Never ever before has November 14 come upon us amidst such tragedy. Even if we go through some routine functions, our hearts and minds will be elsewhere – fluctuating between the bullet-ridden body of Indira Gandhi we have just cremated and the calm, collected Rajiv Gandhi we have installed in her place as the country’s Prime Minister.
It is not that Indira Gandhi’s martyrdom has blotted out our fond memories of the man who is quite justly called the father of modern India. In fact, for the Indian intelligentsia of the older generation, the Nehru era has become a kind of golden age and the man who presided over it a philosopher-king of Plato’s prescription. Attempts have, of course, been made from time to time, especially during the Janata rule, to take him off the pedestal and even denigrate him. But these failed, as they were bound to, in the face of the grandeur of the man’s personality and the magnitude of his contribution.
No, the problem is not that the memory of Nehru has been pushed into the background by the circumstances of Indira Gandhi’s sudden death – the brutal assassination followed by a communal carnage – and the anxieties that it has aroused in the hearts and minds of millions of us. The problem is that today we do not know how to remember him and honour him. The clichéd writings and speeches would be wholly out of place in the present context which is about all we have been capable of all these years.
In a sense, this is an immediate problem. It need not bother us next year when Indira Gandhi’s martyrdom will have passed into history, if in the meantime Rajiv Gandhi proves himself capable of ruling this country. But in another, deeper sense, the problem will be with us even then. Indeed, it has been with us ever since Nehru’s own death in 1964. We have not known how to place him in the perspective of history.
Nehru was, on a surface view, a Westernised oriental gentleman (WOG) in view of his respect for democratic forms and norms and the so-called Queensberry rules, and his modem (Western) sensibilities which extended up to table manners. But he was not the sugar-daddy we made him out to be when we contrasted the daughter’s political behaviour with his – to her great disadvantage. He was a revolutionary. And he was a revolutionary not by virtue of his Fabian socialism and his nodding acquaintance with Marxism but by virtue of his fierce nationalism and commitment to the building and consolidation of an Indian nation-state on the one hand and to democracy on the other.
Potent Ideologies
So great and widespread is the confusion Marxists of different hues have created among our intelligentsia that it is virtually impossible for anyone to sell the proposition that nationalism and democracy are not only extremely potent ideologies but that they are also revolutionary ideologies. Let us take up nationalism first.
One aspect of the potency of nationalism as expressed in the desire of all countries for independence and self-rule is widely recognised. All nations want to manage their affairs even if they make a hash of it and in the process expose themselves to tyranny of one kind or another. (Over 80 per cent of humanity lives under some form of dictatorship.) But nationalism is not just a search for independence and self-rule. It involves a social revolution of the most profound character. It means the subordination of all traditional social loyalties, arrangements and power hierarchies to one overriding loyalty (the motherland) and one authority (the state).
One can legitimately take the view that the objective is not worth the terrible price. This was Mahatma Gandhi’s position though, unlike Western humanists opposed to nationalism on the ground that it provokes wars which in our era can mean the end of our civilization, he did not spell out his reasons. Though he led the freedom struggle with unmatched skill, courage and perseverance, he was not for a modem nation-state. This was the implication of his plea for a social, economic and political order based on more or less self-sufficient villages.
All traditional societies are by definition loosely structured from bottom to top. This is true even of societies which practise monotheistic and monolithic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Naturally this is even more true of Indian society with its predominantly Hindu majority which recognises as many paths to spiritual elevation as the number of human beings and provides for a system of castes and sub-castes with their own rules and regulations designed to produce a high degree of autonomy for these units.
An effort to build a nation out of this loose conglomeration of castes and sub-castes cannot but be a painful and prolonged affair. For, involving as nationalism must the concept of a common and equal citizenship with rights and obligations which are to be determined and mediated by agencies deriving their authority from the state, it represents the very opposite of the Hindu social arrangement. In plain words, the rise of a nation in India, as elsewhere, is conditional on the weakening of all traditional forms of authority, whether based on customs and usage or on religious scriptures, and their subordination in the secular realm to the agencies of the state which enforce the laws and regulations that the state legislates.
