Vilifying Nehru is futile

Stop It!

History that misleads generations is more dangerous than a weapon of mass destruction. Today, the amount of muck splattered on our national heroes like Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi on social media is unfathomable. The internet and social media have been made so user-friendly that they have been captured by unread hooligans that have built an entire Nehru vilification industry across cyberspace. The aim of the masters that have let loose these rogues is to discredit Nehru and erase his imprint on the country.

Nehru has been projected as a philanderer. In November 2017, BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya put out photographs of Nehru with this mischievous intent, and it went viral and continues to be circulated even today. The photographs were of Nehru sharing an affectionate moment with his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit and niece Nayantara Sehgal!

Alt News and other fact-checkers have found several fake photographs and claims about Nehru that keep doing the rounds. Photographs depicting Nehru attending an RSS shakha, the viral message that Nehru had said “I am Hindu by accident of birth”, the claim that Nehru had called Subhas Chandra Bose “a war criminal”, that he had scrapped currency notes featuring Bose, the claim of a British minister lambasting Nehru over education policy, the claim of Nehru being thrashed by a mob, or of Nehru refusing to extend financial support to the Indian football team in 1948 Olympics – these and many more are all fake.

It clearly shows that as a society we are illiterate. Worse, we have such sick minds that pictures of a man with his sister and niece are put out to paint him as a womaniser, and we all enjoy and share in such character assassination. We are ever ready to raise apprehension on the character of a woman without knowing the truth about her. We are verily the descendants of the washerman who raised a question mark on the character of Sita in the Ramayana!

If it were only anonymous internet nutters making such attacks, it wouldn’t matter much. But a steady stream of the ruling BJP’s leaders, led by the Prime Minister himself, have continuously sought to belittle Nehru and purge him from our history books.

Yet, they will find that for all their efforts, it is impossible to write the history of India’s freedom struggle or of independent India without acknowledging Nehru’s contribution to it. He is a leader of pre-and post-Independence India that cannot be forgotten.

In 1927, Nehru attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels and took the freedom movement international. It was Nehru, and Subhas Bose, who in 1928 demanded complete freedom (Purna Swaraj) from the British, disagreeing with Gandhi and the Congress moderates’ demand until then for merely a Dominion status for India within the British empire. It was under his presidency that the Purna Swaraj resolution was moved at the Lahore Session of Congress in 1929. For his role in the freedom struggle, Nehru spent nearly 10 years of his life in jail cumulatively – a total of 3,259 days, in nine jail terms lasting from a short 10 days to a long 888 days.

Did Nehru cause or encourage Partition, as the BJP wants us to believe? Nehru was the last of the Congress leaders to accept Partition (Gandhi never did, and Sardar Patel had accepted it as inevitable as early as January 1947), and Nehru did so only on May 10, 1947, when Mountbatten confronted him with the choice of a partition into two – India and Pakistan – or the Balkanisation of India into hundreds of pieces – the ‘Dickie Bird Plan’.

Nehru, as Prime Minister, had to steer the ship of the nation in tempestuous times: an India that had been ravaged by more than 200 years of colonial rule, an India that had just been partitioned, and an India that was going through a severe famine and food scarcity. There was also the challenge of integrating 565 princely states, each playing truant and each with its own demands, into the Indian Union.

In the 1950s, it was Nehru’s creation of linguistic states that helped keep India united against the centrifugal tendencies that were at work.

In 1947, India had a power generation capacity of just 1,500 MW; it had reached 22,000 MW by 1964 when Nehru died. The most massive irrigation and power projects of independent India were built during Nehru’s years as PM. He propelled India’s infrastructure, industrial and scientific build-up, calling these “the temples of modern India”. All while introducing and building up the DNA and institutions of modern India – the making of the Constitution, universal franchise, the multi-party system, and a truly secular democracy. India’s is probably the only Constitution in the world that explicitly declares a commitment to ‘scientific temper’, a term Nehru is credited to have coined. Briefly, it meant that only reason and science, and not the Holy Scriptures of any religion, would provide us reliable knowledge of the physical world. The IITs, IIMs, AIIMS, India’s nuclear and space programmes, the DRDO, all came up thanks to Nehru. So did many of the cultural institutions that made India a leader in ‘Soft Power’ globally.

Nehru’s policy of non-alignment to steer clear of the Cold War power blocs so that India could exercise strategic autonomy and yet benefit from contacts with both sides created India’s distinctive and independent identity on the world stage, a blessing that the Modi government must have recognised of late in taking its stance on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Nehru was not anti-military nor insulting of India’s military leadership, as is sought to be made out today, but he did believe that in a democracy, the military should be subordinate to civilian authority and not the other way around. It was thus that India alone continued to be a democracy even as countries all around it in South and South-East Asia turned into military dictatorships or ‘guided democracies’. India could have easily become a mirror image of Pakistan, which suffered the first of its many military coups in 1958, but it did not. Former Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is said to have remarked “There is no difference between India and Pakistan, there is no difference between Indians and Pakistanis, except one: You had Nehru and we didn't, and that made all the difference.”

Imagine what India might have looked like if some Hindutva or other religious fanatic, and not Nehru, had become India’s first Prime Minister!

(The writer is a former official of the Government of Karnataka)