Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Syed Mahmud, who had known Jawaharlal since 1912, wrote in 1959 that Nehru “is essentially a man of the future. In his anxiety to build the future of his country in the shortest possible time, he sometimes lamentably ignores the present.” Three decades later, in my own The Great Indian Novel, I portrayed Jawaharlal Nehru as the blind visionary Dhritarashtra, unable to see the realities around him while he fixed his gaze on distant ideals. Such a conceit was the privilege of a satirist, but as with all satire there was a kernel of truth in the portrait. And yet that faith in the future that animated Nehru’s vision of India seems so much more valuable than the atavistic assertion of pride in the past that stirs pettier nationalists.

Until late into adulthood Jawaharlal felt keenly the need for, and depended upon, a strong father figure: first Motilal, then the Mahatma, both strong-willed individuals in relation to whom he shaped his own beliefs, and whose self-confident judgment guided, confirmed, or altered his own. (Even Patel briefly played this role between 1947 and 1950.) The gap between rhetoric and action, between conviction and execution, was particularly apparent in his relations with Mahatma Gandhi, with whom he frequently expressed disagreement but could never bring himself to make a definitive break. The profound certitude that there was always someone older and stronger to set him right if he strayed might help explain his lifelong tendency to affirm principles disconnected from practical consequences. During the freedom struggle, this was manifest in his frequent courting of arrest and enduring prison terms without any concrete effect on the British, his advocacy of the disastrous resignation of the Congress ministries in 1939, his leadership of the futile (and in the end counterproductive) Quit India movement in 1942; as prime minister, it lay in much that he said, on issues ranging from socialism to world peace, which had little relation to the real experience of the Indians in whose name he spoke. Indeed, the gap between the ideals he articulated and their achievement became one of the tragedies of Nehru’s life, because the more people took him at his word, the more disillusioned they became — as with the Socialists, who broke with him precisely because they shared what he declared to be his beliefs but rejected what they saw were his actions.

But it would be wrong to see this talent for compromise in purely negative terms. Jawaharlal saw the task of nation-building as requiring inclusiveness and consensus; the hotheaded radicalism of his youth, when he was critical of Gokhale and later of Gandhi, gave way over time to a profound respect for consensus over conflict, idealism over ideology, and democracy over dictatorship. He told André Malraux that his greatest challenge was “creating a just state by just means.” The equation of means and ends was fundamentally Gandhian, even if in other respects Nehru might have disavowed the label. His critics on both the left and the right saw his moderation as temporizing; the left attacked him for selling out to capitalism, the right for appeasing Indian Muslims and Pakistan. Ambedkar accused him of reducing the Congress Party to a dharamsala, or rest home, devoid of principle or policy, “open to all, fools and knaves, friends and foes, communists and secularists, reformers and orthodox and capitalists and anti-capitalists.”

But this was what Jawaharlal believed Indian democracy required. “India,” he told Malraux, “must struggle against herself.” The statesman who epitomized the marriage of British political education, Muslim aesthetic refinement, and Hindu civilizational tolerance helped establish and affirm a democracy that has proved both freewheeling and enduring. Yet it now appears that one of the early strengths of Nehruvian India — the survival of the nationalist movement as a political party, the Congress Party serving as an all-embracing, all-inclusive agglomeration of all the major political tendencies in the country — turned out, with hindsight, to have under-mined the evolution of a genuine multiparty system. Had the nationalist movement given birth to, say, three major parties — one right of center, one social democrat, one communist — a culture of principle might have evolved in India’s political contention. Instead the survival of the eclectic Congress for decades as India’s dominant party (a survival ensured by Nehru’s talent for accommodation) stifled this process, and opposition to it (with a few honorable exceptions, like the pro-free-enterprise Swatantra Party between 1959 and 1974) emerged largely in the form of the assertion of identities to which the Congress was deemed not to have given full expression. Nehru sought to promote a politics based on the management of secular relationships, but not long after his death, politicians began to organize themselves, and even to create parties, around primordial identities, including the very elements Nehru abhorred, particularly caste, ethnicity, and religion.

The result is that instead of parties distinguished by political principle, Indian politics too often offers the spectacle of a choice between different group identities. And democratic politics is not always able to contain the country’s undemocratic passions. Early in the twenty-first century India witnessed, in the state of Gujarat, a politicized form of sectarian bloodletting that took over a thousand (mainly Muslim) lives in scenes reminiscent of the partition killings. This occurred with a democratically elected government in office. This was not the freedom Nehru had fought for. Jawaharlal had written, in The Discovery of India, that India offered “the terrifying glimpses of dark corridors which seem to lead back to primeval night,” though he had added, with typical optimism, “but also there is the fullness and warmth of the day about her.” Nehru built India’s political institutions with conviction and principle, but many of India’s politicians increasingly reflect the qualities required to acquire power by the assertion of communal difference rather than the skills to wield it for the common good. Across the country, the democratic process has attracted figures who can win elections but who have barely a nodding acquaintance with ethics or principles, and are untroubled by the need for either.

So there is no denying the disillusionment with aspects of Indian democracy that afflicts middle-class India; many who ought to know better lapse disturbingly into a wistful longing for benign authoritarianism. Jawaharlal’s daughter, Indira, suspended the country’s democratic freedoms during a twenty-two-month “state of emergency” from 1975 to 1977, imprisoning her opponents, suspending civil rights, and censoring the press. It is a measure of the values she imbibed at her father’s knee that she then called a free and fair election and lost it comprehensively.

The disconnect between father and daughter during Indira’s formative years had a lasting impact. Indira spent the last fourteen years of her father’s life by his side, in his home, serving as his official hostess and political colleague; but she failed to become his true political heir. She had none of his intellectual gifts and few of his ideals. From his years of suffering and resistance, and even from the inspiring correspondence he addressed to her, she learned little, except for a heightened sense of her family’s sacrifices, intensified by the insecurities that haunted her lonely childhood. Instead, Indira’s education would always be empirical. Her proximity to Jawaharlal came when he was in office, the unquestioned leader of India and of the Third World. From this experience she imbibed a taste for power and its acquisition, with little of the sense of the larger good for which it could be used. Jawaharlal, ever the democrat, did little to prepare his daughter for high office; when this was thrust upon her, two years after his death, by Congress Party bosses hoping to capitalize on her name and pedigree, she seized the mantle of Nehruvianism but never understood its spirit. That the Jawaharlal who had warned of the temptations of dictatorship should produce a daughter who would, albeit briefly and unsuccessfully, suspend India’s democracy, remains one of the great ironies of his legacy.