The Indian National Congress was faced with an embarrassing situation last week, when news broke that the Congress Darshan, a monthly associated with the Mumbai branch of the party, published an article on India's first home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, that was read as being critical of decisions taken by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. An article in the issue of the magazine brought out to commemorate Patel's death anniversary on December 15 praised his vision and foresight on international affairs in particular. It repeated several old stories suggesting that an excessively idealistic Nehru should have listened to the realist Patel - including the one that Patel had warned Nehru not to trust the People's Republic of China. It is of course true that Patel sent Nehru a letter on the subject dated November 7, 1950, after China had annexed Tibet. Less well known is the fact that Nehru wrote a note that served as a reply on November 18 that year, in which he argued, first, that India did not have the capability to prevent the annexation of Tibet; second, that there was no chance of a "major attack" on India by China, although "entering and taking possession of disputed territory" was a possibility; and, third, that India's "major possible enemy" was Pakistan, and what was important when drafting a China policy was to prevent Pakistan from taking advantage of Indo-China relations and putting India in a pincer. This does not sound like hopeless idealism in the least.
Such discussions, of course, are the bread and butter of historians. Nor should it cause any surprise or controversy if such a debate finds place in a publication in order to glorify a leading Congressman whose death anniversary is being commemorated. However, the Congress party's reply leaves much to be desired; party leader Sanjay Nirupam said that "action will be taken against people in the editorial team", and later it was reported that the "content editor" of the magazine has been fired.
For a party that wishes to claim liberal principles, this is the wrong stand to take. Claims that Patel had a keener eye than Nehru can easily be disputed, but there is no reason that the reverse should be an article of faith for the Congress. There are pragmatic reasons for this: after all, Patel himself was a life-long Congressman, and insisting he was never right when he contradicted Nehru just leaves his legacy as fertile fodder for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has practically no independence struggle-era heroes of its own. There are also deeper reasons. If the Congress wishes to live up to the liberal principles it espouses, then it should allow its members to speak their mind about its own history. No party that has ruled India for six decades can reasonably insist that every decision its leaders took during that time was spot on. By allowing criticism of its past, it only strengthens itself.
Most of all, it is ironic that a controversy should be suppressed by the crushing of dissent when the subject in question was Jawaharlal Nehru. After all, Nehru, whatever his many failings, was perfectly willing to deal with criticism of his decisions, whether from within or outside the Congress. There are more than enough famous incidents that testify to this - for example, just days before his death in 1964, the prime minister told the well-known cartoonist Shankar to keep on lampooning him: "Don't spare me, Shankar". In fact, when it seemed there was insufficient criticism of Nehru, he himself could take a hand: there's the fascinating story of how, in 1937, the Modern Review in what was then Calcutta published a trenchant critique of Nehru. It was titled "Rashtrapati", written by someone calling himself "Chanakya", and warning that Nehru may call himself a democrat and a socialist but, "a little twist and Jawaharlal may turn a dictator, sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy...His conceit is already formidable. It must be checked." The writer was, of course, Nehru himself, as emerged decades later. The party that claims to defend him would do so best if it learned from him.
