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Thursday, May 27, 2004

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Remembering Jawaharlal

By Inder Malhotra

A 40th death anniversary tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru. In the multi-coloured pageant of modern Indian history, he marches a few steps behind the Mahatma but way, way ahead of everyone else.

OF THE numerous towering leaders of the second half of the twentieth century, few are remembered so respectfully as is Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first Prime Minister for 17 long and formative years, who passed into history exactly 40 years ago today. There could not have been a more eloquent tribute to his memory than that, just before his 40th death anniversary, the Indian people should have voted back to power the inheritors and upholders of his legacy that had been in the wilderness for eight years.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that for many years now there has been a campaign to denigrate Nehru, to hold him responsible for everything that is wrong with India today, and indeed to demonise him and the values he stood for.

This campaign of vilification has had two main sources. The first is the visceral hatred of Nehru on the part of those ideologically driven to dismantling his greatest achievement — the founding of a modern, democratic and secular Indian state committed to protecting and preserving the country's plurality and inclusiveness. In this venture, he may not have succeeded fully but he certainly did substantially (to borrow his own words used in a different context). His mentor, indeed master, Mahatma Gandhi, was India's liberator; Nehru was its moderniser.

The practice of secularism has never been perfect. Often enough lapses from it have been serious. But the bottom line is that the foundations of secularism and equality before the law that Nehru laid have withstood the worst of onslaughts on them. During the last six years, the Hindutva hotheads have done all they possibly could, with active help from some at least of those entrenched in the power structure, to convert this country into a "Hindu Pakistan." If they have failed, the credit goes primarily to Nehru. This has only accentuated the frustration and fury of his detractors.

In this context it is remarkable that when Andre Malraux, then France's Minister of Culture, had asked him what his "greatest difficulty" since Independence had been, Nehru's answer was "instantaneous." "Creating a just State by just means," he had said and then, after a brief pause, had added: "Perhaps, too, creating a secular state in a religious country. Especially when its religion is not founded on an inspired book."

The second source of Nehru-bashing is the utter ignorance about the country's recent history of the burgeoning younger generation that would never know what a privilege it was to live under his civilised rule. These innocent souls have apparently convinced themselves that the "joys of globalisation" would have reached them much earlier had Nehru not embarked on wrong-headed policies of socialism and egalitarianism. Some of his critics have gone so far as to denounce his essentially Fabian approach and constant quest for the middle path as `Stalinist'.

To say this is not to deny that even in his time, the then popular doctrine of state control of the "commanding heights" of the economy had started turning into the "licence-quota-permit Raj." But the reckless and ill-conceived expansion of the public sector — which became the breeding ground of political and bureaucratic aggrandisement, rank inefficiency and rampant corruption — took place later, largely during the watch of his daughter, Indira Gandhi.

Even so, Nehru's traducers have been able to do him little damage. Ironically, he has suffered more at the hands of those Nehruvians who went on building plastic pyramids in his honour but thought nothing of compromising his legacy with all kinds of communal elements, most deplorably with that Frankenstein's monster, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, in Punjab.

Sadly, Nehru too once blotted his copybook in this respect, which underscores that, like all human beings, he was not perfect but had his share of flaws, failings and foibles. In an uncharacteristic violation of democratic norms in July 1959, he dismissed Kerala's Communist Ministry, with Indira Gandhi, then Congress president, clamouring for "getting rid of the Reds." And then, in the ensuing State Assembly elections he acquiesced in the State Congress' alliance with the Muslim League. However, Nehru's fall from high standards in Kerala was an aberration, not part of a pattern.

In any case, it did nothing to diminish his fervour for safeguarding democratic values and strengthening democratic institutions, especially Parliament. No other Prime Minister has shown the national legislature the respect that he did. No wonder Parliament has lost much more besides its efficacy.

The paramount role that Nehru was to play after Independence had cast its shadow during the freedom struggle. In 1942, the Mahatma had appointed Nehru his "political heir," calling him the "jewel of India," and proclaiming that the nation would be "safe in his hands." Several senior leaders of the movement such as C. Rajagopalachari, better known as Rajaji, Sardar Patel, and Rajendra Prasad, had reservations. Nehru's socialism, they said, was a negation of the Gandhian vision of India "as a loose federation of half-a-million self-sufficient and largely self-governing villages." The Mahatma told them: "After I am gone, he will speak my language."

Nehru may have spoken Gandhi's language but he stuck to his resolve to industrialise the country and build a strong industrial, technical and scientific infrastructure. Urging his countrymen to develop a "scientific temper," he set up a network of high-class institutions of science and technology, including national laboratories, IITs and the superb atomic energy establishment. But for this pioneering work, India could not have become a "software superpower" and a nuclear weapons power.

To speak of Nehru's pre-eminence in the arena of foreign policy and as a major actor on the world stage would be to stress the obvious. But what a painful paradox it is that his worst failure was also in this very area. The collapse of his China policy that led to the brief but brutal border war in the high Himalayas in 1962 was catastrophic. It shattered not only his dreams of Asian solidarity but also national morale and Nehru himself. The remaining two years of his life turned into a tragic twilight period.

And yet it was during this period that Nehru reinvigorated the Congress through the instrumentality of the Kamaraj plan. More importantly, he made a last-ditch attempt to solve the Kashmir problem that is still with us. On April 8, 1964, Nehru released from a eleven-year imprisonment his old friend and Kashmir's tallest leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, and encouraged him to go to Pakistan and explore whether the Gordian Knot could be cut. Along with other colleagues, I was with the Sheikh. He secured from Ayub Khan an agreement on a mid-June summit between Nehru and the Field Marshal.

The next day Nehru died. To this day I cannot forget the deep and sincere sorrow and mourning that engulfed Pakistan. Those who had cursed Nehru a day earlier for having become an "obstacle" to a Kashmir settlement wept uncontrollably. It was a measure of both the complexity of the subcontinent and Nehru's unique place in it.

No feminist could have fought so hard for the emancipation of Indian women as Nehru did. Despite stiff opposition from his party as well as the Republic's then President, Nehru staked the future of his government on the Hindu Code Bill, the law that, for the first time, gave Hindu women the right to divorce and property. He later told The Guardian that he was sorry he could not do much for Muslim women because the community was not yet ready for reform.

There isn't enough space for discussing other facets of Nehru's life and work. So let me conclude by citing the summing up of Nehru by three prominent individuals, none of whom can be accused of being his uncritical admirer.

Dean Acheson, the U.S. Secretary of State during the Truman years, frankly confessed that he and Nehru were "not destined to be friends." But, he added, "India was so important to the world and Nehru so important to India that if he did not exist, then — as Voltaire said of God — he would have had to be invented."

At a time when the undivided Communist Party of India was hostile to Nehru, one of its leading lights, Hiren Mukerjee, wrote a biography of Nehru under the telling title, Gentle Colossus. Even so trenchant a critic as Nirad C. Chaudhuri described Nehru as "India's Ineffectual Angel." Niradbabu has a point that given his stature, authority and the people's adoration of him, Nehru could and should have been more effective than he was. But others point to the formidable obstacles he was up against.

India, for all its agonising faults, is a better place to live in because Nehru had lived. In the multi-coloured pageant of modern Indian history, he would march a few steps behind the Mahatma but way, way ahead of everyone else.

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