Nehru: The Invention of India

10. “India Must Struggle against Herself”: 1889–1964–2003

“My presents,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his daughter Indira from prison on her thirteenth birthday in November 1930, “cannot be very material or solid. They can only be of the air and of the mind and of the spirit, such as a good fairy might have bestowed on you — things that even the high walls of prison cannot stop.” These gifts he bestowed in plenty, and when he died in 1964, Nehru’s legacy to the nation and the world seemed secure. A towering figure in national politics and on the international stage, the reflective, mercurial Nehru had — in innumerable books and speeches, but also in his conduct as a prime minister — developed and articulated a worldview that embodied the aspirations of his generation, of his country, and (many believed) of the developing postcolonial world as a whole. “We are all Nehruvians,” a senior Indian official told me years later, with conviction and pride, of his colleagues in the Indian ruling establishment.

Two and a half decades after that remark, there are fewer Nehruvians in office. Indeed, Nehruvianism seems to have lost both power and allure. Nehru is criticized, even derided, by votaries of an alternative version of Indian nationalism, one that claims to be more deeply rooted in the land (and therefore in its religious traditions and customary prejudices). His mistakes are magnified, his achievements belittled. How are we, today, to parse his legacy? Nehru’s impact on India rested on four major pillars — democratic institution-building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home, and a foreign policy of nonalignment. All four remain as official tenets of Indian governance, but all have been challenged, and strained to the breaking point, by the developments of recent years.

“The world’s largest democracy” remains the sobriquet of which all Indians are proud. India became that under the tutelage of a man so unquestionably its leader — so unchallengeably the personification of its very freedom — that all he needed to do if anyone opposed him was to threaten to resign. Nehru usually got his way. And yet he was a convinced democrat, a man so wary of the risks of autocracy that, at the crest of his rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. As prime minister he carefully nurtured democratic institutions, paying careful deference to the country’s ceremonial presidency, regularly writing letters to the chief ministers of India’s states explaining his policies, subjecting himself to cross-examination in Parliament by a fractious opposition, taking care not to interfere with the judiciary (on the one occasion where he publicly criticized a judge, he apologized the next day to the individual and to the chief justice of India).

Though he was, in the celebrated Indian metaphor, the immense banyan tree in whose shade no other plant could grow, he made sure that every possible flora flourished in the forest.

In his 1937 Modern Review article in which he had anonymously portrayed himself as a potential dictator “sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy,” Jawaharlal had added the revealing aside: “He is far too much of an aristocrat for the crudity and vulgarity of fascism.” As an aristocrat he disdained autocracy, and this paradox illuminated his nurturing of Indian democracy. If there was something tutelary about it — the idol of the masses dispensing democracy like so much prasad⁹ to the worshipping throngs — that was a necessary phase in the process of educating a largely illiterate, overwhelmingly poor people in the rights and prerogatives that came with freedom. There is no doubt that Nehru romanticized his connection to the Indian masses. As he wrote to Edwina in 1951: “Wherever I have been, vast multitudes gather at my meetings and I love to compare them, their faces, their dresses, their reactions to me and what I say…. I try to probe into the minds and hearts of these multitudes…. The effort to explain in simple language our problems and our difficulties, and to reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.”

When Dr. Rafiq Zakaria began a biographical essay on Nehru for his compilation A Study of Nehru, published to mark the prime minister’s seventieth birthday, he noted the “extravagance” of the Indian people’s love of Jawaharlal:

They have idolized him; they have worshipped him. Even in the inaccessible tribal areas, his name is a household word; to the illiterate villagers he has become almost a god. To most Indians he has symbolized everything that is good and noble and beautiful in life. Even his faults are admirable; his weaknesses, lovable. In a land of hero-worship he has become the hero of heroes. To criticize him is wrong; to condemn him is blasphemous…. They may be dissatisfied with his party; they may be unhappy under his Government, but such is their devotion to the man that he is not blamed for anything.

