NEHRU, MOTILAL

NEHRU, MOTILAL (1861–1931), attorney and political leader, president of Indian National Congress (1919 and 1928). Motilal Nehru was the father of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; the grandfather of the third prime minister, Indira Gandhi; and great-grandfather of her son, the fourth prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi. One of British India's wealthiest and wisest lawyers, Motilal abandoned his life of Western luxury in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre at Amritsar in 1919 to follow Mahatma Gandhi's call for nonviolent noncooperation (satyagraha). That December, Motilal presided over India's National Congress, which met in Amritsar.

Motilal Nehru was less revolutionary, however, than either Gandhi or his own son, Jawaharlal, and he refused to boycott elections to India's new Legislative Councils following the enactment of Edwin Montagu's 1919 Government of India Act. Motilal joined forces with his Bengali barrister friend, Chitta Ranjan Das (1870–1925), to start their Swarajist (Freedom) Party in 1923, sponsoring Indian candidates to run for council seats in local elections, which Gandhi and his Congress disciples boycotted. The Swararjists did fairly well, but when their candidates won seats to provincial legislative councils, instead of supporting the British viceroy and his government, their strategy was to vote against and criticize every measure proposed by the government from within its own council chambers. Nehru and Das both knew the new viceroy Lord Reading, a jurist, well enough to argue with him personally, while Gandhi retreated to his rural ashram, spinning and weaving cotton, focusing his energies on village self-help as the best means of attaining self-rule (swaraj), or "freedom."

Soon after Das died in 1925, Nehru lost faith in the efficacy of the party they had founded, and before the end of his own life he returned to Gandhi's way. Together, they worked to revive Congress demands for changes leading to independence, too long ignored by British Tory indifference and arrogance. Nehru accepted for one last time the heavy burden of presiding over the Calcutta Congress in 1928. His own heart was weakening by then, but he went to Calcutta more to keep his only son from leaving the Congress in disgust and frustration. He sponsored Jawaharlal, with Mahatma Gandhi's support, to preside over the next Congress in Lahore, which resolved to call in December of 1929 for purna swaraj (complete freedom) from the British Raj in one year.

Motilal and Jawaharlal would both be back in jail, however, long before India's freedom was finally won. Yet by securing for Jawaharlal the helm of the Congress when he did, Pandit Motilal assured his son the first premiership of independent India, sixteen long years after his own death.

Stanley Wolpert

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nanda, B. R. The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal. New York: John Day, 1963.

Panikar, K. M., and A. Pershad, eds. The Voice of Freedom: The Speeches of Pandit Motilal Nehru. London: Asia, 1961.

Wolpert, Stanley. Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.