Negotiating Minority Concerns : Syed Mahmud, Congress, Community and the State

As the news of Jawaharlal Nehru’s death spread through New Delhi, one of the people it reached was an American graduate student named Granville Austin who was writing a thesis on the making of the Indian constitution and thus had a more than ordinary interest in what Nehru stood for. The next day Austin noted in his diary that ‘at Teen Murti house, among the many mourners, arrived Dr Syed Mahmud, a veteran freedom fighter who had been with Nehru at Cambridge and in jail.’ Austin further noted that ‘he saw a weeping Mahmud given a helping hand by Jagjivan Ram, a senior Congress politician and Cabinet minister of low-caste origin. This was truly a scene symbolic of Nehru’s India: a Muslim aided by an untouchable coming to the home of a caste Hindu.’