Shashi Tharoor Quotes
Five decades ago, as India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began visibly ailing, the nation and the world were consumed by the question: 'After Nehru, who?' The inexpressible fear lay in the subtext to the question: 'After Nehru, what?'
Tharoor, Shashi. Nehru: The Invention of India. Arcade Publishing, 2003.
This is another example of how President Roosevelt conducted his own international diplomacy independent of his own State Department. At the time, the U. S. State Department would not have any contact with Nehru who was in and out of British Indian jails for his anti-Colonial agitating. Roosevelt, however was a great admirer of Nehru and the Congress party and the commitment to democracy, freedom of religion, speech and the press and civil rights. Roosevelt and the American military strategic leaders were beginning to worry that China, even with help, would not be able to hold off the Japanese aggression, and India would become a frontier for the Allied war effort. The President realized that Nehru and his Congress Party were pressuring England for independence and extreme Indian nationalists were advocating non-support of the British military effort and strikes and protests to bog down the British army dealing with them instead of fighting the Japanese in Burma and elsewhere. There were a large number of Indian Brigades fighting for the British and if the Indian military volunteers were to be discouraged or boycotted, the allied war effort would suffer. So the President's style was to personally see what he could contribute over and above (and often to the distress of) his agencies established to do the job.
Churchill, out of power at that time, was outraged that the Labour government was about to grant India self-government and independence removing half of the British Empire which he revered. His passion for maintaining the empire was so extreme that it affected his usual great powers of political analysis and prediction. The Congress Party Leaders led India to become the largest democracy the world had ever known, and leaders like Nehru and Gandhi became almost as famous and remembered as was Churchill himself.
After Rudolf Hess was found missing, Hitler and others presumed he had become mentally instable and had been seeking a peace agreement with the Allies.
Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician, writer and former international diplomat who has been serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He was formerly Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and contested for the post of Secretary-General in 2006.