Yet by his speeches, his exhortations, and above all by his own personal example, Jawaharlal imparted to the institutions and processes of democracy a dignity that placed it above challenge from would-be tyrants. He instituted a public audience at his home every morning where ordinary people could come to petition or talk with their prime minister. His speeches were an extended conversation with the people of India. “Sometimes,” wrote the journalist A. M. Rosenthal, “he talked angrily to his India and sometimes he shrieked at it and denounced it and said it was just impossible, impossible. Sometimes he courted his India, laughed with it, and was merry and delicate and understanding. But it was always as if Jawaharlal Nehru was looking into the eyes of India and India was just one soul.”

And yet Jawaharlal was often described by his critics as the last Englishman left in India; the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called him the last viceroy. By Nehru’s own admission as a young man, “I had imbibed most of the prejudices of Harrow and Cambridge and in my likes and dislikes I was perhaps more an Englishman than an Indian…. And so I returned to India as much prejudiced in favor of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian to be.” The writer Nirad Chaudhuri declared that Nehru was “completely out of touch with the Indian life even of his time, except with the life of the self-segregating Anglicized set of upper India.” Chaudhuri described Jawaharlal as a snob, contemptuous of those who spoke English with an Indian accent, with no understanding of contemporary Hinduism. Such criticisms are not entirely illegitimate (though at least one admirer, the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg, declared that for Nehru “Shakespeare did not overshadow Kalidasa, and he conversed with a Punjabi peasant as naturally as with a Cambridge professor”). But they were often sparked by animus. Those who resented Jawaharlal’s near-total identification with his country challenged the authenticity of his claims to embody India. N. B. Khare, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1950, described Jawaharlal Nehru as “English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident.” He meant it as an insult, but in fact it was a tribute — to the eclecticism that had made Jawaharlal the finest product of the syncretic traditions to which a twentieth-century Indian was heir. Eh-renburg called Nehru “a man of great and universal culture. His interests have lain in Marxism and in the origins of religions, in Freudianism and in ethics, in the sculpture of Ellora and Elephanta, in the poetry of the English Romantics. He has discussed human discontent with Romain Rolland, revolutionary romanticism with Ernest Toller, and the destinies of Buddhism with André Malraux.”

From these varied sources of inspiration emerged Nehru’s most important contribution to Indian democracy — the very notion of Indianness. It is worth remembering that, amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a mosaic of principalities and statelets, the Italian nationalist Massimo Taparelli d’Azeglio had memorably written, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Nehru never succumbed to the temptation to express a similar thought, because he believed in the existence of India and Indians for millennia before he gave words to their longings. He would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, the nationalist movement did. And Nehru it was, above all else, who welded that India into a plausible nation — the man who, through his writings, his speeches, his life, and his leadership, can be credited with the invention of the India we know today.

Jawaharlal always saw India as more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, he wrote in The Discovery of India, “by strong but invisible threads…. She is a myth and an idea” (he always feminized India), “a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.” Who better than Nehru to incarnate this India, this idea, this present reality? Nehru articulated a vision of India as pluralism vindicated by history:

India … was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously…. Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, every-where there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages…. [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in … and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.

This was a vision of India that resolved the national argument about identity by simply bypassing it. Nehru argued that the unity of India was apparent from the outside: every Indian, whatever his differences from other Indians, was seen by foreigners as an Indian first, rather than as a Christian or Muslim, even though he might share his religion with those foreigners. For Nehru, the “Indian people” had a timeless quality, emerging from history and stretching on into the future. Not surprisingly, it was Nehru who insisted that the name India be retained in the Constitution, in the face of attempts by Prasad and others to rename the country Bharat, a piece of Hindu atavism that Jawaharlal accommodated by allowing both versions to be used. For he was above all a unifying figure for the newly independent country. In a 1953 article Nirad Chaudhuri considered Nehru “the indispensable link between the governing middle-classes and the sovereign people” of India, as well as “the bond between India and the world” … “India’s representative to the great Western democracies, and I must add, their representative to India…. [W]hen Nehru takes an anti-Western or neutral line[,] they feel they are being let down by one of themselves.”

