Nehru, Gandhi and a dream state

When I first visited India, in 1976, political conversation was full of the linguistic conventions of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had died 12 years earlier. One bowed in ritual regard before “the steel frame of the bureaucracy”; one warned against the “fissiparous tendencies” posed by religious or regional chauvinism; one professed faith in “the socialistic pattern of society,” even without quite knowing what it meant. The streets were full of white Ambassadors, India’s clunky domestic car, as they had been in Nehru’s time. And the best and the brightest aspired to join the Indian Civil Service, as they had in Nehru’s time.

India, which gained independence from the British in 1946, is today a much older sovereign nation than it was when I was there. And the Nehruvian world I knew seems almost as archaic as the imperial culture that preceded it. Socialism is a dead letter, and India is struggling to thrive in a world of globalized capitalism. Bright young people go into software development. The old Congress Party has been supplanted in power by a party professing the Hindu nationalist values that Nehru and his generation considered the single greatest threat to India’s future. The spirit of disinterestedness, personal austerity and secular cosmopolitanism that Nehru sought to foster are all but defunct. Nehru is often considered the George Washington of India, but the Founding Fathers seem to have left a more lasting imprint on the United States than Nehru and his revolutionary generation did on India.

What are we to make of Nehru, and of Nehru’s India, 40 years after the great man’s death? Nehru is unique in modern history, not only the father figure of his country, but also a gifted writer and global actor who offered his people an exhilarating emblem of modernity.

Nehru is a biographer’s dream, and over the last half century he has been the subject of books by leading Indian writers as well as by American and British figures. An exhaustive three-volume work by Sarvepalli Gopal appeared between 1975 and 1984. Stanley Wolpert, a leading American authority on India, published a psycho-biography in 1996 that promised to unearth the “passions and fears which drove and tortured Nehru” and featured dizzying leaps of speculation about the great man’s sex life.

Two new biographies of Nehru -- one a brief and nimble sketch by Indian writer and diplomat Shashi Tharoor, the other a more substantial work of history by a British scholar of India, Judith M. Brown -- make no attempt to answer such palpitating questions as whether Nehru had an affair with Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of Lord Mountbatten, viceroy of India after World War II. But both try, in different ways, to measure just how successful Nehru was in his quest to reshape India according to the idea of it that he carried in his head and, especially in Tharoor’s case, to ask whether India might have been better off with a different set of ideas.

Nehru once described himself as India’s last English ruler. He was, by upbringing and experience, a remarkably unrepresentative figure, given his later iconic status. The son of a wealthy lawyer, Nehru was sent to Harrow and Cambridge, where he enjoyed a sort of Prince Hal phase as a dandy and spendthrift. He absorbed English manners and habits of thought and speech.

How this hothouse plant turned into a revolutionary firebrand is something of a mystery, and yet, as Brown points out, even as a young man Nehru was prone to bouts of withdrawal and solitude that kept him from being seduced by his surroundings; this afforded him a melancholy and critical perspective quite rare in a man of action.

Once back in the increasingly turbulent atmosphere of India in the years before World War I, Nehru might well have joined the ranks of well-heeled barristers demanding to be treated more like Englishmen. But he was deflected from that lesser destiny by the immense influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Biographers have made much of this extraordinary relationship, which in many ways echoed that between Nehru and his beloved, demanding father. It was Gandhi who persuaded Nehru -- and his terribly proper father -- to throw off foreign garb and to fight the British empire in a way that would resonate with the ordinary Indian.

Gandhi’s gift for touching the hearts of millions of his countrymen made him indispensable to the anti-British campaign. But Nehru, with his English rationalism and secularism, found Gandhi’s religiosity obscure and maddening, and he raged against the older man’s habit of calling off protests at the first sign of disorder or violence. And yet the older he got, the more convinced Nehru became of Gandhi’s conviction that change must begin in the heart of each man, until, ironically, he died almost a Gandhian.

All this is largely familiar from previous accounts. But once Nehru becomes prime minister, Brown widens her focus to ask a typological question: How does the leader of an abruptly decolonized nation forge a sense of national identity? Nehru had not only deeply pondered this question in his extensive reading of history and in his own writing, but over the years he had also engaged in a self-conscious “discovery” of India. It was almost a mystical faith on Nehru’s part that India was a true nation long before it became a state. Although for others India’s nationhood was rooted in ancient Vedantic texts and the timeless Hindu social order, Nehru found it in his homeland’s repudiation of all forms of parochialism -- “a composite nation,” Brown writes, “born from a civilization which over centuries had drawn from and assimilated the many religious and cultural traditions present on the subcontinent.”

