The Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Deva Legacies in the Socialist and National Movements in India: A Preliminary Exploration | Anil Nauriya

 Jawaharlal Nehru is an intrinsic part of the nationalist legacy of Indian freedom; nor can the Indian socialist legacy be defined or recalled by excluding him. And on inter-communal questions, which have a bearing on the very definition of India, Nehru’s record is par excellence and second only to that of Mahatma Gandhi.

The massacre of unarmed civilians who had gathered for a protest meeting against the Rowlatt legislation at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, took place on 13 April 1919. Thereafter there was also aerial bombing in parts of Punjab, followed by the imposition of martial law. These events did briefly stall the resistance movement, but they also put iron in India’s soul, strengthening people’s resolve to resist imperial rule. In 1920, the epochal Non-cooperation Movement got under way. Acharya Narendra Deva (1889-1956), often referred to as the doyen of the Socialist movement in India, also attended the All India Congress Committee and the special and plenary Congress sessions at Banaras, Calcutta and Nagpur that year which paved the way for Non-co-operation with the Colonial regime. [1]

 In an essay published in 1949, Acharya Narendra Deva has written of how deeply the Non-co-operation movement changed personalities like Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru and C R Das. [2] As the leading socialist Yusuf Meherally (1903-1950) would write, the "Non-Co-operation Movement brought about a virtual renaissance in India." [3] It is this movement that brought Jawaharlal Nehru and Acharya Narendra Deva close to each other. "Narendra Deva who had suspended his practice after the Nagpur Congress of 1920 was now pressed by Babu Shiva Prasad Gupta, his close friend and fellow student to join the (Kashi) Vidyapith. It was actually Jawaharlal who persuaded him to agree." [4]

Narendra Deva’s appreciation of Mahatma Gandhi was rooted in the fact that "it was he who first initiated the common man into politics and emphasised that a political movement to be successful must have the support of the mass of the people."  [5]  This was somewhat similar to the basis of Narendra Deva’s admiration of the Russian Revolution of 1917 about which he used to say that it had placed the masses at the centre of the world stage for the first time.

There were certain vital methods of thinking that both Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Deva imbibed from Gandhi. In the 1920s, civil disobedience was contemplated at Bardoli in west India, Guntur in south India, and a few other places, in addition to the all-India non-cooperation programme. Gandhi would lay down rigorous conditions for people in areas where civil disobedience was planned. To Abbas Tyabji, the "Grand Old Man of Gujarat", as he was known, who was active in Kheda, an area of Gujarat that was being considered in 1921 as an arena for civil disobedience, Gandhi wrote: ‘Our preparation must be solid and substantial. Swadeshi must take deep root; untouchability must go in reality, and Hindu-Muslim unity must be true. All this is impossible without a truly non-violent spirit.’

Even on the re-emergence of civil disobedience in Gujarat and on its successful conclusion in 1928, Gandhi had reminded the peasants of Bardoli, that they had yet fully to redeem their pledges of the early 1920s: "The way in which the Hindus, Musalmans and Parsis of this taluk stood shoulder to shoulder together in the course of the struggle was splendid. All honour to them. But can we lay our hand on our heart and say that a real and abiding heart-unity between the various communities in this taluk has been established? Would you have been able to keep together without the consummate tact of the Sardar and the presence of an Abbas Tyabji or an Imam Sahib [Imam Bawazeer] in your midst? Are you sure that you will be able to remain unaffected even if the whole country is plunged into an orgy of communal hatred? "  

These commitments were common to Jawaharlal Nehru, Narendra Deva, and all those who followed Gandhi’s lead, even as they tried to push forward in multiple directions in addition to the overarching Gandhian framework. When the United Provinces branch of the Independence of India League was set up in December 1928, Jawaharlal Nehru became its President and Acharya Narendra Deva its Secretary. A little over five years later, Narendra Deva opened his Presidential address at the Founding Convention of the Congress Socialist Party at Patna in May 1934 by remarking: "My task is made all the more difficult by the absence of our beloved friend, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, whose absence today we all so keenly feel and whose valuable advice and guidance would have been of immense value to us on this occasion". [6].

