Nehru
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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.
But it is startling to realize how the emergency is remembered in many middle-class homes as a time of order and relative honesty in government, when officials came to work and did not ask for bribes, when the streets were free of agitations and demonstrations, and blackmarketeers and hoarders were locked up along with troublesome politicians. Tyranny always serves the interests of those who are themselves untouched by it, which is why autocrats and dictators everywhere have always enjoyed some popular support. Nehru’s ashes are no doubt churning the waters of his beloved Ganga at the news of public opinion polls in which a majority of India’s urban middle class say that the problems of the country can best be tackled through dictatorship. Democracy, in their minds, was associated with inefficiency, corruption, and mediocrity.
But if the Nehruvian vision of democracy seems discredited, the democratic system itself has survived. Amid India’s myriad problems, it is democracy that has given Indians of every imaginable caste, creed, culture, and cause the chance to break free of their lot. There is social oppression and caste tyranny, particularly in rural India, but Indian democracy offers the victims a means of redemption through the ballot box. Elections have increasingly given real political power to the lowest of India’s low. For that, we must be eternally grateful to Nehru.
A related distinctive feature of the Nehruvian legacy was secularism — his visionary rejection of India’s assorted bigotries and particularisms. Nehru was, by upbringing and conviction, completely secular. “I have no patience left with the legitimate and illegitimate off-spring of religion,” Jawaharlal wrote in a letter to his Muslim friend Syed Mahmud in 1927. He was scathing about the superstitions and petty prohibitions that came with religious observance. In a speech to students in Bombay on May 20, 1928, Nehru declared: “Much is said about the superiority of our religion, art, music and philosophy. But what are they today? Your religion has become a thing of the kitchen, as to what you can eat, and what you cannot eat, as to whom you can touch, and whom you cannot touch.” Well before partition, Jawaharlal was conscious of the danger that “religion in India will kill that country and its peoples if it is not subdued.” After partition, his uncompromising commitment to Indian secularism made him the symbol of security for India’s Muslims and other minorities, the assurance that pluralist India would never be reduced to Hindu India.
Nehru’s distaste for religion in public life was matched by his family’s disregard for it in their private lives. Displaced Kashmiris to begin with, the Nehru family tree sports Parsi, Sikh, Italian, and
now Indian Christian branches, and its roots are universally seen as uncontaminated by the communal and sectarian prejudices of the Hindi-speaking cowbelt. The one strand of political opinion Nehru and his offspring abhorred was that of Hindu religious revivalism. “The [real] danger to India,” Nehru declared bluntly the year before his death, “is Hindu right-wing communalism.” Nehru himself was an avowed agnostic, as was his daughter until she discovered the electoral advantages of public piety. All four generations of Nehrus in public life remained secular in outlook and conduct. Their appeal transcended caste, region, and religion, something almost impossible to say of any other leading Indian politician during Nehru’s life or afterward.
There could be no starker indication of the end of Nehruvianism that, fifty-five years after partition and independence, religion has again become a key determinant of political identity in India. Yet it can be argued that “Hindutva”10 has become a credible political movement precisely because of the nature of the strategy pursued by the Indian state since independence in relation to its religious communities. Nehru’s ostensibly secular Indian state granted major concessions to its minority religions, organized not just as religions but as social communities. Personal law, on matters concerning worship, marriage, inheritance, and divorce, was left to the religious leaders of each community to maintain and interpret; the state passed no law to alter or abridge Muslim personal law, even though Parliament, through the Hindu Code Bill, radically transformed Hindu society in these areas as early as 1956. Educational and cultural institutions of religious minorities are subsidized (in some cases almost entirely funded) by state grants; these include even explicitly religious schools. Muslim divines and preachers routinely receive government grants, and the government disburses considerable sums annually on arranging for them to travel on the annual Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. Indeed, despite the fact that a political party organized on religious lines had partitioned the country, the government did nothing to discourage political mobilization on the basis of religion, so that the rump of Jinnah’s Muslim League not only continued to be active in independent India, but even became an electoral ally of the Congress Party (in Kerala).
If Muslim politicians developed a vested interest in minorityhood, the Nehruvian state evolved a vested interest in its perpetuation: support the leaders of the minority, preempt their radicalization by giving them no cause to fear the state, and so co-opt them into the national consensus. When objections to national policy were voiced on religious grounds, as over the Shah Banu affair in 1986, when a Supreme Court ruling granted a Muslim woman alimony in defiance of Muslim personal law, the state (under Nehru’s grandson, Rajiv Gandhi) rushed to appease the most conservative elements in the minority community. This was not particularly secular in any sense of the term, let alone Jawaharlal Nehru’s, but secularism is what Indians have called it for over five decades.
Perhaps inevitably, the Indian state constructed by Nehru came to be seen by many Hindus as an instrument to control and rein them in, while perpetuating the selfassertion of the minorities (and by this is almost always meant one particular minority, the Muslims). The ?Hindutva” project so assiduously being promoted these days depends on a fundamental rejection of what Nehru stood for, by suggesting that it speaks for a true national ethos that he denied. It rejects the pluralist Indianness of The Discovery of India for a narrow “Hinduness.” Both sides of the argument seek vindication for their views in their differing readings of Indian civilizational history, but on the cusp of the twenty-first century it was the non-Nehruvian view that did better at the ballot box.
