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The Fate Of (Secular) India 50 Years After Jawaharlal Nehru

By Sukumaran C. V.

25 May, 2014
Countercurrents.org

May 27, 2014 marks the 50th death anniversary of India’s first Prime Minister who is the prime architect of our secular democracy.

“[The] combination of politics and of religion in the narrowest sense of the word, resulting in communal politics is—there can be no doubt—a most dangerous combination and must be put an end to. It is clear that this combination is harmful to the country as a whole….so far as the Government is concerned…we should function …to give a lead to the country in this matter, so that the country may realize as clearly as possible that the only right way for us to act is to do away with communalism in its political aspect in every shape and form.” Thus spoke Jawaharlal Nehru in a speech delivered at the Constituent Assembly on April 3, 1948.

If India still survives as the largest democracy in the world, it is because of the inherent strength of our democracy and for that strength we owe greatly to Jawaharlal Nehru. But we have never been able to understand our first and only visionary PM and therefore we failed to emulate and strengthen the secular democracy we have inherited from him. India ‘seemed a strange and bewildering land’ to Nehru. And if he happens to see the India today, it will seem to him a stranger and more bewildering land with his secularism falling apart and democracy controlled by the corporate giants. Nehru wrote in An Autobiography:

“I felt lonely and homeless, and India, to whom I had given my love and for whom I had laboured, seemed a strange and bewildering land to me. Even with my closest associates I felt that an invisible barrier came between us. The old world seemed to envelop them, the old world of past ideologies, hopes and desires. India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else, and Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and others take pride in their faiths and testify to their truth by breaking heads. The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India and elsewhere has filled me with horror, and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests.” (Chapter 47, What is Religion?)

Nehru knew full well that ‘nationalism covers many sins and includes many conflicting elements’ and believed that ‘nothing is more absurd than to imagine that all the interests in the nation can be fitted in (it) without injury to any.’ He saw the ‘vital conflict between the possessing classes as a whole and the others; between the haves and have-nots’ and his sympathies were always with the have-nots. He wrote in his Autobiography (first published in 1936): “Our final aim can only be a classless society with equal economic justice and opportunity for all, a society organized on a planned basis for the raising of mankind to higher material and cultured levels, to a cultivation of spiritual values, of co-operation, unselfishness, the spirit of service, the desire to do right, goodwill and love—ultimately a world order. Everything that comes in the way will have to be removed, gently if possible, forcibly if necessary.” (Chapter 63, Conversion or Compulsion)

And in the above mentioned speech in 1948, he said: “We talk about democracy and unity and all that and I hope we shall rapidly have more and more democracy and more and more unity in this country. Democracy is not purely a political affair. The nineteenth century conception of democracy, that is, each person having a vote, was a good enough conception in those days, but it was incomplete and people think in terms of a larger and deeper democracy today. After all there is no equality between the pauper who has a vote and the millionaire who has a vote. There are a hundred ways of exercising influence for the millionaire which the pauper has not got. After all there is no equality between a person who has tremendous educational advantages and a person who has had none.”

Do we have more and more and deeper democracy today, 65 years after Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about a more and deeper democracy and 50 years after the demise of Nehru? Everybody knows that we can answer the question only in the negative. It is unfortunate that there is nobody in our present political landscape even to think in terms of a deeper democracy, let alone speak about it.

The picture of India in 1948 in the words of Nehru: “Now it is patent in India today that there are huge differences between certain groups, classes and individuals. There is a big hiatus between those at the top and those at the bottom. If we are to have democracy it becomes necessary and essential for us not merely to bridge that gap but to lessen it very greatly.”

50 years after Nehru and 65 years after independence, have we succeeded even to bridge the gap? According to UNESCO’s EFAGMR (Education for All Global Monitoring Report) 2013/14,Teaching and Learning: Achieving quality for all, India occupies the first place in the list of 10 countries that account for 72 per cent of the global population of illiterate adults. India’s share is 287 million!

And we are not going to bridge the huge hiatus between the rich and the poor or to eradicate poverty and illiteracy; but we are going to destroy our already devastated Environment in the name of ‘development’ and to have bullet trains and more airports and bigger statues!!

As Jawaharlal Nehru said in the speech, “we must have it clearly in our minds and in the mind of the country that the alliance of religion and politics in the shape of communalism is a most dangerous alliance, and it yields the most abnormal kind of illegitimate brood.”

But we failed to have 'it clearly in our minds and in the mind of the ‘country’ and our secularism was forced to genuflect in front of the most abnormal kind of the illegitimate brood by our vote bank politics when the Rajiv Gandhi government surpassed the secular ruling of the Supreme Court in the Sha Bano case, to appease the orthodox elements, casting an eye on the vote bank; when the same government banned Satanic Verses for the same reasons.

Vote bank politics started to shatter Indian secularism from the very beginning of the Babri Masjid issue (in independent India) on December 22, 1949, when idols of Rama and Sita were stealthily brought into the mosque and erected at night. ‘Secular’ India failed to remove the idols! At last on December 6, 1992; Narasimha Rao’s Congress government made Indian secular Indian State look the other way when the mosque was being vandalized!

We failed to inculcate a secular culture. In the name of secularism we allowed religions to meddle with politics. As a result in the 50th death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, the greatest secularist India has ever seen, ‘secular’ India stands swerved decisively towards the Hindutva Right which will be detrimental to the future of our secular democracy.

Sukumaran C. V. is a former JNU student and his articles on gender, communalism and environmental degradation are published in The Hindu. Email: [email protected]



 

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