Jawaharlal
Nehru -- 40 Years After
By Niranjan Ramakrishnan
30 May, 3004
Indogram.com
It
was afternoon in India, forty years ago on May 27, 1964, when news came
of Jawaharlal Nehru's death. Few things have stunned India in a similar
manner, before or since. For seventeen years, the Prime Minister had
led India with a mixture of vision, charm, bombast -- and some tilting
at windmills. Since he fostered a democracy, there were plenty of people
to criticize his policies, but it was clear that everyone, including
his detractors, liked him personally.
It was an expansive
era in Indian politics when Nehru reigned. Indian political parties
were yet to become as venal as they have since, and because most were
offshoots of the Congress, the standard-bearer of the Freedom Movement
under Mahatma Gandhi, there was an element of collegiality even in the
fiercest debates in Parliament. Almost everyone who has lived through
that era remarks how parliamentary debates meant something in those
days, unlike the chair-throwing and slipper-waving spectacles for which
Indian legislatures have become world-renowned in the recent past. Indeed
it is the era itself, of greater courtesy, generosity and gallantry,
that many miss most when they reminisce about the Nehru age.
Nehru's achievements
were many, as were his failures. For good or bad, however, his foundations
shaped the India we see today.
For the thousands
of engineers, doctors and scientists that India turns out today, we
have the huge investments Nehru made in primary and higher education
to thank. When we look at India's gigantic and rambunctious press --
not always readable but unquestionably free, we once again must acknowledge
Nehru's faith in, and implementation of, plurality in governance. When
India exploded the bomb in 1998, then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee
paid tribute to Nehru's foresight in setting up the Atomic Energy Commission.
In just two-and-a-half years after freedom, India had a constitution.
This month, India just finished her fourteenth general elections. This
functioning democracy is, in many ways, as much a product of Nehru's
architecture as it is of India's unique non-violent struggle to wrest
freedom from Britain.
Critics will point
to the growing disparity between the rich and the poor, the conspicuous
consumption habits of the Indian elite, the spreading culture of waste,
the depredation of the forests, the nexus between organized crime and
the political class, the continuing problem of Kashmir, the scourge
of pervasive and ever-expanding corruption, a bloated government bureaucracy,
all growing out of Nehru's grandiose schemes, his blind faith in the
western-socialist model of industrialization and central-planning, his
turning away from Gandhi's prescriptions of simple living and focus
on economies, and Nehru's own romantic notions, far removed from realpolitik.
And both would be
right. But merely to conclude, therefore, that his legacy is mixed,
would be to miss the wood for the trees. For, while most of Nehru's
positive contributions are directly attributable to him, his negative
contributions were, to a large degree, inchoate in his time, accentuated
more by his successors, chiefly his daughter Indira and grandson Rajiv,
both of whom acquired a reputation far less unsullied than their illustrious
progenitor -- Indira for introducing her particular brand of Willie
Horton politics where everything was in play if it could win that extra
seat in Parliament -- and Rajiv for interfering in the Shah Bano case
and his mischief at the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, thus lending a legitimacy
to the politics of communalism of the just-deposed BJP.
Nehru ruled for
seventeen years -- he was prime minister from the day of India's independence
till the day he died. There was never a direct challenge to his leadership,
and his party's position in parliament, though steadily declining in
the three elections during his lifetime, was always a majority. He was
considered indispensable, for he was a figure above everyone else in
the polity. The people of India adored him personally - his elite background
and his pompous ways notwithstanding, he could connect with the common
man's heart through some magic which can only be compared to the appeal
Kennedy wrought in America.
He was in every
way a remarkable personality (see, A Stroke of Good Fortune).
When Nehru died,
an British newspaper wrote that "hereafter, India will be ruled
by an Indian", meaning that he was the last Englishman to rule
India. (Something Indians might reflect upon when they were outraged
by his grandson Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi, an Indian citizen of Italian
origin, daring to dream of becoming India's prime minister).
On this last matter,
I've tried to imagine what Nehru, a lifelong opponent of colonial rule,
would think of a white woman presiding over a nation of 1 billion brown,
black and yellow people. I like to think that he would treat her as
just another Indian, deserving to be judged on her own merits, not on
her origins. However, he did have an eternal answer to such conundrums
(I paraphrase), "He who tries to predict the India of tomorrow
would be a bold man. He who would predict the India of the next century
would be a mad man."