The Reality Of Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister was celebrated across the length and breadth of his vast, populous and diverse country during the 17 years he was in power and after.

But today, as his admirers observe his 136th birth anniversary on November 14, Nehru is generally caricatured as a weak and woolly-headed leader who was responsible for all that went wrong in India since independence in 1947.

Not many acknowledge now that Nehru gave the country its foundational democratic institutions which have survived despite determined attempts to subvert them from time to time. And he is often robbed of the credit for setting up high quality scientific and educational institutions which turn out world-class talent. That he was the father of India’s industrialization is also not openly acknowledged.

It was Nehru who harmonised India’s bewilderingly diverse peoples and cultures into what came to be known as the “idea of India” with concepts like “unity in diversity”. He gave to the country a unique and trend-setting “non-aligned” foreign policy which is still its guiding spirit.

But today Nehru is squarely blamed for all the ills of present-day India in the domestic, economic and foreign relations spheres. With the encouragement of the government of the day, the villifiers get extensive and positive media coverage while the handful of defenders are trashed ad nauseum as relics of the dead past.

For the first 11 years of his tenure as Prime Minister (1947-1958), Nehru was the toast of India and the world. Historian Ramachandra Guha quotes what Canadian diplomat Escott Reid said about Nehru in 1957 - “There is no one since Napoleon who has played both so large a role in the history of his country and has also held the sort of place which Nehru holds in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. For the people of India, he is George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one.”

Guha points out that no modern politician had anywhere near as difficult a job as Nehru’s at independence. “The country he was asked to lead was faced with horrific problems. Riots had to be contained, food shortages to be overcome, princely states (as many as 500) to be integrated, refugees (almost 10 million) to be resettled. A constitution had to be written that would satisfy the needs of a diverse and complex nation. An election system had to be devised for an electorate that was composed mostly of illiterates. A viable foreign policy had to be drafted in the threatening circumstances of the cold war. And an economic policy had to be forged to take a desperately poor and divided society into the modern age,” Guha recalled in a public lecture in Bengaluru in 2005.

Of course, Nehru had a set of very gifted ministerial colleagues such as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Dr. B R Ambedkar and C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji). The Indian Civil Service, the steel frame set up by the British, was in place.

But on every issue, the ball stopped with Nehru as he was the Prime Minister and supremo of the ruling Congress party. At any rate, help disappeared as soon as Sardar Patel died in 1950 and Ambedkar and Rajaji left the cabinet in 1951.

However, Nehru had enormous popular appeal as he was looked upon as Mahatma Gandhi’s chosen heir. “When I am gone, Jawaharlal will speak my language,” Gandhi had said.

Though Nehru did not subscribe to his village-based economy and his opposition to industrialisation, Gandhi was aware that only Nehru was spotlessly secular and even-handed in communal matters, qualities essential to lead a diverse Indian population. Indeed, Nehru had appeal across genders, classes, castes, religions and regions, unmatched by others.

Ably assisted by Dr.Ambedkar, Nehru piloted independent India’s democratic constitution by 1950 and held a general election in 1952 for the first time in history with universal adult franchise. According to Guha, Nehru campaigned for the Congress, travelling 25,000 miles in all (18,000 by air, 5,200 by car, 1,600 by train, and even 90 miles by boat). He addressed 300 mass meetings and myriad smaller ones. He spoke to about 20 million people directly.

Admiring Nehru’s leadership, writer Nirad Chaudhuri wrote in 1953 - “Nehru’s leadership is the most important moral force behind the unity of India. He is the leader not of a party, but of the people of India taken collectively, the legitimate successor to Gandhiji”.

Though Nehru had adopted non-alignment as his foreign policy, albeit with a tilt towards the Soviet Union, the US looked upon him as a democrat and rendered much needed economic support such as foodgrains under Public Law 480.

However, as in the case of all leaders, Nehru could not shine all the time. According to human rights activist Aakar Patel, Nehru had achieved what he had set out to do by 1958 and that post-1958, he was in decline. Patel pointed out that by 1958, Nehru had set up modern institutions of science and education. Dams, steel plants and hydel power stations were built. Non-alignment has become a key factor in world affairs. Nehru also reorganized India on linguistic lines on popular demand, and won the 1957 elections.

But the 1962 military debacle against China broke his spirit as it was he who had popularised the slogan “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers). Nehru died in 1964, a broken man.

Now, 61 years later, with an anti-Congress and Hindu majoritarian set up at the helm, Nehru is vilified with greater venom than ever before. It is he who is blamed for failing to make India a world economic and military power in the first decades of independence, and for not building a strong and centralized government that would have brooked no diversity of views or any challenge to authority. Hindu majoritarian forces blame him for fissiparous tendencies and the “appeasement” of Muslims.

Nehru is blamed for the loss of a good part of Kashmir to Pakistani military aggression in 1948-49 and the crushing defeat that the Indian army suffered at the hands of the Chinese in 1962.

Right wingers criticise him for setting up a mixed economy which turned out to be a controlled economy that for years generated only a 2 to 4% “Hindu rate of growth.” Socialists and Left wingers slam him for not going far enough to close the yawning income gap.

Liberal democrats question his commitment to electoral democracy as he used Article 356 of the Indian constitution to dismiss the elected non-Congress government of Gian Singh Rarewala in the Punjab and East Patiala States Union (PEPSU) in 1953. In 1959, Nehru’s government sacked an elected Communist government in Kerala on the issue of State control over private schools. It is also recalled that despite his democratic credentials, Nehru weeded out communists from government institutions.

According to Ramachandra Guha, the Congress after Nehru was itself responsible for the tarnishing of Nehru's memory. The authoritarianism of his daughter Indira Gandhi manifested itself in the 1975-77 Emergency. During her son Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure, a multitude of regional issues cropped up. Article 356 was used liberally to sack non-Congress governments in States. And the Nehru-Gandhi family unabashedly promoted dynastic rule.

The Opposition did gain ground as a result of these tendencies. But it was anti-secular and not constructive. The Congress suffered electoral reverses but did come back to power periodically due to an inchoate opposition.

Congress’ successes ended with the rise of a new non-Congress star on the horizon, Narendra Modi. Modi rode to power in 2014 on a wave unleashed by the youthful and “aspirational” middle classes which were unabashedly right wing and Hindu majoritarian in orientation.

Under Modi, anti-Congress and anti-Nehru propaganda rose to new heights with the mainstream media joining the bandwagon with alacrity. Everything about Nehru, the Indira Gandhi family and the Congress, was trashed. The youngest in the clan, Rahul Gandhi, was ridiculed as a “nincompoop”.

The Hindu right wing, lacking heroes of the freedom struggle, brazenly appropriated pre-independence Congress icons like Sardar Patel and Subhas Chandra Bose who were Nehru’s rivals. These personalities were built up while Nehru was denigrated.

However, since the 2024 parliamentary elections in which the Bharatiya Janata Party led by Modi failed to get a majority on its own, and given the spirited opposition mounted by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, there are signs of a revival of interest in Nehru’s contribution to India.

But if the rehabilitation of Nehru is to gain wide acceptance, the Congress party’s electoral performance should improve. In present-day India, the image of a political personality is dependent on electoral success and not on ideology or policies. Power and only power bestows aura.