The memory of great men often fades with times: The Gandhi generation has gone and the Nehru generation is passing rapidly. It is, therefore, important to preserve the legacy of these remarkable leaders so that future generations remain aware of their contribution to achieving and consolidating our dearly won freedom.

We now take our Independence for granted, but it is often forgotten that at least a million people were brutally murdered in the process and as many as ten million uprooted from their homes on both sides in what was probably the largest mass migration in human history. To stabilise and consolidate the situation after Independence required statesmanship of a high order, and the Cabinet, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and including stalwarts like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as deputy prime minister and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, was able to do this. The first great achievement of Nehru after Independence, therefore, was to hold the ship of state firm amid the turbulent waters of the Partition process, despite predictions of the prophets of doom, including Winston Churchill, who said that after the British left India would Balkanise and break up into a dozen units.

The second great task was, after centuries of foreign rule, for India to get itself a new Constitution. Himself an impeccable parliamentarian, Nehru not only took a keen interest in the framing of the Constitution but also attended Parliament for long hours, answered questions and in particular spoke on foreign relations, a portfolio he had kept with himself.

After Partition, India was a patchwork quilt consisting of what used to be called ‘British India’ and hundreds of princely states ranging from large ones like Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad, Mysore, Baroda and Gwalior to tiny principalities. Knitting these separate units into a single State was a massive task, the main credit for which goes to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The non-violent integration of so many feudal states into a democracy was surely unprecedented in world history. Although Nehru left this area mainly to Patel, he closely monitored the whole process and, despite his strong anti-feudal feelings, he realised the importance of seeking the cooperation of the ruling princes.

Nehru was deeply committed to the development of science and what he called the scientific temper, an attitude devoid of superstition and blind faith. For this purpose he had the foresight to set up the Indian Institutes of Technology in major cities around the country.

The underpinning of the whole saga of independent India has been an unwavering commitment to democracy. Nehru, steeped in the liberal democratic traditions of Britain, the republican ideals of the French Revolution and the socialist vision of the Russian Revolution, was a firm votary of democracy. It is interesting to recall an anonymous letter that appeared in the late 1930s in the Modern Review saying:

“(Nehru) has all the makings of a dictator in him — vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organizational capacity, ability, hardness, and with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt of the weak and the inefficient…From the far north to Cape Comorian he has gone like some triumphant Caesar, leaving a trail of glory and legend behind him…(I)s it his will to power that is driving him from crowd? His conceit is already formidable. He must be checked, We want no Caesars.” Astoundingly, he had written that article pseudonymously!

A major triumph consisted in his leadership of what came to be known as the Non-Aligned Movement, along with President Nasser of Egypt, President Tito of Yugoslavia and Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus. President Sukarno of Indonesia was also involved, although his actions were often erratic.

His greatest tragedy, of course, was China. Nehru believed that the new China, which emerged after the overthrow of the previous regime, and which had suffered long periods of colonial domination, would be a natural ally of India in the post-colonial period.

Despite the long undemarcated border with China, Nehru was convinced that differences could be sorted out in a spirit of goodwill and mutual adjustment. As it turned out he underestimated the Chinese drive for power. The whole Chinese disaster has been widely researched and written up, except that the Henderson Brooks’ report on the debacle has still not been made public.

The whole episode caused Nehru immense shock and embarrassment. He was obliged to sack his favourite Krishna Menon. The failure of the whole Panchsheel approach to China was something that shattered Nehru’s psyche. He never really recovered from this setback and passed away within less than two years thereafter. Despite the Chinese debacle, the Indian Foreign Service today owes its origin to him, because after the British had left he had to build the whole service virtually from scratch.

Another area in which he faced difficulties, of course, was the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. Suffice it to say, after my father (Maharaja Hari Singh) had signed the Instrument of Accession in the wake of the Pakistani invasion, the much-criticised reference to the United Nations once again flowed from his idealism and his firm belief, strongly encouraged by Lord Mountbatten, that the newly created international body would clearly identify the aggressor and take steps to have the invasion withdrawn.

Nehru was a bitter opponent of religious fundamentalism, whether Muslim or Hindu. There is a view that Nehru’s attitude towards religion tended to be dismissive, and that despite all that he has written in the Discovery of India, he was never at ease with organised religion. This was largely true, though in his writings he did pay rich homage to the Upanishads and Shankaracharya, and he was particularly impressed by the Buddha and his teachings.

