Nehru had threatened to resign on several earlier occasions to have his way safe in the knowledge that people would back off.

If I agree, tomorrow they will ask for my blood.”įinding it difficult to resist pressure, Nehru played his old game of a threat of his own resignation. Nehru told Yashwant Rao Chavan who had come to Delhi to attend a meeting of the Chief Ministers: “You see, they want Menon’s blood. Not only that, Nehru was not even willing to remove the Defence Minister Krishna Menon. Mr Anthony Eden was forced out of office after the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956…” Mr Chamberlain was removed after Hitler invaded France in May 1940 with Cromwell’s classic plea, ‘For God’s sake, go’. “We must also learn that a democracy has no room for proven failures.

In any developed democracy the Government would have been replaced, instead of being allowed to continue in office and sit in judgement on their subordinates… “Instead of gracefully accepting responsibility for erroneous policies, the guilty men sought alibis and scapegoats. He did not even go through the motion of resigning he merely presented his trusted colleagues and military appointees as sacrificial offerings… “When the inevitable disaster came Nehru did not even have grace or courage to admit his errors or seek a fresh mandate from the people.

Wrote Brigadier JP Dalvi in his book ‘Himalayan Blunder’: Krishna Menon was reluctantly made the scapegoat. Menon was only a protégé of Nehru, did his bidding, and became Defence Minister only in 1957. Such was the ignorance of the opposition that Kriplani and others asked Nehru to take over the defence portfolio from Menon! The poor fellows had no idea that the disaster both in the foreign policy and in the defence was actually thanks to Nehru. Such was the economy practised in sharing information with the public, the media, and even the parliament, and such was the economy with truth in Nehru’s democratic India that the blame for debacle in the India-China War came not on Nehru, the principal person responsible, but on Menon.

Himalayan blunder by jp dalvi