Even as the Lok Sabha results were streaming in, many were rolling up their sleeve in glee — their hour had come; they were getting ready to dismantle, and then bury fathoms deep, what after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death has come to be known as the “Nehruvian consensus”.
Try as they might — and there will be no lack of effort there, both in the government and outside of it — the Nehru-sceptics are likely to soon realise that the edifice of Nehruvian constructs does not rest on quick sand, that it is rooted in our history as well as our current reality, and therefore won’t be easy to get rid of.
Even a government led by the most ardent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracha-rak or whole-time propagandist, who would love to double-wrestle Nehru and his ideas all the way to the farthest akhara, is likely to find it near impossible to consign the first Prime Minister’s basic thinking about India’s history and society to the dung heap.
Narendra Modi, now that he is our Prime Minister, or others speaking in the name of his government, may proceed to do all manner of undesirable things that may comfort the RSS — such as infiltrate the administrative and security apparatus, or seek to undermine the validity of scientific education and evaluations and promote hocus-pocus (for instance, the academically ridiculed notion that India was always the home of the Aryans who, on account of their prowess, spread to other parts of the world from here) in the name of upholding Indian (this is a surreptitious short-hand for “Hindu alone”) culture and values.
But such enthusiasts of the Hindu far right, abetted without shame by the high priests of the market-alone principle in public affairs, are likely to be defeated before their own eyes. Nehru believed, for instance, (and he drew this also from Mahatma Gandhi, from whom, in particular, his social beliefs gained great strength) that this ancient land belongs to all those who live here even if they came only a few hundred years ago, unlike the Aryan invading hordes who arrived a few thousand years ago.
It follows that no group or community can take precedence over any other in the name of religion, ethnicity, or caste and tribe, for that would be another name for discrimination. This was not merely a matter of adhering to the grand juridical principle of equality before the law, but also suffusing that idea with social sanction and acceptance in our hearts.
Thus, by virtue of being a part of the majority Hindu religious community, a dhoti and teeka-wearing Hindu traditionalist cannot claim superior rights in society (leave alone the law) over a burqa-wearing Muslim woman or a Christian prominently displaying the sign of the cross. To their credit, many influential Hindu traditionalists — in the past as well as now — have sturdily upheld equal rights for non-Hindus. Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda are strong examples of this. For that matter, so was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, whose idea of India — as evident in his policy actions as home minister — did not include privileging the Hindus over other religious communities.
This is seen above all in his integration of all princely states, Hindu and Muslim alike, with equal vigour in a certain framework of a democratic, newly-emergent, post-colonial India. (If Mr Modi and the RSS school seek to give the impression of being Patelites, rather than Gandhian or Nehruvian, it is because they wish to link themselves through Patel to the freedom movement in which they did not participate as a group, and because Patel had several policy differences with Nehru, whom they abhor).
These epochal men were “nationalist”, not “Hindu nationalist”, unlike our present Prime Minister, who embraced the latter tag with frightening enthusiasm in the recent election campaign without a whimper of protest from the liberal camp who forgot even the basics merely because they wanted to fight the Congress. How would the liberals have reacted, one wonders, if a prominent Muslim politician got up and called himself a “Islamic nationalist”?
Unlike the RSS and its cohorts, Gandhi and Vivekananda wanted to despatch British (they did not call it Christian) colonialism and create a sovereign and equal India. They had no mind to restore a Hindu India of the pre-medieval type, which is what the votaries of Hindutva were after.
It is the ethos of the Hindu nationalist that the RSS and its kindred bodies would like to see prevail in India today, although, when expedient, they swear by the Indian Constitution in which there is no place for any form of sectarian nationalism. Time will help us judge if Prime Minister Modi furthers the cause of Hindu nationalism, or of Indian nationalism.
Nehru was also a strong votary of two other powerful notions — his idea of “socialism” and of “nonalignment”. In a desperately poor country — and extensive pockets of intense poverty conspicuously remain — he was persuaded that a government-led direct assault on poverty (and its social consequences) was an inescapable necessity. This did not mean condoning the siphoning off of government funds meant for anti-poverty programmes, as well as bank deposits, by powerful vested interests (including capitalist fat-cats). If through “good governance” which he promises, Mr Modi can eliminate or vastly reduce the scope for such corruption, India will be a more wholesome, a more equal and a happier place.
Will his government move in this direction, besides promoting investments? Or, will it cut programmes for positive discrimination in favour of the poor, citing that as the only way to achieve financial stability? A good deal of the politics outside Parliament may depend on that and impact Parliament itself even if the government has unassailable numbers at present.
Nehru’s “nonalignment” has been ideologically assaulted by quarters that desire India to surrender its autonomy of action on the international stage to Western — chiefly US — conceptions of the world order. Essentially, this is an assault on the idea of a democratic India that is “strong” and determines its own moorings. The Bharatiya Janata Party government will naturally be watched on all fronts, especially that of Hindu nationalism versus Indian nationalism, which is the crucible of a Nehruvian, even a Gandhian consensus.
