We join the nation in the Nehru centenary celebrations which begin today (November 14). But, to be candid, we do so with an uneasy feeling on two counts. First, the occasion, like all other such occasions, will be overwhelmed by a flood of cliches, platitudes, insincerity and incomprehension. There can be little doubt on that score. Indeed, the process has already begun. There might have been some chance of sobriety and honesty having the better of exuberance and flattery if Nehru’s grandson was not in the office of Prime Minister. With Rajiv Gandhi there and in addition to seeking legitimacy by virtue of that ancestry and the claim to be following in the grandfather’s footsteps, the issue is settled in advance. Secondly, at a time when mankind is going through a revolution which is perhaps unprecedented in its sweep – it covers the whole world at the same time – and speed, we shall be told that Nehru gave us eternal verities which will continue to stand us in good stead as we steer our way through the mounting uncertainties and turbulence ahead. All in all, we can expect a major effort at idolization of Nehru in the year ahead. We shall be lucky if occasionally a voice of reason and awareness (of the reality) can be heard in the next 12 months on this subject.
Yet it is only right and proper that the occasion is being celebrated. We owe Nehru a debt of gratitude we cannot possibly repay with our homage to his memory, however sincere that homage. Nations also honour themselves when they honour their great. Moreover, they renew themselves through such acts of remembrance. Remembrance of the great is a form of self-remembrance and self-glorification. That, however, is precisely why the celebrations, as on this occasion of the Nehru centenary, should not be allowed to become an extravaganza which is, above all, a collective attempt at euphoria and evasion of the harsh realities. No nation can rise to greatness if its people choose to wallow in self-pity, self-hate and self-denigration, as we in India often tend to do. The search for greatness calls for a dose of romanticism. Nehru was a bit of a romantic. That enabled him at least partly to ignore the misery and sloth, moral and intellectual, around him and attend to the tasks confronting him. But nations rise to greatness and prosperity with the help of dedicated effort and clear vision; they do not escape into success through a collective loss of touch with reality. Nehru was not an escapist.
It has been fashionable to describe Nehru as a great revolutionary and thereby to emphasize the romantic aspect of his personality and character. This, to put it mildly, involves a measure of distortion and exaggeration. Whenever he was faced with a choice between romantic evolutionism and hard-headed realism, he invariably chose the latter. Thus, despite all his differences with Gandhiji beginning with the Mahatma’s decision to call off the disobedience movement on account of the Chauri Chaura incident in the early twenties, Nehru preferred to abide by the Mahatma’s leadership; he empathized with the Congress socialists and even the communists, often highly critical of Gandhiji, but he never joined them. While he was, of course, a great freedom fighter and wanted the British out soonest, he was deeply committed to the institutional and value framework the Raj had provided for the future governance of India. As independent India’s first Prime Minister, he did not tamper with that framework, though he had of necessity to ignore deviations from it on the part of his lieutenants who had to cope with the compulsions of mass politics.
In this context, it would be in order to point out that the two central pillars of Nehru’s programme – secularism and the public sector – came straight from the Raj. If we set aside the British policy of “divide and rule”, the Raj was essentially non-discriminatory in religious matters. And railways, posts and telegraph, power and canal irrigation (that is the infrastructural services) belonged to the public sector before 1947. They still constitute the heart of the public sector. Similarly, it will not be out of place to recall that it was the US shortsightedness as on the question of keeping communist China out of the UN or to cross the 38th parallel in Korea, defiance of India’s national interest as on the issue of arming Pakistan and siding with it in the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and, above all, its refusal to help India build up its defence forces in the wake of the Chinese aggression in 1962, that gave the policy of non-alignment a pro-Soviet twist. Incidentally even then Nehru maintained the closest ties in the economic and diplomatic fields with the west. By any reckoning realism had always got the better of the ideologue in him, though he, unlike most of his colleagues in the Congress, tended to think in ideological (Marxist) terms.
Nehru has been both adored and decried in connection with his approach to the so-called communal issue as if a different policy could have been viable in the long run. Right now, the issue has been further confused by the release of the 30 hitherto unpublished pages of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s “India Wins Freedom” which holds Nehru partly responsible for the country’s partition in 1947. This is a personalized view of history which ignores the larger impersonal and, as in this case, irresistible currents and thus makes nonsense of history. It need not, therefore, detain us, especially in this bird’s eye view of a great and complex man’s long, complex, glorious (and towards the end tragic) political career. Another leader in his place might not have been so stirred as he was by the plight of the Muslim on the eve of, and in the wake of, partition. Sardar Patel certainly spoke a different language from Nehru’s and Gandhiji’s. But essentially no Prime Minister could have pursued a different approach without placing an intolerable strain on the country’s unity and integrity. In this matter, as in all others, Nehru was a realist. His realism was without doubt tempered by his humanism and his ideological predisposition. But it was not the other way around. It was not the case of Nehru’s humanism and leftism being tempered by his awareness of the Indian reality.
Nehru embodied India as only the truly great such as Gandhiji can be said to do. On a surface view, this would be a shop-worn cliche. Indeed, so this formulation is mostly. But behind the cliche lies a deeper truth. Which is that one cannot embody what one regards as the positive aspects and leave out the “negative” aspects, though the permutations and combinations are different in every such case. In this specific case, we might allude to another aspect of Nehru which has seldom, if ever, attracted even cursory attention. In the very act of embodying India, Nehru was exposed to contrary pulls and pressures. For India itself is a vast contradiction. Nehru was not an integrated personality because India is not an integrated society. The problem is civilisational, and not social and therefore communal. In his autobiography, Nehru described old India as a palimpsest with layer upon layer of civilizations. So indeed he saw it. So perhaps he saw himself, a Kashmiri pandit deeply influenced by the Arab-Persian culture through his ancestors and the west through his education. But palimpsest can only be a transitional arrangement. A civilization has to be internally consistent; it cannot be a patchwork. India remains a battleground of three civilizations. As an individual, Nehru too was such a battleground. He synthesized the competing civilizations better than most of us. But great civilizations absorb and reject; they do not synthesize.