Whatever the outcome of the election to the Lok Sabha in arithmetical terms, it will not pave the way for anything like a stable political order. That much should be beyond dispute even before the results are announced, beginning this evening. What is in question is only whether we shall have a government in New Delhi which can, like the Janata in 1977-79, manage to survive for a couple of years.
India is passing through a painful transition period and cannot, therefore, produce a stable political order. The next government can at best hope to cover partly this transition.
The reason for this assessment is simply and quickly stated. While the political order over which the Indian National Congress has presided since independence in 1947, with the brief Janata interregnum in 1977-79, is suffering from multi-sclerosis, the party of a potentially new viable political order still lacks the necessary popular support to be in a position to take over. That organisation, as I have indicated in my previous articles, can only be the Bharatiya Janata Party. Bharat has to take over from India, but no one can say when the process will be finally consummated. This cannot be a linear process, there will be many ups and downs on the way. But I for one have little doubt that the process is irreversible.
If the Congress fails to win a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha, as is virtually certain, and if it also fails to secure enough support to be able to retain office, as is likely but not yet quite certain, Rajiv Gandhi will be greatly, though not wholly, to blame. The Bofors payoff scandal has hurt him and therefore his party pretty badly, above all, because it has helped to promote a kind of opposition unity which might not have been possible otherwise. But his and the party’s greater tragedy is that he has remained the ‘alien’ that he was when he moved from flying to politics after Sanjay Gandhi’s death in June 1980.
One had not only to be a rank outsider but also thoroughly contemptuous of Congressmen to be able to make the ‘banish-the-power- brokers’ speech he made at the Congress centenary celebrations in December 1985 in Bombay. Indeed, it is difficult to cite a single move by him in the past five years which would speak of a worthwhile understanding of India. Hundreds of thousands of Indians with similar backgrounds – well-off parents, public or Christian school-college education and a comfortable job in a corporation – belong to the same category. They are not only ‘aliens’ in their own country but are proud of it. This is a matter of deep concern; no country can afford so many caricatures of themselves and their models in influential positions. But it is a separate issue.
Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership is, however, an old, even if a continuing story. It has been discussed ad nauseam and need not detain us right now. I am interested in drawing attention to a more fundamental development which, in my view, explains the impasse we face as a people. As I see things, while we have approached the end of the Nehru era, we lack the will and capacity to move into a new phase in our history. It may or may not be a coincidence that this end should virtually coincide with the conclusion of the one-year-long Nehru centenary celebrations on November 14. But that is besides the point.
The Nehru era must not be treated as if it is either synonymous, or coterminous, with the so-called Nehru dynasty rule. The Nehru era is an ideological proposition, while the so-called Nehru dynasty is a physical reality. The two are inter-linked but not inextricably. In plain terms, I am suggesting that the loss of the office of Prime Minister by Rajiv Gandhi is not a necessary condition for validating my assessment that the Nehru era has drawn to a close. His presence in, or his absence from, power is immaterial to the historical process, though in the first event, the existing intellectual confusion can get worse confounded.
The confusion will, however, persist even in the event of Rajiv Gandhi’s exit from office because the most aggressively articulate section of the English-educated intelligentsia has a powerful vested interest in the continuance of the Nehru ideology. Without this support, it would feel intellectually and ideologically lost. And as it happens, it is too well entrenched in too many highly influential positions to accept defeat. This is especially true of leftist intellectuals who have innumerable allies, not so much among fellow travellers as in the past, as among liberals. Fellow travellers as such are by now an almost extinct species; liberals dominate the scene. By definition a liberal is an imitator of the West.
Deprived of the old legitimacy which the non-existent but effectively advertised success of the Soviet Union and China conferred on them, leftist intellectuals must now hang on desperately to Nehru. Secularism and ‘anti-Hindu communalism’ and not socialism have to be their battle cry. For one thing, socialism is now too discredited to serve as an effective propaganda weapon; for another, the ‘secularist’ and ‘anti-Hindu communalist’ platform assures them the support of not only the Muslims at home and abroad but, interestingly enough, of a lot of people in the West. Rare is a Western intellectual who has been willing to back us in our struggle against Sikh terrorism in Punjab. No one need be surprised if EMS Namboodiripad comes to be feted in Washington.
No Indian can possibly be insensitive to Nehru’s great services to the country for almost half a century. But two points have to be remembered in assessing him in the long-term perspective of history. First, that he was the product of his times; and second, that his responses were determined by the prevailing intellectual climate and social, economic, and political realities.
Nehru’s impressionable years coincided, on the one hand, with the most glorious period of the British empire, the period of supreme confidence (before World War I) of the West in the utter superiority of its civilisation and its destiny, and finally with the Russian revolution and, on the other, with the apologetic phase of Indian nationalism and of Muslim resurgence with British encouragement and support. His concept of nationalism was inevitably shaped as much by the British and Russian intellectual-ideological impact as by the compulsion to accommodate the Muslim reassertion.
