Walter Crocker’s Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate, first published in 1966, has been reissued by Random House recently with a foreword by historian Ramachandra Guha. A review in Mint-Lounge:
In August 1964, three months after the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Australian scholar and diplomat Walter Crocker, who had spent several years of the Nehru era in India, sat down to distil his memories into a book that he called “a contemporary’s estimate” of the late prime minister. An assessment of the life and career of a man so recently departed, a man whose policies were still current and about whom history had not yet made up its mind, required an unusual degree of confidence on the part of the writer. But Crocker had seen Nehru from up close, both politically and in a personal capacity, and he was confident of the authority he claimed. “The historians of the future will know more of the documents,” he acknowledged, “but not Nehru himself nor the men who figure in the documents.”
And in Hindustan Times,TV commentator Karan Thapar asked Minister of Panchayati Raj Mani Sha kar Aiyar, columnist Swapan Dasgupta, historian Ramachandra Guha and Business Standard editor TN Ninan how much India owes its first Prime Minister.
KT: Ram Guha, there is something that Crocker couldn’t have foreseen but which Indians are only too aware of today – the fact that for many Indians, the most enduring legacy that Nehru left behind is the Gandhi family. Would he have been proud of the fact that his daughter, his grandson, his grand-daughter-in-law and perhaps even his great-grandson have achieved the pinnacle of power? Or would he have been embarrassed and even disapproving?
Ramachandra Guha: I think he would have been deeply embarrassed. As the journalist Frank Moraes said in 1960, “The creation of a dynasty is wholly inconsistent with Nehru’s career and character. The dynasty was created by Indira Gandhi through an accident – the six Congress bosses who chose her as Prime Minister thought they could manipulate her. They were proved horrendously wrong. So it’s important in assessing Nehru to separate him from what followed later. One major difference between Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and so on, is that in Nehru’s time, and with Nehru’s encouragement, the Congress Party was a properly democratic organisation. Nehru could not impose Chief Ministers on states; Nehru could not impose presidents on the Congress. It was a thriving, decentralised, democratic organisation. So the answer to your question is clear: Nehru would have been deeply embarrassed by the fact that his party has become captive to the interests of a single family.
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