During the heyday of Nehruism, books were banned, and people were jailed for contrarian views. And his discomfort with unfettered press freedom is well recorded.
I have met historian Ramachandra Guha on multiple occasions, but when I received an e-mail from him in late January, saying he would like to meet in Delhi towards “end February/early March”, I felt excited. More so because Guha, a self-confessed follower of Rabindranth Tagore and Andre Beteille, said he would discuss how “the quest for the truth is always more important than loyalty to the ‘nation'”.
While thanking him for his generosity, I politely registered, among other things, a fundamental difference in our respective worldviews. For me, the idea of nation was invariably more important than an individual’s understanding of ‘truth’. On a theoretical level, my India has never been an “imagined” one, but very much alive and unapologetically so. Anybody even with a cursory understanding of the Indic civilisational ethos would realise that nationalism, like religion, is not an exclusivist phenomenon in India; they are unifying factors, quite unlike in the West where both religion and nationalism divide people into two utterly irreconcilable blocs. On a practical level too, one just needs to look at the plight of the Afghans to understand the importance of a nation.
Coming to ‘truth’, it is a subjective notion, often jaundiced by individual pride and prejudice. Truth is like dharma: Everyone will have a different interpretation of it. Bhishma, Karna and Kumbhakarna — they were pursuing their dharma and yet not doing the right thing. Interestingly, they are admired very much for that reason and despite standing on the wrong side of history. In contrast, someone like Vibhishana did the right thing by switching his loyalty to Bhagwan Ram, but he failed to perform his dharma: He remains a cautionary tale of how a brother should never act.
To make things more complicated, there’s an interesting episode in the Mahabharata where Yudhisthira, after losing his brothers and wife one by one on his way to heaven, found Duryodhana and his brothers enjoying spoils up there. So, in the long term, the “virtuous” Pandavas weren’t as upright as they seemed. And the “villainous” Kauravas weren’t as bad as they were projected!
The apogee of the Indic civilisational open-endedness, a hallmark of unadulterated liberalism, is the Rig Veda’s Nasadiya Sukta, which starts with the questions:
There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?
And it ends with the following statement:
Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,
Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.
It is this civilisational candidness to indefinite and endless possibilities that has made India an inherently liberal society. It’s definitely not the gift of Jawaharlal Nehru, as several self-proclaimed liberals, including Guha, would like us to believe. In fact, Nehru wasn’t as liberal as he is made out to be. He was as liberal as his idol Ashoka was; the Mauryan emperor went against the grain of the Indic civilisation to put in place a state religion. Also, it’s possible that Nehru found his inspiration of socialistic, mai-baap sarkar as much from Harrow as from Ashoka who — again going against the Arthashastra and other mainstream Indian traditions — vowed in his edits to care for his people like a father.
Sadly, my meeting with Guha couldn’t materialise. Maybe he forgot. It’s possible that he was genuinely caught up with the promotion of his new book. Or, worse, his secular pretensions got the better of him.
Be that as it may, my questions remained unanswered. I wanted to remind Guha that his Nehru obsession has blinded him of the Nehruvian excesses. In one of the interviews, Guha proudly said that he was a Nehru bhakt and like the first PM, he believed the greatest danger to India was the RSS. A true liberal doesn’t operate in such a confining zone; he is open to all interpretations. On RSS, for instance, Nehru revised his stand post the disastrous China war, inviting the Hindu organisation to participate in the 1963 Republic Day parade; Guha refuses to revise himself, though.
Guha, in his obsessive Nehru bhakti, however, gets the fundamentals of Nehru and Nehruism wrong. Nehru was secular when it came to the majority community; for the minority he was willing to bend backwards with the usual they-are-not-ready-yet argument. He was liberal mostly in the comforts of the Leftist ecosystem. He was a gentleman in the company of the ‘sophisticated’ and the ‘superior’, but those seen to be ‘inferior’ suffered. So, who really was Nehru?
This dichotomy was apparent in the writings of his contemporaries. British writer EM Forster, in 1958, while imagining Voltaire being reborn, believed that “only one head of a state would welcome a letter from him, and that was President (sic) Nehru of India”. In sharp contrast, Sita Ram Goel, in his book, Why I Became a Hindu, accused him of acting ruthless, almost tyrant-like with those he thought he could get away with, while at the same time sustaining “a deep-seated sense of inferiority vis-a-vis Islam, Christianity, and the modern West”.
