A Tribute to Jawahar Lal Nehru on his 135th birth anniversary | Suresh Khairnar

I was eleven years old when the news of Jawaharlal Nehru’s death came on 27 May 1964. Shindkheda is a taluka of Dhule district where I had gone to my aunt’s house to spend summer vacation. And my aunt had bought a good radio of Philips company at that time. So, just before 2 o’clock in the afternoon on 27 May 1964, the radio broadcast was suddenly stopped and the news of Jawaharlal Nehru’s death was broadcast. I was shocked to hear it with my own ears.

As it happened some times before that, my father being a freedom fighter and a committed worker of Congress, had gone for election campaign with him. (I started wearing Khadi after seeing him!) And in a village near our village, during my father’s election rally, people from the opposition party created a ruckus and threw some stones. One of those stones hit the right corner of my right eye and I was bleeding. Someone brought turmeric powder from somewhere in a hurry, filled it in that place and tied it with a cloth. I don’t remember what happened after that. Maybe I fainted.

So before Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of India for the third time, I was listening to the news of his passing away from this world with great sadness and strange curiosity because of my right eye being injured. And I was sad for a long time.

That afternoon of 27 May 1964, and for many days after that, this was probably the first time I had read Nehruji’s photo, information, news from the Marathi daily newspaper of that time, after my grandfather’s death. Due to this, I remained in a very sad state of mind for a long time. I had cut out all the photos, information, news related to Nehruji from the Marathi daily newspaper of that time with scissors and pasted them in my notebook with glue. But due to change of place of study after seventh class, and admission in Amravati Homeopathy Medical College after the eleventh class examination, all the collections made with great care from my class first to eleventh were left at the age of fifteen. Today, after 60 years, everything suddenly looks like a movie.

The reason is that the person who has been occupying Jawaharlal Nehru’s place for the last ten years! The way he has been running a program to destroy his ideal ! Because of being in our age, after sixteen years, he came under the influence of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia! We have also been in the anti-Nehru camp for a long time! But the people of the Sangh, and mainly the current Prime Minister, have Nehru phobia! They criticize Nehruji every now and then! And we ourselves have been carrying a feeling of neglect towards Nehruji for twenty-five-thirty years, the most important time of our lives!

During 1985-86, the Sangh Parivar grabbed the slogan that came out of the Shah Bano issue and on the issue of Babri Masjid Ram Mandir, Lal Krishna Advani had started a series of Rath Yatras from Somnath. After the riots in Bhagalpur on 24 October 1989 during the Rath Yatra organized for Shila Puja in the same Rath Yatra, seeing it as the only program of the Sangh to put the Muslim community in a completely insecure mindset! I was forced to examine all my beliefs! And I got a chance to rethink about Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Ravindranath Tagore and all the important social-political leaders and thoughts! And perhaps today, on the pretext of the 135th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, I openly accept my point! The credit for keeping a country like India with a multi-faceted culture united for 77 years after independence goes first to Mahatma Gandhi and second to Jawaharlal Nehru.

Otherwise, the present ruling party has vowed that during the 75 years of independence and the 100 years of the establishment of the Sangh in 2025, they will leave no stone unturned to convert this country of multi-faceted culture into a Hindu nation.

After the demolition of Babri Masjid, starting from Kashi, Mathura and almost all mosques to Qutub Minar, Taj Mahal, Red Fort, all the buildings constructed during the tenure of Aurangzeb and other emperors, RSS started its program of doing complete politics on religious places a hundred years ago, first slowly and now with full force!

And this is because of Mahatma Gandhi’s tolerance and Jawaharlal Nehru’s responsibility towards secularism! Even after 77 years of independence, the country’s unity and integrity have not suffered much!

But at present, the ruling BJP and its parent organisation RSS, in collusion with the fascist ideology of the media organizations, have decided to convert this country into a Hindu Rashtra and have been continuously trying for the last 10 years.

Therefore, where is Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who challenged the crowd by brandishing his lathi during the riots in Punjab or Delhi, Calcutta during Partition? And where is the current Prime Minister, who rushed to Godhra, 200 kms away, after the burning of S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express on 27th February 2002, and handed over 59 half-burnt bodies in the custody of Vishwa Hindu Parishad President Jayesh Patel (despite the protest of the then Godhra Collector Jayti V Ravi!) to take out a procession on the streets of Ahmedabad? And then the one who himself wrote a letter to our army to maintain law and order in Gujarat, but did not let the same army out of the Ahmedabad airport for three days? (Lieutenant General Zameeruddin Shah, the author of the book Sarkari Muslim, has himself stated this fact!) It is natural to hate Jawaharlal Nehru!

