BOOK REVIEW Nehru's
overlooked legacy Nehru. The Invention of
India by Shashi Tharoor
"We are terribly narrow in our outlook and
the sooner we get out of this narrowness, the
better." - Jawaharlal Nehru
Reviewed by
Chanakya Sen
In The Moor's Last Sigh
(1995), novelist Salman Rushdie cheekily named a dog
Jawaharlal. But for a handful of enraged Congress party
politicians who raised a brouhaha and went to court in
vain, most Indians did not bother to react. The general
indifference to yet another act of iconoclasm by Rushdie
revealed how much the India that Jawaharlal Nehru had
laboriously constructed has gone astray and has
forgotten his legacy. Nehru was after all a secular
prophet in his own right, "incorruptible, visionary,
ecumenical, a politician above politics ... a peerless
global statesman". (Preface) Shashi Tharoor's
reinterpretation of Nehru's extraordinary life doubles
as a commentary on how and why present-day India
frittered away beneficial parts of his inheritance.
Destiny's child Nehru's father,
Motilal, one of the most successful lawyers of late 19th
century India, saw his son as a child of destiny, one
made for outstanding success. Born into a prosperous
Kashmiri Hindu family in 1889, Nehru imbibed
cosmopolitan and pan-Indian values. His earliest
caretaker, Mubarak Ali, was a Muslim. Aged five, Nehru
stole and hid his father's pen, leading to a spanking
from Motilal. The lesson for the young scion was never
to assume he could simply get away with something - a
trait that later was to manifest as the famous Nehru
sense of responsibility. The young Nehru voraciously
read Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle and Mark
Twain, besides the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
At 15, Nehru was enrolled in the prestigious
British public school Harrow, where he excelled at
ice-skating, calisthenics and athletics, portending his
lifelong faith in physical fitness. At Harrow, Nehru
found the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi inspiring and
criticized his father for being "immoderately moderate".
(p 13) He went on to Cambridge and the London School of
Economics, leading, in his own words, "a soft life and
pleasant experiences". He qualified as a barrister in
1912 with modest academic achievements and returned to
India, where a stint practicing law in his father's
chambers flopped.
Political entry
Enchanted by nationalist stirrings, Nehru joined
the Home Rule League run by an extremist faction of the
Congress party. In 1917, he published a letter in a
leading newspaper calling for non-cooperation with the
British government. In 1919, he signed a pledge not to
obey the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of the
colonial authorities. Alarmed at Nehru's inclination to
make extremist politics his career, Motilal got the
rising star of the Indian independence struggle, Mahatma
Gandhi, to advise his son to "put his love for and duty
towards his father ahead of his commitment to
satyagraha [non-violence]". (p 30) But only one
month later, Motilal was appointed by the Congress to
head a public enquiry into the Jallianwala Bagh massacre
and Nehru was sent to Amritsar to fact-find. Nehru
realized "more vividly than I had ever done before how
brutal and immoral imperialism was". (p 34)
In
1920, as Gandhi spearheaded the Khilafat movement, Nehru
wrote articles in the Independent depicting it as "an
integral part of the ongoing political struggle for
Asia's freedom". (p 35) Global consciousness was already
present in Nehru's brilliant mind. The non-cooperation
movement of the early 1920s turned Nehru into the
principal galvanizer of volunteers and party workers in
the United Provinces. He embraced Gandhian austerity,
travelling in third-class railway carriages and living
among landless peasantry. Looking at the undignified
conditions of the poor of India, Nehru was "filled with
shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life". This
Buddha-like epiphany was to form the core of Nehru's
strivings until his last breath.
Symbol of
new India Nehru was increasingly visible in the
Congress for his oratory, organization and leadership.
Arrested for the first time in 1921, he declined special
privileges offered to him in jail cells and fell "in
love with sacrifice and hardship". (p 45) In his
post-sentencing speech in 1922, Nehru said: "Jail has
become a heaven for us, a holy place of pilgrimage."
This turned him into a national celebrity and a hero of
Indian youth. Spending plenty of time behind British
bars, Nehru relished the role of the unjustly imprisoned
martyr.
The growing communalization of politics
worried Nehru as early as 1923, when he wrote "senseless
and criminal bigotry struts about in the name of
religion". (p 48) After being elected chairman of the
Allahabad municipal board, Nehru displayed traits of
hard work, incorruptibility and refusal to play the
patronage game. As a delegate at the Brussels
International Congress Against Imperialism in 1927,
Nehru affirmed his faith in socialism, but asserted
fearlessly: "I have the strongest objection to being led
by the nose by the Russians or anybody else." (p 58) At
the Madras session of the Congress, he explicitly called
for the complete independence of India, an aspiration
that Gandhi himself thought was too radical.
