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Sixty years ago, in the depths of the second world war, Pieter Geyl began work on a book on the legend of Napoleon. Conceived in a Nazi internment camp, written after his release, and published only after the war was over, Geyl’s Napoleon: For and Against analysed what several generations of French scholars had said about this most formidable figure of history. It is time that someone did something similar with regard to the modern statesman who embodied his nation’s hopes and fears as intensely as did Napoleon. This was Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India for the first 17 years of its existence as a free nation. As the Canadian diplomat Escott Reid wrote in 1957, “there is no one since Napoleon who has played both so large a role in the history of his country and has also held the sort of place which Nehru holds in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. For the people of India, he is George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one.”

This essay is inspired by Pieter Geyl, yet its methods are somewhat dissimilar to those used by the great Dutch historian. I seek here to ask, and at least partially answer, a question that has long intrigued me – why has a man who was so greatly adored in his lifetime been so comprehensively vilified since his death? However the evidence I present is by no means restricted to the printed word. In a culture that remains principally oral, I also draw upon years of listening to what Indians of different generations, backgrounds, and temperaments have been saying about Jawaharlal Nehru.

It is safe to say that no modern politician had anywhere near as difficult a job as Nehru’s. At independence, the country he was asked to lead was faced with horrific problems. Riots had to be contained, food shortages to be overcome, princely states (as many as 500) to be integrated, refugees (almost 10 million) to be resettled. This, so to say, was the task of fire-fighting; to be followed by the equally daunting task of nation-building. A constitution had to be written that would satisfy the needs of this diverse and complex nation. An election system had to be devised for an electorate that was composed mostly of illiterates. A viable foreign policy had to be drafted in the threatening circumstances of the cold war. And an economic policy had to be forged to take a desperately poor and divided society into the modern age.

No new nation was ever born in less propitious circumstances. Fortunately, Nehru had on his side a set of superbly gifted colleagues. His cabinet included such men of distinction as Vallabhbhai Patel, B R Ambedkar and C Rajagopalachari. They were helped by the remaining officials of the Indian Civil Service; the steel frame that was one of British colonialism’s unquestioned gifts to free India.

For all the assistance he got Nehru was, as the elected prime minister, most responsible for the success or failure of his government’s policies. For one thing, the other giants I have named all departed early. Patel died in 1950; Ambedkar and Rajaji left the cabinet in 1951. For another, in the popular mind it was Nehru who was most directly identified with the philosophy of the new nation state; with ideas such as democracy, non-alignment, socialism, and secularism, ideas to which, in his writings and speeches, he gave such eloquent expression.

At this time, the mid-1950s, Nehru’s domestic reputation was as high as high can be. He came as close as anyone has, or ever will, to becoming the ‘people’s prince’. He was Gandhi’s chosen political heir, and free India’s first freely elected prime minister. After the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, he towered among his colleagues in the Congress Party. His vision of an India fired by steel plants and powered by dams was widely shared. He was seen as a brave man, who fought religious chauvinists; as a selfless man, who had endured years in jail to win freedom; and above all as a good man. His appeal cut across the conventionally opposed categories of man and woman, low caste and high caste, Hindu and Muslim, north Indian and south Indian. Representative here are the recollections of a now distinguished Tamil diplomat who grew up in the capital in the 1950s. He told me that “to us Pandit Nehru was a great golden disc shining in the middle of New Delhi”.

A spectacular demonstration of the Indian people’s love for Jawaharlal Nehru was on display during the general elections of 1952. In campaigning for the Congress Nehru covered the country from end to end. He travelled 25,000 miles in all: 18,000 by air, 5,200 by car, 1,600 by train, and even 90 by boat. A breathless party functionary later described this as comparable to the ‘imperial campaigns of Samudragupta, Asoka and Akbar’ as well as to the ‘travel[s] of Fahien and Hieun Tsang”.

In the course of the campaign Nehru ‘travelled more than he slept and talked more than he travelled’. He addressed 300 mass meetings and myriad smaller ones. He spoke to about 20 million people directly, while an equal number merely had his ‘darshan’, flanking the roads to see him as his car whizzed past. Those who heard and saw him included miners, peasants, pastoralists, factory workers and agricultural labourers. Women of all classes turned out in numbers for his meetings.

