Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser, who first met in February 1955 in Cairo, were an unlikely pair. Nehru, now in his mid-60s, had spent seasons of his life championing a non-violent struggle for freedom. Nasser, youthful at 37, had led a young officers’ coup that deposed the Egyptian monarchy in July 1952. Nehru was a democrat and a man of thought. Nasser, in contrast, was forthrightly a believer in action – indeed, his only attempt at philosophising his revolution was effectively a repudiation of philosophising the revolution. The revolution, he argued, was driven by feelings and action, rather than deep underlying truths. Both would end up shepherding their countries for roughly the same number of years, eighteen. And both were similarly inclined with their socialistic approach to economy, a fascination for planning, a rationalist worldview, and a strong anti-imperial stance.
When Nasser left Cairo in early April 1955, he was the leader of an important country, by the time he arrived back in the Egyptian capital in early May, he had emerged as a world leader. Nehru played an important part in Nasser’s transformation. The two leaders met eight times between February and July 1955, cultivating a relationship that stood at the heart of the subsequent non-aligned movement
Nehru was parodied in the world press as either peeved, or pontificating, or patronising, as one Sri Lankan newspaper, The Nation, put it. Often, he could be all three together. But despite, and at times because of, these qualities, Nehru was a political giant on the world stage: several leaders, particularly from the ‘third world,’ looked up to and sought advice from him. Nasser’s confidant, ghostwriter and propagandist, Mohamed Heikal, defined the Nehru-Nasser relationship as a father-son bonding. In this first meeting in Cairo, Heikal recalled, Nasser took Nehru on an eight-hour cruise on the Nile just so the former could talk alone with the Indian Prime Minister. Nasser sat, metaphorically, at Nehru’s feet, indulging the latter on his propensity to wax eloquent on everything from philosophy to history to contemporary world politics. With Nehru, the Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito once jokingly said, everything started in BC!
