Events have moved fast in India in the six brief years since Mr Nehru’s death on May 27, 1964. The country has witnessed a war with Pakistan, two major droughts, an economic recession, two succession crises, the break-up of the Congress party, the fragmentation of other political organisations, a general lowering of standards of public life and the resurgence of communal violence.
Fortunately, some of these negative developments have had positive features. The war with Pakistan restored the people’s faith in themselves and in their armed forces. Both had been shaken by the Chinese aggression in 1962. The droughts have helped to push through a programme of modernisation in agriculture which can facilitate impressive economic growth if the political climate is not too adverse. The two succession crises, the split in the Congress, the politicisation of the hitherto inert masses and the pressures generated by the explosion of rising expectations have all tested the strength and resilience of the political system and may have contributed to its survival in the long run.
Amidst all these mixed and to some extent contradictory developments, Mr Nehru remains relevant for the simple reason that the ideals for which he lived and worked must continue to serve as guidelines for his countrymen if India is to acquire some meaning and purpose for itself and for the international community.
Politician
Mr Nehru was a politician and not a political scientist. He himself made this point more than once. Much of what he said and did was therefore inevitably influenced by the exigencies of the immediate challenge facing him at a given time. But he was not an ordinary politician. He was deeply imbued with a sense of history and his whole life was, as one perceptive writer once said, a quest for a political faith and for a better future for India. The result of this search may be summed up as independence for the country, democracy, socialism and secularism. The policy of non-alignment which is specially associated with his name does not have to be added to this list because it was only a means to an end – the maintenance of India’s independence in the context of the cold war.
Beneath all the formulations of policy, however, lay a passion to renovate Indian society to enable it to overcome the fatal weaknesses of the past – divisiveness on the basis of caste and creed, degrading superstitions, blind adherence to dead and meaningless rituals and forms – and the lack of a zest for innovation and adventure. Indians who do not share this passion cannot even begin to understand him. Though they may praise him and pay tribute to him, they can only distort his message and life-time’s work.
Mr Nehru was not a Westerniser. He did not want India to imitate Western ways and, unlike Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, he could never dream of tearing it away from its socio-cultural moorings root and branch. If he often criticised and denounced institutions and the mores which the traditionalists of his day prized and revered, it was mainly because he was convinced, and quite rightly, that these were stifling the spirit of free inquiry and debate which was the hallmark of India’s genius in the creative period of its history.
One Culture
India for Mr Nehru was not just a geographical entity bounded by the Himalayas in the north and the sea in the south. Neither was it merely an administrative, economic and political unit created by the British in a fit of absent-mindedness. It was above all a cultural entity for him -the land of his ancestors who had fashioned a rich and in many ways unique civilisation. This seeps through passage after passage in his autobiography and his Discovery of India.
For instance, he wrote in his autobiography: “…there was a common bond which united them (different classes and castes) in India and one is amazed at its persistence and tenacity and enduring vitality. What was this strength due to? Not only the passive strength and weight of inertia and tradition, great as these always are. There was an active sustaining principle, for it resisted successfully powerful outside influences and absorbed internal forces that rose to combat it.”
In another place in the Discovery of India, he said: “There are repeatedly periods of decay and disruption in the life of every civilisation, and there have been such periods in Indian history previously; but India has survived them and rejuvenated herself afresh, sometimes retiring into her shell for a while and emerging again with fresh vigour. There always remained a dynamic core which could renew itself with fresh contacts and develop again, something different from the past and yet intimately connected with it.”
Like Gandhiji and other reformers before him, Mr Nehru was concerned that the fixity of beliefs and the rigidity of the social structure had weakened the people’s capacity for adaptation, self-renewal, expansion, tapping of new resources of energy and talent. That explains his emphasis on science and its accompanying attributes of pragmatism and rationality. But as he gained in maturity, science and technology ceased to be the new gods for him.
It would not have been necessary to labour the point, regarding Mr Nehru’s belief in the need for renewal and therefore revival of India’s heritage if it was not assumed by most of his admirers and critics alike that his concept of secular nationalism was culturally neutral and helped to preserve intact all the diversities and pluralities that one finds in the country today. He did not want to force the pace of assimilation because that would have been out of character for him and also because it would have aroused unnecessary opposition and resistance, a point which the Hindu communalist has yet to comprehend. But there can be no doubt that he cherished what he regarded as the quintessence of the Indian heritage and that he was interested in its survival.
Changed
Its pull grew with the years. He himself told Mr RK Karanjia in a tape-recorded interview in 1959: “I have changed. The emphasis on ethical and spiritual solutions is not unconscious… the human mind is hungry for something deeper in terms of moral and spiritual development, without which all material development may not be worthwhile… The old Hindu idea that there is a divine essence in the world, that every individual possesses something of it and can develop it appeals to me.”
Two days before he died he wrote in a foreword: “We must not forget that the essential objective to be aimed at is the quality of the individual and the concept of Dharma underlying it.”
Mr WR Crocker, a former Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi who has done a perceptive study on Mr Nehru, has recalled that the late Prime Minister told him in “I am not
irreligious.” According to him, even Mr Nehru’s agnosticism “belonged to the religious spirit. Hedonism was repulsive to him. Gandhi, whom Nehru never quite got to the bottom of, knew his Nehru. He refused to recognise him as a materialist.”
Besides Mr Crocker’s Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate, I have seen just one more interpretation which relates Mr Nehru’s philosophy to his ancestors’ way of life and thinking. This is a short essay by Mr Deitmar Rothermund, Nehru and Early Indian Socialism in St. Antony’s Paper Number 18 edited by Mr SN Mukherjee. There may be some more in the same category. But they are all too few to correct the popular and superficial interpretations. This is indeed a great pity because Mr Nehru’s great moral authority has been and is being used to propagate viewpoints with which he would not have been in sympathy
Not Anti-US
The same kind of distortions have been taking place of Mr Nehru’s other ideals. Interested parties have, for example, sought to represent his policy of non-alignment as providing some kind of a sanction for anti-Americanism. Mr Nehru fought against the US attempt to dominate Asia in the ’fifties which was inspired by the mistaken belief that this was the only way to contain Chinese communism. He was appalled at Washington’s decision to extend military aid to Pakistan in 1954 because he knew that it would only add to Karachi’s intransigence and upset the natural power balance in the sub-continent. But he was not anti-American. A perusal of Mr Galbraith’s Ambassador’s Journal should suffice to settle this issue.
Similarly, socialism for Mr Nehru was not an exercise in populism and distributive justice. He was concerned with the sufferings of the poorer sections of the community. He hated injustice and vulgar display of wealth. He was interested in curbing the power of the rich so that they did not sit heavy on the rest of the community. But he knew that India’s first priority for a long time must be increased production and the release of the creative energies of the most dynamic sections which in India’s situation necessarily belonged to the upper crust in the social structure.
The public sector was also for him a means to an end. It was intended to take over tasks and responsibilities which were at once vital for the economic regeneration of the country and beyond the capacity of the private entrepreneur. It now threatens to become a deadweight on the economy because demagogues and ideologues with little feeling for reality are able to push those in authority.
All in all, it is precisely because Mr Nehru and his message are highly relevant to this country’s future that it is vital to defend his legacy against ignorant criticism and wilful distortion. Both abound in today’s India.
The Times of India, 27 May 1970