Nirad Chaudhuri always prided himself on his independence of mind, on always being above (and ahead) of the herd. But even he could not escape the glow of the great golden disc then shining in the middle of New Delhi. It is noteworthy that Chaudhuri never allowed this essay to be reprinted, a fact which adds to the delight with which I excerpt it here.

Such, then, was Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation at its zenith; it is time now to move on to its nadir.

In my early days as an academic, I made the mistake of defending Jawaharlal Nehru in the smoky seminar room of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, off Landsdowne Road in south Calcutta. I was then very young, and my defence was weak and confused anyway. I can’t even remember what form it took (I most likely said that he was a decent man, as politicians go). But it was enough to bring the roof down. I got snarls and dirty looks in the seminar room itself, and afterwards was set upon by my immediate boss, then an up-coming political scientist in his mid-30s (and now a scholar of world renown). This gentleman called a colleague into his study and, pointing to me, said: ‘Ei shala Jawaharlal Nehru shapotaar!’

To be a supporter of Nehru in a Marxist stronghold of those days is much like someone now defending the emperor Babar in a ‘shakha’ or camp of that hardcore Hindu organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). For the Left, Nehru was a wishy-washy, weak-kneed idealist, full of high-flown rhetoric but without the will or wherewithal to take revolutionary action against the ruling classes. Indeed, the political scientist who chastised me had just then published an essay making this case – here he also compared Nehru, unfavourably of course, to Lenin.

Truth be told, the first prime minister of free India was not exactly popular among non-Marxist circles in Calcutta either. The intellectuals mocked his second-class degree from Cambridge, while the brown sahibs pointed out that, unlike his close contemporary the yuvraj of Cooch Behar, he had not even made the cricket First Eleven at Harrow. And of course Bengalis of all stripes and ideologies lamented the accident of history which had placed him, rather than their adored Subhas Bose, at the helm of the government of free India.

What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. An old cliché, which in this case turns out to be surprisingly true. For Nehru has been, for some time now, the least liked of Indian politicians, dumped on from all parts of the political spectrum, in all parts of the land. As I know from experience, it is as risky a business to defend Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi or Bombay in 2005 as it was to defend him in Calcutta back in 1982.

A future historian, assessing the decline and fall of Nehru in the Indian imagination, might reckon 1977 to be the watershed, the year in which the delegitimation of an icon began gathering pace. That was when the Janata government came to power, after 30 long years of Congress rule (and misrule). The Janata Party was forged in the prisons of northern India, by men jailed under the Emergency imposed by prime minister Indira Gandhi. It brought together four disparate political groupings, united in the first instance by their opposition to Gandhi. These were the Hindu chauvinist Jana Sangh, the non-communist (or socialist) Left, the old style or ‘Gandhian’ Congressmen, and the free-marketeers of the Swatantra Party.

The Janata Party is long dead, and its constituents have each gone their separate ways. Yet an examination of their political styles in the years since reveals that aside from the Emergency and Gandhi, these four political groupings (as well as the intellectuals who have supported them) were, and are, also united by their hatred of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Each of the Janata fragments has had its reasons for opposing Nehru and his legacy. The Jana Sangh, now metamorphised into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), takes its cue from its mother organisation, the RSS, that seeks to build a Hindu state in India. Following the RSS, the BJP too trains its fire on Nehru’s philosophy of secularism, which they claim rests on the ‘appeasement’ of the minorities. Nehruvian ‘pseudo-secularism’ is said to have shown grave disrespect to Hindu sentiments while wantonly encouraging Muslim ones, this resulting in a wave of communal and ethnic conflict, not least in Kashmir.