Contrary to a belief in certain quarters that the Congress Socialist Party, founded within the Congress in 1934, was merely the result of disillusionment with the Congress leadership, it was actually the consequence and reflection also of a challenge to the tendency on the part of the Communist International to claim a monopoly of Marxist interpretation. This is supported by the writings of, for instance, of Jayaprakash Narayan and Madhu Limaye. [7]

Later, in the 1940s, Narendra Deva would recall that

"Jawaharlalji took great interest in class-organisation. He was elected President of the All-India Trade Union Congress in the year 1929 and it has been his constant endeavour to make the Congress interest itself in the economic struggles of the workers. He tried to bring economic questions to the forefront." [[Acharya Narendra Deva, “Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru†in Acharya Narendra Deva , Socialism and the National Revolution [Yusuf Meherally (ed.)] Bombay, Padma Publications,. 1946, pp. 203-4]]

Acharya Narendra Deva became a member of the all-important Congress Working Committee in April 1936 and remained President of the United Provinces PCC between 1936 and 1938. It was Jawaharlal Nehru who, as Congress President in 1936, had re-organised the Congress headquarters and given Dr Ram Manohar Lohia charge of its Foreign Department.

Socialist concerns in the 1930s were not limited to questions concerning Socialism alone. They extended to upholding the best traditions of our struggle for freedom and the understanding of India involving also the question of the definition of the Indian nation. Even within the state of Maharashtra, the pre-independence Congress, including the Socialist tradition, had strongly resisted Savarkarism.  For instance, Savarkarite notions of Hindus being a nation by themselves were strongly contested in Maharashtra itself. Soon after Savarkar’s faction took control of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937-38, the May Day march in 1938 was attacked by the Mahasabha in Pune. The leading socialist, NG Goray, wrote in the Congress Socialist of 14 May 1938 : "Who attacked the May Day procession? Who assaulted men like Senapati Bapat and [Gajanan] Kanitkar? Who tore up the National Flag? The Hindu Mahasabhaites and the Hedgewar Boys did all this.... They have been taught to hate the Muslims in general as Public Enemy Number 1, to hate the Congress and its flag which is pro-Muslim, to hate socialists and communists who are anti-Hinduism.... They have their own flag, `the Bhagwa’, the symbol of Maratha Supremacy. And their leader is called `Rashtra Dhureen’, i.e Fuehrer!" [8]

N G Goray’s article reflected the strong Socialist commitment at the time to counter communalism. The struggles within were accompanied with the fight against the imperial power. With that struggle coming to a head, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Acharya Narendra Deva and other leading Congress figures were interned together during 1942-1945 in Ahmednagar Fort. In the preface to his famous work, The Discovery of India, Jawaharlalji especially mentions four of his co-prisoners in the Fort whose knowledge and erudition he benefited from in the writing of the book: Maulana Azad, Govind Ballabh Pant, Narendra Deva and Asaf Ali.

It was not Narendra Deva alone among the Socialists who came close to Jawaharlal Nehru. Nearly 40 years younger to Gandhi and some 19 years to Nehru, Lohia wrote to the latter on 23 May 1946 : “....please don’t forget that you and another have influenced men like me so much that there never has been a place for a third nor ever shall be†. A photocopy of Lohia’s letter to Nehru was published by the socialist Bhola Chatterji (1922-1992) in an article in Sunday magazine some decades ago.

Gandhi and the Congress as a whole had placed much importance during the freedom struggle also on what came to be known as the Constructive Programme. This was sometimes scoffed at by individuals belonging to the Communist and even Socialist circles. At the time of leaving the Congress itself in 1948, Jayaprakash Narayan had, however, recorded a significant regret: "Looking back it seems to me that we would have done well to associate ourselves with the constructive work of the Congress to a far greater extent than we did. We were responsible—and I more than others perhaps—in creating the feeling that all constructive work was unrevolutionary and, for socialists, a waste of time. I should like to put on record that that was an immature and mistaken view. Possibly, if we had come into the field of constructive work we might have developed aspects or types of it that would perhaps have enriched it. But whether that would have happened or not there is no doubt that we have impoverished ourselves a great deal by keeping out of that valuable field of activity, which would have given us experience and wider mass contact and enabled us to understand rural India in a more intimate manner." [9]

This was an important point. Fourteen years earlier, in a pithy speech at the Bombay session of the Congress in 1934, the Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had emphasised the connection between the constructive programme of the Congress and its political work. Referring to his tour of Bengal, the Frontier Gandhi had said the people were willing to listen to the Congress in those subdivisions where its constructive programme, in this case the charkha, had reached. It had generated some income and people could get at least a meal a day. In other subdivisions, where the constructive programme had not reached, people were "scared to talk to us or to come near us’’.

