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Less emotionally, Nehru has claimed for years that the British Indian Government is effective only with repressive measures. He has stuck barbs of sarcasm into the classic Tory theory that Britain must dominate India because: 1) it is the bastion of empire and the bulwark of Britain's world power; 2) the economic standard of the British Isles is built on India's wealth; 3) without Britain's strong ruling hand, India's racial and religious groups, unable and untrained to govern themselves, will fly at each other's throats in anarchy, chaos and civil war.
Nehru believes, instead, that British rule has purposely thwarted and nullified Indian attempts at self-government and self-improvement; that British imperialists are "agreeable, astute, forcible, self-confident and, when hard pressed, unscrupulous people who know pretty well on which side their bread is buttered." To him there is no turning back, for there never was a parting of the ways. Even his good friend Sir Stafford Cripps, he found four months ago, was trying to present India with what to his mind amounted to a high-handed and narrow compromise that threatened to break up India into separate states at a time when "the day of separate warring national states is over."
Nehru & Gandhi. There are some who believe that if Nehru had not played Hamlet to Gandhi's ghost, a compromise might have been effected before the latest call for civil disobedience. But past attempts by Nehru to enlist the services of the United Nations for a solution have ended in blind alleys.
There are others who believe that the political power of the Congress party is being broken, that India's present pro-war Indian leaders will eventually take over whatever form of self-government India receives.
But Gandhi and Nehru cannot be brushed off the face of Bharat Mata (Mother India). Until Gandhi dies, Nehru is bound to him by ties of love and political necessity, even though their political thinking is poles apart.
To Nehru, who has written as revealingly of his own thoughts and beliefs as any man since Henry Adams, Gandhi is the great paradox—an arch reactionary,-yet the greatest revolutionary leader of his time. Invariably Nehru has swung to Gandhi's side, often in subsequent amazement that so mystical a character could, by instinct, sense the time for mass movements and the means to arouse public support.
When Gandhi started the khadi movement of hand-spinning and hand-weaving, Nehru found it "a throwback to the pre-industrial age." But the most fretful of Nehru's complaints against Gandhi have been caused by the Mahatma's support of systems Nehru believes are "obviously decaying" and which "stand as obstacles in the way of advance—the feudal states, the big zamindars (landowners) and talukdars ( land rent collectors), the present capitalist system."
An aristocrat by birth, a "repentant bourgeois" by definition, Nehru has fought "muddled humanitarians" and opportunists among the Hindu intellectuals and middle class bourgeoisie which form the core of the Congress party. Started in 1885 by a retired British colonial, the party, since Gandhi took control of it in World War I, has had a melange of supporters held together by one goal: Swaraj (political independence).