And my own opinion is that the partition of India was also caused by people of both the communities doing similar activities.

Had India not been divided, Narendra Modi would have had nothing else to do except singing the RSS prayer ’Namaste Sada Vatsale’ and RSS activities!

As part of a conspiracy, the Sangh has remained aloof from the Indian freedom struggle. On the contrary, the people who used to call the British army, police recruitment, intelligence agencies, whether it was IB or CID and the new NIA, CBI, ED and other important investigative agencies as parrots (when the Congress was in power) are now using them according to their own convenience. And they are mainly using them to take action against their opponents.

And the most serious thing is that till now we have heard stories of governments being formed and toppled in Kashmir with the help of agencies. But in India, governments of states like Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh were formed and toppled with the help of these agencies to topple the governments of their opponents. The election system of our country has become a sham. And most of the governors have turned the Raj Bhavans into BJP offices. No governor is cooperating with the governments of opposition parties even a bit.

And in the seventy-seven years of independence, after seeing examples of forcing constitutional institutions to take decisions according to their own will, the possibility of losing trust in the judiciary, police and administrative sector is increasing day by day!

In this context, the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru is remembered again and again!

The man who, seeing his popularity and being well aware of the dangers of it, wrote the article "We don’t want any dictator" under the pseudonym of Chanakya not only for fellow countrymen but also to warn himself about these dangers! And on the contrary, Ashish Nandi had published a psychological analysis of Narendra Modi in an English magazine after the Gujarat riots! So Modiji has filed a claim of a few crores of rupees! (Don’t know what happened to that case?)

For him, democracy was not just a system of governance, it was a sanskar (culture), which should be included in the social psyche as well as governance. He considered himself the prime servant of the country. Along with regular press conferences, Nehru used to write letters to the chief ministers every month. Along with national and international events, he also discussed topics like the government’s responsibility towards culture and art in these letters. After him, the practice of the Prime Minister writing regular letters to the Chief Ministers came to an end. In the last 10 years, even the press conference of the Indian Prime Minister has become unimaginable. His interviews are not famous for accurate answers to sharp questions, but for beautiful answers to poignant questions like whether mangoes should be eaten by sucking or cutting them? Do you keep a wallet in your pocket or not? Do you take tonic to avoid getting tired?

It should never be forgotten that this situation has not arisen on its own. It has been created through systematic efforts. That debates on TV are competing with fights at street corners and stand-up comedy, or even horror shows. Expecting accountability from the government is not considered a democratic right but a great sin. A strong effort is being made to forget that democracy is not just a game of numbers, but a system based on institutions, decorum and traditions. It is a system of respectful dialogue with the minority, it is not a system that gives the majority the freedom to act arbitrarily or a debating society that runs for the entertainment of the well-off people.

The irony is that the rapid expansion of the aspirational middle class, which considers democracy a burden or just a game of numbers, has happened only as a result of the developmental policies of liberalization and privatization adopted by the Congress government. But was it not equally important to maintain the social psyche that understands the importance of democracy along with privatization and liberalization; respects the plurality and unity in diversity of Indian society; and to make these things the sanskar of the new generation?

Without asking this question, it is impossible to understand why Indian democracy is rapidly turning into mere formality and majoritarianism! Why is the memory of Nehru and the awareness of his contribution vanishing from the minds of the new generation? This question will have to be asked by Nehru’s party, the Congress, to itself, and also by those who understand the importance of Indian democracy and want to protect it! Many of them were convinced till 2014 that the institutional basis of Indian democracy had become so strong that a dictatorial attitude cannot harm it! In a TV debate in 2015, when he said that ’the present Prime Minister does not need a formal declaration of emergency, he and his supporters are capable of creating an atmosphere of fear without any such declaration’, not only the BJP spokesperson but also the most popular anchor sahab in the liberal, democratic sections got angry! Not only them, even the leading scholars of India and abroad were convinced that the institutions of Indian democracy had become so strong that the establishment of a dictatorial mindset was now impossible!

Events in the last few years have exposed the limitations of this belief! And how our Election Commission, the bills passed in our Parliament, and our judicial system after the demolition of the Babri Masjid have started taking decisions under the pressure of the majority community! And the scholars who justify it! In a way, this country is becoming an undeclared Hindu nation! And today, in memory of Jawaharlal Nehru, we really need to take a vow to commit ourselves to fight these communal forces by entering the field with a resolve to build a truly secular, socialist India instead of just performing a ritual by reciting his praises!

Dr. Suresh Khairnar, 8 November 2024, Nagpur.