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Mainstream, VOL XLIX, No 23, May 28, 2011

Nehru for Today

Thursday 9 June 2011

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(On the occasion of Jawaharlal Nehru’s fortyseventh death anniversary on May 27, 2011, we remember the first PM of independent India by publishing the following excerpts from his writings. We are also carrying the piece that N.C. wrote within two days of Nehru’s demise in 1964 and two articles by distinguished personalities published in Mainstream in May-June 1965. —Editor)

A Revaluation of the Congress Party

We have to function in future as a compact political party with a well-defined economic programme. We can no longer carry on in a loose and inchoate way accepting anybody and everybody as a Congress member or candidate. Let us have a broad enough basis, but a Congressman must believe and act up to certain basic principles and policies. There must be a hallmark of a Congressman in regard to political and economic policies. In the old days we had certain distinguishing features. But, with the coming of independence, these have disappeared and many of us talk in a variety of languages and express a variety of opinions on important matters. Anybody can pose as a Congressman, whatever his views might be. One good thing that has emerged from these elections is our straight fight and success against communalism. That success is significant and heartening. But it is by no means a complete success and we have to be wary about this. We have seen at last that we need not be afraid of communalism and we need not compromise with it as many Congressmen did for fear of consequences. Where we fight it in a straight and honest way, we win. Where we temporise with it, we lose.

While we have met the challenge of straight-forward communalism with success, we have seen the growth of casteism with all its narrow-minded and painful consequences. This has to be fought against.

It is perfectly clear to me that the Congress, as it is organised today, is a very feeble instrument for carrying out national work, more especially among the people. It has won elections but that has been due to many causes. It has been due to old tradition, past reputation and to the weakness of others. It has also been due to the hard work put in by a number of people during the elections, with earnestness and vigour. They brought something of the old spirit in this contest and it was heartening not only to see their work but also the immediate reactions of the people to it.

It was disheartening to see office-bearers of Congress committees and executive members functioning sometimes most inadequately and without any faith in the cause they represented.

…One noticeable feature of the Congress organisation in past years has been its lack of appeal to the youth of the country. The type of young man or woman, who came to us in the past as worker or volunteer, and carried out the message of the Congress with zeal and enthusiasm, has not been coming to our organisation. We become progressively elderly men with elderly ways, interested in small committees and reluctant to go to the people. The great problem, therefore, before us is how to bring in the youth of the country to work for the Congress and the cause for which it stands.

….The elections have shown that money does not go very far, though undoubtedly it makes some difference. It is the men and women that count. We have therefore to get the right type of men and women as our colleagues and comrades and, above all, we have to set an example ourselves of what should be done. Every candidate, whether he has been successful or not, must maintain close and continuous contact with his constituency. He must visit his voters and speak to them from time to time on the problems that face us. It is necessary for us to give our workers talking points on these problems. I hope that the AICC office will organise this. But each Pradesh Congress Committee must do likewise. We must treat our vast electorate in an intelligent way and pay them the tribute of intelligence and discrimi-nation which they have shown to a surprising extent.

On no account can faction and sectional groups in the Congress be tolerated in the future. We have to function as a disciplined army now with definite objectives and with continuous work to attain them.

[A Circular to the Presidents of the Pradesh Congress Committees, February 8, 1952]

Identity with the Masses

GANDHIJI’S conception of democracy is definitely a metaphysical one. It has nothing to do with numbers or majority or representation in the ordinary sense. It is based on service and sacrifice, and it uses moral pressure.

….Whether Gandhiji is a democrat or not, he does represent the peasant masses of India; he is the quintessence of the conscious and sub-conscious will of those millions. It is perhaps something more than representation; for he is the idealised personification of those vast millions. Of course, he is not the average peasant. A man of the keenest intellect, of fine feeling and good taste, wide vision; very human, and yet essentially the ascetic who has suppressed his passions and emotions, sublimated them and directed them in spiritual channels; a tremen-dous personality, drawing people to himself like a magnet, and calling out fierce loyalties and attachments—all this so utterly unlike and beyond a peasant. And yet withal he is the great peasant, with a peasant’s outlook on affairs, and with a peasant’s blindness to some aspects of life. But India is peasant India, and so he knows his India well and reacts to her lightest tremors, and gauges a situation accurately and almost instinctively, and has a knack of acting at the psychological moment.

