‘Nehru’s Invention of India’

 

 

 

 

 

50^th post

‘Nehru’s Invention of India’

Jawaharlal Nehru’s impact on India was so great that Shashi Tharoor chose to write his biography Nehru: The Invention of India.  This book reinterprets Nehru’s extraordinary life and work, and the inheritance it left behind. When Nehru left for Harrow in 1905, Pandit Motilal Nehru wrote a moving letter to his son: “the dearest treasure we have in this world…for your own good: it is not a question of providing for you, as I can do that perhaps in one single year’s income. It is a question of making a real man of you…It would be extremely selfish …to keep you with us and leave you a fortune in gold with little or no education.’

The seven years that Nehru spent at Harrow and Cambridge in England had a deep impact on him. Winston Churchill, who studied at the prestigious school Harrow said: "India is not a country or a nation…It is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” That Churchill’s view of India that would one day make Nehru’s invention of India necessary. Nehru, as the product of the same elite British school as Churchill, used that education and the English language to produce a fascinating story of India- The Discovery of India- that presented to the world India’s history, civlization and her rich cultural heritage. In a letter dated February 18, 1950 to the Prime Minister Nehru, Albert Einstein said: “I have read with extreme interest your marvelous book The Discovery of India…it gives an understanding of the glorious intellectual and spiritual tradition of your great country. The analysis you have given in the second part of the book of the tragic influence and forced economic, moral and intellectual decline by the British rule and the vicious exploitation of the Indian people has deeply impressed me.”

Nehru – the heroic fighter for independence, the nation builder and peerless global statesman-through his writings, his speeches  and  his life and work and his leadership is credited with the invention of the India that we know-a pluralistic India adhering to  the ideal of  ’unity in diversity.’  He was one of the finest political writers the world has seen.  He gave a new identity to India, restored her past glory and pride, raised her ethical and moral quotient in the conduct of the administration of the state, and introduced the new awakening India to the rest of the world.

At a time when many newly emerging countries found themselves turning in the opposite direction soon after independence, arguing that a firm hand was necessary to promote national unity and guide development, he spent a lifetime trying to instill the habits of democracy in his people- a disdain for dictators a respect for parliamentary procedures, and abiding faith in the constitutional scheme of governance. He nurtured the infant democratic institutions; treated Parliament as a serious and august body to which he was accountable; set the example himself, spending hours in Parliament, suffering the Prime Ministers’ Question Time and responding seriously to queries unworthy of his attention.

He strived to prevent the partition, but when it became inevitable he refused to accept the two nation theory and the logic that since Pakistan was created for Indian Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus.  However, the credit goes to him for preventing balkanization of India as per the British ‘Plan Balkan’ that gave the Indian British Provinces and the princely states the right to secede from India.  Nehru lived up to his lifelong conviction that India belonged to all who had contributed to its history and civilization and that the majority community had a special obligation to protect the rights of minorities, as he believed multiple religions coexist and thrive in India, and diversity as her strength. And he vehemently resisted attempts to reduce India to a Hindu version of Pakistan.  It is interesting to note that when Nehru inducted Patel as the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister in his Cabinet, he called him ‘the strongest pillar of the Cabinet’, and Patel responding -"My services will be at your disposal, I hope, for the rest of my life and you will have unquestioned loyalty and devotion from me in the cause for which no man in India has scarified as much as you have done.”

Nehru was responsible for the Muslims opting to remain in India  after the partition and not migrate to Pakistan. The initial months of independence were very painful, communal carnage posing a serious problem. An emotional Nehru was seen weeping at the sight of a victim, and erupting in rage at an assailant. Norman Cousins, recounted how one night in August, Hindu rioters in New Delhi, inflamed by stories of Muslim terror smashed their way into Muslim stores, destroying and looting and ready to kill: “Even before the police arrived in force, Jawaharlal Nehru was on the scene…trying to bring people to their senses.  He spied a Moslem who had just been seized by Hindus. He interposed himself between the man and his attackers. Suddenly a cry went up: ‘Jawaharlal is here!’…It had a magical effect. People stood still… Looted merchandise was dropped... The riot was over… The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India staking their lives on Nehru’s ability to protect them assure them justice.” The Muslims felt safe with Nehru as the Head of the Government

In another similar incident, Nehru emerged from a visit to a fasting Mahatma in mid-January 1948 and confronted a demonstration of refugees chanting ‘Let Gandhi die!’ He leapt from his car and rushed towards the demonstrators shouting ‘How dare you say these words! Come and kill me first!’ The demonstrators immediately ran away. Thus he arrested unimaginable communal carnage in Calcutta, restoring communal harmony and making the Mahatma to break his fast. The growing anti-Muslim feeling dismayed him.  And he remained a staunch defender of honorable place for Muslims in a secular India.  He declared in 1950, ‘So long as I am Prime Minister, I shall not allow communalism to shape our policy.’  And during the 1952 elections, he declared to a large crowd in Delhi: “If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both as the head of the government and from outside.’

Nehru’s enduring contribution to Indian democracy- the very notion of Indianness. He saw India as more than “a bundle of contradictions held  together by strong but invisible threads…a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision  , and yet very real and present and pervasive.”  Who better than Nehru to incarnate this India?  He articulated a vision of India as pluralism vindicated by history.  He was a unifying figure in a country divided into mutually exclusive caste and religious conglomerations.  India has failed to create a single Indian community that Nehru visualized. Instead, what we see today is grater consciousness than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language and ethnicity, with politicians mobilizing support on narrow loyalties of caste, sub-caste, region and religion.

 The American statesman, Adlai Stevenson, introducing Nehru to a Chicago audience in 1949, said: “We live in an age swept by tides of history so powerful they shatter human understanding. Only a tiny handful of men have influenced the implacable forces of our time. To this small company of the truly great, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru belongs…He belongs to the even smaller company of historic figures who wore a halo in their own lifetimes.”