When Kamala Nehru’s tuberculosis did not improve with all the treatment available within the country and it was decided in 1935 to send her to Europe for further treatment, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was in jail at the time, found himself short of financial resources for meeting the expenses required for such a visit. A generous offer of help came from the Birla family, which was regularly helping several other Congress leaders, but Jawaharlal turned down the offer. He somehow managed to find enough of his own resources, and Kamla Nehru did go abroad, though ultimately to no avail.
A number of luminaries, from Tagore, Andrews and Sapru to the British Labour leaders, Attlee and Lansbury, asked for Jawaharlal’s full release from prison to attend to his wife’s health, but the government did not oblige. When an advocate petitioned the Allahabad High Court for his release, Jawaharlal dissociated himself from any such mercy petition that would give him special treatment. When Kamala Nehru was on her deathbed, his sentence was suspended to let him go abroad to join her; but his sentence was not commuted.
His biographer, S. Gopal, sees his not asking for any special leniency from the government as a matter of honour for him. Honour here consists in not becoming beholden to an entity one is opposing, which would have happened had he been treated differently from other prisoners. There must have been, one can only surmise, a similar question of honour involved in his turning down the Birla offer. Jawaharlal was a leading figure of the Left at the time; his accepting a largesse from the Birlas would have meant a similar process of becoming beholden to an entity one was ideologically opposed to, notwithstanding the Birlas’ ‘nationalist’ credentials.
Apart from honour, there must have been another factor behind Jawaharlal’s decision against accepting Birlas’ offer, namely, a possible conflict of interest. Though he occupied no official position at the time and was not likely to do so in any foreseeable future, he must have sensed a potential conflict of interest if a prominent leader of the anti-colonial struggle (with the sole exception of the saintly Gandhi) became personally indebted to a leading member of the Indian capitalist class.
Jawaharlal Nehru is a name that is much maligned these days by India’s ruling party; but the leader of the same ruling party was flown in by an aircraft owned by the Adanis for being sworn in as prime minister, totally untroubled by the obvious conflict of interest involved in his doing so. The ethical stance of Jawaharlal, in short, contrasts sharply with the ethics, or the lack of it, that prevails today.
Some may argue that Jawaharlal was being too finicky, that a leader’s acceptance of a favour from a potential beneficiary of possible future government largesse does not ipso facto mean that the favour would be returned, and that any belief to the contrary amounts to questioning the integrity of the leader which is both unwarranted and insulting. This view, however, misses the point for two reasons.
First, even a person of the utmost integrity must never be placed in a situation where he sits in judgement over the suitability of a person for any kind of largesse, when that person has done him a favour. This, after all, is the rationale for avoiding all conflicts of interest, not that there would necessarily be unfairness in a case of conflict of interest, but that the very possibility of such unfairness should be eliminated. Second, it is not just that the right thing must always be done, but it must be seen to be done, for that is what establishes the credibility of a process; and such credibility is in the interests of both the person deciding on the award and the person receiving it.
It is not just a matter of decision on particular awards. A person’s intellectual position and political judgement are deemed to be more credible if they are untainted by any personal indebtedness to a stakeholder. In turning down the Birla offer therefore, Jawaharlal displayed an ethical stance that was the only proper one under the circumstances; in this respect, he was far ahead of many of his Congress colleagues of that time, not to mention contemporary leaders.
After Kamala Nehru’s death, when Jawaharlal was returning to India, his plane had a stop-over at Rome. Benito Mussolini, keenly aware of the propaganda benefits of patronising a leader of an anti-British liberation struggle, sent an emissary to fetch Jawaharlal to meet him, no doubt for a photo-op. But Jawaharlal, aware of the nature of fascism and the possible use that could be made of his visit to Mussolini by the Italian fascists, refused to oblige. He kept arguing with Mussolini’s emissary who even played the sympathy card by suggesting that he would lose his job if Jawaharlal did not oblige; finally, Jawaharlal had his way.
Here again, he showed himself to be far ahead of most other Indian leaders of the anti-colonial struggle in his understanding and abhorrence of fascism. This was in sharp contrast with the sympathy for fascism displayed by the Hindutva camp, from which an emissary, B.S. Moonje, had actually gone to meet Mussolini to acquire first-hand knowledge of his movement. Today, when Mussolini’s descendants are in power in Italy and a party that is an RSS-front organisation is in power here, the need for all who love democracy to appreciate Jawaharlal’s acute understanding of fascism is particularly urgent.
Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi