Freeing Nehru from the Gandhis: A 50th anniversary tribute

As Narendra Modi rode in to be sworn in as the 15th prime minister of India, Anand Mahindra tweeted, “On behalf of the Mahindra Group, I express enormous pride that Modiji chose our Made-in-India-with-Pride chariot to ride to Rashtrapati Bhavan.” Modi was riding the Mahindra Scorpio. Two days before that, across the country in Uttarpara, West Bengal a terse announcement made the inevitable, official. Hindustan Motors will no longer produce one of the most abiding symbols of domestic power in India – the Ambassador. The Ambassador had fallen from grace already during the Vajpayee years. And Manmohan Singh opted for a BMW7 but it seems fitting that the final epitaph of one our most Nehruvian icons be written at the dawn of the Modi age when as Shashi Tharoor writes “(A)n India till recently clad in the trappings of Nehruvianism steps out into the brave new world of a government led by a man who rejects everything Nehru stood for.” Both the Ambassador and Nehru once epitomized a certain post-colonial national pride. Now it’s fashionable to run both down – as out-of-date, stodgy, lumbering, unable to move with the times. Yet once the Ambassador was the perfect car for bumpy Indian roads, spacious enough to accommodate an Indian family and friends, with a dickey cavernous enough to be called a hold-all in the truest sense of the world. Nehru too was once the hold-all for the dreams of a newly independent nation, and while he could not live up to them in full measure or perhaps even substantially and his choices can be challenged in hindsight, the man cannot be dismissed out of hand. He is in this country’s DNA and all the if-only daydreaming about how Sardar Patel should have been the first PM will not change that. [caption id=“attachment_1544805” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Jawaharlal Nehru. IBN Live.[/caption] The problem for us, 50 years after his death, when his memories have been ossified by the hagiographic state, is that we can longer distinguish between Nehru and Nehruvian. “Nehru himself is far more radical than Nehruvian,” says Benjamin Zachariah, the author of Nehru, a biography of our first prime minister. Nehru led a Congress party that was considerable more to the right than he was. Nehru’s own instincts might were socialist but his economic policy says Zachariah was more of an “a state-subsidized capitalism that was allowed to be called socialism once in a while.” As Suranjan Das, professor history at Calcutta University, notes, Jayaprakash Narayan bluntly told Nehru, “You want to build socialism with the help of capitalism.” In the 1962 election, the three highest declared donations to Nehru came from the Tatas, the Birlas (Rs 1.0 million each) and a cement company (Rs 50,000). Zachariah says Nehru believed that “the idea of nation was problematic because he felt human beings should be beyond nationalism and the nationalist is only important until you are free. After that you have to ask larger questions.” Yet as prime minister he naturally became synonymous with the nationalistic aspirations of an independent India and allowed himself to become a Papa who could preach but not be contradicted even as he led the country into the India-China debacle. In life he allowed the creation of the persona of the lovable Chacha Nehru though there is scant evidence he really liked children that much. And in death says Zachariah “his body was appropriated to this Hindu ritualistic funeral he was himself against.” Scholars say that was all part of the awkward compromise between Nehru the man and Nehru the public figure. Nehru wanted, understandably, for the transition from dominion to independence to be as seamless as possible despite the terrible scars of Partition. Suranjan Das quotes Nehru as writing to the Secretary of the Planning Commission that it “should be our endeavor to effect enormous transformation without challenging the existing order.” One example was his decision to continue paying the former princes privy purse of Rs5.5 crore while they held on to their vast estates. Perhaps that helped preserve a certain kind of social peace especially in a largely illiterate and poor country but it also ensured that Indians did not have to really grapple with the harder existential questions about the democratic values and rights at the heart of a country as diverse as India. India gave Nehru a sort of carte blanche to make those decisions for it. As Ramachandra Guha recalls when the horror stories carried by refugees pouring in from West Punjab and the cries for retaliation grew deafeningly loud, Nehru categorically told Patel “India, if it was anything at all, was emphatically not Pakistan. Over there, they might ill-treat or persecute their minorities; over here we would respect and protect ours”. And that was that. Nehru’s personality could override debate and dissension but it didn’t mean the issue was settled. Nehru was clear on secularism personally saying the state should be neutral towards all religions and not subsidize religious denominations even though Shyama Prasad Mookerjee said his Hindu Code Bill was proof that “the government did not dare to touch the Muslim community.” Nehru’s notion of secularism has been steadily eroded by his own descendants. His grandson Rajiv gave in to Muslim hardliners on Shah Bano on one hand and unlocked the Pandora’s Box of the Ram Mandir/Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on the other. Votebank politics in the name of secularism has become the norm. Now the backlash against what’s being called “pseudo secularism” is so strong, a man charged with inciting mobs during the Muzaffarnagar riots finds place in the new Modi ministry. In fact, Nehru’s biggest problem is really he has been most ill-served by his own bloodline who have kept his sense of noblesse oblige intact but whittled away at much of everything else he stood for – including his innate sense of democracy and secularism. Ramachandra Guha quotes an Indian telling the American journalist A M Rosenthal that had Nehru been alive during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, he would have been in jail writing letters to his daughter about democracy. Guha quotes the sociologist André Béteille as saying that the Nehru-Gandhi story reverses the Biblical injunction that the sins of the father are usually visited upon seven successive generations. “In Nehru’s case, the sins of daughter, grandsons, granddaughter-in-law and great-grandson have been retrospectively visited on him.” In a new age in Indian politics, Sonia Gandhi has resigned from her posts at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and the 50th anniversary of Nehru’s death was thankfully not marked by a barrage of unctuous newspaper ads. Narendra Modi in his quest to create a “Congress-mukt Bharat” might have inadvertently also begun the process of freeing Nehru from the deadweight of his descendants of diminishing returns. The Ambassador will not get a new life. Perhaps Pandit Nehru will be luckier.