Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Nehru disagreed with the view that the Opposition in the legislatures was not adequate. Of the five hundred or so members of the Lok Sabha, about one hundred and fifty were members of Opposition parties. They were ‘virile and active’, but being in a minority were generally voted down. ‘Presumably, you would like larger numbers in the opposition,’ said Nehru to Narayan, adding: ‘Even if there were larger numbers, it would be voted down. And how am I to produce the larger numbers?’

  Narayan had asked Nehru to look beyond the confines of the party system, a challenge the older man threw back at him. Apart from the Opposition parties in the legislatures, he pointed out,

  in India there are all kinds of disruptive and reactionary forces. There is also the inertia of ages. And it is very easy for the inert mass to be roused by some religious or caste or linguistic or provincial or like cry, and thus to come in the way of all progress. That is the real opposition in the country, and it is a tremendously strong one. And that is what you seem to ignore completely. We have constantly to battle against it …

  Nehru ended with a qualified defence of parliamentary democracy. It was, he admitted, ‘full of faults’, but had been adopted in India because ‘in the balance, it was better than the other possible courses’.1 He did not agree with Narayan that it was a failure. Like any other system of governance, parliamentary democracy depended on the quality of the human beings who staffed it. ‘I do not think that the present system is a failure,’ said Nehru to Narayan, ‘though it may fail in the future for all I know. If it fails, it will not fail because the system in theory is bad, but because we could not live up to it. Anyhow what is the alternative you suggest?’2

  There are, I think, at least four reasons why this exchange of personal letters between Jayaprakash Narayan and Jawaharlal Nehru is important. First, for its intrinsic interest, for the passion and intelligence with which each person articulated his view of what democracy meant. The ideas of both men emerged from many years of political engagement, but also from wide reading and the enlargement of one’s vision that comes from travel to other countries. Their intelligence is complemented and reinforced by their sincerity. These were busy men, leading very full lives, who were so engaged with the political system of their country that they devoted so many hours to debating it in private.

  Second, the exchange was part of an ongoing conversation that was intellectually as well as politically productive. At the time of the first general elections, for example, the two men had argued about the extent to which the Congress Party as a whole reflected the socialist ideals of the prime minister. The arguments provoked by the polls of 1957 were to continue. Nehru challenged Narayan to come up with an alternative to the parliamentary system; two years later, Narayan wrote his Plea for the Reconstruction of the Indian Polity, excerpts from which are contained in this book. That public pamphlet would most likely not have been written had those private letters not been exchanged.3

  There must surely be few other illustrations from history of such an exchange between the most powerful politician in a country and its most respected social worker. In a more general sense, however, the Nehru–Narayan debates were representative of the ways in which political argument operated in modern India. The books and articles excerpted in these pages were all written as contributions to an ongoing debate on how to win or exercise political power and how to reform or reshape society. Although they contained sometimes strikingly original ideas, these were not academic treatises but political interventions. Crucially, these interventions were on behalf of a particular policy or programme, this presumed to be superior to some other policy or programme.

  The last reason for us to flag the Nehru-Narayan exchange is that while, from the perspective of its time, it was representative, from the perspective of our times it has a whiff of the archival and the archaic. Such debates do not take place any more, at least not among full-time politicians. The tradition that this book has showcased is dead. No politician now alive can think or write in an original or even interesting fashion about the direction Indian society and politics is or should be taking. The discussion of what Narayan, in his letter to Nehru, had called ‘dispassionate political principles’ has now been left, as in other democracies, to the scholars.4

  III

  The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has provocatively and (to my mind) persuasively argued that there was a British ‘Enlightenment’ that is as worthy of study and celebration as its better known American and French counterparts. Each tradition had different orientations and emphases. Whereas the French Enlightenment emphasized scepticism and reason, and the American Enlightenment exalted liberty and freedom, the British Enlightenment put the spotlight on ‘social virtues’ such as benevolence, compassion and tolerance. Thus, ‘at a critical moment in history, these three Enlightenments represented alternative approaches to modernity, alternative habits of mind, of consciousness and sensibility’.5

  Himmelfarb is writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but now, at our own critical moment in history, it may be apposite to add a fourth national experience to the list. I am myself uncomfortable with the word ‘Enlightenment’. Let us simply say that the Indian political tradition is as relevant to the dilemmas of the early twenty-first century as any other. This relevance is in part a product of the distinctiveness of the individual thinkers profiled here, but in greater part a product of the distinctiveness of the trajectories of Indian nationhood. For India was the first country to win its freedom by non-violent means, the first democracy to be successful and sustainable in Asia and Africa, the only nation to have as many as seventeen different languages and scripts on its currency notes.

  In this age of globalization, these multiple histories of modern India must surely have a resonance in other parts of the world—in Africa and in Europe, in North America and in Latin America, where people of different faiths have likewise to learn to live with one another, where the desire to uplift and emancipate the poor by state action likewise conflicts with the freedom and dignity of the individual, where nation-states have likewise to choose between privileging a single ‘national’ culture or permitting a hundred flowers to bloom.

