Bhavuk’s Review of Nehru’s India by Aditya Mukherjee

BOOK REVIEW

Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future
by Aditya Mukherjee

Vintage Books
Penguin (25 November 2024)
Hardcover: 208 pages
ISBN-10 : 0143471953
ISBN-13 : 978-0143471950

Reviewed by Bhavuk

An Appraisal of Nehru In Our Times

Seeing the 14th of November pass uneventfully, one felt dejected that Nehru was not being discussed at such a crucial time for Indian democracy. Aditya Mukherjee’s book Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future (2024) comes at just the right time, waking the academics out of their deep slumber on Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister. This book germinated from Prof. Mukherjee’s presidential address to the Indian History Congress at its Warangal session 2023. This thin volume is a racy read written in lucid prose with strong arguments. The book divided into 8 chapters acts as a bridge between our national movement, Nehru’s tenure as prime minister of independent India and the present time. The book appears to be commentary on contemporary India through Nehru’s lens and offers the present dispensation to take a leaf out of Nehru’s book. It provides a meticulously argued account of Nehru’s tenure proving a fitting tribute to one of the greatest statesmen of 20th Century. Let us delve into the book chapter wise.

Addressing the elephant in the room, the first chapter is titled “Demonising of Nehru” and deals with how those very forces threatening the “Idea of India” are trying their best to demonize Nehru. Mukherjee lists the various ways in which Nehru’s name is being pushed to the oblivion, from renaming Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to Prime Minister’s Museum and Library to the absence of Nehru from the chapter on Freedom Movement and India After Independence of Rajasthan’s school textbooks as well as various malicious publications like 97 Major Blunders Of Nehru being circulated online. He argues that Nehru who had spent 9 years of his life in prison fighting the British had been criticised by neo- colonial writers like Tirthankar Roy and Meghnad Desai also but that wasn’t as “crass and vulgar” as that done today.

The second chapter titled, “Nehru and The Discipline of History” is a refreshing intervention as it is high time we focus upon the academic approach of Jawaharlal Nehru. Mukherjee quotes Prof. Irfan Habib on Nehru’s historical works who compares Nehru’s writings to Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks stating that,“that both went to history to find answers to the questions raised in their minds as men of action.”(p. 13) Nehru talks of the constructive and disruptive forces of history and while urging historians to accentuate the former, asks them to do so within the framework of scholarship remaining true to historical facts. Mukherjee goes on to state that in this matter Nehru himself led by example while writing his Discovery Of India. Mukherjee cites Nehru’s views about Mahmud Ghazni whom he describes as “more a warrior than a man of faith” using “army raised in India under a Hindu general Tilak, against his own co- religionists in Central Asia.”(p.16)

Though the debate around the memory of Somnath initiated by Munshi has been best summarised by Romila Thapar, Mukherjee would have done well to quote Nehru himself on the complete Mahmud Ghazni episode because the excerpt from Al-Beruni cited by Nehru on the theme speaks of his disdain for the attack. There are references to Nehru’s emphasis upon the idea of India which he identifies with the openness to reason and rationality as well as the world outside to invite fresh thoughts and the acceptance of multiple claims to truth. With his focus upon the constructive tendencies of history Nehru has emphasized the synthesis in Indian history.

Mukherjee states that Nehru rejected the colonial framework of dividing Indian history into Hindu Muslim and a British period. He was fascinated with the history of common people termed as the social aspect of history. It is no wonder then that he attracted people like K.M. Ashraf to his side who worked on social history writing the book, The Life And Condition Of The People Of Hindustan 1200-1550 (published in 1959). Mukherjee further argues that Nehru had urged the historians to do what they are now doing after the “Dalrymple controversy”- paying attention to popular writing. Mukherjee remarks that Nehru believed popularisation of history was not a deviation from scholarship. Finally, he makes the point that it was Nehru’s firm moorings in history which made him follow a path which was slow and inclusive, not resorting to violence and brute force.

The next chapter is finely woven with the thread of a theme from the second chapter i.e. Idea of India. Here Mukherjee, explaining the reasons for Gandhi’s immense faith in Jawaharlal Nehru, discusses the idea of India which contained the core values of sovereignty, democracy, secularism, pro-poor orientation and modern scientific outlook. Outlining the critical condition faced by the nation on the eve of independence, he notes that the ‘Nehruvian Consensus’ was kept intact while bringing in rapid economic growth. Admitting that he has not dealt with Nehru’s foreign policy in detail, he nevertheless touches upon it briefly quoting Churchill who called Nehru, “the lighthouse of Asia.”

At the onset, this idea of India was challenged by the communal forces and so the next chapter is titled “Nehru On The Communal Challenge.” Mukherjee identifies the time from 1946-52(till the first general election) as the time when most overwhelming odds were pitted against the idea of India. Apart from Noakhali, he mentions the Bihar riots and Nehru’s efforts to quell the communal fire. He states how Nehru put his own life at stake in this riot and reproduces his statement, “I will stand in the way of Hindu-Muslim riots. Members of both the communities will have to tread over my dead body before they can strike at each other.” (p.52) Thereafter, he lists a series of measures taken by Nehru for the restoration of communal harmony. While citing Nehru’s letter dated 5th February 1948, Mukherjee only mentions the ban on RSS while forgetting to bring out the ban on several Hindi and Urdu newspapers for their malicious campaigns and misinformation which did not help the already tense atmosphere.