...India, even urban India, even the new industrial India, had the impress of the peasant upon her, and it was natural enough for her to make this son of hers, so like her and yet so unlike, an idol and a beloved leader. He revived ancient and half-forgotten memories, and gave her glimpses of her own soul. Crushed in the dark misery of the present, she had tried to find relief in helpless muttering and in vague dreams of the past and the future, but he came and gave hope to her mind and strength to her much-battered body, and the future became an alluring vision. Two-faced like Janus, she looked both backwards into the past and forward into the future, and tried to combine the two.

….Personality is an indefinable thing, a strange force that has power over the souls of men, and he possesses this in ample measure, and to all who come to him he often appears in a different aspect. He attracted people, but it was ultimately intellectual conviction that brought them to him and kept them there. They did not agree with his philosophy of life, or even with many of his ideals. Often they did not understand him. But the action that he proposed was something tangible which could be understood and appreciated intellectually. Any action would have been welcome after the long tradition of inaction which our spineless politics had murtured; brave and effective action with an ethical halo about it had an irresistible appeal, both to the intellect and the emotions. Step by step he convinced us of the rightness of the action, and we went with him, although we did not accept his philosophy. To divorce action from the thought underlying it was not perhaps a proper procedure and was bound to lead to mental conflict and trouble later. Vaguely we hoped that Gandhiji, being essentially a man of action and very sensitive to changing conditions, would advance along the line that seemed to us to be right. And in any event the road he was following was the right one thus far, and if the future meant a parting it would be folly to anticipate it.

All this shows that we were by no means clear or certain in our minds. Always we had the feeling that while we might be more logical, Gandhiji knew India far better than we did, and a man who could command such tremendous devotion and loyalty must have something in him that corresponded to the needs and aspirations of the masses. If we could convince him, we felt that we could also convert these masses. And it seemed possible to convice him for, in spite of his peasant outlook, he was the born rebel, a revolutionary out for big changes, whom no fear of consequences could stop.

How he disciplined our lazy and demoralised people and made them work—not by force or any material inducement, but by a gentle look and a soft word and, above all, by personal example!

[From An Autobiography (1936), pp. 252-5]

The Basic Approach

...THE old question still faces us, as it has faced humanity for ages past: what is the meaning of life? The old days of faith do not appear to be adequate, unless they can answer the questions of today. In a changing world, living should be a continuous adjustment to these changes and happenings. It is the lack of this adjustment that creates conflicts.

The old civilisations with the many virtues that they possess, have obviously proved inadequate. The new Western civilisation, with all its triumphs and achievements and also with its atomic bombs, also appears inadequate and, therefore, the feeling grows that there is something wrong with our civilisation. Indeed, essentially our problems are those of civilisation itself. Religion gave a certain moral and spiritual discipline; it also tried to perpetuate superstition and social usages. Indeed those superstitions and social usages enmeshed and overwhelmed the real spirit of religion. Disillusionment followed. Communism comes in the wake of this disillusion-ment and offers some kind of faith and some kind of discipline. To some extent it fills a vacuum. It succeeds in some measure by giving a content to man’s life. But in spite of its apparent success, it fails, partly because of its rigidity, but, even more so, because it ignores certain essential needs of human nature. There is much talk in communism of the contradictions of capitalist society and there is truth in that analysis. But we see the growing contradictions within the rigid framework of communism itself. Its suppression of individual freedom brings about powerful reactions. Its contempt for what might be called the moral and spiritual side of life not only ignores something that is basic in man, but also deprives human behaviour of standards and values. Its unfortunate association with violence encourages a certain evil tendency in human beings.

