Purushottam Agrawal - Why Hindutva Ideologues, and Some Liberals, Love to Hate Nehru
Spreading hatred
against Jawaharlal Nehru and pitying Gandhi for the “dreadful mistake” of
choosing him as his political heir has been an integral part of the
disinformation campaign by the cultural and economic Right in India, mainly the
RSS and its affiliates. Given the RSS’s understanding of the Indian cultural
experience, it is quite natural that Golwalkar in his Bunch of Thoughts sees
Muslims and Christians as ‘internal threats’; and ridicules the Indian freedom
struggle which Gandhi and Nehru led for ‘reducing itself merely to being
anti-British’.
On the other hand,
there has been a trend in western academia that insists on denying the
devastating effects of colonialism, and locates the causes of all problems
facing India in its own tradition and culture. In this project, the terrible
man-made famines that accompanied colonialism are normalised as a natural
calamity recurrent in Indian history; the deliberate de-industrialisation and
de-urbanisation which took place is projected as an eternal characteristic of
the Indian landscape and ruthless economic exploitation shown as some kind of
‘service charge’ for the civilising mission.
Belittling the leaders
of the Indian freedom movement is necessary for both these projects. Gandhi,
who has grown too big to be easily maligned, has to be projected as a
politically harmless saint; even as a brand ambassador for the fantastical
‘Swachhta Abhiyan’. But his ‘protégé’ Nehru has to be portrayed as a power
hungry hypocrite. Some writers love to negatively contrast the ‘compromising’
Nehru with the ‘revolutionary’ Subhash Bose; while others prefer pitting
the ‘anglophile’ Nehru against the ‘authentically Indian’ Sardar Patel.
Whatever be the ideological impetus – Hindutva, colonial, ultra left or even
liberal – targeting Nehru has become something of a cottage industry for
analysts trying to explain what has gone wrong in India.
An attack from
liberal quarters
Writing for the New
York Times last month, Pankaj Mishra recalls the
African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois describing August 15, 1947 “as the
greatest historical date” of modern history. Mishra tells us, “Du Bois
believed the event was of “greater significance” than even the establishment of
democracy in Britain, the emancipation of slaves in the United States or the
Russian Revolution. The time ‘when the white man, by reason of the colour of
his skin, can lord it over coloured people’ was finally drawing to a close.” According to Mishra,
something then went terribly wrong. “Gandhi was determined not to let
postcolonial India replicate the injustices built into modern civilisation or,
as he put it, ‘English rule without the Englishman.’ From that perspective,
Gandhi may seem to have chosen his protégé unwisely: Nehru was the scion of a
family of rich Brahmin Anglophiles.”
Mishra gives not even
the slightest hint of the gigantic problems – social, political and economic –
left behind by colonial rule, which the leaders of independent India had to
face. We are told that “Nehru never let go of the British-created colonial
state and its well-oiled machinery of repression. The brute power of the Indian
police and army was used in 1948 to corral the princely state of Hyderabad into
the Indian Union. Up to 40,000 Muslims were killed, and the episode remains the
single-largest massacre in the history of independent India.”
This recitation takes
no note of the Nizam’s and Jinnah’s intrigues and the activities of the
Razakars in Hyderabad. He also keeps quiet about the repression of the
communists both by the Nizam and the Indian state. Other aspects of
the record that don’t fit well with his thesis – the Nehru-Liaquat pact,
for example – are simply ignored. To be sure, Nobody is
beyond valid criticism. Nehru himself, writing under the pen-name ‘Chanakya’ in
the 1930s, cautioned against the ‘hero-worship of Jawaharlal’, telling
fellow Indians bluntly, ‘We don’t need any Caesars’. Naturally, many of
his acts and policies have been criticised by serious scholars as well. But
serious criticism must take note of the historical context and challenges the
nascent nation-state faced. In a multi-religious country like India, no ruler
not confident of the support of the majority community can ensure democratic
rights for the minorities. The basic reason the Hindutva ideologues hate Nehru
lies precisely here – he, the ‘anglophile’, ‘irreligious’ one, had earned this
support the hard way, refusing to cater to baser instincts, insisting
that, ‘politics be conducted on the basis of political principles, not on the
basis of religious sentiments.’
