Aditya Mukherjee’s forensic defence of the Nehruvian ‘Idea of India’

At a time when the forces of Hindutva are relentlessly denigrating Jawaharlal Nehru’s contribution to the freedom of our country and the first 17 years of nation-building in independent India, the historian Aditya Mukherjee brings welcome clarification to the debate largely by citing Nehru’s own words and expanding on their import in the present context. He operates on the principle that it is only by diligently researching and citing Nehru’s writings and speeches (and, above all, action) that one can portray the truth of the real Nehru to counter the falsehoods and distortions being so assiduously spread by the very forces Nehru fought all his life, but which have tragically—and, hopefully, transiently—occupied the highest echelons of political power these past 10 years or so. Nehru emerges quintessentially as a thoroughly civilised statesman in sharp contrast to the hate-filled, distortionist, quasi-fascists now roosting in office, often resorting to gangster-speak, especially during elections with a complaisant Election Commission firmly looking the other way.

Mukherjee, an emeritus professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, weaves his story around Nehru’s unmatched “Idea of India”, his lifelong crusade against communal thought and action, his profound belief in democracy and the institutions of democracy enshrined in the Constitution, and the democratic ethos and value system. His advocacy of the “scientific temper” to counter ignorance and superstition and his unprecedented emphasis on development through democracy kept its focus firmly on the poor and their uplift. Let me attempt in this brief review to refer to most of these themes in turn, leaving the reader to evaluate for themselves Prof. Mukherjee’s point of departure—Nehru as an accomplished, if self-taught, historian.

Secularism as constitutional imperative

The author cites the famous phrases from Nehru’s “magisterial magnum opus”, The Discovery of India, comparing the evolution of the Indic civilisation over five millennia with “some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed”, but with “no succeeding layer” hiding or erasing “what had been written previously”. Mukherjee sums up Nehru’s “discovery” of India’s civilisational history as being founded in “an openness to reason and rationality, a questioning of mind and an acceptance of multiple claims to truth, a dialogical tradition of being in conversation and discussion with each other, the ability to live with difference, accommodate, adjust, resolve and transform rather than violently crush difference”.

This is what convinced Nehru to proudly believe that India and Indians were ready for full-fledged democracy based on universal suffrage and affirmative action for the historically disadvantaged. Even as skeptics considered India too poor and Indians too illiterate and superstitious, too fractionated in caste and creed, to be fit for democracy, Nehru knew history had prepared the nation for it. This is how and why the first principle of nation-building in a nation of unique diversity had to be “unity in diversity”, a principle well-known to the author but curiously not even invoked in passing in this otherwise comprehensive—albeit succinct—survey of Nehru’s thinking. It is an omission requiring rectification, for it is from this basic perception that secularism derives its constitutional imperative as the fundamental building block of our nationhood.

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This brings us to the core of this book: that when free, Nehru insisted, “India will not be a majoritarian Hindu state”. Mukherjee names all those Congressmen from Lokmanya Tilak to Subhas Chandra Bose, and, on the Left, all those from “the early Jayaprakash Narayan” to E.M.S. Namboodiripad and Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who shared the premise that secularism was the core of the “Idea of India”. Only “communalists of all hues” were opposed to this consensus.

India’s independence came at the cost of Partition, “a holocaust-like situation where an estimated 5,00,000 were killed and millions were rendered homeless in a spate of communal hatred and violence”. Confronted with anti-Hindu rioting in Noakhali at the south-east corner of united Bengal, Mahatma Gandhi spent four months in 1946 bringing the horror under control even as Nehru, with most of the Congress leadership in tow, rushed to Bihar, Nehru declaring, “I will stand in the way of Hindu-Muslim riots. Members of both communities will have to tread over my dead body before they can strike at each other.” Within one hundred hours, the author emphasises, the communal carnage was ended.

Then, from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Nehru declared that India would not be a sectarian state like Pakistan. Rather, there would not be “the rule of a particular religion or sect. All who owe allegiance to the flag will enjoy equal rights of citizenship, irrespective of caste and creed.” Gandhi and Nehru’s “frontal attack” on the communal forces showed they treated this “as the top-most priority to save the Idea of India”. So, they stood “bravely with the minorities” in the conviction that “without secularism there could not be any democracy in India”. No wonder the Hindutva movement loathes Nehru and all he stood for.

Communalists, said Nehru, had nothing to do with religion or with culture and “were singularly devoid of all ethics and morality”. On the outcome of the first general election of 1951-52, Nehru underlined that “generally… those who talk of Indian culture have really nothing to do with any culture in the world, Indian or otherwise. Those who talk of Indian civilization are in fact completely uncivilized.” He concluded: “Indian culture has been so glorious in the past because it has not followed such communal methods.”

