By Aparna Pande
This article appeared in Chowk on January 3, 2007
The 77th anniversary of the declaration of Purna Swaraj, the 57th anniversary of India’s Republic Day – it is time to pay tribute to some one without whom India would not be what it is today: a global economic, military and political power. And the man in question: Jawaharlal Nehru.
We all love to have idols and we don’t fail to rubbish them if we perceive that those idols are not doing what we expected of them, however, impossible our expectations might be.
They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, well; maybe we need to apply that when we critically dissect our idols or our leaders. It is very easy to criticize someone for not living up to our ideals, it is tougher to try to understand that maybe under the given circumstances the person did what they could and it is still harder to give credit where it is due.
Yes, Pandit Nehru had many faults, we all do; we are humans and humans are not perfect, even idols. There are some stages in history when he said something or took a decision which had an adverse affect; his remarks on the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946 or his oft refusal to overcome his personal connection to the Kashmir issue. However, he laid the foundations of our secularism, our economy, our foreign policy and our democracy.
India, emerging from colonialism, had the good fortune of having a leader with a vision for the first twenty years of its existence. We do not have to agree with his views but we do need to admit that without that base no superstructure could have been constructed.
As Indians we are often fond of comparing our leaders to those of our neighbor, Pakistan. We compare Gandhi and Nehru to Mr Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan in many ways – their attitude towards the British, their views on religion and on economy.
However, what we rarely pause and think is that if along with Gandhi, Jinnah and Liaqat, Nehru too had passed away or been assassinated early in the history of our independent country would India have been any different from Pakistan today? And would India have even managed to survive as a country let alone a strong emerging power?
As Indians, from any part of the country or the world, when we are asked what we consider to be part of our identity most of us will point to democracy, economic power, secularism and our great civilization. A large part of this heritage has been secured for us because at independence we had a leader who had as his vision these very same beliefs along with some others.
Secularism in the Indian context refers to the state treating all religions and sects as equal. The context of partition and the subsequent years was such that there was a need to ensure that the fabric of India itself did not break apart with religious riots and violence. Out of the 95 million Muslims living in pre-Partition India, 35 million remained behind in India after independence. Secularism was an attempt to make everyone who lived in India to feel that it was their home. It has derogatively been termed over the last few decades by the Hindu right wing as an “appeasement of the minorities.”
What they forget and may ponder to think about is that despite the rise of radical political Islam in many parts of the world, there are very few Indian Muslims who have been found to be members of these jihadi organizations, even in Kashmir. Things have changed since 1992 and especially after the Gujarat pogroms of 2002. However, those were a reflection of India’s moving away from its secular ideals and the repercussions will be with us for a long time to come.
Nehru believed in economic autarky. A belief in Fabian socialism, that the state must provide for the people and a centrally planned economy would prevent rampant capitalism were part of this view. Many economists have blamed Nehruvian socialism for the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ i.e a growth rate of 2.5-3% per year during the 1960s-70s.
The excessive government control via the ‘Inspector-license-quota Raj’ led to bureaucratic red-tapism, lack of innovation and massive redundancy at all levels. Suspicion of foreigners and of capitalism did not provide an environment for large foreign investment either.
Yet, through the process of reverse engineering Indians learnt to manufacture many products, which they would never have learnt if they had only imported those technologies without learning to create them. Instead of foreign aid and investment, foreign help in manufacturing and creating new and high yielding variety of seeds and in refrigeration technologies led to the Green and White Revolutions. The first led to the high production of food grains and the latter to the production and distribution of milk and milk products.
A slower, more people friendly model of economic growth is better. Even if it appears that to take two steps forward one often has to take one step back. The leap forward that India has taken from the 1990s has been possible because of the base created during the earlier decades. The service industry boom has been based on the fact that India has the largest English speaking population in the world. Here again Nehru’s vision can be seen. Most of India’s famed institutions – whether universities, institutes of technology or management – trace their heritage to Nehru’s desire to have world-class universities which would produce people of the same caliber.
Yes, a lot still needs to be done. Infrastructure, power, water and manufacturing are still far from perfect. Agriculture needs a lot of improvement too. The Indian economy cannot grow solely on the basis of its service sector. However, the base is there and the superstructure can be constructed.
The Nehruvian stamp can be seen on Indian foreign policy as well. Non-alignment, non-interference in other countries, belief in multilateralism, support to international institutions and plea for world peace are key issues. Our relations with the Afro-Asian countries as well as the Muslim world, though strained during the cold war, have lasted because their roots were established during the early years of Independence when India championed anti-colonialism and nationalism.
Non-alignment did not always serve us well, forcing us to choose between our ideals and our friends. The end of the cold war, however, has opened up a lot of opportunities for India. Our policies, even if we were never in the western camp, have shown us to be an independent power, which has hard, economic and soft power on its side. Relations with our neighbors, especially Pakistan, are a legacy where Nehru can be faulted, as he was never able to come out of the emotional ties to Kashmir and the desire to have a ‘United India’.
India is the world’s largest and most populous democracy. It boggles the minds of most democracy analysts as they lay down certain criteria – economic wealth, paucity of cleavages in society, homogenous culture among others – for democracy to succeed. India’s success at democracy can be laid at the feet of its very decentralized political systems before the British era. However, India’s political elite, especially Nehru, deserve credit too.
Democracy succeeds when the elite believe that it serves them better to allow the system to perform and to allow certain institutional arrangements to be set up. Democracy fails when the elite believe that it serves them better to destroy the present system and create a new one. Nehru believed in democracy. He instilled in both his supporters and those opposed to him the view that if they wanted to instill any changes in the Indian system they must do so only after gaining power democratically.
He was polite to friend and foe. He never rigged elections or tried to have any opposition member or party assassinated or put in jail. He respected the views of others – there is a complete set of volumes which contain the letters he used to write to the chief ministers of various provinces asking for their opinions on various matters, even those related to foreign policy. From the mid-1950s at least two states had chief ministers who were non-Congress, West Bengal and Kerala. Yet he never tried to dismiss those governments or hurt them economically.
After Nehru his successors did not live up to the same ideals. The present political system where there are region-based and caste-based parties is a result of this.
However, everyone still believes that the only way they can cause change is by participating in the system. That is the Nehruvian legacy.