As dusk fell one summer 50 years ago, a friend and I sat on a grassy knoll on the premises of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, silently grieving the passing of a great man. We were stunned to learn that Jawaharlal Nehru had died that day. Newspapers had carried some hints that he was not too well; anything more would have meant in those days of collective innocence sacrilegious gossip-mongering.
Why did this man, so removed in age, background and position, whom we had only occasionally seen and that too at a distance, arouse such deep emotions in us? Reflections over the decades point to one single factor: Nehru was that total rarity in India, an absolutely, thoroughly, modern person. Others, including his great mentor (and in my opinion, the greatest human being of the twentieth century), Mahatma Gandhi, had a part of their being made up of traditional thought and behaviour.
Not so in case of Nehru. His much-talked about scientific temper was not just a veneer; it percolated his entire being. Others, including great scientists like C V Raman and the unsung Ramanujan, were devoutly religious persons, not that their religiosity interfered with their scientific pursuits. Nehru displayed a modern bent in his personal behaviour. He was not known to observe any rituals, did not seek solace in temples and ashrams, never made pilgrimages, did not possess gurus, did not preach other-worldly concerns and never ever made any capital of his religious/ethnic/caste background. To him religion and spiritual concerns were personal prerogatives best left to the individual concerned. None of those who followed him as the prime minister of India could lay claim to such commitments in thought and practice.
That commitment impacted an entire post-independence generation of Indians. In the halcyon 1950s and 1960s, people found questions about their religion or caste embarrassing, if not downright offensive. Religion and ritual were confined mostly to homes and did not intrude upon public spaces. Simplicity in living was not merely a virtue that one paid lip service to, but actually tried to observe every day. The contrast to the present, when identity-based appeals are the norm and ostentation in public observance of rituals is limitless, could not be greater.
Modernity is not blind rejection of the traditional, but its critical assessment and practice of the rational. The spirit of enquiry, the core of modernism, implies being open to a wide universe of ideas and respect for those who in all sincerity espouse beliefs other than one's own. Voltaire's attitude summarised as 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,' is the hallmark of a modern person.
Nehru not only practised this but also encouraged it. He presided over a cabinet of such eminences of Vallabhbhai Patel, C Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad, G B Pant, and C D Deshmukh, who could and often did disagree with him. His party chose a revanchist Purushottam Das Tandon as its president in the teeth of Nehru's opposition. In Parliament, he had to debate daily with the likes of Shyama Prasad Mukherji, Hiren Mukherji, J B Kripalani and H V Kamath, not to mention his own son-in-law Feroze Gandhi. He did so willingly in the spirit of democratic expression of ideas.
He attracted intellectuals from abroad. Harold Laski, J B S Haldane, Nicholas Kaldor, Michael Kalecki, were a few among the giants of their time who came to India, largely at Nehru's behest, and conducted an on-going dialogue with their Indian counterparts, leaving behind a rich environment. It also spawned many new ideas that shaped India's destiny for two generations.
Nehru's concern with modernity encompassed enterprise, both individual and collective, social mores, and above all, education. He is blamed frequently for India's near-calamitous experiments with socialism, but these, too, have to be seen in a proper perspective. The first two five-year plans gave us Bhilai, Durgapur, Rourkela, Hirakud, Bhakra-Nangal, Sindri, the Atomic Energy Commission, and yes, the IITs!
Could we have had these in the absence of these plans? I doubt it very much. India compounded its lack of resources to embark upon such ventures with a poverty of imagination. Indian industrialists of the Bombay Club, displaying a remarkable lack of entrepreneurship, clamoured for protection from foreign competition. Nehru countered that with an exhortation to the can-do spirit. The then Soviet Union which could, within three decades, boast of showcase projects comparable to those of the West, provided a very attractive template. Planned development became the chosen path.
Just how deep Nehru's commitment to making things work was is reflected in his remarks before the inauguration of the Amul factory in 1956. That was the first plant in the world to dry buffalo milk. Leading experts from Australia and New Zealand expressed serious misgivings about its working. Nehru silenced them by thundering that in such a case, he would make boot polish in the factory. Perhaps it is too early, but it is tempting to see the current prime minister's technology-based "make-in-India" drive as an avatar of the original Nehruvian schemata.
In Nehru's time, there was little professional criticism of the planning approach. On the contrary, economic literature of the day comprised many scholarly disquisitions on various aspects of planning. India was widely believed to be at the take-off stage.
The seeds of failure of the statist model were sown during Nehru's lifetime. The 1959 Avadi Congress adopted the Socialist Pattern of Society and enjoined the state to occupy commanding heights of the economy. It was an idea whose time had not come but was forced anyway. Yet I maintain that had Nehru been around a little longer and not broken in spirit in 1962, he would have seen the futility of these excesses and would not have hesitated to undo the damage. That was not to be. His inheritor, the daughter, rushed in headlong where angels should have feared to tread - with disastrous consequences.
India's freedom, its rambling but working constitution, its parliamentary democracy, its lumbering administrative machinery all have many a father, but its greatest claim to fame, especially today, that of being a modern state, is due to but one person: its first and longest-serving prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Abraham Lincoln's doctor announced his passing by saying that "the president now belongs to the ages." My friend and I instinctively knew that to be the case with Nehru that evening of May 27, 1964, long before the unseemly battles to "own" Nehru.
The writer taught at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and helped set up Institute of Rural Management, Anand
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