Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

And yet there can be no greater measure of the extent to which Jawaharlal Nehru dominated the political, intellectual, and moral ethos of his day than the tribute paid to him by his great critic Atal Behari Vajpayee, the opposition leader who would one day succeed Nehru both as foreign minister (in 1977) and as prime minister (in 1996). Upon Jawaharlal’s death, Vajpayee declared in Parliament that “a dream has remained half-fulfilled, a song has become silent, and a flame has vanished into the Unknown. The dream was of a world free of fear and hunger; the song a great epic resonant with the spirit of the Gita and as fragrant as a rose; the flame a candle which burnt all night long, showing us the way.” He added that Nehru was “the orchestrator of the impossible and inconceivable,” one who “was not afraid of compromise but would never compromise under duress.” Vajpayee went on to mourn “that vibrancy and independence of mind, that quality of being able to befriend the opponent and enemy, that gentlemanliness, that greatness” that marked Nehru. When he took over as minister of external affairs in India’s first non-Congress government in 1977, Vajpayee noticed that a portrait of Nehru was missing from its usual spot in the ministerial chamber, removed in an excess of zeal by functionaries anxious to please the new rulers. The lifelong critic of the Congress demanded its return. As he had said in his elegy, “the sun has set, yet by the shadow of the stars we must find our way.”

So one must never forget the man himself, and his stamp on the age. His most comprehensive biographer, the late Gopal, put it best:

No one who lived in India during the enchantment of the Nehru years needs to be reminded of the positive, generous spirit, the quality of style, the fresh and impulsive curiosity, the brief flares of temper followed by gentle contrition and the engaging streak of playfulness, all of which went along with an unrelenting sense of duty, a response to large issues, an exercise of reason and unaffiliated intelligence in human affairs, an intense, but not exclusive, patriotism and, above all, complete and transparent personal integrity…. To a whole generation of Indians he was not so much a leader as a companion who expressed and made clearer a particular view of the present and a vision of the future. The combination of intellectual and moral authority was unique in his time.

The Indian novelist Raja Rao once spoke of the “secret historicity” of Jawaharlal’s mere presence. The American statesman Adlai Stevenson, introducing Nehru to a Chicago audience in 1949, observed:

We live in an age swept by tides of history so powerful they shatter human understanding. Only a tiny handful of men have influenced the implacable forces of our time. To this small company of the truly great, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru belongs…. He belongs to the even smaller company of historic figures who wore a halo in their own lifetimes.

Nehru, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew wrote, “had to stand the test of two judgments: first, how well he succeeded in overthrowing the old order and second, whether he has succeeded in establishing a new order which is better than the old.” Lee’s cautious verdict was that “nobody can say that his reputation has been tarnished as a result of attaining power.” Nehru’s idea of India has held, though his legacy to India remains a mixed one. Of the four major pillars of his system, two — democratic institution-building and staunch secularism — were indispensable to the country’s survival as a pluralist land; a third, nonalignment, preserved its self respect and enhanced its international standing without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people; the fourth, socialist economics, was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere. In some ways, Jawaharlal seems curiously dated, a relic of another era; in others, such as in the development of India’s technological, nuclear, and satellite programs, a vindicated visionary. He called the dams and factories he built the “new temples” of modern India, but failed to realize the hold the old temples would continue to have on the Indian imagination. He created the technological institutes that have positioned India for leadership in the computer age, but he did not understand that software and spirituality could go hand in hand, that India in the twenty-first century would be a land of both programming and prayers. Nearly four decades after Nehru’s death, the consensus he constructed has frayed: democracy endures, secularism is besieged, nonalignment is all but forgotten, and socialism barely clings on.

“Progress,” Jawaharlal declared toward the end of his life, “ultimately has to be measured by the quality of human beings — how they are improving, how their lot is improving, and how they are adapting themselves to modern ways and yet keep their feet firmly planted on their soil.” By his own measure, India’s progress has been mixed. India’s challenge today is both to depart from his legacy and to build on it, to sustain an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the power or the products of the outside world, secure in a national identity that transcends its divisions, and determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of her people. If India succeeds, it must acknowledge that he laid the foundation for such a success; if India fails, it will find in Nehru many of the seeds of its failure.

On his desk, Jawaharlal Nehru kept two totems — a gold statuette of Mahatma Gandhi and a bronze cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln, which he would occasionally touch for comfort. The two objects reflected the range of his sources of inspiration: he often spoke of his wish to confront problems with the heart of the Mahatma and the hand of Lincoln. Nehru’s time may indeed have passed; but it says something about the narrowing of the country’s intellectual heritage that both objects ended up in a museum — and his heirs just kept the desk.

9 Prasad , literally a blessing, is food offered to an idol in a temple ritual and then distributed to the worshippers.

10 See note on Indian Political Parties and Movements, pp. xvi — xvii.

Sheikh Abdullah(1905–1982): Kashmiri leader; founded the National Conference in Kashmir state in 1938, opposing the maharajah on a secular, democratic platform as an ally of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress; prime minister of Kashmir, 1948–53, then arrested and imprisoned; chief minister of Kashmir, 1975–82

Maulana Muhammad Ali(1878–1931): nationalist Muslim; leader of Khilafat agitation; president of the Congress, 1923

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar(1891–1956): leader of the Harijans (formerly “Untouchables,” now called Dalits); leading framer of India’s Constitution; law minister, 1947–51

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad(1888–1958): Muslim scholar and Indian nationalist leader; president of the Congress, 1923, and again, 1940–46; devoted much of his political life to promoting Hindu-Muslim unity and seeking to prevent the partition of India; minister for education, 1947–58

Annie Besant(1847–1933): British-born “Indian” nationalist and theosophist; started Indian Home Rule League; president of the Congress, 1917

Ghanshyam Das (G. D.) Birla(1894–1992): Indian industrialist; supporter and frequent host of Mahatma Gandhi

Subhas Chandra Bose(1897–1945): Indian nationalist hero, known as “Netaji,” or “Respected Leader”; resigned from the Indian Civil Service in 1921 to oppose British rule; president of the Congress, 1938–39; escaped British internment to travel to Germany in 1941; organized the Indian National Army to fight the British in Burma; died at war’s end in crash of a Japanese airplane