I have the greatest admiration for many of the achievements of the Soviet Union. Among those great achievements is the value attached to the child and the common man. Their systems of education and health are probably the best in the world. But it is said, and rightly, that there is suppression of individual freedom there. And yet the spread of education in all is itself a tremendous liberating force which ultimately will not tolerate that suppression of freedom. This again is another contradiction. Unfortunately, communism became too closely associated with the necessity for violence and thus the idea which it placed before the world became a tainted one. Means distorted ends. We see here the powerful influence of wrong means and methods.

Communism charges the capitalist structure of society with being based on violence and class conflict. I think this is essentially correct, though that capitalist structure itself has undergone and is continually undergoing a change because of democratic and other struggles and inequality. The question is how to get rid of this and have a classless society with equal opportunities for all. Can this be achieved through methods of violence, or is to possible to bring about those changes through peaceful methods? Communism has definitely allied itself to the approach of violence. Even if it does not indulge normally in physical violence, its language is of violence, its thought is violent and it does not seek to change by persuasion or peaceful democratic pressures, but by coercion and indeed by destruction and extermination. Fascism has all these evil aspects of violence and extermination in their grossest forms and, at the same time, has no acceptable ideal.

This is completely opposed to the peaceful approach which Gandhiji taught us. Communists as well as anti-communists, both seem to imagine that a principle can only be stoutly defended by the language of violence, and by condemning those who do not accept it. For both of them there are no shades, there is only black and white. That is the old approach of the bigoted aspects of some religions. It is not the approach of tolerance of feeling that perhaps others might have some share of the truth also. Speaking for myself, I find this approach wholly unscientific, unreasonable and uncivilised, whether it is applied in the realm of religion or economic theory or anything else. I prefer the old pagan approach of tolerance, apart from its religious aspects. But, whatever we may think about it, we have arrived at a stage in the modern world when an attempt at forcible imposition of ideas on any large section of people is bound ultimately to fail. In present circumstances this will lead to war and tremendous destruction. There will be no victory, only defeat for everyone. Even then, we have seen, in the last year or two, that it is not easy for even great powers to re-introduce colonial control over territories which have recently become independent. This was exemplified by the Suez incident in 1956. Also what happened in Hungary demonstrated that the desire for national freedom is stronger even than any ideology and cannot ultimately be suppressed. What happened in Hungary was not essentially a conflict between communism and anti-communism. It represented nationalism striving for freedom from foreign control.

Thus, violence cannot possibly lead today to a solution of any major problem because violence has become much too terrible and destructive. The moral approach to this question has now been powerfully reinforced by the practical aspect.

If the society we aim at cannot be brought about by big-scale violence, will small-scale violence help? Surely not, partly because that itself may lead to the big-scale violence and partly because it produces an atmosphere of conflict and of disruption. It is absurd to imagine that out of conflict the social progressive forces are bound to win. In Germany both the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were swept away by Hitler. This may well happen in other countries too. In India any appeal to violence is particularly dangerous because of its inherent disruptive character. We have too many fissiparous tendencies for us to take risks. But all these are relatively minor considerations. The basic thing, I believe, is that wrong means will not lead to right results and that is no longer merely an ethical doctrine but a practical proposition.

Some of us have been discussing this general background and, more especially, conditions in India. It is often said that there is a sense of frustration and depression in India and the old buoyancy of spirit is not to be found at a time when enthusiasm and hard work are most needed. This is not merely in evidence in our country. It is in a sense a world phenomenon. An old and valued colleages said that this is due to our not having a philosophy of life and indeed the world also is suffering from this lack of a philosophical approach. In our efforts to ensure the material prosperity of the country, we have not paid any attention to the spiritual element in human nature. Therefore, in order to give the individual and the nation a sense of purpose, something to live for and, if necessary, to die for, we have to revive some philosophy of life and give, in the wider sense of the word, a spiritual background to our thinking. We talk of a welfare state and of democracy and socialism. They are good concepts but they hardly convey a clear and unambiguous meaning. This was the argument and then the question arose as to what our ultimate objective should be. Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself. We talk of the good of society. Is this something apart from and transcending the good of the individuals composing it? If the individual is ignored and sacrificed for what is considered the good of the society, is that the right objective to have?

