Making A Tryst With Nehru

By Pavan K Varma
History gives people the privilege of hindsight. Hindsight is often over generous or unfairly dismissive. The 'curious' case of Jawaharlal Nehru's legacy on his 125th birth anniversary, which some wish to celebrate and others don't, is a case in point.

BJP's attempt to selectively appropriate or denigrate leaders who Congress has always believed are part of its exclusive and proprietary pantheon, is at the heart of this controversy. For decades, Congress privileged Nehru and his biological prime-ministerial descendants over any other personality, both within their party and outside.However, Narendra Modi's counter attempt to create a parallel iconography by appropriating Sardar Patel and downplaying Nehru is equally suspect.

The consequence is that Congress did not attend the official genuflections at the site of the future Sardar Patel statue in Gujarat, while BJP did not think it necessary to join Congress in making Nehru's 125th commemoration a national celebration. Citizens are mute spectators to this bizarre battle between political 'owners' and 'trespassers'.

I believe Nehru's legacy can be objectively discussed. True he had his faults.But nobody can deny that he laid the ideological foundations of our young Republic in its formative years through his passionate commitment to democracy , secularism, socialism, non-alignment and promotion of a scientific temper of mind.

Many of these achievements are scoffed at today. Democracy is taken for granted, without most people understanding that it required unwavering faith in its relevance by our first prime minister to ensure its survival. In a society where hierarchy had almost religious sanction for millennia, the fact that we are proud today to be the world's largest democracy is, undoubtedly, a tribute to Panditji.

As a professed agnostic, Nehru was not a great believer in religions. He wrongfully associated all religions, and in particular Hinduism, with prejudice, superstition and mechanical ritual. This approach was at variance with Mahatma Gandhi who, even as a practicing Hindu, was devoutly pious to all religions.

But whatever the differences in their personal attitudes, both Gandhiji and Nehru considered it an article of faith that all religions in India should be respected and the state should be above religious bias. Nehru understood, as the country's first top executive, the pragmatic rationale for this.

In 1948, in one of his first letters to chief ministers, he wrote: "We have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else. They have got to live in India. This is the basic fact about which there can be no argument."

The plurality and unity of India, about which well-informed Cassandras had genuine doubts in 1947, has a direct co-relation to this clear mindedness.

Socialism is now considered, like secularism, almost a dirty word. But leaders have to be judged by the circumstances of their time, not subsequent distortions. The relevance of socialism essentially meant a belief that the State must intervene to ensure that the fruits of economic development reach the poor and marginalised.

Few can doubt that such an approach was relevant for a country like India where economic inequality was pervasive and fighting poverty and hunger was the first priority of the government. The fact that subsequently State intervention led more to the infamous 'inspector raj' and less to alleviation of poverty should not lead us to doubt Nehru's intentions. Leaders can be wrong; they cannot be clairvoyant.

Nehru's obsession with modernity, including cultivation of a 'scientific temper of mind', can be faulted for being too influenced by western categories.This led him to dismiss large chunks of our history as 'deadwood of the past'. He carried the so-called notion of westernised modernity to unacceptable levels of impatience with our own cultural idioms, leading to mimicry and hypocrisy.


The writer, a former diplomat, represents JD(U) in Rajya Sabha.