Many aspects of the “constructive programme†formulated by Gandhi had gained the support of Narendra Deva who was included in the body set up by the Congress to prepare a plan for the development of Hindustani. Narendra Deva urged also that the educational system be remodeled “on the lines suggested by the Wardha scheme†. [10]

Such programmes linked the Socialists organically to the Congress. As Jayaprakash Narayan had once written about the Congress Socialist Party : "Our Party, because it grew out of the very heart of the national movement, occupied a very strategic position in it." [11]

In an essay on Jawaharlal Nehru published in 1946 Narendra Deva observed that he was not sectarian in his views. : "He knows that objective situations are more powerful than theories.....He is thus not a sectarian. He is a man of faith, but his faith is of a secular character and not supernatural. He has a scientific outlook and does not believe in metaphysics and mysticism. His approach towards political question is, therefore, not religious or sentimental. Religion in its institutional form is repugnant to him as it is the bulwark of reaction and the defender of the status quo. Its function in society has been to make social inequalities less irksome to the lower classes. But he has no quarrel with that purer form of religious faith which inspires the conduct of individuals. He, however, believes in ethical social conduct and has a deep sense of human values"  [12]

With his understanding of the role that Socialists could play in moulding post-independence India, Narendra Deva had been reluctant to leave the Congress in 1948; he decided to go along with his colleagues only when a bar was proposed restricting the existence of organisations within the Congress. Jawaharlal Nehru himself was unhappy at the departure of the Socialists from the Congress.

Even after the Socialists left the Congress in 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru sought to maintain strong ties with them. He respected Parliament and urged the judiciary, nurtured in colonial times, to recognize social concerns in a changing India. At least two rounds of land reform legislation, at the onset of the fifties and sixties, took place under Nehru’s leadership.

Above all, and in spite of the bitterness ensuing from the country’s partition in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru’s strivings helped maintain inter-communal peace, with the first major riot occurring only in the early sixties.

Jawaharlal Nehru held out a welcoming hand to Socialists in 1953 and offered a political coalition to the Praja Socialist Party thinking this would help in combating communalism and enhance the pace of change. [13] In March 1953 Nehru held personal discussions with the Socialists. . He had invited Acharya Narendra Deva for a discussion. Narendra Deva has indirectly indicated that he then told Jawaharlalji that he was "not in favour of participation in the Government". [14] This seems to confirm that there was an offer to the Socialists from Jawaharlal Nehru’s side regarding participation in Government. As with the fateful decision to leave the Congress in 1948, the prime mover on behalf of the Socialists in the March 1953 discussions appeared to be Jayaprakash Narayan and the correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru as well as the primary discussions had been carried on by Narayan. The latter forwarded along with his letter of 4 March 1953 to Nehru "a programme which he expected the Congress Party to accept before there was collaboration between the two parties. The programme dealt mainly with issues like land reforms, abolition of Upper Houses, organization of village industries on cooperative lines, further nationalization of industries and reforms in the administration". [15] It is not clear how Jayaprakash Narayan realistically expected Jawaharlal Nehru to make advance commitments on all these issues, some of which might even have required amendment of the Constitution. Besides, their cooperation with the Government at this stage would itself have been a transformative factor and helped to change the objective situation.

 To his credit Jawaharlal Nehru made a special effort to keep the conversation lines open. At the end of this process Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the office bearers of UP’s District Congress Committees at Meerut on 20 March 1953. This is what Jawaharlal Nehru told them : "I want that we should march in step with our old colleagues like Jayaprakashji and Narendra Devaji and Kripalaniji. I am not worried about their parties. I would like to benefit from their ideas. Perhaps they may imbibe something from us. Please do not think for a moment that there is any dissension between us. I want that all of us should work together."  [16]

Once the Socialists as an organisation and the Congress had separated in 1948, their respective "institutional egos" had come to the fore and this deeply affected their organisational relations. This was reflected also in the sometimes bitter electoral campaigns by some persons in both parties often even against the leading figures in the two rival parties. In his article published in Janata on 30 August 1953 Narendra Deva was critical of Asoka Mehta’s June 1953 thesis advocating cooperation with the Congress as indicating loss of "confidence that our Party can be an alternative to the Congress". While not in favour of joining the Government, Narendra Deva nevertheless acknowledges in this article that "on issues on which we agree with the Congress we should offer our cooperation." [17]. An important point Narendra Deva makes in this article is that "We can fight the forces of communalism without entering into the Government." [18]. The Acharya, who was in poor health. and passed away in 1956, could hardly have anticipated that it was that precise issue which would become problematic in the Socialist future especially from 1967 onwards.

