Mr Nehru was not much younger than Gandhiji. But he represented a more confident national mood which was at least partly the product of Gandhiji’s more defiant leadership. Mr Nehru was not proud of the state of Hindu society. He detested the caste system in particular. He would have loved to reform it if he could. But he did not regard that as a precondition, the fulfilment of which alone would entitle India to independence.
His personal inheritance was also broader because, unlike Gandhiji’s forbears, his had come under the influence of Islam and his father under that of the West. He himself received his schooling at Harrow in Britain. As such he was better equipped to relate himself to the modern world.
A great deal has been written on Mr Nehru’s modern outlook to emphasise the impact of Western liberalism and Fabian socialism on his personality. This analysis is valid as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. It ignores the cultural aspect of the West’s influence on Mr Nehru.
It is well known that, unlike Gandhiji, Mr Nehru did not possess a religious temperament. Except perhaps in his last days religion did not interest him much. This aspect of his personality has generally been discussed in the context of the allegedly “degenerate” and superstitious facet of what is called popular Hinduism on the one hand and the rationalistic critique of Christianity in the West on the other. Since he talked a great deal about the need to develop the scientific temper, it has been assumed that he related himself to the European tradition dating back to the French Enlightenment. Perhaps he, too, took that view of himself.
Divide
But there is another divide in European culture – between Christian morality and pre-Christian Greco-Roman pagan morality. The values of the pagan world, to quote Mr Isaiah Berlin, a leading scholar on Western thought, “are courage, vigour, fortitude in adversity, public achievement, order, discipline, happiness, strength, justice, above all assertion of one’s proper claims and the knowledge and power to secure their satisfaction.”
“Against this moral universe stands Christian morality. The ideals of Christianity arecharity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt of the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter, belief in the salvation of the individual soul as being of incomparable value – higher than, indeed wholly incommensurable with, any social or political or other terrestrial goal, any economic or military or aesthetic consideration.”
A mere reading of this description is sufficient to underscore the fact that viewed in the Western framework, Gandhiji and Mr Nehru belonged to two different moral universes, Gandhiji to the Christian and Mr Nehru to the pre-Christian Greco-Roman one. This is, indeed, one reason why I have chosen to refer to this divide in European culture. For it shows that in cultural terms Mr Nehru was not Gandhiji’s heir. The former was the latter’s antithesis.
I am inviting attention to the cultural divide in the West for another reason – to say that while the highest goal in the Christian universe is to merit personal salvation (Gandhiji’s preoccupation with his moral advancement), the most desirable objective in the other one is a strong, stable and prosperous republic and to point out that that the latter has its own code of morality and Mr Nehru lived by it. He could say without hesitation that he loved his country more than his soul.
Mr Nehru did not believe in using excessive force to deal with either internal or external threats. But he did not shrink from it. Kashmir, Hyderabad, Goa, Nagaland, the armed conflict with China and the innumerable police firings speak for themselves. Similarly, he did not resort to guile and deception for their own sake. But after Sardar Patel’s death in 1950 up to the time of his passing away in 1964 he always managed to get rid of his critics in the Congress party – Mr Purshottamdas Tandon as Congress President in 1951 and Mr Morarji Desai, Mr SK Patil and some others under the Kamaraj plan in 1963. He worked hard for evolving as broad a national consensus as possible but he himself defined its terms.
Results
It has generally been believed that he put up with men like Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, Sardar Pratap Singh Kairon and Mr Biju Patnaik because he considered them necessary evils. I for one doubt whether he found their amorality all that offensive. They produced results and that is what mattered to him above all else. From the point of view of conventional morality this would amount to an indictment of the man. But statecraft has its own moral code which is as absolute as the other one.
All this raises two questions. How could two men with such basically divergent outlooks as Gandhiji and Mr Nehru not only co-operate so closely but also be so fond of each other? And how could both of them be so enormously popular in the same socio-cultural milieu?
It would be idle for me to pretend that I have a foolproof answer to offer. I do not. But I wish to hazard the view that like European culture, Hinduism is Janus-faced; that it contains within it both the universes described earlier, that religiosity prospered in adverse circumstances and that the ritual tradition with its accent on secular achievement once again came to the fore with independence. By way of evidence, I might cite that the two Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, belong to two different moral universes and so do Rama and Krishna whom the Hindus have deified.
Whatever the merit or otherwise of this hypothesis, there is, however, little doubt that India would not have been able to establish a healthy relationship with the West-dominated world if the Hindus had remained preoccupied with the Christian challenge. For both the “positive” (social reforms) and the negative (glorification of the past) would have immobilised them in a defensive-aggressive stance. Similarly, there can be no question that Mr Nehru helped to accelerate the process of the country moving away from that preoccupation.
Mr Nehru initiated the effort during the freedom struggle itself. In that effort, albeit largely unconscious, his commitment to Marxism, however vague, his understanding of and belief in it, and his pro-Soviet attitude were helpful factors. These enabled him to link India’s fight for freedom with the larger anti-imperialist and anti-Fascist struggle and thus to bypass the issue of religious-cultural reform and identity. In this scheme India did not need to claim spiritual superiority or a hoary democratic tradition (the panchayat raj) to feel entitled to independence. The capitalist West, according to this analysis, was exploitative. It was robbing other countries of their natural resources and also preventing them from industrialising themselves in order to perpetuate its economic and political domination over them.
The Nehru line did not prevail. By and large the nationalist leadership remained parochial in its outlook. Apart from Mr Nehru and the small group of socialists and communists, no one in it knew much either about communism or fascism. Most Congress leaders could not have cared less about the Spanish civil war. But the importance of the Nehru approach cannot be ignored. It provided the educated and politically conscious Hindus with an exit from the inferiority-superiority (defensive-aggressive) complex into which they had been trapped for over 100 years.
This was a turning point in India’s intellectual and political life. Almost on the Russian pattern where the Westernised and the Slavophiles had been locked in combat since the days of Peter the Great, in India the choice was seen in terms of Westernisation and revivalism from the time of Raja Rammohan Roy in the early part of the 19th century. Mr Nehru helped put an end to this false dichotomy.
Decisive
The policy of non-alignment played the same critically decisive role in the post-independence period. It enabled a relatively weak India to deal with the West on the basis of self-respect and equality. On a superficial view, the policy appeared to be directed against the West. In reality it was nothing of the kind. Mr Nehru was interested not in hurting the West but in improving his country’s status, vis-à-vis the United States and its European allies. His emphasis on rapid industrialisation, too, was part of his effort to reinforce India’s search for autonomy. His was a total view and has to be accepted or rejected as such.
Like Gandhiji, Mr Nehru, too, was the product of his time and answered to the country’s need then. He could not in the manner of Judaic prophets lay down immutable laws for it. Indeed, he did not belong to that tradition at all. He was not an ideologue even in the general and vague sense of the term. He was a pragmatist who improvised as he went along. It is, therefore, absurd to talk of Nehruism as a way of life. But even his worst detractors cannot deny that the framework which he helped evolve is flexible enough and broad enough to accommodate such changes as the country may need to make in its onward march. A somewhat increased emphasis on agriculture is certainly too small a change to require a repudiation of the man and denigration of his achievements.
(Concluded)
The Times of India, 15 November 1979