Why Gandhiji chose Nehru as his successor?

 

Why Gandhiji chose Nehru as his successor?

The Idea of India is severely threatened today by the religious communal forces who collaborated with the British imperialism, and didn’t participate in the freedom struggle. It is because of what Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stood for that he is demonized so blatantly by the communal forces, using the massive propaganda machinery. Historian Professor Aditya Mukherjee, in his book Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future, gives a vivid account of Nehru’s legacy.

 

The Hindu communal forces which thought India’s Independence was a black day, refusing to unfurl the national flag for many years, spread falsehood about one of the greatest freedom fighters- second only to Gandhiji.  In fact, “an RSS journal, went to the extent of saying that Nathuram Godse should have aimed his gun at Nehru.” That it is a deliberate effort to demonize Pandit Nehru is evident from the fact that, during the previous BJP’s regime in Rajasthan, the school textbooks made no mention of Nehru either in the chapter on the Freedom Movement or in India After Independence.  More shockingly, the Indian Council of Historical Research came out with a poster, celebrating the 75^th year of independence with the pictures of many freedom fighters, excluding Nehru. Even the British, who were the chief ally of the communal forces did not demonize Nehru in this manner. This despite his spending thirty prime years of his life fighting the British, having been tried on the charges of sedition and imprisoned nine times.

 

And when the BJP government celebrated the birth centenary of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya in 2017, the then President of India Ram Nath Kovind (who authored the report One Nation, One Election) released a largish booklet that contained a section on ‘Great Leaders of India’, the names of Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi were conspicuous by their absence.  Many ‘great men‘ listed  in the booklet had never participated in the freedom struggle, and never been jailed for combating colonialism, but their names occupy pride of place in oral and written histories authored by the BJP. The leaders who fought for independence are simply written off.     

 

The ruling right-wing elements keep parroting that Sardar Patel, and not Pandit Nehru, should have been the first Prime Minister of India.  Professor Mukherjee asks the question: why did the father of the nation, Mahatma 0andhi, choose Jawaharlal Nehru as his successor and not his other brilliant comrades like Rajagopalachari or Sardar Patel? The Mahatma, in his speech at the All India Congress Committee at Wardha on 15 June, 19542 declared: “Somebody suggested that Pandit Jawaharlal and I were estranged. This is baseless. You cannot divide water by repeatedly striking it with a stick.  It is just as difficult to divide us. I have always said that not Rajaji, nor Sardar Vallabhbhai but Jawahar will be my successor. When I am gone…he will speak my language…”

 

Why did Gandhiji’s have such tremendous faith in Nehru?  Foremost, Nehru quintessentially represented and fought for the core values of the freedom struggle.  According to Professor Mukherjee, the core values that Nehru stood for are: (a) Sovereignty, i.e. India will be independent and self-reliant, and oppose imperialist domination globally;(b) Democracy, i.e. India will be a democratic country with adult franchise and with equal rights to all citizens, irrespective of their caste, class, religion, language, gender, region or ethnicity; (c) Secularism, i.e. people belonging to different religious faiths will have equal rights in the country. India will not be a majoritarian Hindu state. Secularism and democracy were seen as coterminous, one could not exist without the other;(d) Pro-poor orientation. Beginning from the early nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji, who wrote the book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, to Gandhiji turning the face of the country towards the poor, the Daridranarayan, to the revolutionaries, socialists and communists…all were agreed on a pro-poor orientation; and (e) Modern scientific outlook was to be propagated, which Nehru called the scientific temper, overcoming obscurantism and blind faith. Gandhiji anticipated this capacity of Nehru in choosing him as his successor.

 

The Indian National Congress was to elect its President in 1946. It was clear that the Congress President would be invited to head the Interim Government.  On 20 April, Gandhiji in his letter to Maulana Azad, the then President, who was eager to continue as the President, said: “In today’s circumstances, I would prefer Jawaharlal. I have many reasons for this. Why go in them?” Consequently, Acharya Kripalani and Sardar Patel withdrew from the contest. Gandhiji believed that Nehru was best suited to negotiate with the British the terms of transfer of power to India.

 

Nehru proved worthy of the faith reposed in him. Not only he fought for the core values as mentioned above, throughout the freedom struggle, but he also played a stellar role in implementing them, presiding over the destiny of India for 18 crucial years. In fact, the burden of implementing these core values fell on his shoulders with the Mahatma being murdered by a Hindu communalist within six months of independence and Sardar Patel passing away in 1950.  Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, shortly before his death, had anticipated the condition of India: “The wheel of fate will someday will compel the English to give up their Indian empire. What kind of India will they leave behind, what stark misery? When the stream of their centuries’ administration runs dry at last, what a waste of mud and filth will they leave behind.”

 

The ’mud and filth left behind’ was a famine ridden country, where some three million people perished in a man-made famine four years before independence; where per capita income and foodgrains output had been shrinking annually for three decades before independence; where the average life expectancy was a shocking low of 30 years, 84 per cent Indians and 92 per cent of women were illiterate. On the top of all this, the British left the country deeply divided on religious lines, with millions dead and rendered homeless in a religious communal carnage.  It was a gigantic task to lift India out of this misery.  It is to Nehru’s credit that he evolved a multipronged strategy to lift India out of this morass, which became an example for the countries which gained independence from the colonial rule, after the World War II.

