| |
Nehru bought this line of thought in totality. ‘Let Jinnah have Pakistan’, he declared: ‘By cutting off the head we will get rid of the headache.’ It was a moment in history when circumspection and discretion in making public utterances should have been the order of the day. A leader who was reckoned to be the future prime minister of India should have known that there was much to be gained by silence or at least in not making speeches that could easily be construed as a deliberate effort to renege. The fortunes of the country were in the balance, and one false or indiscreet move could upset them. Nehru chose this moment to launch into what his biographer, Michael Brecher, has described as ‘one of his more fiery and provocative statements in his forty years of public life’. Nehru certainly did not realize that he was telling the world that once in power the Congress would use its strength at the Centre to alter the Cabinet Mission Plan as it thought fit, not withstanding the fact that both the Congress and the League had accepted the Plan as a cut and dried scheme not open to alternations by either party. In one stroke Nehru had set in motion wheels that would destroy India. To conclude, it can be asserted that every human in this Universe has as amalgamation of positive and negative characteristic, including our great leaders like, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah… The way these leaders and the country acquired freedom by overcoming narrow communalism, racial and linguistic separation is a commendable feat. But seeing the other side of the coin, one is strained to feel that ‘Did Partition emanate with Freedom?’ Or was it the shortcoming of our great leaders. The book answers this and many other questions which are still unanswered.
ISBN : 8170492963
|
| |
|