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Sunday, Jun 06, 2004

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Will Nehru's works see the light of day?

By Inder Malhotra

In the 41st year after Jawaharlal Nehru's death, the motivated assaults on his legacy can go on because they can do no harm. But the country must devote urgent attention to a seemingly minor but actually vital and completely ignored problem. It is the painfully slow pace of the publication of the `Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru', (SWJN), Second Series (Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund).

Given the towering role played by Nehru for so long, this series would have been invaluable under any circumstances. It is now the historian's and serious student's only source of getting a glimpse of the heavily protected secrets and classified documents of the Nehru era, as any researcher worth his salt would testify.

The cause of this scandalous state of affairs is the outrageous archival policy of every single Government that this country has had for whatever length of time. In essence, this policy is to sit tight on every scrap of paper bearing a classified stamp. Not a single secret document of significance has been declassified during the 57 years since the `tryst with destiny,' the 30-year rule or no 30-year rule. The world's largest democracy has become also the worst suppressor of the verities that are the stuff of history.

Rajiv's Initiative

If a personal note is permissible, let me report that in the second half of the Eighties, the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, graciously tried, not once, not twice but thrice, to give me "limited access" to some of Nehru's notings on national defence. On all three occasions, he was stymied by his supposed subordinates. His successor, V. P. Singh, promised to "overrule" the abominable no-men in the establishment. But he did not last long.

The experience of the distinguished retired diplomat, K. S. Bajpai, was even more bizarre. Rajiv Gandhi had told him that there would be "absolutely no problem" in allowing him to read the despatches he had himself sent from Beijing while serving as the Ambassador there. Some weeks later Mr. Bajpai was stunned when he received a letter from a Foreign Office underling informing him that his "request" to the Prime Minister "cannot be granted."

Incontrast, we have the testimony of the legendary American journalist, James Reston, that within a few years after the end of World War II, John Foster Dulles had declassified the entire set of the Yalta papers. He had then "personally handed over" a copy to "Scotty", as Mr. Reston was affectionately called.

No wonder then that in the dreadful darkness caused by the total blackout of all classified documents, here the only silver lining emanates from the SWJN. Hence the dismay over the snail's pace at which these works are coming out.

The first volume of this illuminating series was published shortly after Indira Gandhi's return to power in 1980. S. Gopal, eminent historian and Nehru's celebrated biographer, edited this and the 20 succeeding volumes when his health failed him. The responsibility then devolved on Ravinder Kumar, H. Y. Sharada Prasad and A. K. Damodran. All of them rendered yeoman service, as indeed would Mushirul Hasan, just appointed the series' editor as well as the Vice-Chancellor of Jamia University in Delhi.

However, the end result has been that after the publication of 32 volumes, the story has reached only the third quarter of 1956. One reason for this is surely that the great man was so prolific on almost every subject that a volume of over 600 pages can at most take his writings (selected, not collected) for three months. Twenty-four years have already elapsed. Must another quarter of a century be allowed to pass by before the last volume of Nehru's selected works is published? By then, the generation that formed Nehru's battalions would have passed on.

Surely, the work on the project can be accelerated manifold, especially now that a Congress-led Government is back in the saddle. In this connection, the experience of the publication of the `Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi' should prove both instructive and useful.

Disastrous years

The first few years of this project, too, were disastrous. A former Governor, appointed General Editor, waged a long and frustrating struggle about the status he would have, the salary he would get and the office and staff to which he was entitled. Consequently, over long years only three volumes saw the light of day. Then someone gave Nehru an inspired idea - to assign the task to the highly respected Professor K. Swaminathan. He immediately came from Chennai, accepted the responsibility and produced 94 volumes of the Mahatma's works in record time without allowing the quality of publication to suffer one whit. At the time of the Emergency, Indira Gandhi had to restrain some of her overzealous acolytes who were suspicious of the "finicky" professor's presence in Delhi.

All that is left for me to add is that when offered whatever terms he wanted, Prof. Swaminthan asked just two things. A salary of Rs 1,000 a month; and a small government quarter close to the depository where the Mahatma's papers were, so that he could walk to work and did not need an office car.

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Will Nehru's works see the light of day?