Panditji would never have believed that the Indian children
who grew up after his time would create an unseemly wrangle on Chacha Nehru’s
125th birth anniversary, and that too for party political gains. The
Congress Party refused to invite BJP ministers in power to their international
seminar to commemorate his memory, and Sonia Gandhi attacked her opponents for
trying to defame him. She seated CPM leader, Prakash Karat, next to Rahul
Gandhi, rewriting history in her turn, to obliterate Nehru’s highhanded
dismissal of the democratically elected Namboodiripad’s communist government of
Kerala in 1959 – a peaceful forerunner to the violent American toppling of
Allende’s government in Chile in 1973. The BJP in its turn has promised to
erect a pharaohic statute of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, and absorb Nehru into its
own pantheon of dead minor leaders. Despite Narendra Modi’s emphasis that
Gandhiji’s non-violence included verbal non-violence, his supporters have been
extremely vituperative about India’s first prime minister. The worst offenders
have been the NRI-PIO crowd, who suffering from the well-known expat syndrome,
have at the same time absorbed the rude manners of American rednecks.
The Indian nouveau-riche seems to hate Nehru’s aristocratic
lineage the most. There is a story that his fabulously rich father, Motilal
Nehru, slept on the floor for the first time when his son was arrested, to
experience what Jawaharlal was going through. He was descended from Kashmir
pundits who had been ministers to the Moghul emperors, and he had added to his
wealth by becoming a leading barrister of his time. Jawaharlal had English
governesses, and had gone to Harrow and then to Trinity College, Cambridge. It
is true that he received a third, which Englishmen of his class considered a
‘gentleman’s degree,’ the second being reserved for swots who took up
professions, and the rare first for intellectuals who really did not ‘belong.’ What
stands to his imperishable credit is the fact that unlike maharajahs and the
other colonised elite of the Empire he did not waste his life in luxurious
frivolities, but appalled at the great difference between English liberal
precept and practice plunged headlong into the turbulent politics of the
freedom movement, under the ascetic leadership of the Mahatma. No two men could
have been more different from each other, in belief, taste, or upbringing, but
their comradeship over the difficult decades speaks volumes for their devotion
to their country. Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India’ was a real life experience, like
Gandhiji’s ‘Autobiography,’ and these two books alone show that India was lucky
to find two such leaders of the independence movement, with such natural
inherent honesty. Many cunning leaders and dissemblers followed who served the
country well and ill, but none who laid bare their souls so trustingly to their
fellow compatriots.
Even before the Mountbattens cleverly manipulated the
leaders, and pushed through an early Partition that suited Britain, and which
even Jinnah did not wish for, Gandhiji had decided that Nehru would be the
leader of independent India. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had produced a formula for
the Constituent Assembly which might have avoided partition and which,
surprisingly, was acceptable to Jinnah, for it gave autonomy to the regions
that ultimately became West and East Pakistan. Nehru, unused to the processes
of political bargaining, quibbled at giving Muslims 33% representation in
parliament when they were only 25% of the population. Jinnah broke off the parley
and events escalated towards final break up of India.
Nehru’s differences with Gandhiji go back to the 1920s, and
the Mahatma, whose ‘spiritual son’ he was, even asked Nehru to oppose him
publicly if he held such diametrically opposed views. Nehru was a modernist,
enamoured of the successes of the United States and the Soviet Union alike. He
was in a hurry to build the large-scale ‘temples of modern India,’ the big
dams, the giant-owned state corporations. He fatally discounted Gandhi’s
carefully worked out village economics strategy. By hindsight we see that Mao
Zedong had a similar model which boosted rural people’s associations and
self-confidence, contributing to China’s fantastic growth years later. The
euphoria created by the initial success of India’s First Year Plan was a tide
that carried Nehru, his planners, and the coterie behind him headlong towards
bottlenecks and stagflation, the causes of which were economically deciphered
only a few years after Nehru’s death by Gunnar Myrdal in his monumental ‘Asian
Drama.’ Had the Mahatma lived, India might have been spared decades of poverty,
neglect of rural economies, and a widening class divide, but a Brahmin bigot
ended that precious life on the morrow of independence, and Patel immediately
banned the RSS as the originator of that evil.