As
general secretary of the Congress in 1928, Nehru
received several blows from police batons while
protesting the Simon Commission, enhancing his national
popularity. Made Congress president in 1929 by party
elders who hoped it would "rein in the younger man's
tendency to hot-headedness", Nehru held his own and
steered the full independence resolution. In the heat of
the 1930 civil disobedience movement, Nehru broke salt
laws and inspired Indians with stirring calls such as
"Who lives if India dies? Who dies if India lives?"
Gandhi's successor The 1930s confined
Nehru mostly to British prisons, where he embarked on
the ambitious endeavor to educate his daughter Indira
about the history of humankind through letters.
Glimpses of World History is a testament to
Nehru's intellect and compassion for humanity. Motilal's
death in 1931 veered Nehru ever closer to Gandhi.
However profound his issue-based disagreements with the
Mahatma, Nehru decided not to risk losing another father
figure.
At the Karachi Congress session, Nehru
authored a "minimum program" for the Congress,
guaranteeing Indians constitutional liberties after
freedoms. Economic rights were included in it, but
couched in anti-British terms and not as a form of class
warfare. This was done with a view to "articulating his
views in terms the Mahatma could live with". (p 92)
In 1936, Nehru published his autobiography,
compiled while serving prison sentences. It was an
astounding success in the West and established him as
the leader of modern India in the eyes of the global
community. He was "the glamorous face of Indian
nationalism just as Gandhi was its otherworldly deity".
(p 99) In 1936, Benito Mussolini asked for a meeting
with Nehru when he was transiting through Rome. The
invitation was firmly turned down, marking Nehru as an
uncommonly principled figure of his age at a time when
blimps like Winston Churchill were ambivalent about
fascism.
Against Nehru's wishes, Congress
ministries were formed in six provinces of British India
in 1937. In his home province of Uttar Pradesh (UP), he
dissuaded the Congress from entering into a coalition
with the Muslim League that was demanding separate
voting freedom on "communal issues". There was no
question of giving the league respectability as the sole
representative of UP's Muslims in Nehru's mind. He was
"troubled at the growth of this religious element in our
politics". (p 107) When league chief Mohammed Ali Jinnah
referred to Nehru's "own people, the Hindus", the latter
retorted: "I think of my people as the Indian people as
a whole." (p 109)
In 1938, Nehru went to Spain
and was tempted to join the International Brigades
battling fascism there. He tried to arrange settlement
of European Jewish refugees in India and refused to meet
Nazi officials despite the Third Reich's entreaties. In
1940, he wrote poetic paeans to France on the fall of
Paris and increasingly turned to the United States as a
beacon of freedom and democracy. He also attempted to
enlist American sympathy for the Indian case in
negotiations with the British.
Sentenced to
imprisonment once again, Nehru wrote the monumental
work, The Discovery of India, an articulation of
Indian nationhood that transcended petty nationalism.
Nehru was equally at ease as a broody intellectual who
wrote magnificent prose and as a steely man of action.
On the way to jail during the Quit India movement in
1942, he leapt out onto the platform of Poona railway
station to remonstrate against unarmed civilians being
assaulted by the police.
Freedom amid
despair Emboldened by British patronage and pelf,
the Muslim League swept Muslim reserved seats in the
1945 provincial elections and began the clamor for
partition. Even Viceroy Wavell, who was hostile to the
Congress and sympathetic to the league, had to admit
contempt for league leaders' "hymn of hate against
Hindus". Nehru rejected the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946
on the grounds that India's future would be decided by
Indians and not by the British, though some portrayed
this as Nehru's intransigence on an issue that could
have averted partition.
As vice president of the
Interim Government of India, Nehru continued to
derecognize the league as the sole spokesman of Indian
Muslims. Jinnah instigated communal violence and
declared that the killing would not stop unless Pakistan
was created. Nehru and Sardar Patel agreed to the
partition plan in March 1947 after noting that the
league would never work in a united government of India
and that Jinnah could set the whole country ablaze in
hatred. Tharoor has not tried to explain why Nehru
rejected Gandhi's plea to make Jinnah prime minister of
a united India, but it is clear that Nehru did not want
to jettison the ideals and visions of the nationalist
movement by handing India on a silver platter to
communalists.
Rebuilding India Prime
Minister Nehru's ability to protect minorities and
assure them justice at the bitter dawn of independence,
often at great personal risk, was a reminder that the
two-nation theory was never acceptable to the Indian
leadership. The very notion of "Indianness" was given
meaning by Nehru's championing of pluralism and
tolerance. Like Thomas Jefferson, Nehru was "forever
trying to accommodate and reconcile the country's
various and disparate tendencies". (p 227)
Nation-building through inclusiveness and consensus are
his greatest gifts to posterity.