By contrast, the non-communist Left takes its cue from the work of the brilliant, maverick intellectual Ram Manohar Lohia. Lohia took a PhD in political science in the University of Berlin, fleeing the city just as Hitler came to power. After his return he worked ceaselessly to root socialism in the cultural soil of India. Like Lohia, his modern-day followers – who exercise considerable influence in north India – have seen Nehru as the symbol of the upper-caste, upper-class, English-speaking intelligentsia that has held sway since independence. This elite, they contend, has manipulated both political and economic power to its advantage, if to the detriment of the low caste, non-English speaking majority, whom the Lohiaites themselves seek to represent.

If for the BJP, Nehru could not represent the ‘spirit of India’ because he did not subscribe to the right religion (indeed, to no religion at all), for the Lohia socialists his unfittedness to rule was proven by the fact that he stood apart, in class, culture and language, from those he ruled over. The Gandhian critique takes a different line altogether. It argues that despite being the Mahatma’s acknowledged heir, Nehru ultimately betrayed his legacy. Where Gandhi fought for a free India based on a confederation of self-sufficient village republics, Nehru is said to have imposed a model of industrial development that centralised power in the cities by devastating the countryside. Those who attack Nehru in the Mahatma’s name have forcefully argued that planned industrialisation has fuelled both environmental degradation and social conflict, outcomes that could have been avoided if India had instead followed a decentralised or ‘Gandhian’ approach to economic development.

The fourth, or Swatantra-ite critique of Jawaharlal Nehru is associated with the name and ideas of C Rajagopalachari. ‘Rajaji’ was once a follower of Gandhi, later a friend and colleague of Nehru, and still later an opponent. It was Rajaji who coined the term ‘licence-permit-quota-raj’ to describe the stifling strangehold of the state over the economy. This stranglehold, he and his latter-day followers have argued, has kept India at the low ‘Hindu’ rate of growth of 3-4 per cent per annum. It is their view that if Nehru had instead freed the economy from the government, and allowed private entrepreneurship to flourish, India would have grown at 8 to 10 per cent a year – it would, indeed, long since have become the biggest of the Asian tigers.

Continuing Attack

The Janata Party may have fragmented, but the fragments flourish, each continuing to attack Nehru and Nehruvianism from their own, particular vantage point. Their attacks are given salience by the fact that their main political rival is the Congress Party which, for the four decades after Nehru’s death, has continued to be led (and mis-led) by members of his own family. Thus the BJP mutters – more often shrieks – about the baleful effects of the ‘minority appeasement’ promoted by Nehru and his successors. The Lohia-ites offer themselves as the authentic, grassroots, Hindi-speaking alternative to the deracinated brahmins of the Nehruite Congress. The Gandhians seek a decentralised, village-centred, eco-friendly path instead of the Nehruvian model of ‘destructive development’. And Rajaji’s heirs, the free-marketeers, complain that the second generation of reforms has been held up by the residues of ‘socialist’ thinking that successor regimes have failed to fully wash away. Finally, there are the Marxists, who argue that, to the contrary, there is too little socialism in what Nehru once practised and in what his successors now preach.

Forty years after his death, Jawaharlal Nehru is a visible presence in our public and political life. His name is invoked often, but almost always in a negative sense, as an object of derision or abuse. The criticisms of Nehru now are vast and varied, so varied indeed that they contradict each other without fear of recognition. Just before the general elections of 2004, the Delhi monthly National Review interviewed two stalwarts of the political firmament: Lal Krishna Advani, then home minister and deputy prime minister in the government of India, for many years now the leading ideologue of the Hindu right; and Ashok Mitra, the former finance minister of the government of West Bengal, and a still serving ideologue of the radical left. This, without first checking with one another, is what they said about Nehru’s practice of secularism:

Which of these assertions is correct? Did Nehru hate all religions equally, as Advani suggests? Or did he love all equally, as Mitra claims? Perhaps it does not really matter. Perhaps these statements tells us less about Nehru’s actual beliefs (or policies), and more about the political preferences of his contemporary critics. On the one side, there is Advani, who considers ‘Hindutva’, or Hindu nationalism, the most promising political movement in modern India – and worries why it has not progressed further. Whom does he blame? Nehru. On the other hand, Ashok Mitra considers Hindutva to be the most pernicious political movement in modern India – and is angry that it has progressed so far. And whom does he blame? Nehru.

