A new study of Jawaharlal Nehru, especially by a close family member, raises a lot of hope in terms of using the past to understand the present. In that sense, Ms Sahgal’s credentials are impeccable. As a grand-daughter of Motilal Nehru and daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, she can rightfully claim to provide some special insights into the workings of Nehru’s government and, as an “insider”, throw some new light on Nehru’s contribution to the making of modern India.
Ms Sahgal’s first chapter, “The Family Perspective”, is a good starting point because it is devoted to the Motilal Nehru gharana in which Jawaharlal Nehru grew up and in which Ms Sahgal would have had the opportunity to observe him quite closely. With this start, the author devotes eight chapters to the study of Nehru’s policies, domestic and foreign, between 1947 and 1964.
India’s post-Independence struggles as a nation-in-the-making were multi-dimensional and every major event in Nehru’s prime ministership had a close link between the external environment of Cold War rivalries and domestic policies. Unfortunately, Ms Sahgal’s book does not convey anything that is either not known or has not been commented on and analysed quite comprehensively, whether it is his policy of non-alignment, his condemnation of the attack on Egypt by Britain during the Suez crisis or his soft line on Russia’s military intervention in Hungary.
Similarly, Nehru was fighting big battles within the country for his model of alternative development through a “mixed economy” and planned development, and faced a lot of opposition to his ideology of “neither capitalism, nor communism” but socialism based on democracy. Ms Sahgal only describes these struggles but does not offer an analysis from a distance of more than 40 years.
Nehru’s efforts to reform the Hindu marriage law and his idea of introducing “cooperative farming” for agrarian reform were stubbornly resisted from within his own party and he had to fight conservatives represented by Purushotam Das Tandon, the Congress president, and Rajendra Prasad, the country’s president, on social reform of the Hindu family system. Ministers like John Mathai and other leaders were opposed to his idea of economic planning.
In this context, Ms Sahgal’s focus on her family ties causes her to overlook information that provides promising leads to fresh analysis and an idea of the spirit of the times. For instance, in 2008, Profullo Vaishnav, a former civil servant who worked under Nehru, tells her how they were able to work in complete freedom, adding: “We were a modern nation in Nehru’s time. Hindu fundamentalism is ensuring our backwardness.” Instead of building on this, she chooses to refer to letters sent by her mother Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to Nehru from Moscow, USA, England, or the United Nations where she had represented India. The trouble is that Pandit is a very poor source of any information that would help in an analysis of Nehru because her own world view and intellectual capabilities to understand the complexities of the Cold War were all but non-existent. Pandit may be her daughter’s hero but reproducing her letters to Nehru only served to interrupt the narrative.
Ms Sahgal is able to provide some insights whenever she rises above her family-centred subjectivity. Chapter 8, “The Cold War Endangers India”, contains extracts from “recently published accounts of the CIA” that throw light on the link between CIA and the Dalai Lama’s brothers since 1951 and the growing anger of China against India can be traced to this link. The US government had “sanctioned a covert operation against China in Tibet” in 1956 and orchestrated an uprising in Lhasa in 1959. Ms Sahgal writes, “Neither Nehru nor Indian Intelligence knew the extent of CIA activity… until the 1962 and Dalai Lama denies his role by writing in his autobiography that ‘Naturally my brothers judged it wise to keep this information from me. They knew what my reaction would have been’.”
All the same, this information clearly establishes why the Chinese vented their anger against India in a full- fledged war in 1962. Right-wingers within the Congress and other opposition parties attacked Nehru for following a soft policy of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai, but Nehru was no dreamy-eyed ideologue: he sought a peaceful relationship with China because he was well aware of its growing power in the neighbourhood.
In reality, the Nehruvian phase in Indian politics ends with the Sino-Indian war and its aftermath. But Ms Sahgal continues with a chapter called “Living Legacies” in which she quotes more — quite irrelevant — letters from her mother to Nehru. The legacy of India’s first prime minister surely requires more analysis than that.
In fact, it is difficult to escape the overall notion that Ms Sahgal’s book on Nehru is really a thinly-veiled attempt to project her mother. This, surely, is an injustice. Idolatry and laudatory references to one’s mother would be forgiven only if they had thrown up some fresh facts about Nehru’s role in making modern India. This is not available in this book.
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU
Civilizing a savage world
Nayantara Sahgal
Viking/Penguin 2010
167 pages; Rs 350