The “link,” the “bridge,” the embodiment of India, the man forever trying to accommodate and reconcile the country’s various and disparate tendencies, even the notion of him as a turncoat to the West — these very terms point to the contradictions between conviction and compromise that marked Jawaharlal Nehru’s life. His books reveal a Western intellect articulating an Indian heritage in the voice of the Enlightenment. (In this regard he made possible India’s ability to compete in the globalized world of the twenty-first century, by infusing “Westernization” into Indianness institutionally, temperamentally, and philosophically.) Nehru defined Indian nationhood through the power of his ideas, in many ways like Thomas Jefferson in the United States, a figure to whom he bears considerable resemblance — a man of great intellect and sweeping vision, a wielder of words without parallel, high-minded and eloquent, yet in many ways blind to his own faults and those of others around him.

Syed Mahmud, who had known Jawaharlal since 1912, wrote in 1959 that Nehru “is essentially a man of the future. In his anxiety to build the future of his country in the shortest possible time, he sometimes lamentably ignores the present.” Three decades later, in my own The Great Indian Novel, I portrayed Jawaharlal Nehru as the blind visionary Dhritarashtra, unable to see the realities around him while he fixed his gaze on distant ideals. Such a conceit was the privilege of a satirist, but as with all satire there was a kernel of truth in the portrait. And yet that faith in the future that animated Nehru’s vision of India seems so much more valuable than the atavistic assertion of pride in the past that stirs pettier nationalists.

Until late into adulthood Jawaharlal felt keenly the need for, and depended upon, a strong father figure: first Motilal, then the Mahatma, both strong-willed individuals in relation to whom he shaped his own beliefs, and whose self-confident judgment guided, confirmed, or altered his own. (Even Patel briefly played this role between 1947 and 1950.) The gap between rhetoric and action, between conviction and execution, was particularly apparent in his relations with Mahatma Gandhi, with whom he frequently expressed disagreement but could never bring himself to make a definitive break. The profound certitude that there was always someone older and stronger to set him right if he strayed might help explain his lifelong tendency to affirm principles disconnected from practical consequences. During the freedom struggle, this was manifest in his frequent courting of arrest and enduring prison terms without any concrete effect on the British, his advocacy of the disastrous resignation of the Congress ministries in 1939, his leadership of the futile (and in the end counterproductive) Quit India movement in 1942; as prime minister, it lay in much that he said, on issues ranging from socialism to world peace, which had little relation to the real experience of the Indians in whose name he spoke. Indeed, the gap between the ideals he articulated and their achievement became one of the tragedies of Nehru’s life, because the more people took him at his word, the more disillusioned they became — as with the Socialists, who broke with him precisely because they shared what he declared to be his beliefs but rejected what they saw were his actions.

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 authoritarian 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.

Self-sufficiency and self-reliance thus became the twin mantras: the prospect of allowing a Western corporation into India to “exploit” its resources immediately revived memories of British oppression. (It is ironic that in the West, freedom is associated axiomatically with capitalism, whereas in the postcolonial world freedom was seen as freedom from the depredations of foreign capital.) “Self-reliance” thus became a slogan and a watchword: it guaranteed both political freedom and freedom from economic exploitation. The result was a state that ensured political freedom but presided over; economic stagnation; that regulated entrepreneurial activity through a system of licenses, permits, and quotas that promoted both corruption and inefficiency but did little to promote growth; that enshrined bureaucratic power at the expense of individual enterprise. For most of the first five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and distributing poverty. Nehru called this socialism.

The logic behind this approach, and for the dominance of the public sector, was a compound of nationalism and idealism: the conviction that items vital for the economic well-being of Indians must remain in Indian hands — not the hands of Indians seeking to profit from such activity, but the disinterested hands of the state, the father-and-mother to all Indians. It was sustained by the assumption that the public sector was a good in itself; that, even if it was not efficient or productive or competitive, it employed large numbers of Indians, gave them a stake in worshipping at Nehru’s “new temples of modern India,” and kept the country free from the depredations of profit-oriented capitalists who would enslave the country in the process of selling it what it needed. In this kind of thinking, performance was not a relevant criterion for judging the utility of the public sector: its inefficiencies were masked by generous subsidies from the national exchequer, and a combination of vested interests — socialist ideologues, bureaucratic management, self-protective trade unions, and captive markets — kept it beyond political criticism.