Nehru accepted, and not just implicitly, the superiority of Western civilisation and the inferiority, and again not only by implication, of Indian civilisation and he was at pains to establish that Indianness exceeded Hinduism for the obvious purpose of proving that Indian nationalism could be divorced from the Hindu ethos. Like most of us, he borrowed the concept of territorial nationalism from the West. But he also superimposed on it the belief in the desirability of modernisation, an euphemism for Westernisation; implicit in it was subordination of Indian nationalism to the West in civilisational terms and the civilisational neutrality of the Indian state on achievement of independence. This has been the staple of most Indian intellectuals since. For them, nationalism has been coterminous with Westernism and Westernisation, superficial resistance to the west in political and economic matters notwithstanding.
The failure of this approach became patent with partition. But the horrors accompanying partition only confirmed Nehru, sensitive and humane as he was, in its continuing validity. In effect, an approach resulting from pre-partition correlation of forces flowed into post-partition India.
Electoral politics would have made the approach inoperative if the British had not promoted caste rivalries and conflicts among the Hindus just as they had promoted Muslim resurgence and the Hindu-Muslim confrontation. Inevitably competitive politics was bound to aggravate these rivalries among the so-called caste Hindus. The Congress, despite Nehru’s fulminations against casteism, was not slow to take advantage of it just as it was not slow to appropriate the struggle of the Harijans against the old social order.
It is indisputable that since the days of Nehru, the Congress has kept itself in power on the strength of Muslim and Harijan support, on the one hand, and manipulation of caste conflicts, on the other. In ideological terms, therefore, the contest among the Hindus has been between the ‘communalists’, that is, those who spoke in the name of the Hindus and Hindu civilisation, and the ‘casteists’, who have all along managed to appropriate the ideology of nationalism. Nehru turned his face away from this casteist reality as he did from the industrialists’ bounty to his party.
Nehru could not, however, have sold his own and his party’s communalist-casteist support base to the intelligentsia and thereby assured the ‘legitimacy’ of Congress hegemony, if he had not developed an appropriate ideological structure and if the intelligentsia had not been willing to ignore the reality on the ground. The four pillars of Nehru’s ideological structure- democracy, socialism, secularism and non-alignment – are well known. But even his critics often miss the point that in this framework the key concepts are ‘socialism’ and ‘secularism’ and that the two are like the Siamese twins who cannot be separated.
The story of the struggle between socialism and nationalism in Europe is a long and complicated one which cannot be discussed here. What is pertinent for our purpose, in any case, is that Lenin finally broke the link between Marxist socialism and national tradition and Stalin effectively propagated the proposition that Communism can produce a new Soviet man, a futuristic embodiment of rationalism and scientism who would shape a new civilisation where ‘freedom’ would supersede ‘necessity’ of Marx’s definition. These are technical terms which would be accessible mainly to students of Marxism. Translated in plain terms, these would mean that it is possible to create a new man who is free from the ‘taint’ of a community’s cultural inheritance.
Nehru was as much a convert to this theory of a constructing a new man as were Stalin and Mao Zedong. Of course, unlike Stalin and Mao, Nehru was not a modern version of Chenghiz Khan. He was too much of a Hindu and he had been too deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi to believe in the supremacy and the final triumph of physical force. But for all his sophistication and humanity, he too wanted to create a new Indian man who would not be rooted in his country’s traditions. That is the true implication of the concept of secularism. The Muslims can at best (or at worst) be said only to have taken advantage of it.
It is by now a commonplace that the so-called secular vision has played havoc in the Soviet Union and China. Millions have perished in the two countries in the ruling elite’s perverted search for the rationalist utopia divorced from tradition. The consequences have not been equally grim in India but only because the Indian state has not been all-encompassing and our people have proved remarkably resilient. But no one can possibly miss the link between the moral degradation of the Indian political process and the State apparatus and the deliberate divorce between politics and tradition in the name of secularism. It is an expression of a widespread schizophrenia among our intellectuals that they can believe that a moral public order is even vaguely conceivable with an elite on top, which is getting increasingly ‘secularised’, an euphemism for being de-Indianised or de-Hinduised. Not many Muslims have walked into this trap
Socialism is the Siamese twin of ‘secularism’ as it is defined in India. Since the former is dangerously ill, the latter cannot remain in good health. Thus the country’s civilisational-cultural heritage has refused to make way for a ‘scientific-technological’ utopia. Indeed, it seems determined to seek and secure self-expression. But this search is in danger of getting distorted and perverted in the absence of a competent intellectual leadership.
Despite Gandhiji and other great Indians, there does not exist a coherent framework which can help us to produce a programme of action whereby we can hope to shape for ourselves a future which is based on our own traditions and genius. While that is the challenge the BJP leadership has to confront and meet, even its supporters cannot claim that it is equipped for the task. That is one reason why I take the view that confusion and uncertainty await us in coming months and years. The electoral arithmetic is just one component of this frightening reality.
Sunday Mail, 26 November 1989