The people of India held Nehru in special affection which is reflected in his last will and testament, where he says: “If any people choose to think of me, then I should like them to say this was a man who, with all his mind and heart, loved India and the Indian people. And they, in turn, were indulgent to him and gave him of their love most abundantly and extravagantly.”

I will close with another quotation that could appropriately be directed towards Nehru. It is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and refers to Brutus. But it could very well apply to Nehru. “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world this was a man.”

Karan Singh is  a Rajya Sabha MP

The views expressed by the author are personal

http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/analysis/nehru-held-the-ship-of-state-firm-amid-the-turbulent-waters-of-partition/article1-1285852.aspx#sthash.WqXFF1Iy.dpuf

courtesy : “The Hindustan Times”, November 13, 2014

Whosoever is in power, Jawaharlal Nehru’s memory must be kept alive in the interest of our democratic and secular values. Students of Indian history will benefit from his writings, which embrace the creative thrust and splendour of the Continental and Indian civilisation

Certain segments in our society are engaged in a futile and odious comparison between the tall leaders of our freedom struggle; some others are out to diminish Jawaharlal Nehru’s stature and repudiate his legacy. Without being swayed by the rhetoric of the publicists or the ill-informed mediamen, we need to bolster Nehru’s position as the second best leader after the Mahatma. “Swachh Bharat” will not do. Whosoever is in power, Nehru’s memory must be kept alive in the interest of our democratic and secular values. Students of Indian history, on the other hand, will benefit from his writings, which embrace the creative thrust and splendour of the Continental and Indian civilisation.

Nehru was a voracious reader : he read 55 books from May 21, 1922 till January 29, 1923 alone. He delved into philosophy, and turned the pages of history to illuminate his understanding of the ideas and movements, which stood apart as the catalyst for momentous changes. In so doing, he looked through other people’s writings to understand how simple, ordinary men and women became heroes, and how their strivings made history stirring and epoch-making. Prison had made a man of him, he told the Socialist leader, Acharya Narendra Deva (1889-1956), while they were in jail for the last time in 1942.

Writing to regenerate



Why did he write? Who did he write for? He had no archives to consult; so he relied on his recollections and on bits of information that he could conceal. He disliked being called a writer, and yet, armed with a varied experience of affairs, writing became a congenial occupation. Sometimes he didn’t write for weeks, now and again he wrote daily. His letters from jail represented his moods and thoughts at the time of each event; they were also his escapes from gaol.

He wrote to regenerate his generation, to render them capable of following Gandhiji’s non-violent satyagraha, and to put before them the tangled web of current affairs in Russia, Germany, England, America, Japan, China, France, Spain, Italy and Central Europe. It was a tangled web no doubt, difficult to unravel and difficult even to see as a whole. Yet, he presented the many-coloured life of other ages and countries, analysed the ebb and flow of the old civilisations, and took up ideas in their full flow. The superimposed loneliness empowered him to turn to himself for fellowship and guidance, arrange his thoughts, and evolve his political creed undisturbed by external influences. This exercise affected the whole gamut of his emotions.

In enchantment of history



Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings transmit the enthusiasm and animation he felt for the discipline of history. In fact, there is something uncanny about the way in which a self-taught and amateur historian like him explored the unbounded universe in full variety. True, his vision was far from settled, but it was being etched out in conjunction and in contention with other voices.

He lived in the enchantment of the ancient and medieval histories of India, and sought to understand it in terms of the present and even of the future to come. Why should there be so much misery in the world? This question troubled him. Why do people argue and quarrel among themselves as a sect or a religious group? Why are they blind to the vision of freedom? His comments on political affairs, many of which tend to corroborate or supplement, to a fair degree, with the information that is available to us from some other sources.

Nehru asked what he was heir to, and answered that he was heir to all that humanity had achieved over tens of thousands of years, to all that it had thought and felt and suffered and taken joy in, to its cries of triumph and its bitter agonies of defeat, to that astonishing adventure, which had begun so long ago and yet continued and beckoned to man. Besides commenting on the wisdom of India’s great inexhaustible spiritual heritage, he talked of the vital necessity to apply it intelligently and reasonably to the present and the future.

His vision was hardly ever trapped in the exclusivist, culturological mode; far from it; it was supremely inclusive and driven by a belief in the existence, even the necessity of cultures constantly interacting with each other, of cultures working on and transforming the other and their own through a live contact. In fact, he talked of a whole people becoming full of faith for a great cause, and brought to the fore their treasures of knowledge, learning, heroism and devotion. He looked at the entire world with a fresh eye and gave a balanced view of man’s life on many continents. His was a global view — not an Asian view any more than it was a European one.

