Why Nehru-bashing industry is prospering
As the recent survey conducted by a leading media house captures the ‘mood of the nation’, we are led to believe that Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains immensely popular. And as the ‘best’ Prime Minister India has ever produced, Modi, we are told, overshadows all other PMs.
Indeed, we are living in the ‘Modi era’— the all-pervading Modi moving around as a ‘world leader’, delivering speeches with his characteristic dramaturgical gestures, promising all sorts of things and making everyone insignificant, including his colleagues in the Cabinet.
Yet, a question continues to haunt us. Despite Modi’s larger-than-life image, why is it that the ruling regime (and yes, the propaganda machinery associated with it) is never tired of diminishing or devaluing Jawaharlal Nehru? Why is it that the Karnataka Government can even think of dropping the name of Nehru from the list of freedom fighters in its media advertisement? Or, for that matter, why is it that a glossy Hindi television channel has to assert (once again through the mystique of statistics) that the nation regards Nehru as the worst Prime Minister?
Is it that there is something paradoxical about the cult of narcissism? The more powerful you are, the more insecure you feel! Or, is it that there was something about Nehru that continues to unsettle the ruling regime? Otherwise, how do we make sense of what can be regarded as the chronic ‘Nehru envy’?
To begin with, let me make three points regarding Nehru — his charisma as a statesman, his intellectual depth, his relationship with Mahatma Gandhi, and above all, the project of nation-making he initiated.
First, as any alert reader of The Discovery of India, An Autobiography and Glimpses of World History would concede, Nehru was truly a thinker-philosopher. His awakened intelligence enabled him to make sense of the evolution of human history — the age of enlightenment and significant revolutions in science, culture and politics; his sense of wonder opened his eyes — the eyes that could see, feel and realise the flow of the Indian civilisation; and as a modernist with profound cultural sensibilities, he could dream of a new India coming out of the ‘dead weight of the past’, embracing the spirit of ‘scientific temper’, modernising itself — yet, not forgetting its wisdom emanating from the Upanishads, Gautam Buddha’s quest, our ancestors’ philosophic and artistic achievements and constant cross-religious conversations and dialogues.
Second, his creatively nuanced and critical engagement with Mahatma Gandhi revealed the churning of his enquiring mind. Even though the modernist Nehru could not agree entirely with the fundamental postulates of the Hind Swaraj — the dialogic text Gandhi wrote in order to evolve a moral/spiritual critique of the modern/‘satanic’ civilisation and plead for a largely decentralised notion of ‘swaraj’ based on organic needs and a harmonic relationship with the ecosystem, he could not escape Gandhi.
And Gandhi, too, trusted him. Possibly, with the religiosity of love and ahimsa, Gandhi trusted Nehru’s deep commitment to secularism, and felt that he could heal the wounded self of India traumatised by the pain of the Partition and poisoned by the proponents of the ‘two-nation theory’.
And third, Nehru succeeded in popularising the need and relevance of a welfare state: a state committed to the development of public institutions for reducing the degree of social deprivation and economic inequality.
Like all mortals, Nehru, too, was not perfect. And it would be naïve to say that he succeeded in revolutionising India and emancipating it from socio-economic inequality and the casteist/patriarchal mindset. And, possibly, the Nehruvian age, too, created and pampered a new bunch of elites — western-educated economists, scientists, technocrats and civil servants running the state machineries and generating a new discourse of bureaucratic power.
Yet, it is impossible to negate the remarkable role he played as a freedom fighter, an intellectual filled with new ideas, a world leader, and, above all, the visionary first PM of India.
However, these days, we are seeing an organised effort to erase the contributions of Nehru from our collective consciousness. In fact, the proponents of Hindutva would never be able to feel easy with Nehru’s commitment to the vision of a secular state. A toxic environment that loathes the light of reason cannot come to terms with Nehru’s sharp socio-political thinking, scientific spirit and philosophic passion. And the idea of India that Nehru cherished with the elasticity of his consciousness and cosmopolitanism can never be in tune with what the followers of Golwalkar and Savarkar, guided by their fragmented consciousness, strive for.
Yes, when the gross mass culture of Hindutva manifests itself in loud and violent gestures and historically wrong, intellectually dull and spiritually impoverished messages disseminated through the instantaneity of social media and 24×7 toxic television channels, it is easy to transform everything into its opposite.
In fact, when they seek to sell Modi as a ‘brand’, almost like an avatar, they have to diminish all alternative possibilities. Amid the hyper-masculine assertion of Modi, who is this ‘defeated’ Nehru incapable of giving a tough lesson to China in 1962? And who is this ‘elitist’ secular Nehru in front of assertive and ‘nationalist’ Modi determined to build a spectacular temple at Ayodhya? And why should one bother to engage with Nehru’s deep reflections on the Vedanta, when the widely disseminated image of Modi meditating at Kedarnath looks more tempting? No wonder, the Nehru-bashing industry has to prosper.
However, for a careful observer who has not yet lost the light of intelligence, it would not be difficult to see the psychology of ‘Nehru envy’ in the growing cult of narcissism and associated psychic insecurity.
