Ironically, having let the genie out of the bottle, Nehru got greatly depressed. What “filled him with dismay” was the selection of Congress candidates that he described as “disgusting”. What got his goat were the “cliques”, “bossism”, the “scramble” and “lack of organisation”. In separate letters to Krishna Menon, Vijayalakshmi and several others, he gave expression to his anger and frustration. To Edwina Mountbatten he wrote: “More and more I hate this election business, more especially the choosing of candidates... My dominant urge and desire today is somehow to reach the middle of February. Meanwhile, the intervening period is a nightmare.” When Morarji Desai objected “on principle” to his proposal not to put up Congress candidates against two Socialist leaders, Acharya Narendra Dev and Kamaladevi Chattopadhaya, Nehru shot back: that the Congress could hardly talk of principles when so many of its members were “snarling” for selection and “third-rate individuals were being chosen on grounds of caste and sub-caste. I have felt recently as if I was in a den of wild animals”.

His gloom vanished, however, once he embarked on electioneering and felt invigorated by the response to him of masses wherever he went. In all, he covered 25,000 miles by plane, train and car and addressed nearly 35 million people or a tenth of the country’s population at that time. I was lucky to be included in his press party on two occasions. After reporting that he began his day at six in the morning and ended it late at night, that surging crowds on both sides of road waited for hours to have a glimpse of him, and that he made at least six speeches of about 90 minutes each every day, I had added — rather impertinently for a rookie reporter — that, in fact, the prime minister made the “same speech at six different places, enjoining on the people national unity and secularism and vigorously condemning communalism”.

... contd.