Above all, the results of the first general election showed that “we need not be afraid of communalism and we need not compromise with it…. Where we fight it in a straight and honest way, we win. Where we compromise with it, we lose.” Nearly seven decades after those wise words were spoken, that is a lesson that needs to be dinned into the INDIA bloc’s ears generally and, specifically, into the ears of the “many Congressmen” Nehru identified who “compromise” with communalism “for fear of the consequences” of not doing so.

To give this ideological position political and practical substance, Mukherjee recalls that Nehru got the All India Congress Committee to declare “that there would be no alliance, cooperation or understanding, explicit or implicit, between the Congress and any organization which is essentially communal”. The author italicises these words in today’s political context where, in Nehru’s words, “the whole mentality of the RSS”, which “is a fascist mentality”, prevails, and many Congressmen are prone to adjust themselves to the RSS/BJP line. The author deplores “the fact that the secular forces (have) failed to undertake any sustained ideological work to combat communal ideology”. Sadly, “the ideological battle against communalism” has not been taken up “by the secular forces”.

As to the Hindutva charge of “tushtikaran”, or appeasement (of the religious minorities), Nehru, as pointed out by Mukherjee, responded by saying: “[A] special responsibility does attach to the Hindus in India both because they are the majority community and because economically and educationally they are more advanced.” What is called “appeasement” by communalists is seen as “compassion” by secularists. Presciently foreseeing what we are experiencing daily these days, Nehru says majority communalism “masquerades under a nationalist cloak”—indeed, “Hindu nationalism is but another name for communalism”. To combat this, what was needed was not “force” but “a higher idealism”. That is the prime need if we are to rescue India from its present predicament.

Rescuing Nehruvian socialist thinking

Finally, Mukherjee—who is first and foremost an economic historian—has done a yeoman’s job of rescuing Nehruvian socialist thinking from the sneering that followed the economic reforms of 1991. The author states that “Nehruvian state intervention and planning was to be consensual and not a command performance’’, for whereas the ratio between the public and private sector contribution to development could, and indeed would be, course corrected over time, the irreducible minimum was that economic growth had to be within a “democratic framework”. There was also “the non-negotiable commitment to sovereignty” to immunise the country from being made “a junior partner of any advanced country, however powerful it might be”. Nehru saw the need to cultivate a “scientific temper” among the general population as a critical component of human development. All this made the Nehruvian development story “unique” in the annals of world history.

Mahatma Gandhi with Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi and Nehru’s “frontal attack” on the communal forces showed they treated the idea of a non-sectarian state “as the top-most priority to save the Idea of India”.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu Photo Archives

Quoting a fellow economist, A. Vaidyanathan, and another younger economist, Vijay Kelkar, Mukherjee points out that Nehru’s strategy of a “structural transformation” of our colonial legacy reduced dependence on imported equipment from 90 per cent at Independence to 43 per cent by 1960 and a mere 9 per cent in 1974. This was accompanied by “a three-fold increase in the aggregate index of industrial production between 1951 and 1969, a 70 per cent increase in consumer goods industries, a quadrupling of intermediate goods production, and a tenfold increase in the output of capital goods”.

Mukherjee himself has undertaken scholarly works that show growth in the first three plan periods to have been “roughly four times the rate of growth achieved during the last half-century of colonial rule”. Moreover, at least in Nehru’s time, public sector savings were considerably higher than that of the private corporate sector.

There was also massive structural transformation of the agricultural sector. Major land reforms were pushed through “within a democratic framework”. Cooperative credit “considerably weakened the stranglehold of the money lender”. And “massive State-sponsored technological change transformed Indian agriculture rapidly”, resulting in a growth rate for the agricultural sector that was “eight times the annual growth rate achieved during the last phase of colonialism (1891-1946)”.

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Alas, once again, the eminent professor slips up in not mentioning the giant steps that Nehru took to bring democracy and development to the grassroots through panchayati raj. To quote Nehru at a meeting of State Ministers of community development on December 9, 1960, panchayati raj would be “the most revolutionary development” for “behind it were all the forces which, when released, will change the structure of the country”.

That said, this important work is a necessary corrective to the lies, distortions, and downright falsehoods being spread by the Hindutva forces against the greatest Indian (but one, Gandhiji) of the generation that brought us freedom and taught us, as a nation, the basics of nation-building.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is a former Rajya Sabha member.