Why the Nehru
who was ever eager to redefine Indian nationhood and
Indian interests failed to clearly act on India's
interests in the 1947-48 Kashmir war is not so puzzling,
considering that Nehru was in the dark about British
manipulations at the United Nations.
With
Patel's passing away in 1950, Nehru was the unchallenged
figure in Indian polity with the prospect of near
dictatorial power. But because he was a true liberal and
democrat, Nehru showed due deference to the office of
president, accountability to parliament, never
interfered with the judiciary, and was in his own words
"accessible to every disgruntled element in India". (p
181) He virtually fathered India on minutiae of
democracy. He did not appoint his daughter Indira to his
cabinet and also discouraged her re-election as
president of the Congress in 1960. Dynastic politics
never appealed to this quintessential democrat. Wary of
the risks of autocracy, Nehru strengthened free and fair
elections and constitutional principles, placing India
above the challenge of would-be tyrants.
Nehru
was ever suspicious of communism and convinced that its
loyalties were extra-territorial. His brand of Fabian
socialism was constructed on the pillars of
self-reliance and centralized planning, strategies that
impeded rather than facilitated the country's
development by breeding inefficient industry,
bureaucratic corruption and protectionism. The flip side
of this is the creation of the world's second largest
pool of trained scientists and engineers without
parallel outside the developed West as a result of
Nehru's emphasis on the "scientific temper" and research
and development.
In international affairs, Nehru
dictated India's foreign policy straight from his head.
It was high on idealism and values, but also
tremendously pragmatic and utilitarian. Tharoor unfairly
limns Nehruvian non-alignment as not intended to be
linked to concrete benefits to the Indian people, though
the record is quite to the contrary. Nehru fashioned a
foreign policy that complemented his domestic
development strategy, however faulty that was.
Scientific and technical assistance, particularly in
relation to industrialization, came from both sides of
the Iron Curtain. Nehru approached the American
construction giant Bechtel for the first massive steel
plant of India and also invited British and West German
expertise for two other steel plants in the late 1950s.
India did not merely reverse-engineer Soviet borrowed
industrial ideas. Nehru also began to get American food
aid from 1951 to meet shortages and emergencies. Low
military budgets and avoidance of entanglements in
distant conflicts like the Korean War are other concrete
benefits to the people that Tharoor has not credited
Nehruvian foreign policy.
Tharoor does set the
record straight about Nehru's twilight years, which are
conventionally presented as ones out of touch with
reality. Separatism in the Northeast, Punjab, Madras and
Kashmir was dealt with in Nehru's later days as prime
minister. French and Portuguese enclaves that survived
decolonization were amalgamated. Nehru's Himalayan
blunder in managing India's relationship with China and
the subsequent military defeat of 1962 were grave
mistakes, of course, and some of it may have arisen from
his personal weakness of being blind to the faults of
those he considered friends.
Legacy in the
doldrums Today, Nehru's mistakes are magnified
and his achievements belittled. Criticized and derided
by the same Indians whose forebearers swore in his name,
Nehru looks a curious relic of the past. "India has
failed to create a single Indian community of the kind
Nehru spoke about." (p 239) Politics based on primordial
identities of caste, ethnicity and religion was not the
freedom for which Nehru had fought. Appeasement of
conservative elements among minorities was not the
secularism that Nehru stood for. Power as an end in
itself and not as a means for a larger good was not what
Nehru tutored in his democracy class. The India of today
has shrunk in intellectual heritage by disowning its
great architect.
Though not originally
researched history, Tharoor's biography uses interesting
techniques, like interpreting photographic expressions
and little-known anecdotes. For readers who interpret
the past as a reflection of the future, this is the
ideal book.
Nehru. The Invention of India
by Shashi Tharoor. Penguin Books, New Delhi, November
2003. ISBN 0-67-004985-9. Price US$6.50, 261 pages.
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Jan 10, 2004
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Central, Hong Kong
In The Moor's Last Sigh
(1995), novelist Salman Rushdie cheekily named a dog
Jawaharlal. But for a handful of enraged Congress party
politicians who raised a brouhaha and went to court in
vain, most Indians did not bother to react. The general
indifference to yet another act of iconoclasm by Rushdie
revealed how much the India that Jawaharlal Nehru had
laboriously constructed has gone astray and has
forgotten his legacy. Nehru was after all a secular
prophet in his own right, "incorruptible, visionary,
ecumenical, a politician above politics ... a peerless
global statesman". (Preface) Shashi Tharoor's
reinterpretation of Nehru's extraordinary life doubles
as a commentary on how and why present-day India
frittered away beneficial parts of his inheritance.
