The great relief in the form of the result of the presidential elections of the United States (USA) has made 2020 a less unbearable year. The White House now seems the home of reason.
Just the opposite happened 75 years ago.
In April 1945, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, respected throughout the democratic world, died of a prolonged illness, the White House suddenly had a question mark. No one knew what Vice President HS Truman was like, who had entered that building.
What was the reaction of India? The entire leadership of Congress was in jail. Mahatma Gandhi, from his prison in Poona, sent Eleanor Roosevelt a typically prophetic telegram from him: “My condolences and congratulations. Later because her illustrious husband died in the harness and after a point when the Allied victory had been made certain. He was saved from the humiliating spectacle of being part of the peace that threatens to be the prelude to a bloodier war even if possible. ”
Vallabhbhai Patel, from his Ahmednagar prison, wrote to his daughter, Maniben, on April 14: “Yesterday we had news of the death of President Roosevelt. Much was expected of him in the future. In today’s selfish world, he stood out as a strong man interested to some degree in the welfare of the world … No one knows what God wants and where he wants to take this world. “Jawaharlal Nehru, in the same prison, writing what would become The Discovery of India, he described Roosevelt as someone who “many people around the world looked up to”, as “a man of vision and great political ability.”
So there was uncertainty, worry, even fear for the future. Let’s look, on this anniversary of Nehru’s birth, in that year, 1945.
A prisoner in Ahmednagar, Jawaharlal, 56, had been working to write what would become the great book I just mentioned. It was to be dedicated: “To my colleagues and fellow prisoners in the Ahmednagar Fort prison camp from August 9, 1942 to March 28, 1945.” These colleagues included Vallabhbhai Patel (67), Pattabhi Sitaramayya (62), GBPant (55), Maulana Azad (54), JB Kripalani (54), Asaf Ali (54), Syed Mahmud (53), Narendra Deva (53) , PC Ghosh (51), Shankerrao Deo (47), HK Mahtab (42). Six of the 12 managed to produce topical books: Nehru wrote his Discovery; Azad wrote his collection of letters, Ghubar-i-Khatir; Mahtab documented the history of Orissa; Kripalani did a study of Gandhi; Deva reconstructed a Sanskrit work from the French; and Sitaramayya wrote a valuable diary.
An entirely new activity celebrated and united Nehru with Patel: gardening. Sitaramayya noted in his diary: “In front of his veranda, the Sardar has grown … blue flowers interspersed with some roses (which) present a beauty … of heavenly glory.” And as for Jawaharlal, the chronicler wrote that the man was “sowing, digging, planting, pruning, watering and weeding … in the blazing sun with his hat on and in the pouring rain with his raincoat.” Kripalani said that Jawaharlal had turned “an arid and gloomy complex without even a blade of grass” into a place of beauty.
But we can be sure that behind all this there was great anxiety about the fate of the country and the uncertain and war-weary world. Nehru wrote in the pages that would become his famous book: “Mr. HG Wells has been telling the world, with all the fire of an old prophet, that… it is the system of nationalistic individualism and uncoordinated enterprise that is the disease of the world … Prophets are ignored and sometimes even stoned by their generation. ”
Nehru had no idea, at this point, when he would be liberated, when India would have its own government. He did not know that events would advance rapidly, that he would become the Prime Minister of India and his gardening partner the Deputy Prime Minister, but that the man they both considered to be India’s path finder would be killed.
I did not know that, as Prime Minister of India, you would address the Asian and African leaders in Bandung on April 22, 1955, saying: “The leaders of the great nations like the President of the United States of America have to wear a world of responsibility … a tremendous burden. “
President-elect Joe Biden’s burden has to do with world security, from nuclear, chemical, and biological errors and terrors. It is also about the world being safe from its own ways of heating and infecting the planet. He will be helped by an India that speaks not in terms of “nationalist individualism” but of world security.
Writing in his cell in Ahmednagar, Nehru said: “Unity is always better than disunity, but a forced unity is a sham and a dangerous business, full of explosive possibilities. Unity must be of the head and the heart, a sense of belonging together… ”Biden is talking about that belonging together. You know what you have inherited.
On this anniversary, we can ask ourselves: “Do we know what we inherited?” Are Nehru and Patel gardening in India today?
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and governor
The opinions expressed are personal
.