So it is sadly true that the workings of Nehru’s democratic system, which remains the best guarantee of Indian pluralism, have served to create and perpetuate India’s various particularisms. The Hindu-Muslim divide is merely the most visible, but that within Hinduism, between caste Hindus and the former “Untouchables,” and between the upper castes and the lower intermediate castes known as the “backwards,” is actually transforming Indian society in ways that Nehru did not anticipate. Caste, which Nehru abhorred and believed would disappear from the social matrix of modern India, has not merely survived and thrived, but has become an instrument for political mobilization.
Independent India’s determination to compensate for millennia of injustice to its social underclasses meant that, from the very first, the “Scheduled Castes and Tribes” (so called because the eligible groups of Dalits and aboriginals were listed in a schedule annexed to the Constitution) were granted guaranteed quotas in schools and colleges, in government jobs, both in officialdom and in the public-sector industries, and, uniquely, in Parliament. Indeed, so complete was the country’s acceptance of the principle of affirmative action that the clamor to join the bandwagon of reservations grew, and led to more and more groups wanting reservations of their own. The addition of the “backward classes” as recommended by the Mandal Commission has now taken the total of reserved jobs in the federal government and national governmental institutions to 49.5 percent, and in several states the local reservations are even higher, extending to some 69 percent in Tamil Nadu state. Despite these constitutional protections, inequalities persist between the upper castes and the former “Untouchables.” Affirmative action, perhaps inevitably, benefited a minority of Dalits who were in a position to take advantage of it; independent India has witnessed the creation of privileged sections within formerly underprivileged groups, as the sons and daughters of rich and influential Scheduled Caste leaders get ahead on the strength of their caste affiliation. Caste Hindus have increasingly come to resent the offspring of cabinet ministers, for instance, benefiting from reservations and lower entry thresholds into university and government that were designed to compensate for disadvantages these scions of privilege have never personally experienced.
This has been augmented by the increasing importance of caste as a factor in the mobilization of votes. Nehru scorned the practice, though some of his aides were not above exploiting caste-based vote banks, but today candidates are picked by their parties principally with an eye to the caste loyalties they can call upon; often their appeal is overtly to voters of their own caste or subcaste, urging them to elect one of their own. The result has been a phenomenon Nehru would never have imagined, and which yet seems inevitable: the growth of caste-consciousness and casteism throughout Indian society. An uncle of mine by marriage, who was born just before independence, put it ironically to me not long ago: “In my grandparents’ time, caste governed their lives: they ate, socialized, married, lived, according to caste rules. In my parents’ time, during the nationalist movement, they were encouraged by Gandhi and Nehru to reject caste; we dropped our caste-derived surnames and declared caste a social evil. As a result, when I grew up, I was unaware of caste; it was an irrelevance at school, at work, in my social contacts; the last thing I thought about was the caste of someone I met. Now, in my children’s generation, the wheel has come full circle. Caste is all-important again. Your caste determines your opportunities, your prospects, your promotions. You can’t go forward unless you’re a Backward.” Caste politics as it is practiced in India today is the very antithesis of the political legacy Nehru had hoped to leave.
This damaging consequence of well-intentioned social and political engineering means that, in the five decades since independence, India has failed to create a single Indian community of the kind Nehru spoke about. Instead, there is greater consciousness than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. The Indian political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians mobilize support on ever-narrower lines of caste, subcaste, region, and religion. In terms of political identity, it has become more important to be a “backward caste” Yadav, a “tribal” Bodo, or a sectarian Muslim than to be an Indian. And every group claimed a larger share of a national economic pie that had long since stopped growing.
The modest size of that economic pie was itself a Nehruvian legacy. Other countries put authorita
rian political structures in place to drive economic growth; in some cases, notably in Southeast Asia, this worked, and political liberalization has only slowly begun to follow in the wake of prosperity. Nehru recognized from the start that prosperity without democracy would be untenable; for him the central challenge in a pluralist society was to order national affairs to give everyone an even break, rather than to break even. In the process, Nehru’s India put the political cart before the economic horse, shackling it to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice above economic growth, and discouraged free enterprise and foreign investment. The reasons for this were embedded in the Indian freedom struggle: since the British had come to trade and stayed on to rule, Nehruvian nationalists were deeply suspicious of foreigners approaching them for commercial motives.
Nehru, like many Third World nationalists, saw the imperialism that had subjugated his people as the logical extension of international capitalism, for which he therefore felt a deep mistrust. As an idealist profoundly moved by the poverty and suffering of the vast majority of his countrymen under colonial capitalism, Nehru was attracted to noncapitalist solutions for their problems. The ideas of Fabian Socialism captured an entire generation of English-educated Indians; Nehru was no exception. As a democrat, he saw the economic well-being of the poor as indispensable for their political empowerment, and he could not entrust its attainment to the rich. In addition, the seeming success of the Soviet model ? which Nehru admired for bringing about the industrialization and modernization of a large, feudal, and backward multinational state not unlike his own —institutions. Men like Homi appeared to offer a valuable example for India. Like many others of his generation, Nehru thought that central planning, state control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, and government-directed development were the “scientific” and “rational” means of creating social prosperity and ensuring its equitable distribution.