A royal challenge for India

The country was monarchical from the beginning and the monarchy became absolute when a woman became the only man in the cabinet

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Society’s (NMMLS) controversial concept note should have spoken of monarchical, not presidential, government. If Napoleon could pick up the Crown of France from the gutter, Bokassa style himself Emperor of Central Africa, and Indira Gandhi coyly ask British reporters not to call her “Empress of India”, why should Narendra Damodardas Modi not be “Hindustan Naresh”?

Naresh is “King of Kings”, “Ruler of Man”. Nepalese monarchs, incarnations of Vishnu and absolute rulers of the world’s only officially Hindu state, were known as “Nepal Naresh” until it all ended in a bloodbath. The neighbourhood’s other precedents are equally infelicitous. Westerners called Iskander Mirza, descended from Mir Jaffar, British-appointed Nawab Nazim of Bengal and a byword for treachery, “Iskander the First” when he became Pakistan’s first president in 1956. There was no “Iskander the Second” because Ayub Khan deposed him two years later. Ayub himself was a man who would be king but had to be content with a royal son-in-law (whose own father inspired Edward Lear’s “Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of SWAT?”) and making himself field marshal before he, too, was overthrown.

Indians who gawk in amazement at a 182-metre statue, exclaiming, “So big? Must have been erected by a raja!” understand kings. I was nearly 10 when Sanatan, a family servant, asked whether Gandhi or Nehru would be independent India’s first king. It must have been 1947 or early 1948 because Nathuram Godse hadn’t yet despatched the first candidate. Large autographed photographs of King George VI and his queen graced my school’s assembly hall then, and we still sang “God Save the King” for India wasn’t yet a republic. I must have been a precocious child for I tried to explain democracy to Sanatan and told him sternly, like one of those bloodthirsty sans-culottes of the French Revolution about whom I had read in Baroness Orczy’s exciting novels, that republics sent kings and queens to the guillotine.

Sanatan, whose political vocabulary bristled with words suggesting a lurking royal presence, wasn’t convinced. He didn’t know that the rajdhani’s Kingsway would soon become Rajpath. But there were enough monarchist totems in Calcutta as well. Government was raj. A state was rajatya in Bengali. It was drilled into us that West Bengal’s governor and Government House were now rajyapal and Raj Bhavan, not to be confused with the palatial rajbaris of Cooch Behar, Tripura, Burdwan and other rajas, maharajas and maharajadhirajas scattered about the city. How could India be a raj without a raja? 

Godse’s bullet solved the succession problem for him. The new raja could only be the man who had famously bestowed on himself the title of Rashtrapati in an intriguing article in The Modern Review. “Rashtrapati Jawaharlal ki jai” the crowds in the article chanted as he drove past, “straight and seemingly tall (standing on the car seat), like a god, serene and unmoved by the seething multitude”. Of course, Sanatan hadn’t heard of the The Modern Review. But he knew instinctively India wasn’t like mundane Westminster-style democracies where the prime minister is merely the first amongst equals, primus inter pares. There was no question of “an almost presidential-style parliamentary democracy” evolving in India, as the NMMLS note says. It was monarchical from the beginning, tempered only by Nehru’s commitment to democracy. The monarchy became absolute when a woman became the only man in the cabinet. She refrained from merging practice and principle as the NMMLS seems to yearn for only because she knew the courts wouldn’t tolerate any dilution of the “basic features” doctrine. 

Things have changed. Fervent ultra-nationalists who harp on the “Dilli sultanate” and call opponents “shehzadas” betray their own longings. Nehru’s house is no longer a monument to what he called “the great variety of Indian life.” Peasants and workers, zamindars and capitalists, merchants and peddlers, Brahmins and untouchables, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and Jews no longer constitute the ideal national mix. Nehru’s Anglicism may have justified him being dubbed “the Last Viceroy” but roi he was not because of his parliamentary commitment. “We want no Caesars” he declared, ridiculing the “conceit” of those who did and warning that the “fascist face” is equally unpleasant in public or private. Nehru had a special disdain for the likes of those who inspired the NMMLS’s kite-flying: “He who rides a tiger cannot dismount.” He wouldn’t have had any time for the promised Ram rajya if it meant also being saddled with a Ram who is both god and king.