But since the public sector was involved in economic activity, it was difficult for it to be entirely exempt from economic yardsticks. Yet most of Nehru’s public-sector companies made losses, draining away the Indian taxpayers’ money. Several of the state-owned companies even today are kept running merely to provide jobs — or, less positively, to prevent the “social costs” (job losses, poverty, political fallout) that would result from closing them down. All this we owe to Nehru. Since economic self-sufficiency was seen by the Nehruvians as the only possible guarantee of political independence, extreme protectionism was imposed: high tariff barriers (import duties of 350 percent were not uncommon, and the top rate as recently as 1991 was 300 percent), severe restrictions on the entry of foreign goods, capital, and technology, and great pride in the manufacture within India of goods that were obsolete, inefficient, and shoddy but recognizably Indian (like the clunky Ambassador car, a revamped 1948 Morris Oxford produced by a Birla quasi monopoly, which had a steering mechanism with the subtlety of an oxcart, which guzzled gasoline like a sheikh and would shake like a guzzler, and yet enjoyed waiting lists of several years at all the dealers).

The mantra of self-sufficiency might have made some sense if, behind these protectionist walls, Indian business had been encouraged to thrive. Despite the difficulties placed in their way by the British Raj, Indian corporate houses like those of the Birlas, Tatas, and Kirloskars had built impressive business establishments by the time of independence, and could conceivably have taken on the world. Instead they found themselves being hobbled by regulations and restrictions, inspired by Nehru’s socialist

mistrust of the profit motive, on every conceivable aspect of economic activity: whether they could invest in a new product or a new capacity, where they could invest, how many people they could hire, whether they could fire them, what sort of expansion or diversification they could undertake, where they could sell and for how much. Initiative was stifled, government permission was mandatory before any expansion or diversification, and a mind-boggling array of permits and licenses were required before the slightest new undertaking. It is sadly impossible to quantify the economic losses inflicted on India over decades of entrepreneurs frittering away their energies in queuing for licenses rather than manufacturing products, paying bribes instead of hiring workers, wooing politicians instead of understanding consumers, “getting things done” through bureaucrats rather than doing things for themselves. This, too, is Nehru’s legacy.

The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods of too low a quality at too high a price. Exports of manufactured goods grew at an annual rate of 0.1 percent until 1985; India’s share of world trade fell by fourfifths. Per capita income, with a burgeoning population and a modest increase in GDP, anchored India firmly to the bottom third of the world rankings. The public sector, however, grew in size though not in production, to become the largest in the world outside the Communist bloc. Meanwhile, income disparities persisted, the poor remained mired in a poverty all the more wretched for the lack of means of escape from it in a controlled economy, the public sector sat entrenched on the “commanding heights” and looked down upon the toiling, overtaxed middle class, and only bureaucrats, politicians, and a small elite of protected businessmen flourished from the management of scarcity.

India’s curse, the economist Jagdish Bhagwati once observed, was to be afflicted by brilliant economists. Nehru had a weakness for such men: people like P. C. Mahalanobis, who combined intellectual brilliance and ideological wrongheadedness in equal measure, but who was given free rein by Jawaharlal to drive India’s economy into a quicksand of regulatory red tape surrounding a mirage of planning. Nearly three decades after Nehru’s death and long after the rest of the developing world (led by China) had demonstrated the success of a different path, a new Congress prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, launched the country on economic reforms. In place of the Nehruvian mantra of self-sufficiency, India was to become more closely integrated into the world economic system. This repudiation of Nehruvianism has survived and become part of the new conventional wisdom. Though there is no doubt that economic reform faces serious political obstacles in democratic India, and change is often made with the hesitancy of governments looking over their electoral shoulders, there is now a definitive rupture of the Nehruvian link between democracy and socialism: one is no longer the corollary of the other. The bogey of the East India Company has finally been laid to rest.