 Jawaharlal Nehru continued to exhibit a spirit of cooperation so as to move progressive politics forward. The socialist leader and intellectual, Madhu Limaye, who was close to Dr Lohia and nearly three decades younger than Nehru, has fairly acknowledged Nehru’s initiative in bringing about reform in Hindu law in the 1950s. [19]

 In his writings, Limaye exhibits an awareness of the need “to take an objective view and keep out my personal likes and dislikes, prejudices and predilections†; he refers to Jawaharlalji as the “uncompromising sentinel of Independence†and acknowledges that he “gave a new orientation to (the) Congress policy and programme†; and that “he championed the cause of the peasantry† and “took up the case of the workers working in mines and the factories who were being treated as slaves†.

It was Jawaharlal Nehru who got the Congress committed to a socialistic pattern of society in its session at Avadi in 1955. The building up of the public sector enabled India for long to hold its own in a world that various international powers sought to bend to their own image. Stupendous efforts were made under Nehru to reduce India’s external dependence on oil. How vital this effort was may be gauged from the lengths to which Western powers went in opposing similar Iranian efforts under Prime Minister Mossadegh against whom a successful coup was organized in the 1950s. [20] The building up of an independent public sector tradition had other ramifications as well. The emphasis on research and development, 90 percent of which was done in the public sector, induced a tradition of self-reliance, partly squandered by later regimes. In the case of drugs, this tradition has enabled Indian firms to be prime suppliers of relatively low-priced vital medication to countries with similar problems as India’s, such as the countries in Africa.

Acharya Narendra Deva passed away on 19 February 1956.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who had moulded the post-independence Congress, would pass away some eight years later on 27 May 1964. Significantly, Jayaprakash Narayan remarked in July 1964, a few weeks after Jawaharlalji’s death, that leaving the Congress in 1948 to form the Socialist Party was a mistake committed on account of “the wrong assessment of the character of the Congress†. [21]

According to JP, “(m)ost of his partymen thought at that time that the Congress would slowly develop into a conservative-cum-liberal party just like ‘what the Swatantra Party is today’. But history belied this assessment†. [22]

 Lohiawad had just then begun to emerge as a forceful programmatic ideology among Socialists. And clearly, JP’s assessment of Nehru’s administration and Lohia’s understanding were quite different.

The issues that the Socialists, including Lohia, identified after independence were real and unresolved and many still remain so. The salience that poverty measurement and poverty studies came to occupy in Indian economics and Indian planning undoubtedly received an impetus from the dramatic manner in which the question of the per capita per diem earning was highlighted by Lohia in the Lok Sabha in 1963. Yet the triumphalism sometimes indulged in by a section of Socialists over the Lohia-Nehru debates and such passages-at-arms as the “3 anna versus 15 anna†controversies needs to be tempered with the understanding that the bonafides of the protagonists was not in question.

Similarly, the urgency of the need for affirmative action in favour of “Other Backward Classes† was, in an appreciable measure, inspired also by the importance attached by Lohia to the advancement of these groups. Acknowledged less often in this context also is the fact that it was the Congress-led land reforms that often laid the groundwork for the rise of the backward classes to the point where their representatives could seek wider representation in public employment. Language policy questions also came to the fore, in part, because of Lohia’s emphasis on correcting the disadvantages attaching to a non-English-medium education, particularly in north India.

 The answers Lohia provided to some of the social, linguistic and cultural issues he raised are not necessarily so complete or final that they cannot be supplemented, fine-tuned or re-thought. [23]

 On other issues too, remaining confined to some of the debates of the 1960s and the thinking that emerged then has constricted the intellectual growth of the socialist movement. A similar point was once made also by the late Kishan Patnaik in Janata in 1980. [24]

In the 1967 General Elections the Socialists followed a policy described correctly as "anti-Congressism" and euphemistically as "non-Congressism". Dr N C Mehrotra has pointed out that "Madhu Limaye had deep misgivings about the new line which he often discussed with Lohia. Limaye felt that it would corrupt the party, dilute its ideology, blur its distinctive character and, ultimately, spell the eclipse of an essentially idealistic movement....Ultimately, however, Limaye agreed to give Lohia’s new line an honest trial. But non-Congressism, once enthroned, could not be given up." [25].

