Ratan Kumar Nehru

R. K. Nehru (right) with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (center) and Rajpramukh Man Singh II of Rajasthan (left)

Ratan Kumar Nehru, or R.K. Nehru, (10 October 1902 – 2 April 1981) was an Indian civil servant and diplomat. He served as India's Foreign Secretary from 1952 to 1955.

Biography

Ratan Kumar Nehru was born in 1902 at a time when the Nehru family was yet unknown to the public and the surname had no social or political cache. However, the Nehrus were an educated, affluent and influential family belonging to the high-caste Kashmiri Brahmin community. Ratan Kumar's father, Mohanlal Nehru, was the son of Nandlal Nehru, who was the Diwan (First Minister) of the princely state of Khetri in present-day Rajasthan. Nandlal's younger brother, Motilal Nehru, was at that time an affluent barrister with a well-established practise at the Allahabad High Court. Motilal had been a posthumous child, and has been raised by Nandlal at his expense in his household. Motilal's son Jawaharlal, future prime minister of India, was therefore always deferential not only towards his much older uncle Nandlal but also towards his cousin Mohanlal, father of Ratan Kumar. Ratan Kumar Nehru was thus a first-cousin-once-removed of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Ratan Kumar grew up in an extremely westernized and highly anglophile ambience, where British rule in India was in fact approbated and hailed as a providential blessing on India and a civilizing influence on her socially backward masses. He received an elite English education, rare in India at that time, which accentuated this outlook and prepared him for service in the higher levels of the colonial government. After finishing school, he travelled at vast expense to England to prepare for the Indian Civil Service examination, which was the pinnacle of elitism in those days. He passed the exam and duly joined the civil service, where he continued to rise in the ranks of the colonial administration during all the decades when his cousin Jawaharlal Nehru held a leadership role in the Indian freedom movement.

India became independent in 1947 and Jawaharlal Nehru became its first Prime Minister. The country needed to develop a corps of diplomats to man its embassies across the globe and formulate a fresh foreign policy. Jawaharlal Nehru looked first and foremost to his own family (including his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit, his cousin Braj Kumar Nehru and his nephew Ratan Kumar Nehru) to help in this process, which was aimed at burnishing his own image abroad (in the west) in a way that would enhance his own personal image and prestige on the world stage, and make him look larger than life and indispensable. This exercise would also vastly enhance Jawaharlal's political cache within India, where the tendency still prevailed of accepting the judgment of the western world in all matters; if the west (especially England) approved of Nehru, well, he must be good.

Ratan Kumar Nehru, as a close relative of Jawaharlal, was entrusted with many important assignments in pursuance of these objectives. He was sent as ambassador to several countries in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1952, just at the time when Jawaharlal Nehru won the very first election held in free India and took office as an elected Prime Minister (he had been an unelected, nominated Prime Minister since 1946), he appointed his cousin Ratan Kumar Nehru as secretary-general of the Indian Ministry of foreign affairs (a position now known as "Foreign Secretary of India"). He was only the second person to hold this position, and he remained in that office for three years, until 1955. During 1955-58, he was the Indian ambassador to China and to the United Arab Republic during 1958-60.