Nehru-bashing bodes ill for India

I belong to a generation of Indians that grew up idolising the Mahatma and Jawaharlal Nehru. One was the ‘Father of the Nation’ and the other the country’s first Prime Minister. Tales of their heroic deeds to free our land from foreign rule were what we were told by our elders and what we liked to hear.

Soon after the country was freed and the British had left our shores in August 1947, an extremist, steeped in an ideology to which very few in the country subscribed, shot dead our beloved Mahatma.

Nehru died a natural death many years later. It is only in the past decade since the Modi-Shah government took charge in Delhi that the denigration of our two most respected leaders began. Extremist Hindutva leader Pragya Singh Thakur was given the BJP ticket for the Lok Sabha elections. As an MP, she lauded Nathuram Godse, who had assassinated the Mahatma. The hostile reaction of people to that statement forced our Prime Minister to chide his party’s representative, who is incidentally separately facing prosecution in a terror case.

But the subtle and not-so-subtle, sometimes strident, vitriol against Nehru continues to be spouted by Hindutva elements. It is sickening to hear their laments and accusations that obviously are based on the visceral hatred of the minority Muslim community. These laments and accusations have not cut ice with a large majority of the country’s majority Hindu population. In fact, Nehru’s standing in the freedom struggle and in people’s hearts has not suffered even a tiny bit. Yet the core followers of the majoritarian philosophy continue their tirade!

These brainwashed men and women in saffron want Nehru’s contribution to getting his countrymen free from the colonial yoke to be obliterated from our history books. To that end, their favoured historians are busy rewriting textbooks for students in schools and colleges.

Nehru differentiated between Muslim conquerors who crossed the Khyber Pass to enslave India and European invaders who came by the sea route. According to him, the former settled down and planted roots in our country. Over the years, they have been assimilated into Indian society. Like Jews and Parsis, who sought refuge on the western coast of India and were welcomed, they are to be counted as part and parcel of the country and its people.

On the other hand, the Portuguese, the French and the British were sea-faring people whose sole intent was to benefit their own people back home through trade and expropriation of the country’s natural resources.

Hindutva stalwarts reject Nehru’s arguments and paint the Muslim and European conquerors with the same brush. They refuse to acknowledge the descendants of Muslim conquerors as one of their countrymen. Narendra Modi has often said in his speeches that India’s subjugation to foreign rulers began a thousand years ago. We agree with him on one score, but wonder why he refuses to differentiate between colonialism and plain conquests that are a feature of recorded history in many countries.

There is a thin but clear line between the two forms of servitude. The fact that the remnants of the conqueror’s armies settled in India and were assimilated has, to my mind, to be accepted. There was also conversion of natives to the religion of the conquerors. The converted can under no stretch of imagination be considered foreigners since they have not known any other country that they could call their own.

The communal angle is the one that plays prominently on the minds of the adherents of Hindutva. They also cite faulty decisions by Nehru on the course the economy should have taken. They blame his Eton and Cambridge education and the fact that he was influenced by the thoughts of leftist philosopher Harold Laski.

Prof Aditya Mukherjee, a historian who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, has put up a spirited defence of the economic path followed by Nehru as the first Prime Minister of India. In his book Nehru’s India — Past, Present and Future, Mukherjee argues that two principles were non-negotiable for Nehru — democracy and sovereignty. In the pursuit of development after the departure of the British, he only allowed these two prime concerns to guide his thinking. Hence, his choice of the public sector to fill the yawning gaps in the economy.

The commanding heights of the economy, Nehru decided, could not be placed in the hands of foreigners, who were bound to slip in if industrial development was left to the private sector. His commitment to sovereignty was evident in this decision. The Prime Minister’s commitment to democracy, Mukherjee says, meant that labour needed to be consulted in the pursuit of any grand design. If labour was to be a partner and not merely a performer on command, its consent had to be obtained through democratic consultations.

Nehru’s ‘Idea of India’ was a united country where caste and creed would not matter. That would cover the entire population. Hindutva’s agenda is to unite 80 per cent of the population that professes Hinduism or other religions like Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism that originated in India, to form the bulwark against any threat to the primacy of Hinduism.

Personally, I have no quarrel if the intention is to build up the pride of the Hindu in his or her religion. Why should she or he not be proud of following an ancient religion that has stood the test of time and is now being studied by seekers of spirituality in Europe and other advanced societies of the world? My objection is to the spread of fear and hatred against followers of other creeds and creating dissensions in society that did not exist earlier.

The demonisation of Nehru is a manifestation of the divisiveness that is spreading throughout the country because of an ideology that is fast turning viral. My view is that this will do more harm than good to India and its place in the minds of people all over the world.