  ‘It is sinful,’ writes Himmelfarb, ‘to try to paraphrase Smith, Burke, Tocqueville, the American Founders, and others who expressed so trenchantly and elegantly what could only be trivialized and vulgarized by summary or restatement.’6 She thus quotes their works extensively in her book. I have followed this principle even more faithfully—or dogmatically—by fashioning this book as an editor-driven anthology rather than an integrated narrative appearing in the name of a single author.

  Perhaps this greater reliance on their own words may help further the case that many of these thinkers should have a wider, or trans-Indian, relevance. In the past, it was not just Frenchmen who read Voltaire, or merely Englishmen who admired John Stuart Mill, or only Americans who were inspired by Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson. Likewise, as democracy seeks to establish itself (with so many false starts!) in the countries of Asia and Africa, it may turn out that the ideas of Gandhi and Nehru and Ambedkar are as, or perhaps even more, important to these strivings than the ideas of the great Western thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And as the countries of Europe and America become more diverse owing to the immigration of followers of faiths and speakers of languages earlier considered alien or foreign, these older nations may yet benefit from a sideways look at the historical experience of the most heterogeneous society in the world. The Indian experience is highly pertinent, as well, to the countries of Latin America, whose democratic traditions are longer than those in Africa but more regularly interrupted than in North America or Western Europe. Most Latin American countries seek also to harmonize democracy with cultural pluralism, a process in which the ideas of these makers of modern India may not be entirely irrelevant.

  The fragile democracies of Asia and Africa, the mature democracies of Europe and North America, the ‘in-between’ democrac
ies of Latin America—to this list of nations to which these dead Indian thinkers speak, let me add one more: Communist China. From Rammohan Roy’s worries about the damage to society caused by the state’s suppression of the free flow of information, to Tagore’s prophetic warnings about militaristic nationalism, to Ambedkar’s defence of democracy, via Gandhi’s plea for inter-faith dialogue and his faith in non-violent resistance—this anthology has, I think, materials aplenty for the Chinese to study, be they politicians in power or intellectuals in dissent.

  One of modern India’s potential contributions to the world is its linguistic diversity, which is both mandated by law and affirmed by social practice. It was once believed that a single shared language was constitutive of national identity. Writing in the 1950s, D.W. Brogan remarked that ‘it is not accidental that nearly all modern nationalist revivals have begun by defending the claims of a linguistic culture’. In nineteenth-century Europe, for example, ‘it was in the submerged nations, in partitioned Poland, in Bohemia, in Finland that the linguistic revival became the embodiment of the national spirit’. Moreover, ‘states which were not linguistically united faced a real, political problem. For … there were obvious administrative advantages in linguistic unity and obvious political advantages in securing the kind of spiritual unity that linguistic unity makes possible.’7

  Two influential South Asian politicians drew the same lesson from European history. These were Muhammad Ali Jinnah of Pakistan and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike of Ceylon (later Sri Lanka). Each tried to impose a single language on the citizens of their nation. In contrast, the leaders of independent India permitted different languages and scripts to flourish, allowing people to be educated and governed in the language of their choice and their region. In Pakistan, the bid to impose Urdu on the Bengali-speakers of the east led to the secession of that part of the nation, which emerged in 1971 as the sovereign state of Bangladesh. In Sri Lanka, the suppression of Tamil and the promotion of Sinhala provoked a civil war that lasted thirty years and cost more than a hundred thousand lives. In India, on the other hand, the protection and promotion of different languages has deepened the sense of national unity.8

  The Indian solution to linguistic diversity was innovated rather than theorized. E.V. Ramaswami and C. Rajagopalachari did write at some length about the dangers of a single national language. Gandhi spoke in favour of linguistic provinces on several occasions. However, the politicians and administrators who redrew the provincial map of India in the 1950s to create linguistic states did not write about it at all. Likewise, the decision not to impose Hindi on south India in the 1960s was taken in response to a massive popular movement opposing it, not as a consequence of words on the page.

  Sixty years of Indian history have decisively refuted the European idea—or conceit—that a nation must be defined by a single language alone. Its experience in this regard is very relevant indeed. It has already had a salutary effect on South Africa which, after the demise of apartheid, officially constituted itself as a multilingual nation-state. It may still promote a more sympathetic attitude to minority languages in nations whose laws and customs privilege one language alone.

  Admittedly, there has in recent years been a belated recognition of the Indian experiment. As other ex-colonial nations have succumbed to military dictators or one-party rule, the fact that this poor, large and diverse nation has a robust multiparty system based on free and fair elections has come increasingly to the attention of the world. (The end of the Cold War has helped here, for while that conflict lasted, India’s refusal to entirely side with the Western bloc was deemed more important than its democratic traditions.) While the freedom of expression and the freedom to choose one’s leaders in India is now widely appreciated, how India survives as a single nation despite its staggering diversity is as yet imperfectly understood. For more than scholarly reasons, the institutional and ideational origins of Indian democracy and nationhood need more careful attention than they have perhaps received in the past.