Intellectual Revolution
It is evident that coercion by the state, however powerful the state, cannot produce such a profound transformation. The state has, of course, to be powerful; it has to possess a monopoly of organised violence regardless of whether or not it disarms the citizenry. But the rise of such a state has also to be accompanied, if not preceded, by, on the one hand, an intellectual revolution (like the one the Encyclopaedists brought about in France) which denies the existing institutions the legitimacy they have possessed on the strength of tradition and, on the other, by economic development which can sustain a powerful state and integrate different parts of the country and of society. Nationalism is a modern concept which is practicable only in modern times. For, only a modern economy can supplement the old socio-economic structures by new ones and pave the way for the rise of a nation-state.
Nationalism, with its accompanying intellectual and economic revolutions leads, as its critics often put it, to the atomisation of the human being. The basic unit of a nation-state is the individual and not the larger caste or sub-caste groups. Democracy reinforces this revolution manifold because democracy recognises only the individual as the arbiter of national destiny.
Though he did not inaugurate these two revolutions – they had been launched by the British – they acquired momentum under Nehru on account of a variety of measures and developments which the Indian state deliberately introduced and promoted – adult franchise, abolition of absentee landlordism, the spread of education and means of transport and communication to the remotest part of the country, massive investment in economic growth, and so on. Since India had stagnated under the British – education and other developments had touched a relatively small section of society in a meaningful sense of the term – the twin revolutions gathered momentum rather slowly. And since the Indian people had been ground down by an alien imperial authority which looked down upon them for reasons of racial, religious and cultural differences and had managed to convince them of their inherent inferiority, it took them time to stand up. Nehru did not have to contend with fully aroused people insisting on their rights. On the contrary, he spent a great deal of his time urging the common people to shed their fears and stand and walk erect. Thus, the institutional framework he had inherited – the British administration and the Congress organisation – could cope with the problems he faced without too much difficulty.
Chief Instrument
We do not know what he would have done if the decline of the Congress, the country’s principal instrument for mobilising the people for participation in the democratic process and channelising the energies, pressures and demands so aroused, had become manifest in 1957 as it did in 1967 when he had passed away, and if in the wake of such a decline the organisational bosses had ganged up against him.
It is possible that he would have quit. But that would have been a sign of weakness and unworthy of him. Broadly speaking, two alternatives would have been open to him. Either he could have sought to restore the status quo ante in a proper constitutional manner or he could have done more or less what Mrs. Gandhi did to assert the supremacy of the office of Prime Minister. We have no means of knowing for certain what option he would have taken and whether or not he would have succeeded in making that choice stick.
We do know, however, that not only was Indira Gandhi a very different kind of leader from Nehru, but also that the India she came to rule and the Congress party she came to preside over were very different from the India and the Congress of the fifties. This fact was there for anyone to see in 1967 when the party lost office in all north Indian states from Himachal Pradesh to West Bengal. Indira Gandhi’s style of leadership had to be different from her father’s, although she too was inspired by the same objective of building a strong nation-state.
Perhaps it was unavoidable that many of us should have compared her style with Nehru’s. For we had no other frame of reference in terms of our experience. But in the process we did grave injustice to Indira Gandhi and perhaps gave her a complex. We should not repeat that mistake in respect of Rajiv Gandhi. He is a very different kind of individual from his mother. On this account, if on no other, his leadership style has to be different from hers. As it happens, today, large sections of the Indian people are even more restless and rootless than they were in the sixties when Indira Gandhi came to power.
One must be rather simple-minded to believe that Rajiv Gandhi has to choose and can choose either of the two leadership styles we are familiar with – his grandfather’s and his mother’s. Such a choice is not open to him. He can hurt himself if he tries to make such a choice. He has to be himself and evolve a leadership style peculiarly his own if he has to survive and succeed.
The Times of India, 14 November 1984