It is impossible fully to comprehend the significant ramifications of the great and successful gamble of India’s first general election without understanding a series of preceding events. Without these, Jawaharlal Nehru could not have taken the plunge. For, if adult suffrage was an article of faith with him, he was also convinced that he could not win the elections without first getting rid of the then Congress president, Purushottam Das Tandon, and bringing the party back to its moorings. An elderly and highly conservative Congress leader, Tandon belonged to Nehru’s hometown of Allahabad. As the prime minister said repeatedly, he had the “greatest affection and respect” for Tandon but had intense dislike for his “obscurantism”, “communalism”, “zeal for Hindi” and so on that were “opposed to the basic principles of the Congress”.

Since this was fully known to every Congressman of any consequence, Nehru was startled, in the summer of 1950, when Tandon became a candidate in the impending election of the Congress president. The other two contenders were Acharya Kripalani and Shankerrao Deo, a Gandhian from Maharashtra. Nehru considered all three of them “unsuitable” but his opposition to Tandon was vehement. He therefore wrote to Tandon a courteous, indeed cordial, letter asking him to withdraw his candidature. Only after Tandon had tersely rejected the unsolicited advice did Nehru realize that his bete noire had the powerful backing of Sardar Patel, deputy prime minister and the only near-equal Nehru ever had.    

This led to voluminous correspondence between Nehru on the one hand, and Patel as well as a host of other government and party leaders, including Tandon who he once addressed as “Priya Purushottam”, on the other. Acrimony soon entered these exchanges because of Nehru’s refrain that if Tandon, with his “increasingly communal” and “revivalist” line, were elected, “what use will I be to the Congress and the government”? After mulling his favourite remedy of offering his own resignation, he decided to fight. He virtually adopted Kripalani as his candidate, to Patel’s chagrin because this ran counter to the impression the prime minister had given his deputy.

... contd.