Goel recalled attending a public meeting in Chandni Chowk in 1934-35. Nehru was supposed to address the audience. The crowd was not big, but there was thunderous applause when Nehru came up on the rostrum. Nehru greeted but the very next moment he turned left and “planted a slap smack” on the face of a junior Congress leader who was standing near the mike. The face of the slapped Congress leader was “bathed in smiles as if he had won some coveted prize”. But Goel found it abhorrent to see a man slapping someone “who was placed lower than him in life, and who was in position to hit back”.
Goel shared another anecdote. He had gone to meet a journalist friend from the US who was in Delhi in 1947-48. As Goel sat down with him in the Coffee House, the journalist said, “Sita, who does this man think he is? Almighty God?” He was referring to Nehru. Goel writes, “He told me the story of some sadhus who had sat down on an indefinite fast near Pandit Nehru’s residence in New Delhi, and were seeking an assurance from him that cow-slaughter would be stopped now that the beef-eating British had departed.”
The US journalist had gone there to take photographs and what he saw was horrifying: As he was talking to one of the sadhus, Nehru accompanied by his sister came out shouting and slapped a sadhu, who seeing them come out moved forward with folded hands. “His sister did the same,” recalled the journalist, who was so aghast that he told Goel matter-of-factly: “I don’t know the norm in your country. In my country, if the President so much as shouts at a citizen, he will have to go. We take it from no bast**d, no matter how big he happens to be.”
For all his liberalism, Nehru was a brown sahib, the last Englishman to rule India. He, in fact, acted as an extension of the Raj, with his regime, much like Britain’s White Man’s Burden, assumed the charge of “civilising the savage world”, to use the title of a book by Nehru’s niece Nayantara Sahgal on his great uncle. The result was the Nehru dispensation continued to be suspicious of the press and act strongly against dissent, perceived or real. This explains the First Amendment, and why he pushed for and got inserted “reasonable restrictions” on freedom of expression.
On the First Amendment, Syama Prasad Mookerjee took on Nehru and called the move “scandalous”, to which Nehru responded by saying that those who thought the amendment curbed liberty were liars. Mookerjee advocated unfettered freedom of expression on the lines of what Sweden had, and he was called a ‘fascist’; Nehru believed that free press was “poisoning the minds of the younger generation, degrading their mental integrity and moral standards”, and he was projected as the paragon of freedom — of expression and press!
Unlike what most sarkari historians would like us to believe, the ban culture didn’t come to India following The Satanic Verses in the late 1980s. It was a part and parcel of the Nehru dispensation. The novel, Nine Hours to Rama, written by Stanley Wolpert, is a classic example. Banned in 1962, the book, a fictional account on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by Nathuram Godse, as well as the film based on it, suggests neglect on the part of the Indian government in saving the Mahatma. Interestingly, JNU professor Makarand Paranjape, too, hints at this in his 2014 book, The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi.
There were more than a dozen books that faced the censor’s ire during Nehru’s era, some of them because of the fear of hurting religious sensitivities, while others such as Alexander Campbell’s The Heart of India (1959) was banned due to a fictionalised and humorous account of India’s bureaucracy and economic policymaking.
If one thought book banning was bad enough, putting someone in jail for a contrarian viewpoint was worse. The most glaring case was that of Majrooh Sultanpuri: In 1952, the noted lyricist and poet was put in jail for two years for a poem that called Nehru a lackey of Hitler and a slave to the Commonwealth.
In this backdrop, it would be interesting to quote Guha. In his 2012 book, Patriots and Partisans, he writes, “First, Nehru was without question the chief architect of our democracy. It was he, more than any other nationalist, who promoted universal franchise and the multi-party system. He respected other Congressmen and Opposition leaders and honoured the freedom of press and independence of the judiciary.”
Guha is, undoubtedly and unabashedly, a Nehru bhakt. And bhakts operate from heart, not mind. The tragedy is he is India’s foremost intellectual and historian as well.
This is Part 1 of the two-part series.
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