In spite of the hammer-blows his daughter delivered to our freedoms and our institutional strength, and the mortal wounds his grandson inflicted on our secular identity, Nehru's vision remained our public statement of what we wanted to be. We moved away from it in the details, true. In international relations, we abandoned strict non-alignment once it no longer satisfied the demands of realism, for example. But we lived, still, in Nehru's Republic.
The number of Indians, however, who dissented with the nature of the path that Nehru prescribed grew - at first quietly, and then noisily. There is a reason why men who were once imagined to be dangerous radicals, like Atal Bihari Vajpayee or E M S Namboodiripad, are now seen as comforting middle-of-the-road figures; because they in practice subscribed to essentially the same vision of the republic's future, even while that vision became increasingly contested as they aged. They were willing to follow in Nehru's footsteps. They lived, still, in Nehru's Republic.
Narendra Modi has no intention of walking behind Nehru. I expect that he intends, 50 years from now, for his photograph to be hung beside Gandhi's, and not Jawaharlal's. Our new prime minister has received the mandate he has for many reasons. Too many believe that it was a negative mandate, born only of disillusionment with the last government. This is untrue. To a greater extent, it was born of disillusionment with the Republic of India. It was a positive mandate, saying this: "We have lived so far in Nehru's India; let us try living in someone else's." Mr Modi is the first Indian not to live in Nehru's Republic.
Much that we have taken for granted will, I expect, be dismantled over the next years, if Mr Modi is successful. Few of us will be inclined to dissent. Mr Modi's political genius lies in being able to disarm and pre-empt such dissent anyway - when he handed a Bhagavad Gita as a gift to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, an act that would have been anathema earlier, he smiled and said that his "secular friends" back home would be going crazy. As it happens, there was complete silence, although Mr Modi has now made a habit of choosing the Gita as his official gift. I was privileged to sit in on a small closed-door discussion recently on media regulation, in which one senior editor from a major TV channel said, indignantly, that self-regulation was enough because news TV was demonstrably responsible - had they not, the editor pointed out, minimised coverage of communal clashes in Delhi? This is the sort of thing that suggests to me that the entire battered edifice of Nehru's Republic, held together for so long by little more than lies and memories, will be easily demolished. Most of its exhausted guardians will stand aside and let the eager hordes through to the kar seva.
However, if Mr Modi wishes to supplant Nehru as our Augustus, he should also permit himself a clear-eyed sense of Nehru's failings and virtues, one not constrained by the blinkered and limited narrative provided by India's intellectually impoverished Right. There is much an aspiring Republic-founder can learn from one of the few men who got it right.
First: be pragmatic and internationalist.
Nehru's economic mistakes are well known. But they are often exaggerated. If you have been sadly misled by the many who imagine blaming Nehru for India's wrong turns exculpates the rest of us, I suggest reading Appendix 1 of the fascinating India's Tryst With Destiny by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya - neither of whom can be called a pinko. Nehru, they said, was "a pragmatist first and a socialist next". His primary goal was not socialism, but self-reliance, and a reduction of a dependence on trade. It was this that was Nehru's error, not such limited socialism as the 1950s bequeathed us. Tariffs were low; import licences were easy to obtain; consumer goods were imported; foreign firms were granted national status; the repatriation of profits and dividends was allowed. So friendly to private investment was Nehru's government that "private sector investment greatly exceeded the projected level" in the Second Plan, and the private sector rapidly expanded. Hardcore socialists were forced out of the Union Cabinet, and the economic right, such as S Nijalingappa, was given control of the Congress organisation. Professors Bhagwati and Panagariya show that the turn to import substitution was the essential flaw in Nehru's economic strategy, not the ersatz socialism that became real and stifling under his cynical daughter.
And second: know yourself. Nehru was arrogant, but self-aware. His understanding of his own failings allowed him to trust others, especially Lal Bahadur Shastri, whom he appointed as minister without portfolio when the prime minister's health began to fail at the end of his life. So few Indians are willing to plan their succession well; Nehru, it seemed, understood enough about himself to avoid that pitfall. The seamless transfer of power after Nehru's death was the wonder of the world.
Perhaps one of the most revealing of stories is about how Nehru, anonymously, wrote a warning in the Calcutta Modern Review of his own failings: "All the makings of a dictator in him - vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity, ability, hardness, and with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and inefficient. His over-mastering desire to get things done, to sweep away what he dislikes and build anew, will hardly brook for long the slow processes of democracy ... is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?" It is up to Mr Modi to decide whether this passage, painfully acute in its self-awareness, reminds him of someone he knows.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in