It would be intriguing to develop the Advani/Mitra contrast in other directions. Consider thus their likely views on economic and foreign policy. Advani probably thinks that the Nehruvian epoch was characterised by excessive state intervention; Mitra certainly believes that the state did not intervene enough. Advani holds that, in the formative decades of the 1950s, India aligned too closely with the Soviet Union; while Mitra thinks that we did not cosy up to Moscow enough. Advani must believe that Nehru did not do enough to promote the cause of the Hindi language; Mitra most likely holds that he did too much.

For both Advani and Mitra, their political project is best defined negatively: as the repudiation of the economic and social philosophy of Jawaharlal Nehru. Lifelong political adversaries though they may be, these Indians are joined in a lifelong fight against a common enemy – father.

III

Jawaharlal Nehru’s posthumous reputation brings to mind a remark of the 19th century British radical, Edward Carpenter. Carpenter claimed that ‘the outcast of one age is the hero of another’. He clearly had himself in mind, an environmentalist and prophet of sexual liberation ahead of his time. But the case of Jawaharlal Nehru shows that the opposite can equally be true. That is, the hero of one age can very easily become the outcast of another.

Why has Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation fallen so far and so fast? One reason is that as the first, and longest-serving, prime minister, he was in a unique position to shape his nation’s destiny. He did a great deal, but there is always the feeling that he should have done more – much more. And modern middle-class Indians are as a rule very judgmental, especially when it comes to passing judgment on politicians. As his biographer S Gopal once pointed out, Nehru’s ‘very achievements demand that he be judged by standards which one would not apply to the ordinary run of prime ministers; and disappointment stems from the force of our expectations’.

Allied to this is Nehru’s nearness to us in time. We live in a world shaped by him and his colleagues. And no modern man has had such an authoritative influence on the laws and institutions of his country. Adult suffrage, a federal polity, the mixed economy, non-alignment in foreign policy, cultural pluralism and the secular state – these were the crucial choices made by the first generation of Indian nation-builders. The choices were made collectively, of course, but always with the consent and justification of one man above all – Jawaharlal Nehru. So when Indians today meet to deliberate over them, they single out one man above all for approbation or denunciation. Questions that can be posed in the plural tend to be posed in the singular– instead of asking why India chose to be secular rather than theocratic, we ask why Nehru did so.

It is only 40 years since Nehru died. Since Indians still live with the consequences of decisions taken by him and his colleagues, some of them presume that they could have taken better decisions. And so they pass judgments on Nehru the like of which they would never pass on other Indian rulers, on (say) Akbar or even Lord Curzon. Of course, the judgments are anachronistic, made on the basis of what we know in 2005 rather than what Nehru knew in 1955. That does not stop them being made. Far from it. Over the years, I have spoken often about Nehru to audiences in different parts of India, to audiences composed variously of businessmen, students, scholars, and activists. Everywhere, I have met people who know that they could have done Nehru’s job better than he did it himself; that is, they know that they could have ‘saved’ Kashmir, taken India onto a 10 per cent growth path, solved the Hindu-Muslim problem, eliminated corruption in government, and brought peace with our neighbours. How foolish of us not to have elected them all as prime minister!

To illustrate how anachronistic these judgments are, consider only the claim that Nehru ‘imposed’ a socialist economic model on India. In fact, there was a widespread belief that a poor, ex-colonial country needed massive state intervention in the economic sphere. The leading industrialists issued a ‘Bombay Plan’ that called for the state to invest in infrastructure and protect them from foreign competition. This plan, signed by J R D Tata and G D Birla among others, approvingly quoted the claim of the Cambridge economist A C Pigou that socialism and capitalism were ‘converging’, and that a dynamic economy needed to mix the best features of both. When the draft of the Second Five-Year Plan –the manifesto, so to say, of the heavy industry strategy finally adopted –was shown to a panel of 24 top Indian economists, 23 supported it. Behind the mixed economy model, therefore, was a consensus shared by economists, technocrats, politicians, and not least, industralists.

