His prestige with the Indian people had something of the magical about it. How the… myth had been created is something for psychologists to explain. The vast majority had never set eyes on him; It was based in part… upon the charm and aliveness of his mere presence, in part to his devotion to the national interest as he saw it, so self-evident and so marking him off from the run of Indian politicians."
This despatch is not from the breathless coverage of the past weeks, but a description of Jawaharlal Nehru by the Australian diplomat Walter Crocker, who was in India during its first elections in 1952 and 1957. Photos of Nehru's campaigns are almost three-dimensional, showing extraordinarily large crowds. In footage, we see Nehru being pelted with garlands. His speeches were of dams and electricity, not politics.
After Nehru died on May 27, 1964, the Western press pondered whether India would fall apart without its first prime minister. Half a century on, it is the Congress that looks set to unravel. Consider that 178 of its 464 candidates lost their deposits, as Pradeep Chibber and Rahul Verma of Lokniti-CSDS revealed, and that in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, the Congress has not been in power for 10 to 25 years.
Everyone I know who has met Rahul Gandhi says he is intelligent and polite, but he has become more enigmatic than the Mona Lisa (Where did he go for two days that put him in such a good mood?) The statements from the Congress party sounded like communiques from Brezhnev's Soviet Union, with flotsam of management jargon - accountability, taking full responsibility and so on when the actions speak otherwise - that passes for "official" English in India thrown in.
It seems implausible, incredible really, that the descendants of Nehru, known for his courtesy towards opponents like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, have been so perfunctory and tardy in congratulating the victor of this election. Watching the press conference of the Gandhis on May 16, which lasted just a few minutes because they took no questions from the reporters who had been waiting for almost an hour, felt surreal. How does a party rally its troops when those who lead it have difficulty speaking? On the campaign trail, the Gandhis almost never mentioned Nehru. In more senses than one, they never knew him.
A week, as the cliche goes, is a long time in politics. In the eternity since the election results on May 16, it has been Narendra Modi who has seemed a successor to Nehru. There was the obeisance at the steps of Parliament (Nehru's attendance at Parliament was exemplary). Modi doffed his cap to the governments that came before him, quite unlike his campaign rhetoric where he repeatedly said that the country had nothing to show for more than six decades of independence. "Today, I stand before you as the son of a poor man. This is the strength of democracy," he said, moved by this reflection. As Crocker put it in his biography of Nehru, "In propagating ideas of equality, Nehru and the upper class Indian nationalists of English education abolished themselves. Nehru destroyed the Nehrus."
Five decades on, no previous prime minister-elect represents as sharp a break with Nehru's India as Modi does. And yet, there are similarities. First, there is the scale of ambition. In that 1952 election, Nehru gambled on democracy for a country of mostly illiterate and poor people. Had he lost wars to the Maldives after that, he would still be India's greatest prime minister.
Amid unprecedented reports that bureaucrats are cancelling vacations and working late while preparing reports on how to get work done more efficiently in slimmer ministries, it is clear that Modi has begun the mammoth task of changing the imperial capital that is Lutyens' Delhi. The buzz among the higher echelons of the IAS, India's most privileged caste, is that the new ruler wants "results". Revolutionary, eh?
Nehru essentially bolted the structure of the colonial government on to an already profoundly hierarchical society, and the unhappy results of a detached bureaucracy and high-handed ministers are for all to see. As Arun Shourie put it, governance in India has mostly become "mere correspondence". Modi sees business as critical to this country's development, while Nehru was suspicious of it (given the rapacity of some of our rent-seeking capitalists and the energy of our small businesses, both attitudes can be defended). Today, we rank 180th on a list of 189 countries on the ease of starting a business. Then there are their radically different views on the rights and responsibilities of the majority and of minorities in India.
The battles of this election were a sideshow; Jawaharlal vs Narendrabhai is the contest of the epoch. Like many of history's epic contests, however, this battle of ideas and values could be uplifting or it could turn ugly. It is very early days, but who could have predicted that the monument mentioned by Modi in the aftermath of a thumping BJP victory would be the "temple of democracy?" The phrase sounded Nehruvian.
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