Nehru’s strength, generosity of spirit was his weakness

Over the past week, there has been a raging debate among key political players on how to appropriate, even monopolise, the political legacy of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It would be useful to focus on Nehru the leader and Nehru the person.

Commenting on the leadership potential of Nehru as early as 1929, Mahatma Gandhi had said, “Who can excel him in the love of the country?...If he has the dash and rashness of the warrior, he has also the prudence of a statesman…The nation is safe in his hands".

Was the nation really safe in his hands? As the Prime Minister of India for the first 17 years after Independence, did he truly lay the foundations of democratic traditions and practices? Or, does one concur with his critics and lay the blame for many of the ills of today’s India at his doorstep?

In his autobiography, Morarji Desai highlighted the apparent rashness of Nehru’s approach, but hastened to add that he made more than adequate amends for the same.

Commenting on an incident that occurred at the Bombay AICC session, Desai recounted that Nehru abruptly asked an AICC member from Gujarat to cut short his speech on a particular resolution.

Nehru was pulled up by the veteran Congress leader Satyamoorty for the manner in which he had curtailed a member’s right to speak. Nehru was only too willing to apologise.

He, without hesitation, accepted that it was his fault: “I have got into such habits as I have had the affection of everybody and have been pampered. My parents fondled me. Mahatma Gandhi did the same, and the people…are also giving me every affection.

This has given me this bad habit or weakness…” Many of Nehru’s admirers considered him “too generous to think of not tolerating opposition,” or those who openly opposed or differed with him. His magnanimous nature, his accommodation of dissent were considered by many to be his basic nature.

However, attention also needs to be focused on the fact that there was a distinct, at times subtle yet detectable, change in Nehru’s attitude in the post-Independence years.

Veteran opposition leader Minoo Masani opined that the democrat in Nehru appeared to slowly disappear after 1947. Masani believed that, “within a couple of years of his taking office, I found it was no longer possible to disagree without irking him”.

Masani said such a change was natural because of the sycophants who surrounded Nehru and presented him with a distorted view of his own importance.

It could be argued that the authoritarian streak in Nehru was something that he himself was aware of. When the move to make Nehru the president of the Congress party for a third team was gaining momentum, Nehru himself wrote an article in the Modern Review (1938) under the pseudonym ‘Chanakya’, wherein he subjected himself to scathing criticism.

He cautioned that a third term for Nehru would convince him that he alone could lead the party and bear the responsibility of handling the nation’s problems. In a mood of introspection, he wrote, “he (Nehru) has all the makings of a dictator in him, vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well defined purpose…pride…an intolerance of others…His overmastering desire to get things done, to sweep away what he dislikes will hardly brook for long the slow process of democracy”. When the article appeared, people were not aware that 'Chanakya' was, in fact, Nehru himself.

The piece was one of the most trenchant criticisms of Nehru, and many Congressmen demanded that the real name of the author be disclosed. It was only many years later that 'Chanakya's true identity was revealed.

In his masterly analysis of Nehru’s personality and leadership, S. Gopal opines that he (Nehru) ‘was a subtle aesthete of power’. The nature of Indian politics in the late 1940s and early 1950s bears ample testimony to this fact. With the dawn of Independence, Nehru and Patel played a pioneering role in directing the affairs of the government.

In the Congress party, it was a shared responsibility. Patel, by virtue of his position in the government and due to the wide-ranging contacts he had and influence he exercised, both at the national and at the provincial level, in most cases, controlled and monitored organisational matters of the party.

Despite their differences, which arose on a number of occasions and were rooted in a wide range of causes, the bridge of cooperation between Nehru and Patel never collapsed, though painstaking and major repairs had to be resorted to frequently.

Gopal opines that the differences between Nehru and Patel derived from “an impersonal conflict between two different systems of thinking and feeling, and what enabled an avoidance of open rupture was mutual regard and Patel’s stoic decency”.

When Nehru took over as Congress president in September 1951, for the first time the positions of Prime Minister and Congress president came to be occupied by the same individual.

This development was endorsed by many in the Congress as being not merely inevitable, but also necessary in the context of the political environment and the challenges that the system faced.

Combining the two offices in the same individual would facilitate an organised approach to dealing with problems and prevent the ruling party, on the one hand, and the government, on the other, from pulling in opposite directions.

The issue of combining the two offices in one individual had been raised earlier, too. In July 1950, the then president of the Congress party, Dr. Pattabi Sittaramayya, had, while favouring common leadership for the Congress and the Central government even suggested that Provincial premiers should take over as provisional Congress presidents.

After Nehru gave up the post of party president in 1954, the incumbents who occupied the position were often dwarfed by the position and power of the Prime Minister.

During Nehru’s time, and more so during Indira Gandhi’s reign as PM, the Congress party could not evolve conventions that specifically demarcated the spheres of influence and areas of operation of the two offices.

The control that Nehru came to exercise over both positions resulted in the thinning down of the line of distinction between the party and the government. Given the fact of near one-party domination across the polity, what the Centre could not impose on the state through the apparatus of the Constitution could be imposed through party channels. This became even more visible and blatantly misused in the post-Nehruvian years.

Many would concede that the actions that Nehru undertook (or did not undertake) were dictated by the pressure of circumstances he found himself in.

Each one of his failures was that of a genuine democrat inclined to take people on trust and unwilling to suspect them of foul play, until there was overwhelming evidence. Nehru’s greatest strength was, at times, his greatest weakness.

Nehru’s approach and contribution need to be assessed in the backdrop of the challenges that an infant democracy faced. His efforts were directed towards warding off those challenges.

This was always his key priority. One could extensively debate whether his appreciation of those challenges was rooted in a realistic understanding of ground realities or tinged by an overdose of idealism and rhetoric.

The leadership that Nehru provided in the crucial years after Independence were critical in laying the foundations of strong democratic traditions. It is also important to assert that some aberrations, which were glossed over in the excitement of Independence and joys of nation building, reared their ugly head in the post-Nehruvian years and adversely impacted the working of Indian democracy.

—Dr.Sandeep Shastri is Pro Vice Chancellor, Jain University