A third reason for the fading of the Nehruvian sheen is political, namely, the decline of Congress hegemony. The debunking of Nehru began with the coming to power of the Janata Party in 1977. Since then, the Congress has steadily lost ground in both the centre and the states. There have now been as many as eight non-Congress governments at the centre; and more than 50 such in the states. The composition of these governments has been non-Congress; their beliefs and practices, often anti-Congress. In the realms of politics, economics, culture and the law, these groupings have had ideas often sharply opposed to those that Nehru stood for. While they were out of power these ideas had little salience or popularity; but now that there are in power the ideas themselves have power – as well as influence.

A fourth reason for the fall of Nehru’s reputation lies in the misdeeds of his family. What we have here, as the sociologist André Béteille has pointed out, is the reversal of a famous Biblical injunction. Instead of the sins of the father being visited on his children, for seven successive generations, in Nehru’s case the sins of the daughter and grandson have been visited upon him.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of modern Indian history is that every act of Nehru that nurtured a liberal democratic ethos was undone by his own daughter. He promoted a political opposition, she squelched it. He respected the press, she muzzled it. He allowed autonomy to the executive, she preferred to rely on ‘committed’ civil servants and judges. His Congress was a decentralised, democratic organisation, her Congress was a one-woman show. He kept religion out of public life, she brought it in.

Like his mother, Rajiv Gandhi was a politician with an undeveloped moral compass, yet with a marked capacity for cronyism and manipulation. His regime further undermined the institutions and processes of liberal democracy. Yet, and this is the paradox hardly anybody notices, those institutions and processes were, in the first place, crafted by Nehru himself.

In truth, Nehru had nothing to do with the ‘dynasty’. He had no idea, nor desire, that his daughter would become prime minister of India. In 1960, the respected columnist Frank Moraes wrote that “there is no question of Nehru’s attempting to create a dynasty of his own; it would be inconsistent with his character and career”. In fact, Nehru chose not to nominate a successor at all. That job, he felt, was the prerogative of the people and their representatives. After his death, an otherwise bitter critic, D F Karaka, saluted this determination ‘not to indicate any preference with regard to his successor. This, [Nehru] maintained, was the privilege of those who were left behind. He himself was not concerned with that issue’ – thus, incidentally, giving the lie to the idea that he ever wanted his daughter to succeed him.

After Nehru the Congress chose Lal Bahadur Shastri to become prime minister, a post on which he quickly stamped his authority. Indira Gandhi herself may never have become prime minister had not Shastri died unexpectedly. She was chosen by the Congress bosses as a compromise candidate who (they thought) would do their bidding. But once in office Gandhi converted the Indian National Congress into a family business. She first brought in her son Sanjay and, after his death, his brother Rajiv. In each case, it was made clear that the son would succeed Gandhi as head of Congress and head of government. Thus, the ‘Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’ should properly be known as the ‘(Indira) Gandhi’ dynasty. But blood runs thicker than evidence; and when political commentators persist in speaking knowingly of the ‘Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’, why will the public think any different?

A fifth reason we Indians tend to give Nehru less credit than his due is that he appears to have lived too long. Lord Mountbatten once claimed that if Nehru had died in 1958 he would have been remembered as the greatest statesman of the 20th century. Writing in 1957, Escott Reid remarked that Nehru’s “tragedy may be the tragedy of [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt: to remain leader of his country for a year or two after he has lost his grip and thus damage his own reputation and his country’s interests”.

This was astonishingly prescient. For it was after 1957 that the clouds began to descend on Nehru. In 1958 there was the Mundhra scandal, the first signs of serious corruption in government; in 1959 the unfortunate dismissal of the communist government in Kerala; in 1960 rising tension on the China border; in 1961 the conquest of Goa (which marred both Nehru’s non-alignment and his professions of non-violence); in 1962 the disastrous war with China. These setbacks emboldened the critics to speak of the other failures of Nehru’s regime: such as the continuing conflicts in Kashmir and Nagaland, the lack of attention to primary education, the hostility to business, the failure to effect land reforms.

