Amidst the heat and dust of the election campaign, the end of the old, and the beginning of a new era is being widely missed. Being part of world-wide developments, it is not going to be easy to reverse.
The Nehru era is essentially lover in India. Nothing (and nobody) can help restore it. Yet there is no dearth of backwoodsmen who want India to opt out of the world Burma-style. But India is neither an enlarged edition of Burma nor a tinpot military dictatorship whereby a group of bloody-minded generals can order it back into a pre-modern world and make it wallow in the mire of economic and moral decay.
India is the second most populous country in the world and it is a functioning democracy. It has a large and growing middle class variously placed at between 150 million and 200 million. It cannot be made to retreat into isolationism. On top of it all, Indian economy is by now sufficiently well integrated into the West-dominated world economy that it is just not possible for anyone to implement the concept of autarky.
All in all, India is a member of the international community and cannot opt out of it, however strong the pull of the past for many of us. And in terms of world developments in recent years, symbolised by the near total disarray in the Soviet Union and the threat of disintegration confronting it, India has little choice but to move out of the Nehruvian framework and into a new one.
To say this is not to denigrate either Nehru or his achievements. He was doubtless one of the finest products of the era in which he grew up; socialism and secularism were, as it were, part of the air one breathed in the twenties and thirties and he imbibed them, as did many good men and women of that period, precisely because they were deeply moral and sensitive human beings. And it would be less than fair and honest for any Indian to underestimate his achievements. India under his leadership did not become a great economic and military power. But it acquired the capacity to chart out its own course and that was no mean achievement for a newly-independent country.
It is not Nehru’s fault that men like Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, to name only the most important of them all, turned the morally noble concept of socialism into a monstrosity of unprecedented proportions, or that centralised planning turned out to be the longest, costliest and cruellest road to capitalism of the most inefficient kind. The tragedy is that we have gone on incanting Nehru’s name as if it was a Vedic mantra, little realising that his formulations were beginning to prove inadequate in his own lifetime.
The incompetence of the public sector and its consequences for the economy were obvious by the time of his demise in 1964. Similarly, in the field of foreign policy, the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956, followed by the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 and the attack by China on us in 1962, had made nonsense of the theory of the anti-imperialist nature of socialism-communism and the unity claims of the so-called communist movement. The convulsions of the Indira Gandhi period can be explained at least partly by the fact of our being mired in the Nehruvian past. The economy stagnated and inevitably the polity deteriorated.
Big changes are upon us. These changes must be reflected, to begin with, in a new consensus on economic issues on three counts. They touch the life of every Indian; they have vital bearing on our relations with the world, especially the West and Japan; and the failure of socialist planning, with its emphasis on controls and regulations is too patent to be questioned by the most tenacious among our backwoodsmen.
Indeed, such a consensus has been emerging, though slowly and hesitantly, over the past decade, beginning with Indira Gandhi’s return to office in 1980 when she began to liberalise her economic policy. There has since been no going back on the new approach. In addition to the widely recognised incompetence of much of the public sector, the increasing inability of the Indian state to find resources for development purposes on account of its own dangerously wasteful ways and the growing burden of subsidies and loan waivers under pressure from powerful lobbies has left successive governments not much choice but to encourage the private sector.
This process has now been speeded up. As in other fields where change has long been overdue, the Bharatiya Janata Party is likely to prove to be the trendsetter in this one as well. In its election manifesto it has now gone far ahead of all others, including the Congress which under Rajiv Gandhi pushed the liberalisation programme when it was in office between 1985 and 1989. The BJP has virtually called for an end to state control of the economy in any form.
The point to note, however, is that while the CPM and CPI have repeated formally their familiar positions, there is in fact no worthwhile opposition to the concept of a genuinely free economy. In ideological terms, India is over the hump.
