The Most unlikely Villain : Jawahar Lal Nehru

It would not matter what kind of mess they made – and they would make a mess, if they governed themselves, the people of India. They would probably make the greatest muddle possible.    — D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod

My legacy to India? Hopefully, it is 400 million people capable of governing themselves. — Jawaharlal Nehru

Different people hate him for different reasons. Not only these reasons are the outcome of hindsight, they are also mutually contradictory. In his work of appreciation and depreciation rather than of a dispassionate scholarship, Ramachandra Guha sums them up really well.  ‘For the BJP’, he says, ‘Nehru could not represent the ‘spirit of India’ because he did not subscribe to the right religion – indeed he subscribed to no religion at all’. And for the Lohiaite, his being unfit to rule was ‘proven by the fact that he stood apart, in class, culture, and language, from those he ruled over’. The Gandhian critique takes a different line of argument altogether. It contends that Nehru ‘despite being the Mahatma’s acknowledged heir ultimately betrayed his legacy. Where Gandhi fought for a country based on agriculture, a confederation of self sufficient village republics’. They see Nehru, ‘as having imposed a model of industrial development that centralised power in the cities by devastating the countryside’. Those who attack Nehru in the Mahatma’s name have argued forcefully that ‘planned industrialization has fueled both environmental degradation and social conflict, outcomes that could have been avoided if India had instead followed a ‘Gandhian’ approach to economic development’.

We have now Jana Sangh, now metamorphosed into Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and RSS actively attacking Nehru’s philosophy of secularism, which they claim is rested on the appeasement of the minorities and is responsible for all ethical conflicts in India, most notably, in Kashmir; so called Lohitias, no longer in power, attacks him for being upper-caste, upper-class and English speaking intelligentsia which they seek to replace.

To these Hindutvavadi, Lohiaite, and Gandhian critiques has now been added a fourth. They comes from my generation, supporters of economic liberalization and champions of market (in many ways like their elders who were champions of state) who point an accusatory finger at Nehru for not pushing the state up to the commanding heights of the economy. Without Nehru’s folly, they say, India, would long since have become a Tiger to beat all the other Asian Tigers. As a passionate free-marketeer remarked recently that Raj Krishan derisive phrase ‘the Hindu rate of growth’ should be renamed the ‘Nehru rate of growth.” These days we see newspapers and magazines scoffing at ‘Nehru socialist policies’ and the great hard it has done to their nation. Curiously, historian D. D. Koshami criticised Nehru for bringing capitalism to India in guise of socialism.

If such assault would be welcome by the BJP then, tacitly, Congress would not shy away from ignoring him either. For his own party has turned his back on him and do not make any use of his name or legacy. There is hardly any political capital left in his name.

Its easy to find fault with anyone from a bygone era when you have the benefit of hindsight. And its hard to imagine any political leader who did not make mistakes. Personally he has been a personality to cherish, even before I was educated by him through his books, the discovery of India and ‘Glimpse of world history’ . Remarkably both of these books were written when he was in prison with little resources at his disposal. When Glimpse… was published, New York Times reviewed this book by noting that "It is one of the most remarkable books ever written… Nehru makes even H.G. Wells seem singularly insular… One is awed by the breadth of Nehru’s culture."

Being a farmer by birth, my relationships with him are rather passionate. Most of us are not aware of what he did for us. Indians are generally very amnesic. Perhaps he was the last one in Indian politics who really cared about farmers; the one who could bring ninth schedule to make land reforms for him – "anything else can wait but agriculture." After doing my post graduation in one of the IIT’s makes this relationship passionate and reading what he wrote makes it rather personal.

Guha, sums up his life in the following phrase : ‘our once but not the future king‘. This blog has taken a lot of input from this remarkable essays as well as from his masterpiece, ‘India after Gandhi‘ and ‘The makers of modern India’. But in a blog-post does not look nice if littered with references.

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63 years have passed since our independence. In a country’s life, it’s a very long time. Sarvapalli Gopal wrote three volumes of biography of Nehru’s published in 1984. The last line of third and last volume of his biography runs, ‘He was India’s once – and we may hope – the future king’. By the time Gopal finished his studies, the image of Nehru was at its nadir. If we have to measure the depth for this nosedive, one may consider the works of Rajni Kothari. Those who knows the work of Kothari will not call him an admirer of Nehru. The essay I have on mind was published in Economic weekly in 1964. With Nehru’s memory fresh in his mind, he wrote of the late PM’sgreat unifying role’ in a difficult period of transition, ‘his shaping of institutions and procedure of democracies in a large, diverse, and newly independent country. Nehru, wrote Kothari, ‘give rise to pragmatic orientation to politics, taught leaders the art of managing men and institutions and based political solidarity on the complex mechanics of secular relationships rather than on neat notation of scarifies and transcendental nationalism.’ Moreover, he created an ideological consensus on the need to wed socialism with democracy, a consensus, Kothari clearly believed would last and render obsolete ‘the wholly artificial left-right dichotomy in our politics’. Dismissing talk of ‘end of an era’ with Nehru demise, the political scientist commented,‘Nothing has ended with passing away of Nehru : everything of the values he left are going to last.‘There could be no better memorial ‘to the recently deceased leader, he concluded, ‘than a continuous search for building further on the foundation he left behind and wherever necessary, improving upon them.’

Nehru must have dominated the moral, intellectual and political landscape of India. But after 67 years, Kothari assessment can now be seen wide off the mark. Guha says, ‘The ideological consensus Nehru nurtured has broken down as tendencies of left and right, far from being render obsolete, have emphatically reasserted themselves. No longer are political alliances built on the ‘complex mechanism of secular relationships.’ Rather, caste, religion, and ethnicity, ‘primordial’ ties as it were, are increasingly what bind political parties and movement. Again the values and procedures of democracies, which Nehru deeply cherished and upheld, have cast by the way wind. No one has worked on ‘building upon or improving’ the foundation he laid, though a good many have tried to destroy them. [ibid, pp 178].

Curiously enough, his supporters are only to be found in Marxist circles. So long as he lived, Marxist were unsparing in their criticism of Nehru,  ‘He is not made of the same fiber as for Lenin or Stalin’. This is changed because since He stands for public sector undertakings, and with Eastern Europe gone, these PSUs stands as flagship of socialism, to be defended to last.

Guha was told a tale by an old I.C.S. officer C. S. Venkatachar. One day in the mid nineteen fifties, shortly before he achieved superannuation, Venkatachar passed the prime minister in the corridors of the sectariat. ‘I say Venkatchar’, said Nehru. ‘I believe you are retiring soon. Have I given you a photograph of myself?’ The reply was in negative, so Nehru sent him a framed and inscribed photograph at once.