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MAX DESFOR / AP PHOTO 
BROTHERS IN SPIRIT: India's founding fathers share a joke in Bombay in 1946

Gandhi & Nehru
They were opposite in nature, but they shared a passion for freedom and justice, and together created a giant of democracy

print article Subscribe email TIMEasia The 20th century produced many remarkable leaders, but few nations were blessed with a pair quite like India's Mahatma Gandhi and his protégé Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi was idealistic, quirky, quixotic and determined, a cross between a saint and a ward politician; like the best crossbreeds, he managed to distill the qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions. Nehru was a moody, idealistic intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy for the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat who had passionate socialist convictions; a product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over 10 years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely follower of the deeply spiritual Mahatma. Together they brought a nation to freedom and laid the underpinnings for the world's largest democracy.


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Gandhi was the extraordinary leader of the world's first successful nonviolent movement for independence from colonial rule. To describe his method, he coined the expression satyagraha—literally, "holding on to truth" or, as he variously described it, truth force, love force or soul force. He disliked the English term passive resistance because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive. You had to be prepared actively to suffer for truth. It was satyagraha that first bound Nehru to Gandhi, soon after the latter's return to India in 1915 from a long sojourn in South Africa, where his morally charged leadership of the Indian community against racial discrimination had earned him the sobriquet of Mahatma ("Great Soul," a term he detested).

Gandhi's unique method of resistance through civil disobedience, allied to a talent for organization, gave the Indian nationalist movement both a saint and a strategist. His singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected élite pursuing the politics of the drawing room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of India's suffering multitudes in whose name the upper classes were clamoring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India's political class, which consisted largely of maharajahs and lawyers—men of means who discoursed in English and demanded the rights of Englishmen.

Jun. 30, 1947
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To put his principles into practice, Gandhi lived in near-absolute poverty in an ashram and traveled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poor sanitation and child marriage, while also preaching an eclectic set of virtues from sexual abstinence and frequent enemas to the weaving of hand-spun cotton cloth. That he was an eccentric was beyond doubt. That he had touched a chord amongst the masses was equally apparent. That he was a potent political force soon became clear. He captured the imagination of the nation by publicly breaking English law in the name of a higher law ("the voice of conscience") and challenging the British to jail him.

Despite differences over both tactics (Nehru wanted independence immediately whereas Gandhi believed Indians had to be made ready for their own freedom) and philosophy (the agnostic Nehru had little patience for the Mahatma's spirituality), the two men proved a formidable combination. Gandhi guided Nehru to the political pinnacle; Nehru in turn proved an inspirational campaigner as President of the Indian National Congress, electrifying the nation with his speeches and tireless travel. Gandhi took the issue of freedom to the masses as one of simple right and wrong and gave them a technique to which the British had no response. By abstaining from violence Gandhi wrested the moral advantage. By breaking the law nonviolently he demonstrated the injustice of the law. By accepting the punishments imposed on him he confronted his captors with their own brutalization. By voluntarily imposing suffering upon himself in his hunger strikes he demonstrated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in defense of what he considered right. Gandhi's moral rectitude and Nehru's political passion made the perpetuation of British rule an impossibility.

Of course there was much more to Gandhism—physical self-denial, self-reliance, a belief in the human capacity for selfless love, religious ecumenism, idealistic internationalism, and a passionate commitment to equality and social justice. The improvement of his fellow human beings was arguably more important to him than the political goal of ridding India of the British. But it is his central tenet of nonviolence in the pursuit of these ends that represents his most significant original contribution to the world. Martin Luther King in the U.S., Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in Argentina, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma all sought inspiration from the Mahatma's teachings.

Oct. 17, 1949
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Upon Gandhi's assassination in 1948, a year after independence, Nehru, the country's first Prime Minister, became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of India's struggle for freedom. Gandhi's death could have led Nehru to assume untrammeled power. Instead, he spent a lifetime trying to instill the habits of democracy in his people—a disdain for dictators, a respect for parliamentary procedures, an abiding faith in the constitutional system. He himself was such a convinced democrat that, at the crest of his rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. "He must be checked," he wrote of himself. "We want no Caesars." During Nehru's 17 years as Prime Minister, democratic values became so entrenched that when his daughter Indira suspended India's freedoms with a State of Emergency for 21 months, she felt compelled to return to the Indian people for vindication, held an election, and comprehensively lost it.

While the world was disintegrating into fascism, violence and war in the 20th century, Gandhi taught the virtues of truth, nonviolence and peace. The principal pillars of Nehru's legacy—democratic institution-building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home and a foreign policy of nonalignment—were all integral to a vision of Indianness that sustained the nation for decades. Today, both legacies are fundamentally contested, and many Indians have strayed from the ideals bequeathed to them by Gandhi and Nehru. Yet they, in their very different ways, each represented that rare kind of leader who is not diminished by the inadequacies of his followers. The American editor Norman Cousins once asked Nehru what he hoped his legacy to India would be. "Four hundred million people capable of governing themselves," Nehru replied. The numbers have grown, but the very fact that each day over a billion Indians govern themselves in a pluralist democracy is testimony to the deeds and words of these two men.

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