Different ways of
valorising the past
Ironically, Mishra
chooses to bracket Nehru with the Hindu nationalists because he had faith
in “the essential continuity of India from ancient civilisation to modern
nation.” Nehru indeed had faith
in that continuity but unlike the Hindu nationalists, his was not rooted in
ignorant fantasies and distorted imaginations of the past. As he wrote in Discovery
of India, “A blind reverence for the past is bad and so also is a contempt
for it, for no future can be founded on either of these.” Also, he was aware of
the processes of change in this continuity due to which, “while forms often
remained, the inner content continued to change.” The awareness of this dynamic
of change, coupled with a futuristic perspective and acute sense of the “spirit
of age, the Zeitgeist, the Yugadharma”, made Nehru realise the difficulties
involved in the gigantic task of transforming an ancient civilisation into a
modern nation-state.
Mere recognition of
that continuity does not turn one into a believer in or fore-runner of
Hindu nationalism, just as making an argument against Islamophobia does
not necessarily turn one into an apologist for jihad. Incidentally, Akbar
can serve as a test case for telling the difference between the Nehruvian
and Hindutva sense of continuity of Indian civilisation and history. Given the
recent, renewed Hindutva attacks on Akbar, it will be in order here to remind
ourselves that the Mughal-e-Azam is a villain in the version of the past
constructed by ‘Pakistan Ideology’ as well. In fact, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad
Usmani – whose signature achievement was the ‘Objectives Resolution’
which foreclosed any attempts to create a secular, liberal state in Pakistan –
was fond of condemning the ideas of ‘composite nationalism’ as the modern day
form of Akbar’s ‘Sulah-Kul’, and glorifying Jinnah as the modern day Sheikh
Ahmad Sirhindi leading the jihad against this infidelity.
Nehru’s historical
role
Nehru not only had a
sense of the civilisational continuity of India but he also could not
countenance the idea of India playing second fiddle to any one. This meant
nonalignment in foreign policy while domestically he created a strong public
sector within the framework of the mixed economy and had a futuristic vision of
scientific research and cultural development keeping in view both the
continuities and discontinuities of Indian tradition. His policies, broadly
speaking, were rooted in the wisdom coming out of the varied cultural
experience and memories of the Indian people. The essence of this wisdom is
avoidance of extremes—‘Madhyama Pratipada, as the Buddha put it. His policies
are paying off today, though those in power in India today ignore this fact.
The inclusive idea of India constantly underlined during the freedom movement
had to be translated into a modern nation-state, and this is exactly what Nehru
and his colleagues did by warding off the designs of those seeking India’s
destruction either by its balkanisation or by reimagining the country as a
‘Hindu rashtra’.
The forces of Hindutva
have always seen the Nehruvian idea of India and the ideals associated with it
as the greatest hurdle in their way. They have been working hard to remove this
hurdle and have met some success in recent years. The horrifying results are
there for everyone to see. Analysts and scholars who refuse to see the
discontinuity between Hinduism and Hindutva have contributed to the success of
Hindutva in no small measure. By suggesting Nehru’s sense of India’s continuity
has anything in common with the Hindutva reading of the past, Mishra has gone
many steps ahead in the same direction.
It is partly
irritating, partly amusing to see writers reducing everyone else to the
primordial identities of race, ethnicity, caste, religion or gender, while
reserving the privilege of individual agency for themselves. Nehru, the ‘scion
of a family of rich brahmin Anglophiles” chose to discard the privileges of his
caste and class and lead the freedom movement. He chose to spend a decade of
his life in British prisons in India. His life is a reminder of the fact that
he didn’t just write about democratic values from a safe and privileged perch
but actually fought for them in the heat and dust of the times.