Nehru was in reality an Englishman of his class and era and
was unable to see through the dissembling self-serving obsequiousness of the
Congress satraps who gained local power under his magnanimous leadership. Had
Sardar Vallabhai Patel lived in the 1950s, with his shrewd sense of political
reality, he would have weeded out all the corruption that became the party’s
hallmark of operation in the decades to come. Thus, even before the First Plan
became reality India lost that crucial fellowship of leaders that had brought
her freedom. The Maulana was gracefully secluded from power politics as ‘the
father of learning,’ and Rajagopalachari who might have held the central ground
of the party was forced to start the inconsequential Swatantra Party of
maharajahs and business tycoons.
Nehru’s gaze turned outward, towards the new comity of
post-war nations, where he yearned to play a role which he believed he was
uniquely fitted for. He was to quote Bernard Shaw’s famous lines: ‘This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized
by yourself as a mighty one.’ The war-torn world needed a mediator – who
better than a son of the land of the Buddha? He left his party to decay; and
rural India to stagnate. That other great modernist, Dr. Ambedkar, who
understood the plight of the poor and disinherited people, was also soon dead,
and there was none left to focus Nehru’s attention on the internal plight of
the nation. Despite the nominal introduction of the Panchayati Raj Institutions
in the late 1950s the people were to be ruled hierarchically from the top.
Rajagopalachari and Patel were able administrators, and they would have seen
the dangers of allowing the new country to be ruled by ‘brown sahib’
bureaucrats, which Gandhiji had warned against, but Nehru was naturally at ease
with them and refused to change the old inherited system.
An aesthete and intellectual liberal, he fronted
the non-aligned movement with engaging naivety, refusing to recognize that on
the one hand he faced cynical Russians, who made use of his admiration for
socialism, and on the other the dangerously blinkered John Foster Dulles who,
like Hitler before him, was very willing to plunge the world into catastrophe
to have his way. Mendes-France and Adenauer were busy in post-war
reconstruction, the ‘little Englander’ Atlee disliked Indian nationalists, and
Churchill, who acknowledged Nehru as an equal in his class, would have no wish
to support him. All his international efforts came to nothing very much.
It was also his innate sense of decency and
liberalism that made him stumble into the Kashmir quagmire. It is tragic that
this blunder by a good man has helped neither India nor Pakistan, and least of
all the suffering people of Kashmir. It is equally tragic that the idealist who
blamed the British for bombing insurrectionary tribal villages in the North
West should have been forced in turn to order the bombing of insurgents in the
North East! Perhaps, his greatest mistake was to condescend towards the Chinese,
who secretly held the colonised bourgeoisie in contempt. Swayed by the oratory
of Krishna Menon, and peevish with creeping old age, he unthinkingly led India
into a losing war with China in 1962.
Gandhi’s bright hero, whom he compared to Chevalier
Roland ‘sans peur et sans reproche,’
died a suddenly broken man, leaving his country without leadership and in
economic shambles, needing to import ten million tonnes of food grains a year
to stave off famine. Almost without his knowledge he had groomed his daughter
well, and she, called a ‘gungi gudiya’
by the selfish old guard, seized power like a reborn Catherine the Great and
brought India out of dangerous times, though none may forgive her for the
period of Internal Emergency and its criminal excesses, or the brutal Operation
Bluestar and its equally tragic aftermath.
The powerful stream of politics during the
critical years of the earlier part of the 20th century threw up many
great leaders in India, and they were all contenders for the supreme post of
the first prime minister. A present-day historian, comfortably ensconced in his
chair, can idly speculate what might have happened if someone else had taken Nehru’s
place, even as GM Trevelyan wondered what would have happened in Europe if
Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo. What is important to remember is that
Nehru’s contemporaries and close associates saw him as the unopposed leader,
beloved of all Indians, and they were willing to support him unflinchingly. He
had many failings, as all men have, but these were inextricably derived from
his personality, from the man he was. What he left India with, what all his
associates valued, Gandhi, Patel, Azad, Ambedkar, Rajagopalachari among others,
was a firmly entrenched democratic form of governance, secular and socialist,
taking affirmative action on behalf of disadvantaged communities, with strong
legal measures to do away with traditional injustices, and a society with
modern values for scientific, economic growth, which nevertheless continued to
cherish its rich multicultural heritage. No one could ask for more. Few
countries achieved as much.
Vithal Rajan
Hyderabad
vithal.rajan@gmail.com
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