JAWAHARLAL NEHRU by Frank Morass Macmillan, 551 pp.
Good writers do not necessarily make good biographers. Biography, which deals with the life events of an individual as history with that of a nation, is such a difficult branch of literature that to be a really good biographer is the rarest of intellectual distinctions. No one realized this situation more than G. B. Shaw did when he denied his good friend, Frank Harris, the opportunity of writing his biography, knowing only too well that Mr. Harris, though a good writer, could not make a good biographer. Mr. Moraes is one of those writers who has failed miserably to be a good biographer as evidenced by his latest book — Jawaharlal Nehru:
It is all the more a great pity that the author should have failed on a subject of unusual interest. However unpopular Nehru has been in the free world, he is a hero to many millions of his illiterate fellow countrymen. In portraying his hero, Mr. Moraes' poor judgement in the selection of materials, his complete lack of the power of Imagination and Reason and his unbalanced presentation of facts have left the reader with the inescapable impression that he had a glimpse of Nehru's limbs in one place, his head in another and his trunk somewhere else. As a whole person, Nehru was not to be found.
Nehru, we are told, comes from a long line of well-to-do middle class family long settled in the lovely land of Kashmir in the heart of the Himalayas. At the age of is he was admitted to Harrow. He was very proud of the fact that he was well ahead of his English schoolmates in general knowledge. That does not mean that he was more intelligent than the others. Most boys from the Orient then and today are not in the habit of taking any part in extra-curriculum activities, such as sports. They spend most of their time in reading. Nehru is no exception.
Having spent his formative years in England at the turn of the, century when intellectuals of all subjugated races were agitating for independence, Nehru's future was shaped without his realizing it. He was predestined to devote his life to politics. He did not come to hear Gandhi's name until 1913. Gandhi's non-violence movement in South Africa "impressed and intrigued Nehru with new possibilities of technique." It was in 1916 at the Lucknow Congress that he first met that great religious and political leader. The more he came to know this great Indian' leader, the more he became attached to him. It did not take long for him to be Gandhi's disciple in political thought and technique. In one of his letters to John Gunther written in 1938, Nehru said: I suppose my father and Gandhi have been the chief personal influences in my life. But outside influences do not carry me away. There is a tendency to resist being influenced. Still influences do work slowly and subconsciously. My wife influenced me considerably in many ways, though unobtrusively."
Like other Orientals of his generation, Nehru married a girl of his mother's choice, unsophisticated and without formal education.
Although the outside world did not come to know Nehru's vanity until he attained the notoriety of being a fence rider and an advocate of his own particular brand of neutralism in the postwar world, his intimate fellow countrymen knew him better. "You are so aloof," said a Congress colleague to him many years ago, "I bet you haven't a single real friend." "I like to open my heart before a crowd," answered Nehru. It goes without saying that it is vanity that plays a very important part in driving a man before a crowd.
At a time when Gandhi was making banner headlines day after day and year after year as the unquestioned leader of a national movement with new technique known as non-cooperation and unique as well effective in 3haking the all non-violence, mighty British Empire at the height of its power, Nehru was wise, enough to stay in the shadow of this great man following him wherever the master went. To prove that he too was a patriot and that his name should be in the limelight, he courted jail sentences at every turn of the political storm. All told, he served seven terms of prison sentence, in the course of which he managed to write a book about his political life.
In his attempt to defend Nehru's neutralism in the case of India's relations with the puppet regime of Peiping, the author said: "The political thought and systems of the two countries contrasted strongly. Yet to Nehru, reared on the gentle teaching of Gandhi, there was nothing incongruous in the belief that Communism and democracy could subsist side by side at peace with each other. Had Gandhi during the war not appealed simultaneously to Roosevelt and Hitler? That was the civilized approach. Why should China and India not live as good neighbors?"
To appeal to Roosevelt and Hitler is one thing, but to play the part of a neutralist 'with leanings towards the Communist is another. The one is merely the gesture of a great religious leader who sincerely believed in peace, while the other is a positive action of an opportunist. Any comparison between the two is invidious.
