Once more, it must have sounded better in its original Hindustani. (Here is a try: ‘Usko rehné do, Ba, wo hum sabsé Ishwar ké nikat hai.’) It sounds evocative enough in English. What Gandhi meant was that as a person of decency and charm, a patriot of integrity and commitment, Nehru more closely approximated the moral virtues that men of faith often profess but less often practise.
II
It is safe to say that no modern politician had anywhere near as difficult a job as Jawaharlal Nehru’s. At Independence, the country he was asked to lead was faced with horrific problems. Riots had to be contained, food shortages to be overcome, princely states (as many as five hundred) to be integrated, refugees (almost ten million) to be resettled. This, so to say, was the task of fire-fighting; to be followed by the equally daunting task of nation-building. A Constitution had to be written that would satisfy the needs of this diverse and complex nation. An election system had to be devised for an electorate that was composed mostly of illiterates. A viable foreign policy had to be drafted in the threatening circumstances of the Cold War. And an economic policy had to be forged to take a desperately poor and divided society into the modern age.
No new nation was ever born in less propitious circumstances. Fortunately, Nehru had on his side a set of superbly gifted colleagues. His Cabinet included such men of distinction as Vallabhbhai Patel, B.R. Ambedkar and C. Rajagopalachari. They were helped by the remaining officials of the Indian Civil Service—the steel frame that was one of British colonialism’s unquestionable gifts to free India. They were also helped by the social workers; by women such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Mridula Sarabhai, Anees Kidwai and Subhadra Joshi, who resettled refugees, reunited families, and gave the Muslims who stayed behind in India a sense of safety and security.
For all the assistance he got, Jawaharlal Nehru was, as the elected prime minister, most responsible for the success or failure of his government’s policies. In the popular mind, it was Nehru who was most directly identified with the philosophy of the new nation state; with ideas such as democracy, non-alignment, socialism and secularism, ideas to which, in his writings and speeches, he gave such eloquent expression.
At this time, the mid-1950s, Nehru’s domestic reputation was as high as high can be. He came as close as anyone has, or ever will, to becoming the People’s Prince. He was Gandhi’s chosen political heir, and free India’s first freely elected prime minister. After the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, he towered among his colleagues in the Congress party. His vision of an independent, self-reliant India fired by steel plants and powered by dams was widely shared. He was seen as a brave man, who fought religious chauvinists; as a selfless man, who had endured years in jail to win freedom; and above all, as a good man. His appeal cut across the conventionally opposed categories of man and woman, low caste and high caste, Hindu and Muslim, north Indian and south Indian. Representative here are the recollections of a now-distinguished Tamil diplomat who grew up in the capital in the fifties. He told me that ‘to us Pandit Nehru was a great golden disc shining in the middle of New Delhi’.
A spectacular demonstration of the Indian people’s love for Jawaharlal Nehru was on display during the General Elections of 1952. In campaigning for candidates of the Congress party, Nehru covered the country from end to end. He travelled 25,000 miles in all: 18,000 by air, 5,200 by car, 1,600 by train, and even 90 by boat. A breathless party functionary later described this as comparable to the ‘imperial campaigns of Samudragupta, Asoka and Akbar’ as well as to the ‘travel[s] of Fahien and Hieun Tsang’.
In the course of the campaign, Nehru ‘travelled more than he slept and talked more than he travelled’. He addressed 300 mass meetings and myriad smaller ones. He spoke to about 20 million people directly, while an equal number merely had his darshan, flanking the roads to see him as his car whizzed past. Those who heard and saw him included miners, peasants, pastoralists, factory workers and agricultural labourers. Women of all classes turned out in numbers for his meetings.
This is how a contemporary account describes the interest in Nehru:
Almost at every place, city, town, village or wayside halt, people had waited overnight to welcome the nation’s leader. Schools and shops closed; milkmaids and cowherds had taken a holiday; the kisan and his helpmate took a temporary respite from their dawn-to-dusk programme of hard work in field and home. In Nehru’s name, stocks of soda and lemonade sold out; even water became scarce … Special trains were run from out-of-the-way places to carry people to Nehru’s meetings, enthusiasts travelling not only on foot-boards but also on top of carriages. Scores of people fainted in milling crowds.
No leader in modern times has enjoyed quite this kind of veneration. Thus, as Escott Reid, the Canadian high commissioner in New Delhi in the 1950s, remarked, Nehru was for his people the founder, guardian, and redeemer of the Indian nation state—Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt all rolled into one. Even the most hard-boiled sceptics were swayed by his charm and charisma. Consider this now-forgotten encomium by Nirad Chaudhuri, published in the Illustrated Weekly of India in the second week of May 1953, a year after Nehru and his Congress had won a comfortable victory in the first General Elections. The writer was (by this time) a moderately well-known Indian, but his subject still towered over him, as well as everybody else. Nehru’s leadership, remarked Chaudhuri, ‘is the most important moral force behind the unity of India’. He was ‘the leader not of a party, but of the people of India taken collectively, the legitimate successor to Gandhiji’. However, if ‘Nehru goes out of politics or is overthrown, his leadership is likely to be split up into its components, and not pass over intact to another man. In other words, there cannot, properly speaking, be a successor to Nehru, but only successors to the different elements of his composite leadership.’
