Books | Nehru’s Vision

Aditya Mukherjee

The period from 1946 to 1952, from the time Nehru took over as the head of the interim government till he as prime minister led independent India into its first general election, was the phase when the very ‘idea of India’ was tested against the most overwhelming odds. Independence was accompanied by the partition of the country and widespread religious communal violence. It was a holocaust-like situation where an estimated 500,000 were killed and millions were turned homeless (nearly 6 million refugees poured into India) in a spate of communal hatred and violence. The result was one of the largest transfers of populations in human history in a short span of just a few years. In the midst of all this, Gandhiji, the ‘Father of the Nation’ was felled by an assassin’s bullet, an assassin who was put up to challenge the very ‘idea of India’ the Mahatma had lived and died for. In this atmosphere of hatred and violence, guiding India to its first democratic general election based on complete adult franchise appeared to be a nearly impossible task. But Nehru took the challenge head on and with indomitable energy saw India through its worst ever crisis at its very moment of birth as a new nation. It was, in the words of an Indian historian in a recent study, his ‘finest hour’.

A spiral of religious sectarian violence engulfed India in the run-up to independence and partition. It began with the Great Calcutta Killings as a result of Muslim League’s call for Direct Action in August 1946, barely a month before the Interim Government led by Nehru was set up in September by the British as a prelude to the handing over of power. The very next month, large-scale violence erupted in Noakhali, a remote district of Bengal with the Muslim League government that ruled the province doing precious little to stop it. As a reaction to the violence against Hindus in Calcutta and Noakhali, large-scale violence against Muslims broke out neighbouring Bihar, spreading like wildfire, for the first time in rural areas.

Gandhiji immediately rushed to the villages of Noakhali on 6 November 1946 to take on the most difficult task of trying t