In sharp contrast with the tenor of the pre-independence Gandhi-led struggles that had invariably entailed a deliberate and rigorous self-examination, were some of the movements that emerged in post-independence India, especially from the mid-1960s. The Nav Nirman movement that arose in Gujarat during 1973-74 is a significant case in point because it sparked also the RSS-backed JP movement in Bihar and in the country. The Nav Nirman stir sought to reverse by force the result of the State Assembly elections in Gujarat in 1972 which had led to the election of a Congress Government led at the time by Chimanbhai Patel. During the Nav Nirman agitation many MLAs were collared and intimidated by mobs and made to quit on the ground of alleged corruption. The movement represented, though it was not quite understood at the time even by such otherwise perceptive observers as Madhu Limaye, a defining moment in the birth and growth of fascism in post-independence India.

 In the Platform of the Socialist Party published in September 1972, it had been said of the Jana Sangh : "The Socialist Party does not visualise any alliance or front with this party." This had reflected a deliberate and considered withdrawal from Dr Lohia’s 1967 strategy. Yet the position set out in the Draft Platform of 1972 would change on the ground almost as soon as the Nav Nirman Movement gathered momentum.

In March 1974 Limaye wrote to the President of India drawing attention to police excesses in the course of the Nav Nirman agitation. This writer was present when Limaye spoke at a protest meeting on the subject at the Vithalbhai Patel House lawns in New Delhi. The speech was on lines similar to the letter to the President.

In his autobiography, Morarji Desai, however, acknowledges being troubled by the violence that had been exhibited by the Nav Nirman movement. He wrote : "Many of the student leaders did not believe in peaceful methods, and, having been born after 1945, had no training or experience of satyagraha." Desai went on fast to protest against the violence and also to ask for the dissolution of the Assembly as demanded by the students. Desai wrote in his autobiography that the Nav Nirman movement was spontaneous and no political party had a hand in it. Desai suggested also that Congress dissidents "got interested" in the movement. The facts now emerging tend to cast some doubt on this narrative. A recent biography of Jayaprakash Narayan confirms that "young RSS pracharaks" (including Narendra Modi ) were at the "vanguard" of this movement. The Nav Nirman stir would be the precursor of the events and movements that occurred in India as a whole in the prelude to the Emergency of 1975-77, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then in the second decade of this century. By 1979 Madhu Limaye himself later again realised the danger from such sectarianism. Nitish Kumar in Bihar appears also to have done so now.

 Anti-corruption movements in post-independence years have had a relatively narrow understanding of corruption. In Mahatma Gandhi’s understanding, roguery and debasement too would be included in the meaning of corruption. The post-independence anti-corruption movements have to an extent been fraudulent or Trojan Horses in the sense that they have been conducted for collateral and non-transparent purposes and have, more often than not, produced debased regimes. As Morarji Desai admitted in regard to the Nav Nirman movement, these agitations have been conducted by persons who did not adhere to the stringent discipline of Satyagraha as sought to be instilled by Mahatma Gandhi. They lacked also the pluralist and humanist spirit of the pre-independence movements as they were not preceded by the rigorous and vigorous self-examination that Gandhi had insisted upon especially in the arenas identified for Civil Disobedience. Unfortunately, there was a little attempt from the Socialist side to seek to impose upon the participants in the pre-emergency movements of the 1970s, or upon the later anti-corruption movements, the kind of hard and fast pre-commitments on vital issues that Jayaprakash Narayan had sought to extract from the Congress on various matters in 1953. Compare this with the Jayaprakash Narayan-associated Socialist reluctance even to consider a coalition with the Nehruvian Congress in 1953. In 1977 there was a Socialist willingness to dissolve their identity into a Party inclusive also of the Jana Sangh element. Here too the historical irony is that it was precisely the issue of the Socialist organisational identity, and their response to a proposal placing restrictions on separate party organisations within the Indian National Congress, that had in 1948 triggered the Socialist departure from the Congress.