Nehru's mind, moreover, was on most subjects an open mind as well as a full mind. He had his prejudices --- maharajas, Portugal, moneylenders, certain American ways, Hinduism, the whites in Africa -- and he used to get some illusions, such as about cooperative farming or about the progress in community development, or about certain persons; and he could be emphatic on a basis of insufficient knowledge; but in most things he was without dogmatism.
Only occasionally did his cocksureness take on rigidity. This quality was probably connected with his being a Brahmin, the caste to which belongs the custody of truth. His attack on the prime minister of Australia at the UN in 1961 was an example, though there were other factors behind that attack.
By nature he was intolerant of opposition; so much so that more than one of his senior collaborators considered him unteachable. At times he seemed the exemplar of Swift's dictum that the most positive men are the most credulous, for he could be taken in to a strange degree by people which men of far less perception would have seen through. But rigidity or obstinacy or credulousness ordinarily did not last long.
Image: With Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.
Buy Nehru, A Contemporary's Estimate by Walter Crocker
Also see: 'Nehru should have quit as PM in the late 1950s'
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