Marginalising Nehru

Downplaying the legacy of India's first PM is unfair

The 14th of November, the birth anniversary of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is celebrated as Children’s Day. This association between Nehru and young people may be difficult to dislodge from public consciousness, even though the Union ministry of youth affairs is reportedly preparing a Cabinet note on deleting his name from the government’s network of Nehru Yuva Kendras. This is part of a broader, concerted effort to erase, or at least diminish, the memory of Nehru from India’s public life. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi’s Teen Murti Bhavan, for example, is now dedicated to all Indian prime ministers, and as if to rub in the change of emphasis, this year around Nehru’s birthday it will organise an exhibition of books on and by all of India’s prime ministers. This is particularly odd because aside from Nehru, none of India’s other prime ministers can be described as particularly important literary figures.

At one level, this trend cannot be viewed as entirely surprising. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is politically dominant at the moment and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has long seen Nehru’s often-stated desire for a diverse and secular India as the antithesis of its own preferred form of nationalism. This historical antipathy to the Nehruvian ideal is, of course, politically salient at a time when Nehru’s heirs continue to dominate the Congress, the principal Opposition party. Indeed, it is particularly opportune for the BJP to run down Nehru at the moment, for it can attempt to prop up the narrative that the real hero of India’s founding generation was, in fact, Nehru’s home minister Vallabhbhai Patel, a claim that does not hurt its attempts to win back dissident Patels in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, in which Assembly elections are rapidly approaching. Mr Modi himself has, while campaigning in Gujarat, argued that Nehru and his heirs have historically viewed Gujarat as an “eyesore”, saying that they simply “don’t like Gujarat and Gujaratis”. The prime minister cited the treatment of Patel and Morarji Desai to back his assertion. Many other BJP leaders have joined in; party president Amit Shah has implied that Nehru imported western ideas to dismantle Indian cultural traditions. 

To be sure, the Congress is not entirely without blame; the party has chosen to cling much closer to the legacy of Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi. While Nehru built and preserved institutions, Indira destroyed them; while Nehru was a committed democrat, Indira was authoritarian; while Nehru prioritised a scientific temper and secularism, Indira played games with various populist and obscurantist forces. The current of history runs deeper, however, than the pushes and pulls of politics. While Nehru made more than enough errors of judgement, he had a vast role — perhaps the primary one — in shaping what this country is today. No amount of petty sidelining of his contribution will change that. In decades to come, when there is less political benefit from building up or destroying his reputation, Indians will be able to independently evaluate Nehru’s place in history. And it will not be a small one.