I realise," he writes, "more perhaps than the average reader, their deficiencies and how disjointed and sketch they are." He confesses that some of them were written on trains.

Nehru was impressed by what he saw and felt like a juvenile communist that India could learn much from the Soviets in shaking off the feudal past. He noted that in Moscow the contrast between luxury and poverty was less glaring than in the big towns of India and Western Europe (17) and that high officials in Moscow didn't live lavishly; that the State Opera House was patronized not only by the upper class but also by the commoners; that literacy was increasing fast; that the legal and economic status of women had risen; that conditions in prisons had improved.

He was astonished to see M. Kalinin, President of Soviet Russia, wearing peasant clothes and receiving a salary that was nearly the same as that paid to his subordinates.

While showering praise on the "transformation" in the Soviet Union, he laments the situation in India, thus: "We are a conservative people, not over-fond of change, always trying to forget our present misery and degradation in vague fancies of our glorious past and an immortal civilisation. But the past is dead and gone and our immortal civilisation does not help us greatly in solving the problems of today." (18)

Nehru in Moscow, 1955

So what is the way out? Nehru hints at a revolution: "If we desire to find a solution for these problems, we shall have to venture forth along new avenues of thought and search for new methods. The world changes and the truths of yesterday and the day before may be singularly inapplicable today." (19)

Nehru then proposes for India, the Russian model: "Russia thus interests us because it may help us to find some solution for the great problems which face the world today. It interests us especially because, conditions there have not been, and are even not now very dissimilar to conditions in India. Both are vast agricultural countries with only the beginnings of industrialisation, and both have to face poverty and illiteracy. If Russia finds a satisfactory solution for these, our work in India is made easier." (20)

He also extols the October Revolution as "one of the great events of world history, the greatest since the French revolution, and its story is more absorbing from the human and dramatic point of view than any tale or phantasy.” (21) It is now known that the actual change was in February, in the absence of Lenin, and the October revolution was just a 24-hour coup which unsettled Kerensky, after the return of Lenin. To cap the absurdities, Nehru has devoted an entire chapter to describe Lenin's "virtues". He quotes Romain Rolland at the end to extol Lenin as "the greatest man of action in our century, and at the same time most selfless." (22)

Nehru failed to foresee the tragedy the revolution had in store. He just linked communism with opposition to colonial rule and economic inequality. In his autobiography too,  he praised communism: "Whatever its faults, it is not hypocritical and not imperialistic." He thought the constructive side of the Soviet model was amazing-the so-called massive assault on poverty, disease illiteracy, bigotry and the push towards industrialization. It was Stalin on the throne and Nehru failed to see the skeletons on the cupboard of the dictator, Lenin. 

So, J Coatman wrote in his book, Years of Destiny (23): "Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has now one secret ambition, which is to rival Lenin or Stalin in the history of Communism." But as we all know, Gandhi was a roadblock to Nehru, on the way to the destructive and violent journey to a communist revolution. 

Gandhi wrote to Nehru on January 4, 1928: "You are going too fast. You should have taken time to think and become acclimatized." Nehru tried to explain, but that made matters worse. Gandhi wrote back: "The differences between us are so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us." (24)

Gandhi claimed to be a socialist. "I have claimed that I was a socialist long before those I know in India had avowed their creed," he said."But my socialism," he wrote, "was natural to me and not adopted from any books. No man could be actively non-violent and not rise against social injustice wherever it occurred. Unfortunately, Western socialists have, so far as I know, believed in the necessity of violence for enforcing socialistic doctrines. I have always held that social justice, even unto the least and the lowliest, is impossible of attainment by force." (25)

After becoming the PM, Nehru went ahead with the Soviet model of five-year plans and got stuck discouraging the private sector. He took a leftist, V K Krishna Menon as his defence minister, failed miserably against China, and left the arena as a political disaster.

(This article was published in Indusscrolls: https://indusscrolls.com/nehru-as-a-soviet-communist-crony )

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1. B R Nanda, The Nehrus, Oxford, 1984, pp 258
2. Leonid Mironov, Nehru's First Visit to the Soviet Union, Mainstream, Vol XLVI No 47, 15 November 1975
3. B R Nanda, The Nehrus, Oxford, 1984, pp 256
4. Ibid, 253
5. Ibid, 255
6. A I Yunel, The Russian Revolution and India, 2020, Routledge
7. B R Nanda, The Nehrus, Oxford, 1984, pp 255
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Ibid, p 256
11. ibid
12. Ibid 256-257
13. Ibid
14. Ibid
15. Nehru, Jawaharlal, Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions, 1929, Chetana, Bombay
16. Leonid Mironov, Nehru's First Visit to the Soviet Union, Mainstream, Vol XLVI No 47, 15 November 1975

17. Ibid, pp 13-14
18. Ibid
19. ibid
20. Ibid
21. Ibid, pp 36
22. Ibid, p 39-48
23. Cotman J, Years of Destiny, pp 95. John Coatman (1889–1963) was the director of public information for the Indian Police Service and the British government in India. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1929 and was a member of the secretariat during the first Round Table Conference (November 1930 – January 1931). His writing promoted the benefits of the British Empire.

24. B.R Nanda, The Nehrus, Oxford, 1984, pp 293

25. Gandhi, Harijan, April 20, 1940

© Ramachandran