India without Nehru

by DEV DUTT

On that quiet, drowsy, white May afternoon, Nature broke down into paroxysms of fury and the Heart of India convulsed with sorrow.

Then, there was a pause—a short pause in the affairs of men in India, nay even the world—when the ashes of the departed leader were scattered over the soils and the waters of India amidst warm eulogies couched in soft accents.

Finally, Time and Life recovered, and pressed forward again. Symbols of bereavement began to gradually disappear. The aching sorrow retreated into the vaults of memory. In the one hundred and forty days that have passed India has reconciled to live without Nehru.

The new leadership is in the saddle. India is enjoying a spell of stability in a critical period of history. Obviously, India without him is a going concern. The prophets of doom have been belied by everything that India did after his death: the election of his successor with grace, speed and wisdom; the continuation of his policies; the adherence to his objectives; and the maintenance of the political and social framework in terms of non-alignment, socialism, democracy and secularism.

Substance of Legacy

BUT one wonders if these alone exhaust the substance of Nehru’s legacy.
Freedom: truly he was a passionate devotee of freedom, but has not history known of other emancipators?

Economic liberty: no doubt an ardent though vague socialist, but he was only one of the many radical thinkers India had given birth to in recent times.
Peace: surely he succeeded in saving mankind from nuclear holocaust on a few occasions, but again, peace has had its other crusaders too.

Maker of modern secular Indian state: verily, he will go down in history as an architect of India’s secularism, but there were several others who like him had given their lives in the fight against dogmatism, bigotry and parochialism.
Then what is the Nehru legacy? For there was to him something more than all this.
The answer to this question may be sought in the analysis of the manner in which Indians have looked at the national and international problems since his death.

Several Changes

THE world and, particularly, India without Nehru has been a witness to several changes—some ordinary and some phenomenal. Our enemies of the day have become more bellicose, more powerful and more effective. Our friends are still correct, cautious and calculating in their relations with us.

The centre of tensions in the world has moved to South-East Asia as is reflected in recent developments. There is a stiffening of the attitudes in Laos and Vietnam, the conflict between Malaysia and Indonesia has started having its impact in the councils of the world, and China with her A-bomb has upset the balance of power in Asia and the world materially as well as otherwise.

The changes in leadership in Soviet Russia tended to strengthen the above mentioned trends and shook, for some time, our sense of surety about Indo-Soviet amity. Africa has finally emerged as an overpowering factor in world politics. This was clearly shown by the asser-tiveness of the African states in the Second Conference of Non-aligned States in Cairo.

India’s Preoccupations

WHILE the world was confronted with the prospects of colossal transformation (which might amount to a throw-back to the early 1950s) under the pressure of mighty technological and political explosions, our energies on the home front were being engaged in tackling the rebellion of a few thousand Nagas; checking the schemings of Bakshi in Kashmir; ousting the Kairons of various States; rooting out corruption among Ministers; eradicating administrative delays; launching campaigns to exhort people to dig more ponds and wells and tanks, and use better seeds and fertilisers; fighting in vain the ravenous petty hoarder of people’s food, the cowardly profiteer and the slouching black-marketeer and the sly tax evader; debating about the Plan size and strategy in such terms as whether the Plan should be a few thousand crores less or more, whether there should be more emphasis on stability and consolidation of gains, whether the rate of economic growth should be pushed up to 6.4 per cent or 7.6 per cent in the next five years—and arguing about the prerogatives of the State Legislature and judiciary.

The measure of a nation’s greatness, like that of individuals, does not lie in the size of the problems but in the maturity, broad-mindedness, grace, charity, and perspective with which these are approached and handled.

How did we behave? Take, for instance, the problem of food shortage. The policy of the government and the party in power has been one of procrastination, parrying and drift. Its tools have been conferences, exhortations, reprimands, threats, warnings and appeals. Its main hope has been the generosity of nature or the charity of the United States of America. As regards the people and parties under these trying conditions of economic distress, the people murmured, sulked and surrendered. The Opposi-tion parties, which are supposed to suggest correc-tives to the sluggish ways of the government, and to serve as the guardians of the interests of the people, have failed to mobilise properly the mass discontent to the end of assuring a solution, although some of them, particularly the Jan Sangh, used their sufferings as a tool of agitational politics to gain popular goodwill.

International Affairs

SIMILARLY, in the realm of international relations, we expressed grave concern over US action in the Bay of Tonkin but that was all. What a contrast to the lightning reaction to the proposal of US military aid to Pakistan in 1955 or the instantaneous expression of active indignation over the Franco-British invasion of Suez!

In Cairo the African attitude, however well-founded in their own historical experience, swept us off our feet and we simply followed in their footsteps, trying to gain, wherever it was possible, by going along the pressure of prevailing opinion, a favour here and an advantage there.

India continues to formulate its policies—most of which are of the nature of reaction to cataclysmic events in the Soviet Union and explosions in the deserts of Sinkiang—in a vocabulary which is falling fast into disuse. It only reacted to international events, and exhibited a pathetic lack of initiative. Nearer home, it has started seeking satisfaction in having established ad hoc good relations and in having a ring of nice unoffending neighbours rather than attempting to deal with them in the context of larger global issues which affect the general good of humanity and India. It is now in Guntur that Sri Shastri, by taking a firm stand regarding the Bomb, has shown that the inertia is breaking and the new leadership is coming into its own.