Understanding ideas



With this eclectic approach, he called for breaking down national histories and constructing a more relevant world history as a means to understand the global exchange of ideas in the past and the necessity of exchange for a better future. He wanted books not for specialists alone but also for the general, interested lay reader in a popular and accessible mode. He wanted books on the daily lives of ordinary men and women who lived in the past (family budgets from hundreds of years ago, he suggests could show us how life was organised in that age!). And he wanted Asia’s history to be read as widely as possible so that the readers should think of all the countries and all the peoples, and not merely of one little country.

Glimpses of World History is not a standard textbook, but it still makes an impression of sustained intellectual power. Received with a chorus of admiration, it has become standard reading in India, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Fenner Brockway (1888-1988), a friend of India and for many years Secretary of the Independent Labour Party, mentioned that his daughter learnt more from Glimpses than any other history book she had studied at school.

Written almost entirely in prison in the 1930s, it bears the mark of a passionate, albeit humane, nationalism. Others have also put pen to paper on their life and times, but the biography glows with patriotic feelings. There is no cover-up, and no concealment of facts. As for the “self,” the influences are too subtle, too diffused, to be easily identified or measured. The author loved India tenderly, and, in the words of Monod, to him that loved, much may be forgiven.

Autobiographical confessions cannot be regarded as accurate descriptions of a consistent life, and yet Jawaharlal Nehru’s narrative is out of the ordinary precisely for its tropes and figures of thought, without which he would not have turned the real events of life into a narrative and transform them from a chronicle into a story.

The Discovery of India is a hymn to the glories of India. He mapped the metaphysical and philosophic approach to life, idealised ancient India as a world apart, independent of and superior to the rest of the civilisations, toning down the barbarism of the caste system and throwing the warm colours of fancy around his narrative. At the same time, with his eyes set on India’s infinite charm, variety and oneness he worked ceaselessly for a synthesis, drawing on the best, and breaking with the worst. He consciously followed Gandhi and Tagore in the direction of the universal. Consequently, India appears in The Discovery as a space of ceaseless cultural mixing, and in the past as a celebration of the soiling effects of cultural miscegenation and accretion.

The Nehruvian legacy



While the romantic in Nehru drew on the old and new interpretations to buttress an ecumenical and universalistic point of view, some of the other Indian writers did so from a rather narrow perspective. He conducts the reader through the labyrinth of a colonial era, narrates the most complex events, and recreates portraits of outstanding fellow countrymen. By and large, his writings make public the spirit and substance of his many-sidedness, the deep-seated urge to freedom, and the negative response to the concomitants and consequences of colonial rule.

What is the Nehruvian legacy? Those living in a vibrant parliamentary democracy and amid creative institutions should not ask this question unless they wish to be identified with the Nehru-debunkers. They must remember that Nehru kept the country together, established secular ideals, propelled it forward with the thrust of science and modernity, healed some of the wounds of Partition, and stood before the world at the head of the non-aligned camp. “Men may break,” Gandhi was to say on the eve of the Quit India Movement, “but they should not bend beyond brute force.” His political heir did just that through his public life. He shared with tens and thousands of prisoners the changing moods of exaltations and depressions, of intense activity and enforced leisure. He buttressed the idea that man is not just a simple individual but a crowd of thoughts and ideas.

What raised Nehru in public estimation was his concern for the poor and the underprivileged. The life of the people, which flows in a dark current beneath political events, attracted his attention — the circumstances, sorrows and joys of millions of humble men and women. Even if his personal misfortunes had a melodramatic tinge, there was, always, a constant element of moral austerity to serve as a counterweight.

(Mushirul Hasan is Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow and, formerly, Vice-Chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Director General, National Archives of India.)

courtesy : “The Hindu”, 13 November 2014

When he spoke on the possible consequences of a nuclear conflict, it was visible from the press gallery that not only MPs but evenhis cabinet colleagues were taken aback by his revelations.

The Mahatma was India’s liberator and Jawaharlal Nehru, its moderniser as well as founder of its secular and “socialistic” democracy. Assiduously, he shaped and nurtured every institution that underpins the democratic system. Among these, Parliament was of paramount importance. Nehru devoted much of his time and energy to ensure that it functioned smoothly and effectively in both its roles — as the voice of the people and as a keen watcher of the government that could last only as long as it retained the confidence of the Lok Sabha, originally named the House of the People.