Mukherjee then goes on to state that Congress victory in the general elections of 1952 signalled the euphoria where “communalism was pushed back for several decades.” While it is true that the communal organisations got very few seats, riots continued to occur during the entire decade of 1950s and a major riot erupted in 1961 at Jabalpur. Thus, the fight against communalism was far from over by merely a Congress victory. Also left unanswered is the question that, what about the communal forces within the Congress of whom Nehru had been apprehensive repeatedly in his letters? Acknowledging Nehru’s nuanced understanding of communalism and his mentioning of the elites using the name religion for their interests, it would have been better had Mukherjee clearly spelt out the “Kutchery Milieu.” He states that efforts at distortion of history were initiated through RSS’s Vidya Bharti and Shishu Mandirs which were emboldened when BJP captured state power. Again Mukherjee’s claim that when Congress came back to power in 2004, it was a victory of the secular forces, is nothing but a hasty generalization. Quoting Nehru that “one communalism does not end the other; each feeds on the other and both fatten,” Mukherjee admits that “softness towards minority communalism made the growth of majority communalism much easier,” something which was shown in sections of the left too. (p.75)

When Mukherjee complains that secular forces have created a niche for communalists to occupy nationalist space by neglecting and critiquing the national movement themselves, a question is raised on the historians too. Not only did they not come out vehemently against the communalization of history and appropriation of heroes of freedom struggle but they did not present the true picture when towering figures and colleagues of Nehru like Lohia and Azad presented a picture of them shrouded in dust of inaccuracy. Rajmohan Gandhi had to come out with India Wins Errors: A Scrutiny of Maulana Azad’s India Wins Freedom (1989) to clear the air about some of the inaccuracies that had come up due to Azad’s book(1959).

The next chapter “Building Democracy” contrasts the present regime with the Nehruvian times in order to accentuate Nehru’s efforts at strengthening democracy in the nation. While Mukherjee cites both; Nehru’s article titled Rashtrapati of 1937 written with ‘Chanakya’ pseudonym as well as his speech of 2nd June 1950 in which Nehru says “I do not want a country in which millions of people say ‘yes’ to one man, I want a strong opposition.” However, how Nehru made efforts in day to day dealings both inside and outside the parliament to firmly establish democracy has not been much touched upon. For an account of these aspects popular works like Lokdev Nehru by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (1965) and others should have been engaged with. This would have also made readers aware of the works on Nehru in vernaculars(though no substantial work on Nehru has come out in Urdu).

The next chapter titled “Economics Development With Democracy And Sovereignty” is the most well argued chapter of the book. With facts and figures of the Nehruvian economy, Mukherjee has tried to argue how “the Nehruvian attempt at industrial transformation with democracy was a unique attempt.”(p.105) It is true that Nehru under his five-years plans (particularly well known among them being the Nehru-Mahalanobis plan-2nd five-year plan) put India on the path to economic progress which was exceptional given the devastating state in which he found the economy when he entered the office of the Prime Minister. However, in an attempt to maintain the “mixed economy”, the economy under Nehru sometimes acted as too stifling for the growth of any private venture. While Mukherjee refutes the claims made by Meghnad Desai and Tirthankar Roy, (both of whom have exaggerated when they say that the first forty years of India’s independence were wasted) he should have looked at what Rajagopalachari called the “Licence Raj” of Congress (see Rajmohan Gandhi, Rajaji: A Life, Penguin Random House, 1997). Also he has not mentioned the problem of “wasting of railway gauge” with which Nehru had to grapple, a problem alongside so many others concomitant of British rule in India(for more on railway gauges and their distinctions, see Indian Economy Under Early British Rule 1757-1857, Tulika books, 2013).

While in this chapter and the next, titled “Keeping The Focus On The Poor”, Mukherjee has tried to argue that Nehru always believed agricultural progress is possible through industrial progress and the former will then reiterate the latter. To this end he mentions a lot of projects from the dams to the scientific institutions that Nehru helped built, yet he misses out on the Essential Commodities Act of 1955 and the APMC Market Act of 1962, both of which helped the poorer sections of the society. These would have been really useful arguments to further Mukherjee’s point on the Nehruvian economy.

The last chapter titled “Scientific Temper” is a testament to the scientific outlook and rationalist approach of Jawaharlal Nehru. While the book makes for a useful compilation of arguments on Nehru’s efforts towards a secular, democratic and progressive India and remedies for the ills of today, it suffers on two counts.

1 The book fails to engage with popular books on Nehru like those by Walter Crockton (Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate, estimated as a book that sums up the man in the best way as per Ramchandra Guha), M.J. Akbar (Nehru: The Making Of India, Roli Books, 2002) and even various works by Ramchandra Guha(but most importantly India After Gandhi: The Story Of World’s Largest Democracy, McGill, 2008). Critical works like Sixteen Stormy Days (2020) by Tripurdaman Singh which bring out the stoicism of Nehru, Taylor C. Sherman’s Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (2022), Laurence Gautier’s Between Nation And ’Community’: Muslim Universities And Indian Politics After Partition, Cambridge University Press, 2024 have not been engaged with. Gautier questions Nehru’s patronage to AMU at the cost of Jamia after Partition has not been dealt with. I hope these works have not passed Prof. Mukherjee by. Nehru’s Kashmir imbroglio, captured by a conglomeration of primary sources in his two volumes of The Kashmir Dispute (2013) by A.G. Noorani has been left untouched.

2 Often the greatest of praises on Nehru were showered by his biggest ideological opponents from Iqbal to Churchill till Vajpayee and others. Quoting from them would have showcased the best tribute to Nehru. Popular Hindi books like Lokdev Nehru or Nehru: Mithak Aur Satya(2018) should also have been mentioned to ignite an interest among the Hindi readers on Nehru. The book could have engaged with more sources especially the recent publications to critically paint a nuanced picture of Nehru. Though the book falls short of expectations yet this racy read comes at a crucial time and should encourage other scholars to take up the mantle of nuanced scholarship on Nehru.

(Review author: Bhavuk, PhD Candidate at Department of History, AMU)