MK Gandhi had to choose between Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel in the spring of 1946. The occasion was the first presidential election of the Congress after 1940; a successor to Abul Kalam Azad, who was elected to the post by defeating MN Roy had to be appointed. Although the election was scheduled for late May, on May 9, JB Kripalani, the Congress general secretary, issued a communiqué announcing Nehru as the next president of the Congress, for the fourth time. The announcement came earlier than scheduled as voting had become unnecessary due to the withdrawal of the other two candidates—Patel and Kripalani himself.
As early as April 20, Gandhi had made it clear to Azad that he preferred Nehru as the next president. Azad accordingly issued a public statement a few days later recommending Nehru as the next Congress president. Patel, however, emerged as the preferred candidate of the provincial Congress committees, twelve of which out of fifteen nominated him. In a move that would be considered undemocratic by any standard, Kripalani got a few members of the working committee and some Delhi leaders to propose Nehru’s name to honour Gandhi’s wish since none of the provinces had nominated him.
Both Azad and Kripalani were aware of Patel’s willingness to become the next president when they canvassed support for Nehru and later came to regret it, Azad more bitterly than Kripalani. “Patel never forgave me for that,” Kripalani later told journalist Durga Das. Azad called his support to Nehru over Patel ‘the greatest blunder’ of his political life. He claimed that Patel “would have never committed the mistake of Jawaharlal which gave Mr Jinnah the opportunity of sabotaging the [Cabinet Mission] plan”. “I can never forgive myself when I think that if I had not committed these mistakes, perhaps the history of the last ten years would have been different,” Azad lamented in his memoirs compiled during 1956–57. Nehru took charge as president on July 6, 1946, at the AICC meeting in Bombay.
This was not the first time Gandhi had chosen Nehru over Patel to lead the Congress. When the Bengal leaders insisted on having Motilal Nehru as the president for the 1928 annual session of the Congress in Calcutta, the senior Nehru suggested that either Vallabhbhai or Jawaharlal be chosen instead. Gandhi reported back to Motilal that Patel was unwilling since he wanted to focus on organisational consolidation after the Bardoli Satyagraha. Under the circumstances, Jawaharlal, then 53, fourteen years younger than Patel, was the best choice. “I thoroughly agree that we should give place to younger men. And amongst them, there is no one even to equal Jawahar,” Gandhi wrote to Motilal. The senior Nehru, however, agreed to preside over the Congress, unable to ignore the pressure from Subhas Chandra Bose and Jatindra Mohan Sengupta.
By the middle of the next year, Gandhi again picked up the matter with Jawaharlal, who made his unwillingness absolutely clear. “I represent nobody but myself,” he wrote to Gandhi in mid-July. Gandhi explained his choice in an article published in Young India on August 1, 1929. Since ‘older men have had their innings,’ and the ‘battle of the future has to be fought by younger men and women,’ it was proper that they should be led by one of them.
“Pandit Jawaharlal has everything to recommend him. He has for years discharged with singular ability and devotion the office of secretary of the Congress. By his bravery, determination, application, integrity and grit he has captivated the imagination of the youth of the land. He has come in touch with labour and the peasantry. His close acquaintance with European politics is a great asset in enabling him to assess ours.… And those who know the relations that subsist between Jawaharlal and me know that his being in the chair is as good as my being in it. We may have intellectual differences but our hearts are one. And with all his youthful impetuosities, his sense of stern discipline and loyalty make him an inestimable comrade in whom one can put the most implicit faith.”
The article failed to have any effect on junior Nehru. Even a month later, he was emphatic: “Beg of you not to press my name for Presidentship.” Unlike in the case of Vallabhbhai, Gandhi, however, would not give up on Jawaharlal so easily. Rather, he picked Nehru over Patel yet again. Despite Gandhi’s public endorsement of Nehru, out of the eighteen provincial Congress committees, ten proposed Gandhi’s name as the next president, five had proposed Patel and three Nehru. A reluctant Nehru agreed to occupy the throne at the end of September after Patel withdrew after being asked by Gandhi. “I tried my best to get out of this, but circumstances were too strong for me. I am not all happy about it,” Nehru wrote to an acquaintance.
Patel succeeded Nehru in 1931, being appointed by the Congress Working Committee following the salt satyagraha and long periods of imprisonment. Nehru was back as the Congress president in 1936 and again in 1937. Gandhi wrote to Patel as early as August 1934 that Nehru was “bound to be the rightful helmsman of the organisation in the near future.” Nehru wasn’t unwilling this time. In fact, when the time came for his re-election as the president, Patel himself issued a statement asking Congress delegates “to plump for Pandit Jawaharlal as being the best person to represent the nation.”
Nehru’s position as the leader of the Congress was etched so strongly in Gandhi’s mind that there was no space for anyone else. When Subhas Chandra Bose, the president-elect for 1938, returned after recuperating in Europe, Gandhi sent him a telegram, “God give you strength to bear the weight of Jawaharlal’s mantle.” Patel wasn’t always happy about Gandhi’s choice, but being a perfectly disciplined soldier, he never spoke about it in public. His unhappiness over being sidestepped by Gandhi in the 1929 presidential election has been chronicled by Rajmohan Gandhi in ‘Patel: A Life’. Another anecdote recounted by the socialist leader Minoo Masani in his autobiography ‘Bliss was it in that Dawn’ reflects Patel’s bitterness:
“…he [Patel] once bitterly complained to me how, while Jawaharlal sat on the fence on delicate issues and maintained his popularity, he had to do the hatchet work for the Congress, such as removing [N.B.] Khare, from the Chief Ministership of the Central Provinces, disciplining K.F. Nariman, keeping Subhas Bose in his place and, he might have added, dealing with us socialists.”
If there was a shred of doubt anywhere, Gandhi cleared it when in January 1942 he declared, “I have always said that not Rajaji, nor Sardar Vallabhbhai, but Jawaharlal will be my successor.” He predicted, “When I am gone he will do what I am doing now.” A few months later Gandhi further clarified: He [Nehru] has never accepted my method in its entirety. He has frankly criticized it, and yet he has faithfully carried out the Congress policy largely influenced . . . by me. Those like Sardar Vallabhbhai who have followed me without question cannot be called heirs. And everybody admits that Jawaharlal has the drive that no one else has in the same measure.
If Nehru, as the suave politician with a great reputation in the Western world who could equally charm millions within the country, was Gandhi’s unambiguous choice, Patel was needed as the organisation man who could take difficult, if unpleasant, decisions and implement them. His organisational skills would be invaluable in putting the new government of independent India together. Yet, given the ideological and temperamental differences between Nehru and Patel, clashes were inevitable.
To be continued
Chandrachur Ghose is author of the national bestsellers ‘1947-57, India: The Birth of a Republic’ (2023) and ‘Bose: The Untold Story of an Inconvenient Nationalist’ (2022), both published by Penguin. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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