Finally, Nehru’s posthumous reputation has also suffered from the neglect of scholars and scholarship. There is an intriguing contrast here with Mahatma Gandhi. In his lifetime Gandhi was looked down upon by intellectuals who, even when they admired his ability to move the masses, thought little of his ideas, which were so completely alien to, and often at odds with, the progressive currents of the day. But after his death the intellectuals have rediscovered Gandhi with a vengeance. In Nehru’s case the trajectory has been exactly the reverse; while he lived the cream of the world’s intelligentsia crowded around him, whereas after his death they have left him alone.

This contrast is starkly manifest in the continuing production of books about the two men. Thus, the best Indian minds have thought deeply about Gandhi – consider here the fine recent studies of the Mahatma by Ashis Nandy, Bhikhu Parekh, Rajmohan Gandhi, and others. So have some able foreign minds – as for instance Denis Dalton, David Hardiman and Mark Juergensmeyer, all authors of insightful works on Gandhi and Gandhian thought. By contrast, a cast of rather ordinary Indians have written somewhat superficially about Nehru. And we can say the same about the foreigners. For none of the works on Nehru that now pour off the presses remotely match, in empirical depth or analytical insight, the far older works of Sarvepalli Gopal and Walter Crocker.

I do not mean here to overestimate the power of the printed word. Popular ideas about Nehru will continue to be shaped by propaganda and political prejudice rather than by solid scholarship. Still, had there been a slew of sensitive, empathetic, elegantly written books on Nehru – comparable to those on Gandhi – this might have promoted a more nuanced understanding of the colossal range of problems Nehru had to confront – a range unprecedented in the political history of the modern world – and allowed for a more healthy appreciation of Nehru’s achievements.

Thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece in the Indian Express called ‘Nehru Is Out, Gandhi Is In’, this my first, superficial foray into the question of Jawaharlal Nehru’s posthumous reputation. I said there that “today few other than the career chamchas are willing to defend [Nehru], and fewer still to understand him”. Yet I had “no doubt that in time Nehru’s reputation will slowly climb upwards, without ever reaching the high point of the 1950s”.

When I wrote this, in the middle-class mind Jawaharlal Nehru was a figure of ridicule rather than reverence. That he still is – for the most part. Yet there is now some, admittedly slight, evidence of a clawing back from the abyss. When in the last months of 2004, The Week magazine ran a poll to choose ‘India’s best prime minister’, Nehru ranked a low fourth, below Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Atal Behari Vajpayee. This result must have embarrassed the last-named, as it might have embarrassed Indira Gandhi and Shastri had they been alive. But it was noteworthy that some 13 per cent of those polled had Nehru as their choice; this in comparison to a poll conducted by another popular magazine some years ago, in which a mere 2 per cent of respondents are said to have chosen Nehru as ‘India’s best prime minister’.

There have also been appreciative noises about Nehru recently, from those who have historically opposed him. The Marxists, for so long among his fiercest critics, now defend his public sector socialism against the prevailing winds of privatisation and liberalisation. Meanwhile, one of the key beneficiaries of those winds, the software entrepreneur N R Narayana Murthy, has conceded that without Nehru’s emphasis on high-quality technical education there might have been no Indian ‘IT revolution’ at all. And there has been praise that is even more unexpected. At home, the BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani rarely speaks positively about Nehru, but on a tour in North America he spoke warmly of him as the ‘architect’ of India’s democracy, a democracy that in a post-cold war world is valued more than it ever was before.

There is, I sense, some slight recovery in Nehru’s reputation. As the decades pass the ascent might become more marked. And then the man might be pulled down again. What is certain that if India still exists a century from now, Indians will still be debating what Nehru meant to the history of their country. Over time, his posthumous career might come to resemble that of Napoleon: rise, fall, and rise again. And so on, in an endless and endlessly fascinating cycle. Perhaps in a hundred years someone will be in a position to authoritatively track these shifts in reputation, to write a whole book with the title Nehru: For and Against. This ‘someone’, we may hope, will be a historian with the energy and imagination of the great Pieter Geyl himself.

Email: ramguha@vsnl.com

[This essay is based on the second V K R V Rao Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, on January 20, 2005.]

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