Columns | Open Diary

Nehruvian Mythology

A conspiracy of silence

Swapan Dasgupta | 12 Jan, 2024

WHEN I WAS an undergraduate at the Delhi University of the early-1970s reading history, it was impossible to not be completely brainwashed by the tribe of overbearing Marxists who occupied a twilight zone between the Moscow-centric CPI and the Indira-worshipping Congress. History, we were unendingly told, had to be “scientific” and that, rather than wallow in the romance of the past (which is what had drawn many of us to history in the first place), it was important to assess the past through the prism of something called the “modes of production”. Or, as the acknowledged buffoon of the CPI lobby used to say, “to get marks, you have to read Marx.” An impressionable generation obliged.

I don’t know how much of this ideological regimentation exists in the liberal arts departments today. Judging by the number of petitions signed by members of English and History faculties, and the way the scholarships route to Western universities is charted, I suspect that things have remained broadly unchanged. Till the 2000s, the main enemy was the “communal” barbarians knocking at the gates; today, the ire is directed at the “majoritarian state”.

A feature of this apoplectic anger directed at Narendra Modi and his saffron bandwagon is a contrived nostalgia. It is made out that the Indian Republic was created through the efforts of Jawaharlal Nehru and a galaxy of eminent Nehruvians who epitomised the Enlightenment in India. They, it was suggested, nurtured democracy, upheld secular values, debunked religious backwardness and intolerance, and nurtured equity in economic decision-making. Together, they built the “idea of India”, in whose defence Rahul Gandhi is staging a Nyay march and nurturing the I.N.D.I.A. alliance.

The tragedy of India’s secular and progressive scholars is that they have closed their minds to awkward inputs.

Partly as a response to Modi and Amit Shah’s relentless attacks on the legacy of Nehru that is said to have held India back, a Nehruvian cult has been created by the opponents of Hindu nationalism. India, according to an over-simplified projection, witnessed a veritable golden age between 1947 and 1964.

A recent book by Oxford historian Pratinav Anil, Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77 (Hurst & Company, 2023) has challenged many of the assumptions behind the glorification of Nehru’s India. “Today, the securitisation of Islam is typically seen as a recent phenomenon—of a piece with the world of 9/11 and BJP rule. But Nehru’s age was not very different. Illustrative of the misgivings about Muslims were commonplace fears of Pakistani saboteurs and spies smuggling themselves into the country, of Indian Muslims harbouring them.”

Anil is particularly harsh in his dissection of the so-called “nationalist Muslims” who, apart from being a counter to the separatist, League Muslims, also formed a bridge between the Muslim community in northern India and the Hindu leadership of the Congress. “Too few, too inconsequential, and too averse to politics proper, the nationalist Muslims were completely out of their depth. Theirs was a worldview where cultural took precedence over political concerns, national trumped sectional interest, meekness was preferred to assertiveness.” According to him, the nationalist Muslims—not least Maulana Azad—entered into an understanding with the Nehruvian

Establishment to keep the community depoliticised as long as its cultural institutions—particularly the sharia laws, Muslim monuments and, to a lesser extent, Urdu—were firewalled from state intervention. The Deoband clerics had a free run. Predictably, “Great Tradition piety was a luxury few ordinary Muslims could afford.”

Consequently, Muslim politics in India during the Nehru years became a tale of ashraf politics and detached from most of the community. The “very idea of Islam became ashrafised, paralleling the Sanskritisation of Hinduism.”

It was a little different in Kerala and Tamil Nadu though.

Anil’s book raises a clutch of important questions that are worth answering. It suggests that, Nehru’s own concerns notwithstanding, Congress leaders at the regional level were doubtful of the loyalty of those Muslims who stayed behind in India after Partition. The saga of communal riots led to “the quam, forming a tenth of the national population, inequitably accounting for four in five fatalities in the Fifties, and probably more in the mid-Sixties, when nearly one in fifty Indian Muslims left for Pakistan.”

Anil doesn’t blame either Nehru or Congress for keeping India’s Muslims in a state of helpless subordination. He suggests “its style of rule reflected the conservative, confessional, conformist society it lorded over. In such a setting, an elision between demos and ethnos was inevitable.”

I find it quite intriguing that a study of this great importance hasn’t either got wider publicity or been debated in public fora. It suggests that puncturing Nehruvian mythology is invariably greeted with a conspiracy of silence.