As Chaudhuri saw it, the Nehru of the 1950s helped harmonize the masses with the classes. ‘Nehru is keeping together the governmental machine and the people, and without this nexus India would probably have been deprived of stable government in these crucial times. He has not only ensured co-operation between the two, but most probably has also prevented actual conflicts, cultural, economic, and political. Not even Mahatmaji’s leadership, had it continued, would have been quite equal to them.’
‘If, within the country, Nehru is the indispensable link between the governing middle-classes and the sovereign people,’ continued Chaudhuri, ‘he is no less the bond between India and the world.’ He served as ‘India’s representative to the great Western democracies, and, I must add, their representative to India. The Western nations certainly look upon him as such and expect him to guarantee India’s support for them, which is why they are so upset when Nehru takes an anti-Western or neutral line. They feel they are being let down by one of themselves.’
Nirad Chaudhuri always prided himself on his independence of mind, on being above (and ahead) of the herd. But even he could not escape the glow of the great golden disc then shining in the middle of New Delhi. It is noteworthy that Chaudhuri never allowed this essay to be reprinted, a fact which adds to the delight with which I excerpt it here.
Such, then, was Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation at its zenith; it is time now to move on to its nadir.
III
In my early days as an academic, I made the mistake of defending Jawaharlal Nehru in the smoky seminar room of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, off Lansdowne Road in south Calcutta. I was then very young, and my defence was weak and confused anyway. I can’t even remember what form it took (I most likely said that Nehru was a decent man, as politicians go). But it was enough to bring the roof down. I got snarls and dirty looks in the seminar room itself, and afterwards was set upon by my immediate boss, then a coming political scientist in his mid-30s (and now a scholar of world renown). This gentleman called a colleague into his study and, pointing to me, said: ‘Ei shala Jawaharlal Nehru shapotaar!’
To be a supporter of Nehru in a Marxist stronghold of those days is much li
ke someone now defending the emperor Babar in a shakha of that hard-core Hindu organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. For the Left, Nehru was a confused, weak-kneed idealist, full of high-flown rhetoric but without the will or wherewithal to take revolutionary action against the ruling classes. Indeed, the political scientist who chastised me had just then published an essay making this case at some length—here he also compared Nehru, unfavourably of course, to Lenin.
Truth be told, the first prime minister of free India was not exactly popular among non-Marxist circles in Calcutta either. The intellectuals mocked his second-class degree from Cambridge, while the brown sahibs pointed out that, unlike his close contemporary the Yuvraj of Cooch Behar, he had not even made the cricket First Eleven at Harrow. And of course, Bengalis of all stripes and ideologies lamented the accident of history which had placed Nehru, rather than their adored Subhas Bose, at the helm of the government of free India.
What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. An old cliché, which in this case turns out to be surprisingly true. For, Nehru has been, for some time now, the least liked of Indian politicians, dumped on from all parts of the political spectrum, in all parts of the land. As I know from experience, it is as risky a business to defend Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi or Mumbai in 2012 as it was to defend him in Calcutta back in 1982.
A future historian, assessing the decline and fall of Nehru in the Indian imagination, might reckon 1977 to be the watershed, the year in which the delegitimization of an icon began gathering pace. That was when the Janata government came to power, after thirty long years of Congress rule (and misrule). The Janata Party was forged in the prisons of northern India, by men jailed under the Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It brought together three disparate political groupings, united in the first instance by their opposition to Mrs Gandhi. These were the Hindu chauvinist Jana Sangh, the non-Communist (or Socialist) left, and the old style, so to speak, ‘Gandhian’ Congressmen.
The Janata Party is long dead, and its constituents have each gone their separate ways. Yet an examination of their political styles in the years since reveals that aside from the Emergency and Mrs Gandhi, these three political groupings (as well as the intellectuals who have supported them) were, and are, also united by their hatred of Jawaharlal Nehru.
Each of the Janata fragments has had its reasons for opposing Nehru and his legacy. The Jana Sangh, now metamorphosed into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), takes its cue from its mother organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which seeks to build a Hindu state in India. Following the RSS, the BJP trains its fire on Nehru’s philosophy of secularism, which they claim rests on the ‘appeasement’ of the minorities. Nehruvian ‘pseudo-secularism’ is said to have shown grave disrespect to Hindus while wantonly encouraging Muslims, this resulting in a wave of communal and ethnic conflict, not least in Kashmir.
By contrast, the non-Communist left takes its cue from the work of the brilliant, maverick intellectual Ram Manohar Lohia. Lohia took a PhD in political science from the University of Berlin, fleeing the city just as Hitler came to power. After his return he worked ceaselessly to root socialism in the cultural soil of India. Like Lohia, his modern-day followers—who exercise considerable influence in north India—have seen Nehru as the symbol of the upper-caste, upper-class, English-speaking intelligentsia that has held sway since Independence. This elite, they contend, has manipulated both political and economic power to its advantage, but to the detriment of the low-caste, non-English-speaking majority, whom the Lohiaites themselves seek to represent.
