Indira Gandhi birth anniversary musings: Here's how PM Modi carries forward the Dynasty's legacy

So the celebrations of the 125th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru are now over. Prime Minster Narendra Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh paid glowing tributes to the country’s first prime minister. But the Congress is still not satisfied, objecting to the omission of Nehru’s photo in a government advertisement on Children’s day. It has also hit out at the government for undermining Nehru’s legacy, a charge others have also levelled. Today, the birth anniversary of Indira Gandhi, will see more sniping about Modi not paying tributes to her. But has the government really strayed from the Nehru-Gandhi legacy? The government has certainly been guilty of a barely-concealed desire to diminish the space the dynasty filled in public memory, if not obliterate it altogether.  The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library is to showcase other historical personalities; external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj made no mention of Nehru in her speech on the 50th anniversary of the Non Aligned Movement of which Nehru was a key architect; Modi too did the same when addressing the India-Africa Forum Summit last month, a slight underlined by the fact that all the African leaders heaped praises on Nehru for furthering India-Africa ties. And now, this omission of Nehru’s photo, when it is known that Children’s Day is celebrated in his memory. This is being churlish and only gives yet another handle to Modi’s many critics to beat him with and one which even those well-disposed towards him would use. It is also needless because there are many ways in which Modi is actually perpetuating the wrong policies of Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi even while his government tries to belittle them. (Interestingly, many commentators have pointed out similarities between Modi and Gandhi.) How, for example, is Modi’s approach to the public sector different from the Nehru-Gandhi one? Nehru created the public sector and Modi keeps talking about strengthening it. For Nehru, setting up a vibrant public sector was necessitated by the fact that the private sector was not up to the task of fast-tracking industrial development at that point in time. This rationale is now being questioned, but there’s little point in debating it 50 years later. But why continue with that approach even today, when the Indian private sector has developed into a competent and globally competitive force, even in sectors like steel and heavy engineering where the first public sector undertakings (PSUs) were set up? Besides, how is a huge public sector consistent with Modi’s frequent assertions about minimum government? Going a step ahead of her father, Indira Gandhi expanded the public sector through nationalisation of whole sectors (banking, insurance, mining, coal etc) on the plea of consumer interest and government takeover of sick private companies. But the objective of nationalisation and take-over were never really met -the public sector did not mean a better deal for consumers and the government’s management of sick companies did not make them healthier. Many of these are bleeding profusely, but the Modi government continues to follow the United Progressive Alliance policy on disinvestment, which is a reversal of the policy initiated by P Chidambaram during the United Front government and implemented by the first National Democratic Alliance government. The UPA put a stop to the privatisation programme and said that the government stake in profit making PSUs would not go below 51 percent and loss-making PSUs would be sold off only if they could not be revived. The Modi government is following the same policy. Disinvestment of PSUs is being done mainly to conform to listing norms set by the Securities and Exchange Board of India and, in the process, bring in non-tax revenues to plug the fiscal deficit, while efforts are being made to revive loss-making ones, never mind that this has not been successful. Reversing the nationalisation of banks and coal mines will not be an easy sell even to the pro-liberalisation brigade. But why is the government dragging its feet on giving more operational autonomy to banks? Even the appointment of non-pubic sector people on bank boards, as part of the Indradhanush initiative announced with great fanfare, has been rolled back. In the case of coal, even private competition is not being encouraged as the government is not allowing commercial mining by the private sector. A rejection of the Nehru-Gandhi legacy should also have entailed the government getting out of administering organisations like the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), the Film and Television Institution of India (FTII). The ICSSR and ICHR were set up by Gandhi in 1969 and 1972 and were undoubtedly the result of growing Soviet influence on her government. Government-sponsored social science institutions were a typically Soviet way of indoctrination and were avenues of rewarding fellow travellers. These two institutions had a stranglehold on all social science research in the country, which got an overwhelmingly leftist slant. A minimum government agenda should involve getting the government out of areas like education, academics and culture. Far from doing this, the Modi government has only been appointing its own ideological companions to these bodies, not all of them possessing stellar qualifications. In the case of the FTII, the choice of Gajendra Chauhan is cringe-worthy to the extreme. Why should the government be running a film training institute, in any case? So, it is clear that the BJP is quite comfortable with a Nehru-Gandhi legacy if it helps it in its own indoctrination agenda. Does the Nehru-Gandhi legacy need to be junked? Not wholesale, perhaps, but large parts of it (especially those with an Indira Gandhi stamp on them) need to be discarded. That is what the Modi government should be doing. There is little point in trying to erase the Nehru-Gandhi name from public memory, if the bad parts of the legacy continue.