As in the economic field, we are on the way to disposing of much of the redundant baggage of the Nehru era in the field of foreign policy. No Indian leader is likely in the foreseeable future to repeat the inglorious performance of the then Minister for External Affairs, Inder Gujral, at the time of the Iraqi occupation and annexation of Kuwait last August, and of Rajiv Gandhi who rushed to Moscow and Teheran on a ‘peace mission’ in February when a total collapse of the miserable Iraqi resistance was only a few days away.
As I see things, that part of the Nehru legacy, which the concept of secularism symbolises, is going to prove most difficult to get rid of. This is likely to be the case not so much because we have a large Muslim population which is anxious to ignore the country’s pre-Islamic heritage as because we have an intellectual elite who believe that nationalism can be culturally neutral and indeed that they can build an Indian nation with the help of borrowed institutions and ideas, provided, of course, they can achieve in certain rate of economic growth and a measure of economic justice.
Indeed, the Muslim attempt at self-definition in terms of Islamic heritage independently of the Indian heritage could not have survived without support from the westernised Hindu intelligentsia contemptuous of their own past and bewitched by the glamour of the West.
But however prolonged and painful the struggle, there can be little doubt that this part of the Nehru legacy will disappear, as will others, in the period ahead. In this regard, too, the BJP as much reflects the change already in the works as it influences the pace of that change. In other words, it is at once a barometer and an instrument. For, if the BJP could not have come up the way it has, if the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had not mobilised Hindu opinion the way it has on the Ram Janambhoomi issue, the VHP also could not have survived without the kind of success it has if the stirring among Hindus had not proceeded far enough.
The issues involved in this formulation are clearly too many and too complex to be dealt with in this space. So I have to limit myself to a few observations.
First, no worthwhile attempt has been made for decades to define Indian nationalism in Indian terms for the simple reason that no one has been able to accommodate the Muslim factor within the framework of Hindu civilisation. Nehru talked of a Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis but one has only to refer to his address to the Aligarh Muslim University in 1948 and to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in 1950 to know that he came to entertain serious reservations about it.
Secondly, the Indian intellectual-political elite has sought to fill the void arising out of the absence of a conscious articulation of a nationalist ideology with the talk of secularism. This strategy has worked for so long on two counts. There has existed in the shape of the Congress an organisation which could represent Hindu aspirations in the secular realm and treat Muslims as its clients in all but name. And the Hindu recovery of self-confidence and therefore need for self-affirmation in civilisational terms has been of an order that it could be accommodated within the Congress framework.
Surely, these conditions no longer obtain. The Congress has grown weak over the years; with the arrival of the Janata Dal under VP Singh’s leadership on the scene, Muslims have got another option and therefore want to be wooed rather than be treated as clients; and, above all, Hindu recovery, going back to the 18th century, has finally acquired such power and momentum that it cannot be content to operate in disguise which is all that was possible under the Congress umbrella. So they have erected their own institutional arrangement with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as the base and the BJP, the VHP and other organisations as it arms.
Thirdly, a series of developments – collapse of pan-Arabism, or Arab nationalism, symbolised currently by the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, return of western powers to the Gulf, disappearance of a rival anti-US power centre in Moscow, renewed tensions between Sunni-dominated Baghdad and Shia Iran, failure of the Islamic revolution in Iran to justify itself in terms of results and the power struggle in Teheran – must create for Indian Muslims a psychological situation the like of which they have not faced. Since the beginning of the decline of the Moghul empire in the early 18th century, a critical point for Indian Islam, there has existed for them a centre of hope and reference. No such reference-hope centre exists now.
It would be premature yet to sound an optimistic note. But I sense, even if still vaguely, the possibility of a profound change in Indian Muslims. It is not going to be easy to root Islam in Indian tradition. But there is not much choice left, and once the process begins, it is likely to prove irreversible. Even as things are, I attach considerable importance to Hindi as a solvent of many civilisational knots which have baffled us for centuries.
Sunday Mail, 5 May 1991