Reading Nehru in hard times

THIS issue of Seminar is an exception to the usual format of the magazine. It does not contain new pieces that speak to a contemporary theme or problem. Instead, the material on offer here is a selection from the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru. Perhaps Nehru’s importance was never more vividly, if unfortunately, on display than during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent speech in Parliament. Modi’s suggestion that Sardar Patel would have better secured India’s national interests – that had Patel been prime minister, Kashmir would have been India’s to have and to hold – has little historical basis. The factual inaccuracies in the speech have been nicely observed by historians, who have shown how those who claim to remake the future cannot quite as easily remake the past. But regardless of the merits of the claims involved, it is telling that Nehru remains both the point of reference and the point of departure for any radical claim in Indian politics. His is a legacy that one must either reaffirm and work within or challenge and reject.

In this introduction, I want to say very little about that legacy. The choices that Nehru made, the decisions that he took, and the consequences and impact of his time as India’s first prime minister are matters far too daunting for an essay as short as this. Moreover, they are matters that merit the attention of professional historians, who have interrogated – and will no doubt continue to interrogate – them with much energy and meaning. His legacy will partly, for better or worse, turn on the trajectory that India takes. Every generation will, in a way, form their own image of Nehru before some more settled understanding of his mark on history comes to be acknowledged with honesty and confidence. And, coming to terms with Nehru will of course be part of a larger process of coming to terms with the extraordinary facts of his age: colonialism and the end of empire, partition and the birth of modern India, the passage of democracy into unchartered waters.

I should also like to avoid saying very much about the biographical details of Nehru’s somewhat startling life. These details are familiar if easily forgotten. Perhaps the most striking facts of Nehru’s life are also the simplest – that he spent nearly ten of his years in prison and that he served as prime minister for nearly seventeen. Nehru was the only major figure to play such a central role in both the struggle for freedom and in the creation of the new nation. There were remarkable men and women who were part of that journey at different stages, but he was the common thread that kept together the story of India for decades. It was Nehru’s fate, and often his burden, that every feature of his life seemed prone to a narrative that seemed overwhelming: his childhood, his personal relationships, his sense of destiny.

To read Nehru today is to read him in an age of disenchantment about democracy. It was, of course, nearly a century ago, when self-governing regimes that had replaced the continental empires collapsed in Europe, that one was forced to seriously ask whether democracy was a feasible and sustainable form of political organization. It was a formative time for Nehru’s political thought – a time when the relationship between capitalism, democracy, domestic order, and international security were all being worked out in one way or another. Even though colonialism somewhat complicated the questions on offer, as evidenced by the fascinating debates over whether Indians should join Britain’s forces in the Second World War, the promise of freedom offered a host of political possibilities. The end of empire promised a clean slate. Nations like India could remake themselves entirely, and potentially remake the world.

Nehru took the idea of political transformation seriously. Although he was often vulnerable to romanticism and sentimentality, his scepticism toward otherworldliness arose from the conviction that humans have the power to change the facts on the ground of the world that they inhabit. A crucial theme in Nehru’s writings, thus, was the provisional nature of our lives. The colonial project had been built on visions about the certainty of Indian life. The response to imperialism was partly a challenge to such visions; it was an effort to show how much of what appeared to be ‘permanent’ facts about India were in fact the consequence of its political enslavement. The empire, in other words, claimed to address problems that were a product of its own creation. Nehru’s emphasis on contingency in politics is evident throughout his works such as The Discovery of India, but we also see it in a different form in his future-oriented writings. In his effort at exploring the modern Indian project, Nehru took a remarkably gratifying view of how much we can indeed change.

The political imagination that Nehru held was demonstrable across a wide range of areas. The most noticeable area related to the most basic fact about the postcolonial Indian state: the adoption of democracy with universal adult suffrage. Today, we often speak about the peculiar survival of democracy in India. While self-government has unravelled, with disastrous and tragic consequences, in so many other postcolonial countries, it has somehow persisted in India. Yet, less has been said about the choice of democracy with universal adult suffrage at the creation of the Indian republic. Indeed, the gradual extension of suffrage, a limit on the forces of popular authorization, was not merely an idea with historical precedent, it was one actively proposed by political thinkers and legal scholars across the world at the time. When the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote to Nehru urging India to join the Commonwealth, to offer but one example, he reminded him that monarchies were far better suited to the Asian people.

For Nehru, Indians could resist the conventional wisdom on democratic survival – democracy could be made to work for anyone, should they want to make that happen. As I have argued elsewhere, his writings as prime minister were filled with the importance of cementing the conventions and norms that must accompany the enterprise of self-government. They underlined the role and meaning of institutions, procedures, and the use of public power. They were also sensitive to the softer aspects of democratic life – the role and place of public reason, and the importance of honest debate and deliberation. His fortnightly letters to India’s chief ministers embodied these ideals, and were themselves part of an attempt at reasoning, engagement, and democratic consolidation. The animating sentiment of this drive toward democratic consolidation was clear: just as Indians were not fated to be ruled by others, they were also not fated to be governed by themselves. Democracy was a form of political organization as contingent as any other. It was an act of choice.

