Will (insert-name-here) subvert institutional frameworks and establish a dictatorship? Political science departments love debating variations of this topic. There has been wide ventilation of this in the recent past, with "Narendra Modi" starring as the "insertion". The topic also attracted interest circa 1980, when Indira Gandhi returned. Given the Emergency, speculations about her dictatorial tendencies were quite explicable.
The current consensus seems to be that India's institutional-constitutional framework is strong enough to resist any aspirations to dictatorship that Mr Modi may possess. Some of the credit for creating and nurturing those institutions must go to the person who had the best shot ever at establishing a desi dictatorship.
Jawaharlal Nehru died 50 years ago. Any objective attempt to analyse the Nehruvian era runs into many problems. One is best articulated by Shakespeare: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." Thus, the Nehru legacy is tainted by 1962, by the absurdity of the licence raj, the assorted messes in Kashmir and the Northeast, and the high-minded lunacy of non-alignment.
The second problem is that it is difficult to assign weights to bad things that did not happen and to judge his contribution to preventing such undesirable events. As colonial empires unwound after World War II, most of the newly independent nations headed into chaos.
The history of post-colonial Africa and Asia is one of coups, civil wars, multiple variations on apartheid, and innumerable dictatorships. Nation after newly independent nation saw a freedom fighter taking charge with popular support - and then, that man turned into an absolute ruler for life.
India shines like an exceptional beacon. It was not beset by the syndrome of "one man, one vote, one time". Also, in retrospect, when one looks at the accession of multiple princely states, and the forcible takeover of Hyderabad and Goa, it is surprising that there weren't multiple versions of the festering sore of Kashmir. The process of amalgamation was managed with surprising deftness. Multiple Kashmirs could have occurred and did not.
There has also never been a shadow of an attempt at a military coup. The civil-military relationship has remained stable, and, whatever tensions there are, have been addressed through legal, democratic means. India has also seen its share of separatist movements, but it has never been close to a civil war. There has been much sectarian, linguistic and communal violence, and ghettoisation of communities. But there is no official apartheid policy and, in theory at least, the state and its organs do not discriminate against any citizens.
How much of the responsibility accrues to Nehru? His detractors claim he was responsible only for the negative outcomes that can be traced back to his time; B R Ambedkar, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, an apolitical series of army chiefs, etc were responsible for the good things. That is just absurd. Good and bad, the buck stopped at Teen Murti Bhavan. Nehru outlived both Patel and Ambedkar by many years and his political stature was unchallenged, even after 1962. He could have crossed over to the dark side any time he wanted.
A third issue, that of dynasty, also pops up. The world may well have been a better place if the Nehrus had been a childless couple. But how on Earth do you blame a dead man for the sins of his descendants? If blame must accrue, it should accrue to the so-called syndicate that propped up the "dumb doll" after her father's death.
Few, if any rulers anywhere, have held power for 17 years and left a legacy of unalloyed good. Even in his lifetime, attitudes to Nehru were mixed and things soured after the 1962 debacle. In the 1950s, R K Laxman, cartoonist extraordinaire, always drew Nehru in a vigorous topi-clad avatar, even when he castigated him. By the 1960s, the bald pate was often in evidence. The good, the bald and the ugly - that's a pretty good summation of the Nehruvian era.
Twitter: @devangshudatta
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