And yet there is no denying one vital legacy of Nehru’s economic planning — the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for the country today. Nehru was always fascinated by science and scientists; he made it a point to attend the annual Indian Science Congress every year, and he gave free rein (and taxpayers’ money) to scientists in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions. Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research; they and their successors have given the country a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world. Jawaharlal’s establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology (and the spur they provided to other lesser institutions) have produced many of the finest minds in Silicon Valley; today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the U.S. as one from MIT or Caltech, and India’s extraordinary leadership in the software industry is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru’s faith in scientific education.

Of course this record also masks much mediocrity; overbureaucratized and underfunded scientific institutes that prompted gifted researchers like Har Gobind Khurana and Subramanyam Chandrasekhar to take their talents abroad and win Nobel Prizes for the U.S. rather than India. It is striking that post-independence India has not replicated, at any of Nehru’s much-vaunted scientific institutions, the success of pre-independence scientists like C. V. Raman, Satyen Bose, or Meghnad Saha, who had left their marks on the world of physics in the first thirty years of the twentieth century with the Raman effect, the Bose-Einstein statistics, and the Saha equation. Still, Nehru left India with the world’s second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.

Nehru was skeptical of Western claims to stand for freedom and democracy when India’s historical experience of colonial oppression and exploitation appeared to bear out the opposite. His conclusion was to see a moral equivalence between the two rival power blocs in the cold war, a position that led to nonalignment. Nehru saw this as the only possible stance compatible with the self-respect of a newly independent nation, and one which entitled India to take an independent position on each international issue. The limitations of his approach became apparent near the end of his own life, and today the end of the cold war has left India without a global conflict to be nonaligned against. Nonalignment, its defenders suggested, gave credibility to Indian nationalism by providing it with an overarching international purpose; without it, some questioned whether the idea of India could have stood its ground. But the point about the nationalist idea in India was that, for all the Nehruvian rhetoric, it was not dependent on an internationalist mission: its principal relevance was internal, in “creating Indians” out of the world’s most disparate collection of fellow citizens. Today one might argue that the changes in India’s external orientation necessitated by its economic reforms and by the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower have made nonalignment a rhetorical device at best, an irrelevance at worst. Be that as it may, the point remains that nonalignment is no longer a sufficient explanation for India’s interests on the world stage. Once again, Nehruvianism is passé.

A retired Indian diplomat, Badruddin Tyabji, surveying the conduct of Nehru’s foreign policy after Nehru’s death, lamented sardonically:

Subjectivity still rules the roost, though the great

Subject himself died in 1964. His successors now

quibble over the contents of his “system,” though

he had no system. He had only behaved like himself,

and no one can do that any more for him.

The political ethos Nehru promoted was one of staunch anti-imperialism, a determination to safeguard India against foreign domination and internal division, and a commitment — at least in principle — to the uplift of the poorest sections of Indian society. These concerns fused together in the four pillars of Nehruvianism. If they were infused by what sometimes seemed excessively idealist rhetoric, Jawaharlal had a typical retort: “idealism,” he declared, “is the realism of tomorrow.” Tomorrow, however, has a habit of finding its own realisms. The last Congress Party government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao paid little but lip service to the traditional leitmotivs of the Nehru legacy. Instead, Rao tried to manage the contradictory pulls of India’s various particularist tendencies by seeking to accommodate them in a new consensus: economic reforms to invite foreign investment, to reduce the government’s power to command the economy, and to spur growth, coupled with politics that gave a little to each new group demand. The governments that have followed his have gone even further, even beginning to dismantle the public sector that was among Nehru’s proudest creations.

And yet there can be no greater measure of the extent to which Jawaharlal Nehru dominated the political, intellectual, and moral ethos of his day than the tribute paid to him by his great critic Atal Behari Vajpayee, the opposition leader who would one day succeed Nehru both as foreign minister (in 1977) and as prime minister (in 1996). Upon Jawaharlal’s death, Vajpayee declared in Parliament that “a dream has remained half-fulfilled, a song has become silent, and a flame has vanished into the Unknown. The dream was of a world free of fear and hunger; the song a great epic resonant with the spirit of the Gita and as fragrant as a rose; the flame a candle which burnt all night long, showing us the way.” He added that Nehru was “the orchestrator of the impossible and inconceivable,” one who “was not afraid of compromise but would never compromise under duress.” Vajpayee went on to mourn “that vibrancy and independence of mind, that quality of being able to befriend the opponent and enemy, that gentlemanliness, that greatness” that marked Nehru. When he took over as minister of external affairs in India’s first non-Congress government in 1977, Vajpayee noticed that a portrait of Nehru was missing from its usual spot in the ministerial chamber, removed in an excess of zeal by functionaries anxious to please the new rulers. The lifelong critic of the Congress demanded its return. As he had said in his elegy, “the sun has set, yet by the shadow of the stars we must find our way.”

