The Nehruvian vision

The sadly vanishing legacy of India's greatest architect

India's post-colonial history has been unique in many ways. Few other countries survived the first decades after achieving independence from their foreign rulers without giving in to dictatorship, authoritarianism or one-party rule. India developed, instead, robust institutions, a firm civil-military hierarchy and the rule of law. It continues to progress and change within a flexible constitutional framework that retains the respect in practice, if not always in principle, of even such groups as communists and Hindu fundamentalists. Many reasons for India's uniqueness in this respect can be adduced. But it should be beyond question that the most powerful reason is that its first post-colonial leader was Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nehru's 125th birth anniversary, being celebrated today across the nation, falls in the year that is also a half century after he died. It comes at a time when the Nehruvian legacy is widely seen as being under threat. Partly, this is just a product of time and circumstances. The Nehruvian state, built on complex social compromises with a veneer of liberalism on top, was always susceptible to capture by powerful social coalitions once they developed. In the 1980s and 1990s, the first blow was delivered by the upsurge of political mobilisation around "middle" or locally dominant caste groups like the Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh. Then, after the economic reforms process began to gather steam, urbanisation and economic growth have flattened some identities - public sector as an idea, for instance, has been challenged in many ways. But, in the process, this may have also served to enhance the separateness of other identities. The almost-inevitable consequence of this is that the old "consocialism", group coalitions empowering a liberal nation-building project, that Nehru sponsored seems on its deathbed. The dangers of this decline may not yet have been fully understood by many.

The politics of the recent past has not helped. The Congress party - presumably miffed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's effortless appropriation of the lives and legacies of Vallabhbhai Patel and Mohandas Gandhi - has declared that Nehru, at least, is off limits. Mr Modi is not invited to the Congress' commemoration of Nehru. The Congress is following the faulty template laid down by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989, when Nehru's centenary year turned into a celebration of the Congress. This identification diminishes Nehru who, even in life, was arguably even larger than the Congress he led. The first election the Congress fought without Nehru, in 1967, was also the first in which it lost major ground in several states. If Nehru is reduced to just the Congress' patron saint, it will not help preserve the Congress - it could instead destroy Nehru. Mr Modi's government is not blameless - the composition of the panel it set up to decide how Nehru's anniversary would be commemorated has justifiably been questioned.

It is worth noting that Nehru's centenary was celebrated in the last year in which the Congress had a full majority, and his 125th anniversary comes as a non-Congress political party, descended from political forces among his most energetic opponents, achieved a majority on its own for the first time. The last 25 years have been years of decline for Nehru's vision; what will the next 25 have in store?