Another notable domain where Nehru sought to resist traditional modes of thought was the relationship between the citizen and the nation. In the years preceding Indian independence, many imaginaries were painted of the nation but nearly all worked within the colonial idea of seeing India as an assemblage of groups. It was Nehru who, both during the making of India’s Constitution and in his time as prime minister, played a major role in putting forth some conception of a liberal model of citizenship, where individual liberty might take precedence over group affiliation. The mediation of citizenship through one’s group identity, he believed, offered little hope of freedom. It condemned India to a politics of unstable negotiation between different groups, and it kept the individual hostage to a pre-defined identity. Moreover, tensions between groups were not, he suggested, inevitable. Rather they were the product of ideologies and policies structured around allegedly permanent group interests. In other words, they were the product of a specific brand of politics, and they could therefore be done away with by a different outlook.

The alternative vision that Nehru proposed was one in which the state could be used as a vehicle for altering the material conditions of life. In a way, the very centrality of the state was itself an affirmation of egalitarianism. For all Indians to be under the umbrella of a single state was to place them in a new relationship with one another. Forms of state and non-state municipal life were taken to be captured by local bonds and prejudices, which could not liberate Indians from prior forms of association. But the state also held a further promise, namely the potential for development and an increase in the standards of living. Here, Nehru was struck – as anyone might have been – by Soviet Russia’s tremendous success, but he remained equally troubled by its curbing of civil liberties. It was a mistake, he argued, to think that one necessarily went along with the other. The trade-off was hardly necessary, and it was possible to create a strong state alongside rules and procedures for the responsible and limited exercise of public power. He complained about Marxism’s collapse into a kind of dogmatism, and about how many had failed to see that both democratic liberties and welfare were ultimately targeted at the same end – the fulfilment of freedom.

In his time as prime minister, Nehru also served as India’s foreign minister. In the realm of international affairs, too, he challenged the accepted rules of the day. Matters of war and peace were central to much of his time in office, from his early challenges with Kashmir to the 1962 war with China. As Srinath Raghavan has so meticulously shown, Nehru was far from being strategically naive when it came to the use of force. War, he believed, was an option to be chosen with great care, not because India was poised to lose but because it was the kind of exercise where one was often left with only losers.

The China war was a shock to Nehru’s system – he had seen both countries in similar ways, ancient civilizations finding their path in a strange, new, modern world. He rationalized Chinese aggression by linking it to the dominant methods of international politics. China, he suggested, had departed from the doctrine of peace because it had fallen prey to great power narratives. China, that is to say, had mistakenly bought into the idea that stability in the international realm could only exist by the balancing of power. But the balancing of power hypothesis, Nehru felt, was a mistake. It furthered rather than reduced military tension, and did not actually promise long-term peace and stability. Ultimately, attempts to balance power would always spiral out of control. Nehru’s challenge to the balance of power hypothesis was not based on the innocent idea that nations should be drawn to global peace rather than domestic self-interest. Rather, it was driven by the belief that self-interest itself would pave the path toward global peace. It was self-interest which would encourage countries to cooperate, a radical idea that China, he lamented, had not shared.

In recalling some of these aspects in which Nehru tried to recast extant debates and probe established beliefs, we can envision the possibilities that he associated with political life. The most tragic orientation in politics, he felt, was cynicism – the idea that things were doomed to be the way that they were. Whether in restructuring the relationship between the citizen and the nation, between nations and the international order they inhabited, between socio-economic freedom and civil-political rights, or with regard to the very idea of democracy itself, Nehru expressed the highest form of courage – the courage to believe that one could think for oneself, that one could hold ideas that had little historical precedent, and that one need not be bound to the world that one was born into.

It is perhaps that loss of courage, that loss of political possibility, that is the most unfortunate aspect of our contemporary political reality. Our efforts lie in trying to manage situations that we believe we cannot escape, to make the best of a second-best world without remembering that the world is one of our collective making. The vulgar drive in politics toward attention and marketing, toward the challenge to facts, is in part a consequence of cynicism. It flows from a belief that our reality cannot truly change, and so what we must instead change is what people take to be real. Since we cannot change how people in fact live, there is no point in even trying, and we might instead focus on changing their perception of reality.

The outlook of our times suggests that we live not in an age of anger but in one of cynicism. Such an age may be one where major democracies are failing in several respects, and it may be one where some might collapse altogether. But, regardless of how they eventually fare, so many of the great nations of the world, including our own, appear to have given up on the most democratic sentiment of all: the idea that we can make decisions, rule ourselves, and change our lives. What we ought to most remember about Nehru’s life is not the decisions that he took or those that he avoided, but his commitment to the idea that it was possible for us to collectively determine the rules that governed our lives, and to thereby change lives – that to be a democrat meant that one neither appealed to ancient rituals nor medieval truths, but rather to the brutal constructability of the present world.

MADHAV KHOSLA