The real reason that lies behind Nehru's neutralism may be seen in his declaration after independence, in March 1948:
"We are not citizens of a weak or mean country, and I think it is foolish for us to get frightened, even from a military point of view, of the greatest of the Powers today. Not that I delude myself about what can happen to us if a great Power in a military sense goes against us; I have no doubt it can injure us. But after all in the past, as national movement, we opposed one of le greatest of World Powers. We opposed in a particular way and in a large measure succeeded in that way, and I have no doubt that if the worst comes to the worst--and in military sense we cannot meet these great Powers--it is far better for us to fight in our own way than to submit to them and lose all the ideals we have. Therefore, let us not be frightened too much of the military night of this or that group. I am not frightened and I want to tell the world on behalf of this country that we are not frightened of the military might of this Power or that. Our policy is not passive or a negative one."
Without the aid of a psychoanalyzer, anyone in his right mind can tell that when 'one keeps on saying repeatedly that he is not frightened, it admits of only one interpretation: He is definitely and unmistakably frightened. When a child goes to bed in the dark, he is invariably reminded by his mother to keep saying that he is not frightened so that he will not be frightened.
Nehru kept on reminding his fellow countrymen of the necessity to fight in "our own way." He could not have much faith in "his own way" as long as he allowed "fear" to shape his policy. No matter how Nehru dislikes to be labeled a neutralist, he is a notorious one just the same, his biographer's quibbling notwithstanding.
The more the author tries to impress his reader with the sterling qualities and virtues of his hero, the more the reader is led to believe the opposite is the truth.
At the conclusion of their first interview at Vice regal House, Lord Mountbatten said, "Mr. Nehru, I want you to regard me not as the last Viceroy winding up the British Raj but as the first to lead the way to the new India." Anything new is not necessarily good. What has happened in India since her independence must be thought-provoking to the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, who least suspected of handing over India to a leader who placed personal vanity above the welfare of 360 million people whose future is anything but optimistic as long as they are under the leadership of an opportunist in the person of Nehru. —D.J. LEE
THE CAUSE OF JAPAN by Togo Shigenori Translated and Edited by Togo Fumihiko and Ben Blakeney Simon and Schuster 372pp.
When a book is a translation, the reader is justifiably concerned about the competency and qualifications of the translator. As translation is a work of art, a good artist in this field must meet certain requirements. In addition to his knowledge, there must be "truthfulness", "good taste", "sense of period" and an excellent command of the language of the original text and the one employed for translation. "The Cause of Japan" by Togo Shigenori, foreign minister of Japan at the time of Pearl Harbor and at the end of the Pacific War, is an example of good translation. Credit should go to Togo Fumihiko and Ben Blakeney who have proved to be competent and fully qualified' translators. Their introduction constitutes an important part of the book. It is as much a concise diplomatic history of Japan of the last 50 years as it is an account of the diplomatic career of the author.
As a foreign minister during the war, Mr. Shigenori devoted more time to the super-human task of cooling the hot-headed warlords whose independent position granted by the Constitution of Japan had caused no end of embarrassments to the civil administration. How independent they were may be seen from Mr. Shigenori's confession that Tojo, although the minister of war and premier, had been kept in the dark, let alone been consulted, of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. If the premier knew nothing about it, his foreign minister could not be expected to know more. He believed so much in peaceful negotiations as the only method of settling international disputes that his government found it necessary to keep him under surveillance. The views of Mr. Shigenori and that of the warlords were poles apart. The former entered the cabinet for the purpose of averting war, while the latter had long decided to engage Japan in war, however costly, as the only way for Japan to assert her greatness.
When Mr. Shigenori first assumed office as foreign minister, he "carried out a small 'purge'" within the ministry. He requested the resignation of an ambassador who was known to have been working for the promotion of the policy of southward expansion. Two section chiefs and another official were suspended." However hard he tried to maintain the independence of diplomacy and its freedom from military interference, he found that it was an uphill fight. But this would in no way discourage a tenacious fighter like Shigenori. Needless to say that he had more reasons to dread the consequences of the unpredictable action of the military men than he had to worry about any action of Japan's enemies from without. The following quotation shows the relations, if any at all, between the warlords and the cabinet.