  To be sure, the learning must be reciprocal. In the past, the Indian political tradition innovatively adapted Western ideals and values. Rammohan Roy read, with interest and profit, the works of Rousseau and Bentham. Gokhale was a liberal in the best British tradition—he even rendered into Marathi a book on compromise by John Morley, the follower and biographer of Gladstone. Tagore travelled across Asia and Latin America as well as Europe and America. In these travels he spoke, but also listened and learnt. Gandhi was deeply influenced by Western thinkers such as Tolstoy and Ruskin. Ambedkar was influenced by the pragmatism of John Dewey, who was one of his teachers at Columbia University. Nehru, Kamaladevi, Narayan and Lohia were all influenced (albeit in different ways) by European socialism.

  In the present, too, India has much to learn from the world. Despite its absolutism, the Chinese state has been far more focused on creating equality of opportunity through the provision of decent education and health care. Western political parties, unlike their Indian counterparts, are not run as family firms. Also in the West, public institutions such as the bureaucracy and the judiciary function with greater efficiency and honesty.

  In a book on the democratic traditions of his country, Ronald Dworkin remarks that ‘Americans of goodwill, intelligence, and ambition have given the world, over the last two centuries, much of what is best in it now’. He continues:

  We gave the world the idea of a constitution protecting the rights of minorities, including religious dissenters and atheists, a constitution that has been the envy of other nations and is now increasingly, at least indirectly, an inspiration for them. We gave the world a lesson in national generosity after the Second World War, and we gave it leadership then in its new enthusiasm for international organization and international law. We gave it the idea, striking in mid-twentieth century Europe, that social justice is not the preserve of socialism; we gave it the idea of an egalitarian capitalism and, in the New Deal, a serious if limited step toward that achievement.9

  The United States has given the world some noble social and political ideals. So have France and the United Kingdom and perhaps also India. In a Dworkin-esque mode I could thus write: ‘India can give the world the idea of a state and constitution that protects far greater religious and linguistic diversity than is found in any other nation. We have shown other young nations how to nurture multiparty democracy based on universal adult franchise, mass poverty and illiteracy notwithstanding. But older nations may learn from our model of nationalism, which is inclusive within and outside its borders, and open to ideas and influences from even the powers that once colonized it. We have demonstrated that nationalism can be made consistent with internationalism; without ever having waged war on another nation, we have contributed to peacekeeping efforts in other countries and continents, and lent moral and material support to such causes as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Finally, despite our own past history of hierarchy and inegalitarianism, we have designed and implemented the most far-reaching programmes of affirmative action on behalf of the discriminated and underprivileged.’

  IV

  To make the Indian experience more central to global debates is one aim of this book. Another, and perhaps greater aim, is to make Indians more aware of the richness and relevance of their modern political tradition. Unfortunately, the works presented in these pages remain far less known than we might suppose. One reason is the bias within the literature towards economic, political and social history. Thus many scholars, Indian as well as foreign, have written insightfully and at great length about the impact of colonial rule on the indigenous economy; about the various competing strands of Indian nationalism and how they jockeyed for position during the last phase of British rule; and about the culture and social life of peasants, tribals, women and other subaltern groupings.

  Within the vast and still proliferating literature, however, the history of ideas remains a poorly tilled field.10 Thus, with the exception of Gandhi—whose ideas have indeed been car
efully and systematically studied by scholars—there are few serious books on the thought (as opposed to life) of the individuals featured in this book.11 Astonishingly, this is true even of some hugely influential individuals such as Tagore, Nehru and Ambedkar. We have studies of their lives, their political careers and—in Tagore’s case—of their creative writings, yet no scholar has written about their political or social ideas with any rigour or depth.

  A second impediment to a deeper understanding of the Indian political tradition is sectarianism and partisanship. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, is treated as a Bengali poet; B.R. Ambedkar as a Dalit icon alone; Jawaharlal Nehru as the property of the Congress Party. This capturing of individuals by the sect to which they originally belonged has obscured their wider relevance to intellectual and political life in India as a whole. The appropriation is at once defensive and aggressive; seeking to claim individuals exclusively for a particular sect, while proclaiming their superiority over individuals privileged by another sect.

  This (to my mind) lamentable tendency is manifest most obviously in the sharp opposition of Ambedkar to Gandhi by their latter-day admirers. They ask that we follow one man completely, while rejecting the other man in toto. To a lesser degree, this competitive partisanship vitiates the understanding and appreciation of other remarkable Indians as well. Thus, in current debates on the economy, free-market advocates uphold Rajagopalachari and vilify Nehru, whereas those in favour of more state intervention tend to do exactly the reverse. These rhetorical invocations are often based on a casual and superficial understanding of the thinkers themselves. They make it hard, if not impossible, for anyone to follow a catholic approach—to study and appreciate both Gandhi and Ambedkar, or both Nehru and Rajagopalachari, on the basis that these legacies may be equally relevant or significant, albeit in different and arguably complementary ways.