Men cannot act and think better than their capacities. We must realise the limitations—some inherent, some acquired, and some implicit in a given situation—of the present generation of Indians and the leadership. It has to function in the context of a heavy backlog of work. It is circumscribed by a legacy of thwarted effort and misdirected energies in some areas. It is seriously conditioned by several institutional and organisational pressures and historical factors.

Moreover, they have not had enough time to be conversant fully with the situation in which the country found itself after Nehru’s death. Therefore, a measure of caution, circumspection, and hesitation is inevitable in their approach. They might even err, nay commit blunders, and yet be excused.

But that is not so important. What causes anxiety to some of us is that in the post-Nehru era there seems to be heart-breaking absence of the awareness of the importance of bold thinking, courageous action and audacious idealism. We are tending towards a cult of the possible and a religion of the practical. A general process of narrowing down of the intellectual horizons, a shrivelling up of the perspectives of thought, a shrinking from big responsibilities coupled with another equally dangerous tendency of the hardening of sensibilities, and a coarsening of our responsiveness, is fast corrupting the outlook of the articulate section of public opinion and intelligentsia.

Outlook on Life

TO adequately comprehend this phenomenon we have to understand Nehru’s outlook on life. He was a Titan. He thought, felt and acted in a big way. Pettiness, triviality, and lack of grace seldom sullied his approach. Whenever weari-ness overtook his mind, whenever folly of men’s ways in the world became unbearable, whenever bigotry of religion, corruption of politics, degradation of their ideals filled him with intolerable anguish, his spirit soared and perched itself on the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas or stretched itself out across the expanse of seas and oceans, and sought to partake of their majesty and vastness and grandeur and beauty.

This instinctive response to magnificence, majesty, expanse and vastness is the stuff of which true nobility is made and this in turn is the true measure of Nehru’s thought and practice.

Once he wrote: “Many people go up the mountains and risk life and limb for the joy of the climb and the exhilaration that comes from a difficulty surmounted, a danger overcome; and because of the danger that hovers all around them, their perceptions get keener, their joy of the life which hangs by a thread, the more intense.

“All of us have our choice of living in the valleys below, with their unhealthy mists and fogs, but giving a measure of bodily security, or climbing the high mountains, with risk and danger for companions, to breathe the pure air above, and take joy in the distant views and welcoming the rising sun.”

No Crystal-Gazer

YET Nehru was no crystal-gazer or an idle dreamer. He was an idealist but not a prisoner of ideals. He was a man of vision but not a captive of utopias. He was deeply committed to principles and values but he was not dogmatically partisan. His approach had an openness, a catholicity and an all-inclusive character approximating to that of life’s.

History is replete with instances of great minds vitiated by narrow intensity of passionate, single-eyed idealism, instances of great persona-lities vulgarised and rendered hideous by an all-consuming obsession for an exclusive value or idea, of great men brutalised by an over-anxious concern for the abstract. Nehru’s mind was singularly free from this almost demonical compulsiveness of the love for the abstract.

There is another source from which Nehru sought his sustenance and which is also a measure of his bigness. He developed a historical perspective and acquired a uniqueness of vision in the context of which he tried to place the ugly realities of life.

One of the truths which history taught him was that since man has progressed not by helpless submission but defiance, we should learn to live dangerously, courageously and vitally in a big way. He viewed the problems of the present in an extremely live and vibrant consciousness of history. This enabled him to sift the contingent from the more enduring and helped him to be above the demeaning and degrading pull of conflict and tension.

Refinement

NEHRU blew into an otherwise vulgarising process of politics and the business of state a “breath” of poetry. He gave it a measure of refinement, sweetness and light—in fact huma-nised it and elevated its character.

The extremely warm relations he could develop with British statesmen after their withdrawal, his relations with Sheikh Abdullah’s family during the period of his imprisonment, his behaviour towards T.T. Krishnamachari when he resigned on account of the LIC-Mundhra episode, his responsiveness to political opponents —all these bear witness to the fact that Nehru had a style of his own in politics.

He realised that politics and statecraft alone will not serve their own ends and, therefore, it was necessary to relate politics to ethics and culture. Indeed, his was the “most cultured voice” of India.

All work of art ultimately tends to change the state of consciousness or the quality of awareness of human beings. All his life Nehru tried to achieve this stupendous task, namely, to modify the collective consciousness of the Indian nation by shuffling into it the love of new values, new ideas, new ideals, and by placing before the Indian people the vision of a brave and big and bright life of dignity, freedom, prosperity and culture and peace.

India without Nehru is India without that responsible, soft, brave firm voice of a teacher who always exhorted us to blaze a trail of glory through the vast vistas of history. Socialism, peace, secularism, democracy alone are not the stuff of the Nehru legacy. It is also this capacious vision, this spacious comprehension with which Nehru looked at the political and social and economic problems of India and of the world, and which gave to his thinking a quality of ineffable charm and distinction.

(Mainstream, November 14, 1964)