This generous and idiosyncratic vision was arguably Nehru’s greatest gift to the fledgling nation. In the face of tremendous opposition, he strove to protect Muslim personal law and to diminish the influence of Hindu law on matters of marriage and family. He opposed -- unsuccessfully, in the end -- the creation of language-based states and refused to impose Hindi, a northern language, on the southern states. He inveighed ceaselessly against all forms of communalism or provincialism and commended instead a modern, scientific outlook.

It was India’s destiny, as Nehru understood it, to follow a uniquely Indian path in its foreign policy and the organization of its economy. Nehru was one of the founders of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement of Third World states, but Nehru understood nonalignment not as a pragmatic choice that allowed India to stand between the two great blocs but as a philosophical position that gave it a superior perch from which he could preach his vision of world peace and brotherhood.

Nehru was a socialist, of course, as were virtually all the decolonizing father figures, for socialism promised to liberate the ordinary man from the tyranny of capital. But Nehru also understood socialism as a heroic exercise in nation building. Brown writes that Nehru “exuded an almost messianic zeal” as he drew up the first of India’s notoriously unsuccessful five-year plans. “Behind the Plan,” Nehru wrote, “lies the conception of India’s unity and of a mighty cooperative effort of all the people of India.”

It all sounds sadly dated now, doesn’t it? Nonalignment collapsed around Nehru’s ears in 1962, when China, which Nehru had declared India’s great Asian brother, attacked India to reclaim disputed territory and administered a humiliating rout to the Indian army while the nonaligned nations maintained a conspicuous silence. Nehru’s rarefied idealism looks even more misguided in our hardheaded world.

Tharoor, who as a U.N. official might be expected to be a sympathizer, writes that Nehru’s “Olympian disdain for ‘power politics’ ” ensured that foreign policy would never serve the national self-interest. Socialism has, of course, written its own epitaph. All those five-year economic plans produced what came to be known mockingly as the “Hindu rate of growth,” or 3%, as compared to the 7% or 8% regularly racked up by the free-market nations of East Asia. Earlier biographers criticized Nehru for insufficient redistributive zeal. No longer. Here is Tharoor’s biting verdict of Nehru’s socialist policies: “For most of the past five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and distributing poverty. Nehru called that socialism.” How the mighty have fallen.

Even in his greatest, noblest goal of shaping a secular, unified India, Nehru appears to have failed. Brown details the sad demise of the social reforms, including mass education, village-level democracy and women’s rights, that Nehru depended on to overcome ancient prejudice and practice. Communal hatred devoured Nehru’s only child, Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1984 by Sikh militants seeking a separate Sikh nation. Chauvinism has lost much of its stigma; on my most recent visit to India, a few years ago, I noticed that it had become vastly more acceptable for well-educated Hindus to express overt hostility to Muslims than it had been a quarter-century before. And the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is not shy about exploiting that animus.

It’s obvious, in retrospect, that Nehru’s means -- passing statutes, formulating plans, issuing pleas -- were grossly inadequate to his goal of shaping a new India. The resistance was too deep and too widespread. Indians often yearn for a “benevolent dictatorship,” and perhaps the country would have been better off with the likes of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. Nehru was profoundly wary of power, including his own; he once composed an anonymous profile of himself in which he noted that his impatience and ill-temper “will hardly brook for long the slow process of democracy.” Nehru grafted Mohandas Gandhi’s belief in the imperative of pure means onto an Englishman’s faith in the powers of rational persuasion. The idea of benevolent dictatorship would have struck him as a contradiction in terms.

And yet he was surely right. Nehru was acutely aware that India’s delicate frame could crack if he pushed too hard. He valued stability above progress; that was why he accepted language-based states in the south and muted his campaign for land reform. And the stability that Nehru achieved during his 18 years as prime minister is itself an extraordinary achievement of statesmanship. Perhaps it might have lasted longer if his heirs, including his daughter, had not played with communal fire for political gain. But even with all its fissiparous tendencies, India is neither a patchwork state, like Indonesia, nor an anarchic dictatorship, like Pakistan. India is very much a functioning democracy, and surely much of the credit must go to Nehru’s unwillingness to use undemocratic means to achieve even the most desirable ends.

There is, it turns out, no uniquely Indian way to conduct foreign or domestic policy. India looks increasingly like a “normal” country, using familiar means to attain familiar goals. Even its ugly messes are the result of normal political self-seeking, though Nehru would have been sickened by the vulgarity of the spectacle. And the trend lines for this all-too-conventional India are broadly positive: Economic growth is up around 8%, and the Hindu nationalist prime minister is offering tentative peace feelers to Pakistan. These two biographies, the one careful and comprehensive, the other swift and sharp, offer a measuring stick not only for Nehru but also for India’s unfolding experiment. One wonders how the chronicles will read a generation from now. *