So one must never forget the man himself, and his stamp on the age. His most comprehensive biographer, the late Gopal, put it best:

No one who lived in India during the enchantment of the Nehru years needs to be reminded of the positive, generous spirit, the quality of style, the fresh and impulsive curiosity, the brief flares of temper followed by gentle contrition and the engaging streak of playfulness, all of which went along with an unrelenting sense of duty, a response to large issues, an exercise of reason and unaffiliated intelligence in human affairs, an intense, but not exclusive, patriotism and, above all, complete and transparent personal integrity…. To a whole generation of Indians he was not so much a leader as a companion who expressed and made clearer a particular view of the present and a vision of the future. The combination of intellectual and moral authority was unique in his time.

The Indian novelist Raja Rao once spoke of the “secret historicity” of Jawaharlal’s mere presence. The American statesman Adlai Stevenson, introducing Nehru to a Chicago audience in 1949, observed:

We live in an age swept by tides of history so powerful they shatter human understanding. Only a tiny handful of men have influenced the implacable forces of our time. To this small company of the truly great, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru belongs…. He belongs to the even smaller company of historic figures who wore a halo in their own lifetimes.

Nehru, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew wrote, “had to stand the test of two judgments: first, how well he succeeded in overthrowing the old order and second, whether he has succeeded in establishing a new order which is better than the old.” Lee’s cautious verdict was that “nobody can say that his reputation has been tarnished as a result of attaining power.” Nehru’s idea of India has held, though his legacy to India remains a mixed one. Of the four major pillars of his system, two — democratic institution-building and staunch secularism — were indispensable to the country’s survival as a pluralist land; a third, nonalignment, preserved its self respect and enhanced its international standing without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people; the fourth, socialist economics, was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere. In some ways, Jawaharlal seems curiously dated, a relic of another era; in others, such as in the development of India’s technological, nuclear, and satellite programs, a vindicated visionary. He called the dams and factories he built the “new temples” of modern India, but failed to realize the hold the old temples would continue to have on the Indian imagination. He created the technological institutes that have positioned India for leadership in the computer age, but he did not understand that software and spirituality could go hand in hand, that India in the twenty-first century would be a land of both programming and prayers. Nearly four decades after Nehru’s death, the consensus he constructed has frayed: democracy endures, secularism is besieged, nonalignment is all but forgotten, and socialism barely clings on.

“Progress,” Jawaharlal declared toward the end of his life, “ultimately has to be measured by the quality of human beings — how they are improving, how their lot is improving, and how they are adapting themselves to modern ways and yet keep their feet firmly planted on their soil.” By his own measure, India’s progress has been mixed. India’s challenge today is both to depart from his legacy and to build on it, to sustain an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the power or the products of the outside world, secure in a national identity that transcends its divisions, and determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of her people. If India succeeds, it must acknowledge that he laid the foundation for such a success; if India fails, it will find in Nehru many of the seeds of its failure.

On his desk, Jawaharlal Nehru kept two totems — a gold statuette of Mahatma Gandhi and a bronze cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln, which he would occasionally touch for comfort. The two objects reflected the range of his sources of inspiration: he often spoke of his wish to confront problems with the heart of the Mahatma and the hand of Lincoln. Nehru’s time may indeed have passed; but it says something about the narrowing of the country’s intellectual heritage that both objects ended up in a museum — and his heirs just kept the desk.

9 Prasad, literally a blessing, is food offered to an idol in a temple ritual and then distributed to the worshippers.

10 See note on Indian Political Parties and Movements, pp. xvi — xvii.