IDEAS: Pandit's Mind

• Share

(6 of 8)

Gandhi said affectionately of Nehru: "When I am gone he will begin speaking my language." Since Gandhi's death Nehru has indeed tried to speak Gandhi's language, but he has not acted by Gandhi's faith. He says: "Protecting oneself, unfortunately, means relying on the armed forces and the like, and so we build up, where necessity arises, our defense apparatus. We cannot take the risk of not doing so, although Mahatma Gandhi would have taken the risk, no doubt, and I dare not say that he would have been wrong . . . But we are small folk and dare not take that risk . . . [You] ask me what you are to do—if you are slapped in the face, should you turn the other cheek, as Christ said . . . ? The police force is not supposed to turn the other cheek when it is slapped." Nehru, however, forgets this practical attitude and tends to apply Gandhi's principles to Western preparedness or to the U.N. action in Korea. Nehru is all for nonviolence—when it comes to governments other than his own.

When Moslem tribesmen, apparently with Pakistan's sanction, raided Kashmir in 1947, Nehru refused to turn the other cheek. He ordered the Indian army to move and restore order. Cried he: "Aggression of every type must be resisted." Since then, largely on legalistic grounds which add up to a stubborn "They started it," Nehru has refused all U.N. proposals to settle the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan (TIME, Nov. 10, 1947 et seq.).

Last year Nehru condemned the North Korean attack on the Korean Republic, then refused to condemn the far larger attack by Communist China. Nehru seems to feel that there is a kind of quantitative morality about war: it is all right to fight a little war to stop a little aggression, but it is wrong to fight a bigger war to stop a bigger aggression. (This is the same kind of logic that considers one atom bomb morally wrong and ten "conventional" bombs morally all right.)

Too Little Force, Too Little Faith. How would Gandhi have reacted to the Korean situation? He would certainly not have behaved as Nehru has. For Gandhi never turned away from evil or denied its existence. He fought evil in his own way, which was essentially to suffer rather than to inflict suffering, to die by the sword rather than to kill with the sword. Gandhi did not believe in unresisting meekness but in non-violent resistance ("A rabbit that runs away from the bull terrier is not particularly nonviolent").

Gandhi might well have denounced the Communists, as he denounced the Nazis in World War II, but he would have called on the West to fight them with non-violent weapons, as he suggested that the Nazis should be fought. The West might not have been able, or fit, to follow that advice, but the moral conflict would have been clear: a conflict between a saint and worldly men. The conflict between Nehru and the West is not a conflict between saintliness and worldliness, but between two forms of worldliness—Nehru's neutralism masquerading as otherworldliness. As one writer on India, Herrymon Maurer, has put it: "[Nehru's] middle ground is the dangerous ground: it provides neither enough faith nor enough force."