Engaged in a fierce battle against secularists and pseudo-secularists, the BJP leadership cannot possibly own up Jawaharlal Nehru, even partially. Otherwise too, the Nehruvian ideological framework, with its emphasis on socialism and non-alignment, does not have much to commend itself. There is, however, one face of Nehru which places him, even if indirectly, among the proponents of Hindu civilisation.
This, of course, is not one of Nehru’s prominent faces. He rarely allowed it to come to the fore. It is not pertinent to assess whether this was his true face which he kept hidden from public view because he felt his role as India’s Prime Minister required him to do so; or whether it got overlaid by masks the West managed to slip on him. Or did the masks suit him so well that he seldom felt the urge to put them off? It would suffice for us to be sure that the other face was also there.
Nehru revealed it in his address to the convocation of Aligarh Muslim University on January 24, 1948.
He said: “I am proud of India, not only because of her ancient, magnificent heritage, but also because of her remarkable capacity to add to it by keeping the doors and windows of her mind and spirit open to fresh and invigorating winds from distant lands. India’s strength has been twofold; her own innate culture which flowered through the ages, and her capacity to draw from other sources and thus add to her own. She was far too strong to be submerged by outside streams, and she was too wise to isolate herself from them, and so there is a continuing synthesis in India’s real history and the many political changes which have taken place have had little effect on the growth of this variegated and yet essentially unified culture.
“I have said that I am proud of our inheritance and our ancestors who gave an intellectual and cultural pre-eminence to India. How do you feel about this past? Do you feel that you are also sharers in it and inheritors of it and, therefore, proud of something that belongs to you as much as to me? Or do you feel alien to it and pass it by without understanding it or feeling that strange thrill which comes from the realisation that we are the trustees and inheritors of this vast treasure? …You are Muslims and I am a Hindu. We may adhere to different religious faiths or even to none; but that does not take away from that cultural inheritance that is yours as much as it is mine.”
In view of his bitter experience of events leading to Partition, it is inconceivable that Nehru could be so naive as to believe that educated Muslims could possibly regard themselves as sharers and inheritors of the cultural heritage he was speaking about. In fact, it would be reasonable to infer that he said this because he knew the opposite was true.
Nehru posed another question to his audience. “Do you believe in a national state which includes people of all religions and is essentially secular as a state, or do you believe in a religious, theocratic conception of a state which regards people of other faiths as somebody beyond the pale?”
He did not remind them that only a few months earlier many of them had sympathised with, if not actively worked for, Pakistan. But he did speak of “one national outlook” which would inform the working of the Indian state, though he did not spell out the source of that “one national outlook”.
In a different way and in a different context, Nehru expanded on this theme in his address at the inauguration of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in New Delhi on April 9, 1950.
He said: “One can see each nation and each separate civilisation developing its own culture that had its roots in generations hundreds and thousands of years ago. One can see these nations being intimately moulded by the impulse that initially starts a civilisation going on its long path. That conception is affected by other conceptions and one sees action and interaction between these varying conceptions.
“Culture, if it has to have any value, must have a certain depth. It must also have a certain dynamic character… If we leave out what might be called the basic mould that was given to it by a nation’s or a people’s growth, it is affected by geography, by climate and by all kinds of other factors. The culture of Arabia is intimately governed by the geography and the deserts of Arabia because it grew up there. Obviously, the culture of India in the old days was affected greatly, as we see in our literature, by the Himalayas, the forests and the great rivers of India among other things. It was a natural growth from the soil…”
Nehru was not a logical thinker. He was neither inclined nor capable of facing the challenge of Muslim revivalism and fundamentalism of which India has been a major centre from the beginning of the 18th century. His understanding of Hindu civilisation was superficial. Gandhiji’s abhorrence of violence helped legitimise his tendency of escapism which was reflected in his defence-foreign policy pronouncements and actions.
Typically, Nehru skirted inconvenient issues. He did not explain why the Christian-Muslim encounter did not lead to a synthesis despite the Semitic nature of the two faiths, or how Hindus and Muslims could move towards one if both were truly closed systems, or why Hindus shrank into their shell before the onslaught of Islam as they had not faced a hostile civilisation earlier.
It is possible to take the view that Nehru put aside the issue of the pre-eminence of Hindu civilisation because he was convinced that Hindus needed to overcome the weakness resulting from their lag in science and technology.
It must be remembered that he grew up in Britain in the age of optimism before World War I when the West entertained little doubt that limitless progress was possible, if not inevitable. And that science based on reason and technology were the instruments of that march into the future.
Nehru spoke frequently of the need to overcome “superstition” and cultivate the scientific temper. He did not identify Hindus as his target audience. But they were. Muslims were largely outside his purview except as citizens (or subjects) entitled to protection, if only because he could not expect them to respond as a community.
I am not unaware of the fact that this is not the popular interpretation of Nehru. And I cannot possibly insist that this is more valid than the popular one. Indeed, I could not have put it forward if I had not become sensitive to the concept of the power of time spirit in recent months. This has led me to the conclusion that much more could not have been successfully attempted by way of reaffirmation of Hindu civilisation in the period in question.
It is not particularly relevant to speculate on the “ifs” and “buts” of history. So I would not wish to speculate on what turn India could have taken if Sardar Patel, or C. Rajagopalachari, or Rajendra Prasad had taken over as Prime Minister in place of Nehru except to say that each of them would have been out of tune with the dominant sentiment in the Third World and among the Indian intelligentsia.
On this reckoning, our cultural-civilisational reaffirmation had to await the collapse of communism and its Third World expressions such as Arab nationalism, and acquisition of a certain measure of scientific, technological, economic and military strength by us. Islamic fundamentalism is, of course, not a direct offshoot of communism; it antedates the latter by centuries; but in the post-war era it has been as critically dependent on Soviet power as has been pan-Arabism.
Thus it is possible to think of Hindu self-affirmation and self renewal as a process to which Gandhiji and Nehru contributed considerably and to conclude that L.K. Advani, with his quiet but confident assertion of the primacy of Hindus and Hinduism in India, fits better in this unfolding progression than Rajiv Gandhi, V.P Singh and others who parrot tired slogans. Advani too can ask Muslims the same questions Nehru posed at Aligarh in 1948.
Sunday Mail, 7 April 1991