 

Nehru undertook this stupendous historically unique task of creating a modern democratic nation state in a plural society deeply divided, of promoting modern industrialisation within the parameters of democracy in a backward and colonially structured economy; and of promoting the highest level of scientific education, a field left barren by colonialism. All this is done without the use of force, keeping what is called the ‘Nehruvian consensus’ intact in the critical formative years of the nation building.  A herculean effort was needed to achieve this complex task and, Nehru rose to the occasion, putting his head and heart, in the process leaving behind a legacy not just for the Indian people, but for all the people across the world oppressed by colonialism, who were striving to liberate themselves of their past, but in a humane and democratic manner. 

 

It is also important to recall how Prime Minister Nehru met the communal challenge. The period 1946-52 was the phase when the secular 'Idea of India’ was tested against the most overwhelming odds. The independence was accompanied by ‘a holocaust-like situation’ where about half a million people were killed and millions were rendered homeless (nearly six million refuges poured into India) in a spate of communal hatred and violence, resulting in one of the largest transfers of populations in human history.  And with the assassination of the tallest leader of the fledgling Indian nation, the Father of the Nation, the very ‘Idea of India’ that the Mahatma lived and died for was under siege.

 

A spiral of religious sectarian violence engulfed India in the run-up to Independence and Partition. It began with the Great Calcutta Killings as a result of the Muslim League’s call for Direct Action in August 1946.  In October, a large-scale violence erupted in Noakhali, a remote district of Bengal Province that had the Muslim League government. As a reaction to the violence against Hindus in Calcutta and Noakhali, large scale violence against Muslims broke out in neighbouring Bihar. Gandhiji rushed to the villages of Noakhali on 6 November 1946 to take on the most difficult task of trying to contain the communal violence, spending next four months there, walking on village paths and sleeping in huts in hamlets in this virtually unreachable remote corner of India. 

 

Nehru rushed to Bihar and between 4 and 9 November, along with the top Congress leadership, toured the affected areas, determined to stop the violence.  He put his own life at stake and declared immediately on reaching Bihar: “I will stand in the way of Hindu-Muslim riots. Members of both the communities will have to tread over my dead body before they can strike at each other.”  On 8 November, the situation was brought under control in Bihar.

 

And when the independence came, hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into East Punjab and Delhi, ensuing large scale violence. In his Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi on 16 August 1947, Nehru made it clear that communal strife would not be tolerated and that India would be a secular state, and not the mirror image of Pakistan, a Hindu state.  He declared: “The first charge of the Government will be to establish and maintain peace and tranquility in the land and to ruthlessly suppress communal riots.  It is wrong to suggest that in this country that there would be the rule of a particular religion or sect.  All who owe allegiance to the flag will enjoy equal rights of citizenship, irrespective of caste and creed.”  In a broadcast to the nation on 19 August, he asserted again in no uncertain terms; “Our state is not a communal state but a democratic state in which every citizen has equal rights. The Government is determined to protect these rights.”

 

On Gandhiji’s assassination he said: “We have banned the Rastriya Swayam Sevak Sangh...enough has come to light already to show  that this assassination was not the act of just an individual…behind him lay a fairly wide spread Organisation and deliberate propaganda of hate and violence.” In his letter to the Chief Ministers on 5 February 1948, he did not mince his words: “It would appear that a deliberate coup d’etat was planned involving the killing of several persons and the promotion of general disorder to enable the particular group concerned to seize power.” It was a threat to the very ‘Idea of India’ as a secular country and Nehru was determined not to let it succeed.

 

He converted the first general election of 1951-52 into a virtually referendum on what was to be nature of the Indian state. He made the fight against the communal forces his central objective and campaigned relentlessly for realising the secular vision of the Indian national movement.  He travelled nearly 40,000 kilometers and addressed an estimated thirty- five million people - one-tenth of India’s population. The communal parties – the Hindu Mahasabha, the newly formed Jana Sangh and the Ram Rajya Parishad - were decimated, polling less than six per cent of the vote, and winning seats in a single digit in a house of 489.   It was a stunning achievement and a fitting tribute to the Indian national movement. Communalism was pushed back with the triumph of Nehru’s Idea of Secular India.

 

And now 75 years later, we find ourselves once again in a similar situation and are bewildered about how to combat the communal threat to secular democracy, though Rahul Gandhi - the great grandson of Nehru – seems to be committed to reviving the Gandhian-Nehruvian idea of India.  Ironically, India of today, more educated and more modern, has become more communal than India of the unlettered and backward masses who rejected the communalism as an ideology.  What our tallest leaders, Gandhi and Nehru, did to combat communalism! Their frontal attack on the communal forces and the vision they represented, treating it as the top most priority to save the Idea of India; their refusal to compromise on this question ; and their understanding that without secularism there could be no democracy in India.   

 

Emphasizing the critical importance of an ideological battle to challenge the communal onslaught, Nehru told his chief ministers shortly after Independence, when the RSS threat was still very strong: “Those who are impelled by a faith in a cause can seldom be crushed by superior force.  They can only be defeated by higher idealism as well as a vision and a capacity to work for the cause that represents these objectives.” To him, “communalism bears a striking resemblance to the various forms of fascism that we have seen in other countries. It is in fact the Indian version of fascism… We have to uproot this despicable communalism. It must be obliterated from this land so that it may not take roots again.”