As we once again celebrate Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary it may be appropriate to remember one of his warnings. We Indians, he often said, tend to deify our great men and women and then conveniently ignore what they stood for. He, of course, did not have himself in mind. He was concerned over what a lot of people were already doing to Gandhiji.
Deification involves another danger which is even more serious. One freezes what one deifies. This is only too evident in the world of religion. The Prophet or the great teacher said so, and so you cannot deviate from it we are told daily. These guardians of the faith never pause to think of the specific circumstances in which a great religious figure might have said or done something and to ask themselves whether the prescription or the example can hold good in our very different circumstances. The danger is even more acute in the world of secular affairs.
Since great religious teachers deal mainly with issues relating to the psychic health of individuals and communities, their prescriptions have a timeless quality about them. It is largely when they concern themselves with social, economic and political questions that they propose solutions which cannot in the nature of things be valid in different climes and conditions. In the case of secular leaders, nothing they say or do can possibly possess the quality of timelessness and permanence. They deal with transient matters of the outer world.
Nehru set an example in how we should treat those whom we respect. He called Gandhiji his master and there can be no question that he so regarded the Mahatma even in the deepest layers of his consciousness. But he never sought to imitate the master or to pretend that he accepted what the Mahatma said and did as being valid for eternity. Indeed, when Nehru took over as independent India’s prime minster in 1947, he put India on a course of economic and political development which was largely contrary to Gandhiji’s publicly stated positions.
Gandhiji’s influence
The Mahatma could not have been unaware that Nehru would do so. For the latter had never made a secret of his views in favour of industrialization, socialism and a strong state structure. Gandhiji’s statement that Nehru would speak his language when he was gone can thus admit of only one interpretation which is that the Mahatma expected Nehru to live by and propagate the essence of what he stood for and lived for.
Nehru did precisely that; of course, according to his own lights. His deep commitment to the cause of peace was, for instance, his (and a more practical) version of Gandhiji’s non-violence. Similarly he spared little effort to eliminate untouchability from the Indian social scene and to help uplift weaker sections of society, especially the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, and to protect the Muslims whom the Hindus then tended to hold responsible for the country’s partition.
The late prime minister could have been so committed to the cause of peace and the uplift of the weak even if he had not lived for three long decades under the shadow of the Mahatma. He could have derived both these passions from his socialism (Fabian and therefore democratic). But the fact remains that Gandhiji had had a great influence in shaping his personality and his philosophy of life and that this influence found expression, among other things, in his devotion to peace and justice for the depressed and the down-trodden.
Two other points are relevant in this regard. First, Nehru could absorb and implement to the best of his ability only those aspects of the Mahatma’s precepts and practices which accorded well with other influences on him, or, to put it differently, with his personality. Secondly, he could implement the programme of raising the social status and improving the economic conditions of scheduled castes and tribes, or of protecting the lives and rights of Muslims, only to the extent that the Indian society as a whole was willing to go along with him. While he doubtless played a major role in reshaping the social reality, he could not ignore it.
No Mere Imitator
Nehru was a courageous man. He knew that it was in Gandhiji’s power to make or mar any political leader in the Congress. Yet he never hid his differences from ‘Bapu’ not even on the issue of the “Quit India” movement in 1942 when his own sympathies were engaged on the side of the allies after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union and when he was convinced that Gandhiji was being influenced by the military victories of the axis power. And in the post-partition period he did not mind attracting the charge of bypassing the Gandhian legacy. But this is what true loyalty to the master means. A mere imitator, if one had happened to be placed at the helm of the country’s affairs, could have been a disaster. Imitators do not make good, leave alone great leaders. One is entitled to wonder if “Bapu” was himself aware of the risk and if that was one reason why he named Nehru as his heir long before independence.
It is only appropriate that we should have put Nehru through a similar transvaluation or, to use the famous communist jargon for the sake of clarity, we should have creatively applied Nehru’s precepts at once to transform and conform to our complex social/economic and political reality. In a sense, the task devolved on Mrs. Gandhi by virtue of her having succeeded him as the country’s prime minister after a brief interregnum when Lal Bahadur Shastri held that office.
Her critics have often made the point that Mrs. Gandhi is very different from Nehru, though she happens to be his daughter. They have argued that unlike him, she is neither a genuine democrat nor a socialist and, indeed, that she is a mere opportunist with no ideological commitment whatsoever. Of late, some of them have gone so far as to charge her with communalism. It is an extraordinary sight, with so many of Nehru’s own detractors putting him on a pedestal in order run down the daughter. And they have managed fairly successfully, on the one hand, to rewrite their own earlier version of history, without once acknowledging that they were wrong then, and, on the other, to produce a nostalgia for Nehru.
As I see it, the truth has been very different. In my view, one reason why Mrs. Gandhi has not been able to do to Nehru what he did to Gandhiji is that she is not different enough from him. She may not be as great a respecter of forms, norms and institutions as he was. She is certainly not steeled in history as he was. Nor can she claim to be the kind of reflective person he was. But her broad commitments are similar – to science, and technology, to India’s place in the world, for instance. And while of late she has shown herself to be more religious than he ever was, she is essentially a modernist and a modernizer. In plain terms, while it can be argued that she has not fully lived up to the ideals and the example of her father, it cannot be held that she is sufficiently different from him.
Country in Tumult
There have been other difficulties as well. Since the passing away of Nehru, the Indian scene has been too turbulent to permit Mrs. Gandhi to preside over the kind of transvaluation he did in regard to Gandhiji. She has in certain periods been sufficiently secure in office. But those periods have been relatively brief. For instance, while it is only after the early 1971 election that she can be said to have come into her own, by the end of 1973 she was faced with a challenge which compelled her in June 1975 to clamp emergency on the country. The subsequent turbulence ended in January 1980 but in June that very year she lost her younger son, closest political aide and possible successor.
It would be an exaggeration to say that she has been drifting ever since. She has been remarkably active, especially in the international field, and the general trend of economic policy has been fairly pragmatic till recently. But she has not acted as if she has been in command of the situation. Her frequent and rather shrieking attacks on an opposition in disarray and her persistent talk of dangers from abroad have not been indications of self-assurance. This is perhaps partly why she has not been able to follow what has come to be called the politics of consensus.
Consensus is often misunderstood in our country to imply agreement on major issues facing the nation. It is nothing of the kind. It means that the discourse must be carried on in a civilized manner which is possible when no side questions the bona fides and integrity of any other. For a variety of reasons, some of which are not at all connected with Mrs. Gandhi’s personality, this has just not been possible in India since 1967, especially since the Congress party split in 1969. Incidentally in such an atmosphere a society cannot achieve the kind of transvaluation of a leader’s legacy it can in a period of consensus.
For the reason cited earlier, that is antagonism to Mrs. Gandhi, Nehru is not reviled as he used to be. This is not an unmixed blessing. Nostalgia blurs the vision and makes it difficult to assess the reality. This is in evidence all the time. Mrs. Gandhi’s recent decision to take over a number of sick textile mills is one illustration and the charge of communalism against her by a section of the left is another. It looks as if as a society we have got stuck. The country is in tumult as it has perhaps never been before in the sense of social and economic change but the spirit of adventure is conspicuous by its absence. A sad thing on the birth anniversary of one for whom all life was an adventure.
The Times of India, 14 November 1983