"It is not difficult to conceive the extent of the tyranny of the military power from the fact that on the eve of the Pacific War such a fundamental datum on the total tonnage of Japanese naval vessels--not to speak of the displacement of the gigantic battleships Yamato and Musorshi, or the plan to attack Pearl Harbor--was vigilantly withheld from the knowledge of the civilian cabinet ministers. General Tojo even told me that it was only at the IMTFE (International Military Tribunal for the Far East) that he first had learnt that the Japanese task force which carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor had assembled at Haitokappu Bay on December 10, and weighed anchor for Hawaii in the morning of 26th. The high command did not diverge its secrets even to the general who was premier and minister of war; it is easy to conceive how other ministers were treated."
During World War II, the allies were under the impression that Tojo was Japan's No.1 warlord. The revelations made by Mr. Shigenori certainly cleared a part of Tojo's guilt.
Japan's sneaky attack on Pearl Harbor without a formal declaration of war was looked upon by the allies as an act in violation of international law and convention. Little did they realize that prior to the attack the Japanese cabinet and the warlords were engaged in heated debate over this mooted issue. Mr. Shigenori wasted no time "to stress that notification of a declaration of war was absolutely necessary from the point of view of international good faith." Finally great pressure was brought to bear upon him to meet the warlords halfway by agreeing to the sending of a notification, announcing the termination of negotiations on condition that "there shall be a proper interval between notification and attack."
Although the notification is in form different from a formal declaration of war, Mr. Shigenori found justification on the strength of a declaration made by General Porter, the American delegate to the Third Hague Convention of 1907 that the provision of the "convention should not apply in case of war of self-defense from which view the delegates of other nations participating voiced no dissent." Could Mr. Shigenori convince anyone in his right mind that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, thousands of miles away from any Japanese territory, without the least provocation, was a defensive action?
In order to strengthen his argument, the author cited the recent instance of Franco-German war of 1939 when France merely stated in her note to Germany that the former "would carry out her obligations to Poland," and was not in terms a notification of commencement of hostilities. The Japanese memorandum not only conformed to the precedents of notification of declaration of war, but it left no doubt in high quarters of the adversary nation that it meant war."
That Mr. Shigenori should accuse the U.S. Government of "scheming to make Japan to fire the first shot" cannot be supported by evidence and substantiated by facts. Such accusation was entirely based on a guilty conscience. If America had such a scheme in mind, she would be much better prepared to go to war than to concentrate a greater part of her navy in Pearl Harbor, providing an ideal target for the enemy's aerial attack. President Roosevelt once told a reporter that Japan made the fatal mistake in war by not following up her attack on Pearl Harbor with an assault of the West coast of America. America was so unprepared for war that she would be caught with her pants down. How can a nation placed in such a situation be "scheming for Japan to fire the first shot?"
Mr. Shigenori did not write the book just because he wanted to be an author. Being a prisoner of war he was denied all facilities to which a writer is generally entitled. His phenomenal memory stood him in good stead, otherwise he could not have been able to write this book. As foreign minister during the most critical period of his country, he deemed it his duty to record and relate what he knew and what he had done for the benefit of posterity. In short, he wrote in the spirit of that great historian, Tacitus, "without either bitterness or partiality from all motives to which he was far removed." By various acts, Mr. Shigenori has proved to be a shrewd and astute diplomat, a far-sighted statesman and a man of principles. He never accepted his cabinet post blindly. Whenever an offer of the portfolio of foreign minister was made to him, he would make it a point to have the assurance of the premier that he could have a free hand in running the foreign office without any interference from the military clique as the only condition before he could consider accepting this honored post. Most important of all, Mr. Shigenori was a great patriot with unusual moral courage. He had to fight the warlords as relentlessly as he had with the enemies of Japan from without. He will long be remembered by the Japanese people as one who best exemplified what a diplomat, statesman and patriot ought to be. All the sterling qualities of Mr. Shigenori had been put to a test during the darkest hour of the history of Japan. He had done everything humanly possible to avert a war. Japan's tragic end in defeat was a vindication of Mr. Shigenori's convictions. He died with a clear conscience. He did not fail as a foreign minister. But his country failed him by not adopting his foreign policy.