Jawaharlal Nehru: The Man and the Myth

THE FEARS WERE genuine. Many influential, moneyed, individuals and big companies preferred to give big chunks of money to the ruling party. The Opposition cried foul as it lacked the resources to fight elections in what was turning out to be a one-sided electoral fight. If your history lessons are weak, you can easily mistake the time and imagery to be, say, the year 2018 and the overwhelming political dominance of India’s political space by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi.

That would be a mistake. An eerily similar situation prevailed on the eve of the second General Election in 1957. The Congress party, the then dominant force in India’s politics was on the verge of gathering a war chest of `5 crore, a gigantic sum at that time. The nascent Opposition worried about its ability to muster enough cash to even stay in the reckoning. But in these days of alleged “democratic backsliding” these facts are forgotten, almost conveniently.

In Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press; 304 pages; $39.95), Taylor C Sherman sketches a very different history. In pars­ing the myth of a successful democracy during Jawaharlal Nehru’s time she says, “Although large-scale corruption tied to permit-and-licence raj is often dated to the late 1960s or early 1970s, it can be traced at least to the second general elec­tion.” She highlights the now forgotten Serajuddin affair in which a company trading in manganese and chromite was given mining licences and favours. This was in return for a donation of `10,000 to Keshav Dev Malaviya, the then minister for mines and fuel. The problems that corroded India’s electoral practices such as the inability of the Election Commis­sion to ensure expenditures by candi­dates within prescribed limits, corporate contributions to political parties and more can be dated to this period.

Why should any of this matter now, 65 years later? The answer has much to do with the myth, created assidu­ously over time, that in Nehru’s time democracy in India was pristine and was suffused with idealism. The other part of the myth is that Nehru’s successors distorted democracy until the Modi era when it was finally twisted out of shape to be something less than democracy. Sherman, a professor of his­tory at the London School of Economics, is clear on this point. She writes, “It is when they remain unexamined, or when they are marshalled to form part of an argument about something else, espe­cially about the present, that the myths are produced and amplified most powerfully.”

It is instructive that none of the members of the “Nehru industry” are mentioned in the book’s acknowl­edgments. This is not a coincidence: this group acts as a gatekeeper for what is acceptable and what is unacceptable on Nehru scholarship in India. It is also worth noting that new interpretations of the Nehru period have come from scholars who work abroad. Tripurda­man Singh’s Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitu­tion of India (2021) is another example.

What is interesting about Sherman’s interpretation of the Nehru age is her steering clear of any “political interpretations”, liberal or conserva­tive. This is unlikely to please any of the warring camps in contemporary India, with the possible exception of the Left. She notes, “By the end of the Nehru era, many of those claiming to speak on behalf of Muslims and Dalits were anything but satisfied with India’s official secularism. Focused as it was on monumental spaces, revered person­alities and iconic pieces of legislation, this secularism had left India’s least advantaged communities beleaguered and frustrated in their daily lives.” This comes close to leftist interpretations that have now abandoned the myth of the Nehruvian “golden age” and reason that Indian “communalism” is a much older problem, dating far earlier than the contested 1980s.

At the core of Sherman’s interpretation is the idea of a myth as a gap between what existed in reality and what was projected later. This can be true of any facet of social life and to that extent Nehru­vian myths are no different. All Nehruvian myths—non-alignment, socialism, successful democracy, a strong state, high modernism and Nehru as “architect of Independent India”—have this gap in varying measures. In some cases, this gap is small and in others, more of projection and very little of reality. What makes Nehruvian myths striking is their persistent hold over the imagination of India’s intellectuals (but not its people: they have far more prosaic concerns). It is the differing mechanisms by which these myths were propagated that make her book a riveting study.

“Nehruvian socialism” is an interesting example. Sherman says that during his time as prime minister,

Nehru refused to define the expression “socialism.” The use of that word with­out a clear definition has created a gap that has been filled with the assumption Indian socialism can be equated with Soviet-style planning. How did this lazy interpretation arise? This was done by a combination of politics and history. In this case, the Swatantra Party—in­dependent India’s first liberal political experiment—laid the groundwork for a caricature of Indian socialism as having “totalitarian” ambitions. In the author’s delicious words, “In the absence of a more complex picture, the blazing furnaces of steel plants have been left to stand for India’s official socialism.”

The reality was somewhat more complicated. Nehruvian socialism was an attempt to solve collective action problems in areas as diverse as irrigation (such as the construction of multi-purpose river valley dams), industry (factories owned and controlled by the government for producing basic goods like iron and steel and pharmaceuticals) and other sectors. This is closer to the imagination of Dadabhai Naoroji than the brutal plans of Joseph Stalin.

As with so many other myths, Indian socialism acquired a life of its own. And it was damaging. Nehru bequeathed the idea along with a part of the apparatus (such as The Industries (Development and Regulation), Act 1951) to his daughter. It was during her time that India’s economy was entangled in a web of controls and quotas that choked growth. Parts of that pernicious legacy—such as the idea that welfare is synonymous with a state-controlled economy—are yet to be overcome.

Sherman’s analysis of the myth of a “strong state” is equally interesting. She says the truth of India inheriting a strong state from the raj has more to do with the fact of inheritance and not the quality of the bequest. This is true. Forging a coherent nation-state from a patchwork of independent principali­ties stretched the capacity of the Indian state to an extreme. Where Hyderabad could be integrated by mere “police ac­tion”, Kashmir had to be carved out as a distinct political sphere. Sherman states, “Here is the pattern: Indian statesmen and stateswomen recognised that India was a union in the making. To meet the differential needs of the nation-to-be, asymmetric privileges were granted and basic rights were curtailed on an exceptional basis. While meant to be transitional, these measures became entrenched, as each attracted a constitu­ency that argued for its extension.” This is on target. To give one example, by the end of the 20th century, “asymmetric federalism”—originally carved out as an exception due to the weakness of the Nehruvian state—gained a hydra-like character as India turned into a fractured and dysfunctional polity.

So much so, it has become an article of faith among India’s intellectuals that India’s democracy can survive only by furthering it. Never mind the fact that taking this idea to its logical conclusion would have sundered India’s unity, the very danger that Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel did everything in their power to avoid.

Nehru was India’s first prime minister and by the fact alone, an interesting figure. But he is not a deity to be worshipped on an intellectual altar. Sherman has done well to restore some credibility to scholarship on him.

booksJawaharlal Nehrumodern IndiaNehruvian socialismTaylor C Sherman