It was agreed that the individual should not be so sacrificed and indeed that real social progress will come only when opportunity is given to the individual to develop, provided the individual is not a selected group, but comprises the whole community. The touchstone, therefore, should be how far any political or social theory enables the individual to rise above his petty self and thus think in terms of the good of all. The law of life should not be competition or acquisitiveness but co-operation, the good of each contributing to the good of all...

[The AICC Economic Review (August 15, 1958)]

The Concept of Socialism

FOR twenty years or more I have been closely associated with the Congress and have worked for it to the best of my ability, till I have come to consider myself almost as having merged into it. I have given the best part of my life to it because I believed that it was working for the ideals that I had in my heart. Inevitably, therefore, the Congress occupies a great part of my being and the ties that bind me to it are hard as steel. I have also progressively accepted the ideology of scientific socialism and I may claim to be now a socialist in the full sense of the term. Any organisation that claims to represent these two ideas and ways must therefore have my goodwill, quite apart even from the detailed programme it might advance. I find further that many of my old colleagues whose opinions I have valued are now in the ranks of the Congress Socialist Party.

I have mentioned the two ways that have moved me, and I take it that they move also, in varying degrees, many of my countrymen. These are: nationalism and political freedom as repre-sented by the Congress, and social freedom as represented by socialism. Socialism, it is obvious, includes political freedom, for without that there can be no social and economic freedom. But India being unhappily still politically a subject country, nationalism is the dominant urge of most of her politically-minded classes. That is a factor of primary importance and any socialist who ignores it does so at his peril. But no socialist need be reminded that nationalism by itself offers no solution to the vast problems that confront our country and the world; it ignores indeed the world and fails to realise that in doing so it makes an understanding of even the national position impossible. For the Indian problem is but a part of the world problem of imperialism, the two are indissolubly linked together, and that world problem is essentially an economic problem, though it has many changing faces.

To continue these two outlooks and make them an organic whole is the problem of the Indian socialist. Scientific socialism itself teaches us not to follow slavishly any dogma or any other country’s example, which may have resulted from entirely different circumstances. Armed with a philosophy which reveals the inner workings of history and human relations, and with the scientific outlook to guide him, the socialist tries to solve the problems of each country in relation to its varied background and stage of economic development, and also in relation to the world. It is a hard task. But then there is no easy way.

Ideas are the essential basis for action. But behind ideas there must be the men to carry them out and the character and discipline to translate them into results. No socialist can be true to his creed or mission if he seeks satisfaction merely in brave ideas and in criticism of others who do not agree with him. That is the way of facile intellectual opportunism. He has to remember that he is no armchair politician but one working for an object—for achievement. And achievement requires character and discipline and united action and the readiness to sacrifice the individual self for the larger cause. That discipline and character have been sadly lacking in India in recent months, and the brave memory of united and effective action is almost a dream that has faded. It is for us to make that dream real again, and real in an even more fundamental sense than it was in the past, for in the future it must be built upon a clear and well understood ideology.
[A Message to the All-India Congress Socialist Conference, Meerut, January 13, 1936]

India’s Future

IF I think of India, as I do very often, it is in terms of our development plans, so that a measure of well-being might come to all our people, something that they have lacked for so long. I think that will come, though it will require great efforts. Material well-being, advance in education, health, industry, etc. is the necessary basis for progress. But I earnestly hope that this will not be at the sacrifice of certain moral values and, if I may say so, rather vaguely, a spiritual outlook on life and its problems. I do not mean to say that India functions on a high moral or spiritual plane. But it has certainly thought a great deal through hundreds and thousands of years of these values, and at least in theory it approves of them. It would be a misfortune if, in the pursuit of material well-being, it forgot those values. I hope also that as we grow in strength and prosperity, as we are bound to do, our people will not give way to the arrogance that often comes from strength and prosperity and will not forget the basic lesson that Mahatma Gandhi taught us: that means are at least as important as ends. I hope that our nationalism will always be tempered with internationalism and will, at no time, develop into anything approaching chauvinism.