If for the BJP Nehru could not represent the ‘spirit of India’ because he did not subscribe to the right religion (indeed, to no religion at all), for the Lohia Socialists his unfittedness 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 altogether. It argues that despite being the Mahatma’s acknowledged heir, Nehru ultimately betrayed his legacy. Where Gandhi fought for a free India based on a confederation of self-sufficient village republics, Nehru is said to have imposed a model of industrial development that centralized power in the cities by devastating the countryside. Those who attack Nehru in the Mahatma’s name have forcefully argued that planned industrialization has fuelled both environmental degradation and social conflict, outcomes that could have been avoided if India had instead followed a decentralized or ‘Gandhian’ approach to economic development.
To the Hindutva, Lohiaite and Gandhian critiques has now been added a fourth. This comes from the supporters of economic liberalization, who point an accusatory finger at Nehru for insisting that the state play a dominant role in economic life. Without Nehru’s folly, they say, India would have long since become the biggest of the Asian Tigers. As a passionate free-marketeer remarked recently, Professor Rajkrishna’s derisive phrase, the ‘Hindu rate of growth’, should be renamed the ‘Nehru rate of growth’.
The criticisms of Jawaharlal Nehru now are vast and varied, so varied indeed that they contradict each other without fear of recognition. Just before the General Elections of 2004, the Delhi monthly National Review interviewed two stalwarts of the political firmament: Lal Krishna Advani, then home minister and deputy prime minister in the Government of India, for many years now the leading ideologue of the Hindu right; and Dr Ashok Mitra, the former finance minister of the Government of West Bengal, and a still-serving ideologue of the Marxist left. This, without first checking with one another, is what they said about Nehru’s practice of secularism:
Lal Krishna Advani: ‘We are opposed to Nehruvian secularism. We accept Gandhian secularism. Nehru started off with the assumption that all religions are wrong. For Gandhi, all religions are true, and they are different paths to the same goal. We thought many of Gandhi’s political policies were not sound, but we accepted his idea of secularism.’
Ashok Mitra: ‘Nehru turned the meaning of secularism upside down. Secularism, he thought, was embracing each religion with equal fervour. And which he exemplified by frequent visits to mandirs and mosques, to dargahs and gurdwaras, to churches and synagogues. But once you embark on this slippery path, you end up identifying the state’s activities with religious rituals such as bhumipuja and breaking coconut shells to float a boat built in a government workshop. This was inevitable because since Hindus constitute the majority of the state’s population, Hindu rituals came to assert their presence within state premises.’
Which of these assertions is correct? Did Nehru hate all religions equally, as Mr Advani suggests? Or did he love all equally, as Dr Mitra claims? Perhaps it does not really matter. Perhaps these statements tells us less about Nehru’s actual beliefs (or policies), and more about the political preferences of his contemporary critics. On the one side, there is Mr Advani, who considers ‘Hindutva’ the most promising political movement in modern India—and worries why it has not progressed further. Whom does he blame? Nehru. On the other hand, Dr Mitra considers Hindutva to be the most pernicious political movement in modern India—and is angry that it has progressed so far. And whom does he blame? Nehru.
It would be intriguing to develop the Advani/Mitra contrast in other directions. Consider thus their likely views on economic and foreign policies. Mr Advani probably thinks that the Nehruvian epoch was characterized by excessive state intervention; Dr Mitra certainly believes that the state did not intervene enough. Mr Advani holds that, in the formative decades of the 1950s, India aligned too closely with the Soviet Union; while Dr Mitra thinks that we did not cosy up to Moscow enough. Mr Advani must believe that Nehru did not do enough to promote the cause of the Hindi language; Dr Mitra most likely holds that he did too much.
For both Mr Advani and Dr Mitra, their political project is best defined negatively: as the repudiation of the economic and social philosophy of Jawaharlal Nehru. Lifelong political adversaries though they may be, the left-wing Indian and the right-wing Indian are joined in a lifelong fight agai
nst a common enemy—Father.
IV
Jawaharlal Nehru’s posthumous reputation brings to mind a remark of the nineteenth-century British radical, Edward Carpenter. Carpenter claimed that ‘the Outcast of one Age is the Hero of another’. He clearly had himself in mind, an environmentalist and prophet of sexual liberation ahead of his time. But the case of Jawaharlal Nehru shows that the opposite can equally be true. That is, the Hero of one age can very easily become the Outcast of another.
Why has Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation fallen so far and so fast? One reason is that as the first and longest-serving prime minister, he was in a unique position to shape his nation’s destiny. He did a great deal, but there is always the feeling that he should have done more—much more. And modern middle-class Indians are, as a rule, very judgemental, especially when it comes to passing judgement on dead politicians. As his biographer S. Gopal once pointed out, Nehru’s ‘very achievements demand that he be judged by standards which one would not apply to the ordinary run of Prime Ministers; and disappointment stems from the force of our expectations’.