There’s something unique about the Nehrus and the Gandhis; at least the colossus among them — Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi. They sensed the presence of death even when they were alive! Indira Gandhi would talk about death and dying months before she was brutally assassinated by her own bodyguards. As fate would have it, her last speech, a day before her death on 30 October 1984, was: “Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood… will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.”
Nehru’s premonition was even more striking. One morning in 1958, he told his private secretary, MO Mathai, that he would die at the age of 74. Nehru was 69 then. Nehru had famously snubbed Rajendra Prasad for his suggestion to delay the declaration of the Republic on 26 January on astrological grounds. And here, wondered Mathai, as he recalled in his memoirs My Days with Nehru, if the prime minister had finally succumbed to astrology. Nehru reasoned, saying he had reached this number based on the average age of men in his family! Be that as it may, the fact is Nehru, like his daughter, was thinking about death a few years before he died.
Ironically, the last six years of his life not just made Nehru behave like an average mortal but also turned him into one of the most tragic personalities in post-Independence India. He became associated with almost all things wrong that happened — and could have happened — in independent India. Kashmir, China, Tibet, Pseudo-Secularism, Socialism, Diplomacy… You name it, and Nehru invariably appears to be a cautionary tale on how not to run a country. So much so that even Shashi Tharoor, a Nehru admirer otherwise who would later join the Congress under the leadership of one of the lesser Gandhis, wrote in his 2003 book, Nehru: The Invention of India: “Nearly four decades after Nehru’s death, the consensus he constructed has frayed: Democracy endures, secularism is besieged, non-alignment is all but forgotten, and socialism barely clings on.”
The year 1958 was a watershed period for Nehru. History could have been kinder to him had he not hung onto power that long, had he abdicated the throne by, say, 1958. But then Nehru was addicted to power. “I was not much of a politician,” Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India, “although politics had seized me and made me its victim.” He could see the downside of his continued presence in the corridors of power. His heart said he should resign. He sought the party’s permission to do so. Being in power for 11 years could be a tiresome affair, and he wanted to return to “myself as an individual citizen of India and not as prime minister”.
But then his mind, his undue sense of self-attachment and importance made him cling on to power. No wonder, when American journalist Norman Cousins asked him in 1961 if he would ever give up power, Nehru “looked as though nothing would be more unwelcome… more than ever we realised that Nehru loved his job and had no thought of leaving it”. Politics had “seized” him. It was only a matter of time that he would become its “victim”.
The moment of reckoning for Nehru came in 1962 when Mao’s China attacked India. But then it was only logical that Nehru, howsoever tragic it might seem today, faced this reality. The fact that 1962 was just the culmination of the Nehruvian mishandling of the Chinese affairs, starting from of the PLA’s invasion of Tibet in 1950, which Nehru not just refused to take note of, but also rushed in to accept the Chinese suzerainty on the Roof of the World. He ignored Sardar Patel’s warnings vis-?-vis China’s imperialistic designs just before his death in 1950, and all through kept himself surrounded by people like KM Panikkar and VK Krishna Menon who were actually betting on Mao’s behalf without ever realising that. So, India provided rice to invading PLA troops in Tibet, and when it became obvious that the PLA would soon be turning their gaze towards India, as forewarned by then Army Chief KS Thimayya, India refused to import defence equipment and, worse, turned the military factories into production lines for hair-clips and pressure-cookers. China’s attack was “a stab from the front”, as MJ Akbar writes in his Nehru biography.
Today, when one looks back at Nehru, one wonders how history would have treated him had he not hung onto power after 1958. He would have escaped the tyranny of history — and karma — largely unscathed. His successor would have taken the fall for the war with China, which would have happened with or without Nehru. What the 1962 war did was that it took away the fa?ade of invincibility around him. It also shook the nation out of the Nehruvian mirage to see matter-of-factly the nightmare it was in. India not just built its diplomatic castle on thin air but also followed an economic policy that pushed the country backwards since 1947. Tharoor writes, “For most of the first five decades since Independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidising unproductivity, regulating stagnation and distributing poverty. Nehru called this socialism.”
The main reason, as Nirad C Chaudhuri observed, was that Nehru was “completely out of touch with the Indian life even of his time, except with the life of the self-segregating Anglicised set of upper India”. Chaudhuri saw him as a snob, contemptuous of those who spoke English with an Indian accent, with no understanding of contemporary Hinduism. This attitude allowed a certain kind of people, with a certain ideological leaning, to make headway under his regime.
This allowed corruption to creep in, a phenomenon not much talked about as those close to the establishment made us believe that all went wrong when Indira Gandhi came to power. The truth is it all began under Nehru. A Nehru admirer and former cabinet colleague, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, put it bluntly: “He (Nehru) is not a good judge of character and is therefore easily deceived. He is not averse to flattery and there is a conceit in him which makes him at once intolerant of criticism and may even warp his better judgement. His very loyalty to friends blinds him to their faults. For this very reason he is not ruthless enough as a leader and his leadership is weakened thereby.”
Interestingly, in 1959, Nehru’s own sister Krishna (Betty) wrote quite scathingly: “Nehru the Prime Minister no longer remembers or adheres to the ideals or dreams that Jawahar the Rebel had… (H)e can no longer arouse his people as he did in years gone by, for he has allowed himself to be surrounded by those who are known to be opportunists and the entire Government machinery, corrupt and heavy with intrigue, rules the land with no hope of an honest hearing from any quarter.”
More interestingly, and ironically, his own son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi, played a big role in exposing some of the high-profile cases of corruption during Nehru’s regime.
In the larger context, however, Nehru’s distrust of civilisational India and his attempt to push the Westernised idea of India based on an alien and alienating notion of socialism and secularism hurt the country most. His attempt to place the Damocles’ sword of the success of secularism on the Hindu head while giving Muslims a free pass, was a template that his political successors pursued and perfected to keep the nation on communal tenterhooks. He refused to listen to Iqbal who forewarned that Nehru’s egalitarian nationalism would ultimately fail to satisfy the Muslim minority. He refused to listen to JB Kripalani’s verbal assault during the parliamentary debate on the Hindu Code Bill in 1955 when the Acharya charged Nehru with communalism “because you are bringing forward a law about monogamy only for Hindu community”. Even Tharoor concedes, “If Muslim politicians developed a vested interest in minorityhood, the Nehruvian state evolved a vested interest in its perpetuation.”
Today, on his birth anniversary, as we look back at the Nehruvian legacy, it’s obvious that Nehru remains relevant for India and its democratic journey, even if as a cautionary tale. He, despite his monumental failures, remains a guiding light for the Republic. He is also a reminder to how karma catches up with even the most powerful, at the prime of their lives. For, here was the democrat who “wielded an authority usually reserved to dictators”, as Walter Crocker, his contemporary Australian diplomat, observed about Nehru in his book.
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
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