Bhutto's Nehru Story

Nehru's principle of "compromise and argument" remains the only workable formula for South Asian leaders

- Harish Khare

SIXTY years ago, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of South Asia’s most brilliantly devilish minds, penned an assessment of Jawaharlal Nehru. Titled ‘India after Nehru’, Bhutto had the document confidentially printed at the State Bank of Pakistan Press, Karachi. Only 500 copies were made. Since Bhutto was a minister at the time in Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s government and what he had to say about India’s first prime minister was not quite palatable to the Pakistani establishment, he found himself constrained to withdraw as many copies as could be retrieved. However, the very efficient Indian diplomats in Karachi had managed to secure a copy, and a copy of that copy somehow found its way into the Haksar Papers.

This 60-year-old assessment, made by India’s most trenchant critic, makes rewarding reading, particularly in the current season of demonising Nehru. Bhutto’s is a masterly overview of India’s struggles as an independent nation-state and Nehru’s role and contribution in imposing a governing order in a land, which for centuries had succumbed to the outsiders’ armies and firmans (orders). Bhutto’s unsentimentally prescient judgement reads:

“...The myth and image of Nehru were greater than the man. Although he committed aggression, alienated his neighbours, suppressed his opponents, made mock convenience of his ethics, he was Nehru the redeemer of 400 million people, a valiant fighter who led his people to freedom and, for the first time in 600 years, gave them a place in the sun.”