For the last several decades, Parliament has been greatly devalued and often made dysfunctional by its own “honourable” members who think nothing of rushing into the well of the House and even using a pepper-spray there. The character of the Rajya Sabha or the Council of States has been distorted to the point of destruction by a joint effort of all political parties, even though some of them detest one another. In Nehru’s time, things were totally different. The British political scientist, W.H. Morris-Jones, already quoted in this series, wrote that India’s Parliament was, in some ways, “Nehru’s sound box or tuning fork”, but it had also become the “Grand National Council” to debate and decide on all national issues, and should therefore be a “role model” for nations that were being liberated from “Western colonial rule”. He deservedly gave Nehru full credit for this.

Illustration by: C R Sasikumar

Having covered Parliament for long years, I have been witness to the great respect Nehru always showed it. He attended it regularly, unlike some prime ministers in later years. He also treated all its members with regard. After the Bandung Conference in 1955, he had invited President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Nehru noted the visitor’s surprise at the number of communist MPs present at a reception in his honour and said to him: “Gamal, you put your communists in prison; I put them in Parliament.” Alas, sometimes, Nehru had to teach many MPs not only parliamentary norms but also elementary manners. For instance, in the spring of 1951, Parliament’s first late-night sitting became necessary because of the urgency to pass a particular bill. All concerned were also promised dinner. The moment the meal began, there was a virtual rain of chicken bones on the grassy plot. Nehru handed his plate to someone and started picking up the discarded bones. In the ensuing shockwave, everyone joined him shamefully.

Several were the occasions when his role was that of a teacher for the whole House. For instance, in an illuminating speech once, he told the MPs that the mere size and bravery of the troops weren’t enough. Technology mattered more. The first invention that had changed the nature of war was that of the stirrup. It gave the Tatars huge superiority over rival horsemen. From this grew the concept of the centaur. On another occasion, when he spoke on the possible consequences of a nuclear conflict, it was visible from the press gallery that not only MPs but even his cabinet colleagues were taken aback by his revelations. They seemed to be unaware of what was at stake until Nehru declared that after a nuclear holocaust the “living would envy the dead”.

At one stage in the mid-50s, Feroze Gandhi, Nehru’s son-in-law and a very hardworking Congress MP, won fame by exposing various scandals. The climax was reached in 1958, when he unveiled what came to be known as the “Mundhra Affair”. It related to the Life Insurance Corporation’s dubious investments in Mundhra’s near-bankrupt firms. Feroze’s performance was devastating and was applauded by both sides of the House. Nehru began his response by welcoming the “majesty of Parliament” and ended it by instituting an inquiry by Justice M.C. Chagla. Consequently, Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari had to resign, and several top officials lost their jobs.

Nehru’s habit of threatening to resign frequently is well known. But the two occasions when he did so in Parliament are noteworthy. One was when he firmly rejected a conservative Congress member’s resolution demanding a complete ban on cow slaughter. The latter had the temerity to claim that a majority of the ruling party backed him, whereupon Nehru thundered: “I would rather resign than accept this futile, silly and ridiculous demand.” The other occasion was much more serious. For the first and last time, he read a written statement to his party to say that he had “grown tired and stale… and had decided to give up his office, even if temporarily”. For a minute there was stunned silence, and then the loudest shouts of “no, no”. Eventually, he was persuaded to stay and take a brief holiday in the hills.

From 1959 until the humiliating defeat in the border war with China in 1962 was the toughest time for Nehru in Parliament. His China policy understandably came under sharp attack. Even his staunch admirers on the treasury benches silently agreed with the opposition’s criticism. However, except for rare occasions, his critics continued to treat him with respect. Even at the height of heated exchanges, there could also be humour. For example, when Acharya Kripalani said that India’s agreement with China on Tibet was “born in sin”, Nehru rose to say: “Come to think of it, all of us are born in sin.” Prolonged laughter and cheers greeted this.

Though he sometimes rambled, Nehru usually dominated the debates. Only once he was beaten by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a powerful orator and founder of the Jana Sangh, which later morphed into the BJP. After a spellbinding speech against the Preventive Detention Bill, he addressed Nehru directly and said: “In my speech there is not one word of mine. I have been quoting what one of our greatest leaders had said in the Central Assembly in 1921 against the Rowlatt Act. His name: Motilal Nehru.”

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-teacher-for-the-house/99/

courtesy : “The Indian Express”, November 12, 2014