These are my hopes and what I shall work for so long as I have strength to do so. I think these hopes are realisable because, in the final anlysis, it will be the quality of the Indian people that will count. I have great faith in the masses of India, illiterate as most of them are. In spite of this illiteracy, which will, of course, rapidly disappear, they have a basic culture and tender-ness which makes life worthwhile for them and for others. We have many failings and we are very conscious of them, but we have some virtues also which, I hope, will survive even when progress and prosperity come to us.

I dare not look into the crystal ball any more, but I have given you some vague idea of how I look at the future of India. That gives me hope and a sense of function. After all, it will be for others to decide and to work for this future India. Already I see major changes taking place which are not perhaps so evident to outsiders. There is the process of industrialisation bringing new problems. Even more so is the spread of education, more especially among our women-folk. Probably the biggest revolution that is taking place in India is through women’s education which affects directly the home.

[A Letter to Bernard Hollowood, May 22, 1959]

Rabindranath Tagore

IT is just a year ago that I heard in Dehra Dun Jail of Gurudev’s death. Suddenly I felt very lonely, for his mere presence in distant Santiniketan was an abiding comfort and an inspiration. The warmth of his genius surrounded me, as it did so many others, and produced in me a sense of companionship. To be deprived of this was loneliness and desolation.

And yet the sorrow, intense as it was, soon gave place to pride and triumph. It was well with India if she could produce, even in her present subject and lowly state, such a magnifi-cent person. He was a great poet, a great artist, a great patriot, but he was above all a man of giant stature in a world of pigmies. That India should have produced him and another mighty personality, Gandhi, in the course of one generation filled me with wonder and glow of pride in my country. It was well with India, I thought, for the spring of her youth had not dried up and her vital energy still flowed out to enrich the world. From what vast store did this come, and what was her strange secret which enabled her to renew her youth from age to age?

Tagore and Gandhi, each in his different way, was a symbol of India, steeped in her ancient culture and drawing strength and sustenance from her. How typical they were of India, and yet how utterly different from each other! Possibly no other country could have produced them, and they had their roots deep down in the Indian soil and their minds roamed over the many thousands of years that have gone to make India what she is. And yet they were men of the present day, intensely alive to the day’s problem. Both of them, in their respective and wholly different ways, represented that wonderful continuity of India’s cultural tradition which has known no break though disaster has so often laid her low.

Typical of India as Tagore was, yet he was typical also of the wide world today, as well as of the world of tomorrow. He showed us how India might be intensely national and yet, at the same time, international with her thought and sympathy embracing the world. In the midst of our national struggle, he created that symbol of internationalism that is Visva-Bharati.

Standing on the edge of a precipice, as we all do today, my mind goes back to that great and magnificent message which Gurudev gave to his country and the world on his eightieth birthday. That was his last will and testament. Out of the store of his rich mind and experience, he gave that final message. In line with the ancient sages and great men of India, he spoke to us of our country’s sorrow at the crisis that had overtaken civilisation in the Western world. As I read that message in prison it seemed to me that I heard the voice of India herself whispering in my ears. Today that message comes back to me and that lesson is imprinted in my mind. It were well if all of us, in Asia or Europe or America, paid heed to it for we are being swept away by the passions of the moment, and war, that great falsifier, is perverting and degrading our minds.

[A Message on the Death Anniversary of Tagore, August 7, 1942]

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