In search of Nehru’s republic

For well over six decades November 14, the birthday of India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, has been celebrated as Children’s Day in schools.

This year marks the 125th birth anniversary of Nehru but the day had no children in the frame. Schools were possibly fatigued by the marathon exercise launched by the new PM, Mr Narendra Modi on Teacher’s Day (September 5) to draw millions of schoolchildren into his net. But there was worse: a complete absence of official celebrations of this Nehru milestone. Instead, with the right-wing BJP firmly ensconced in Delhi, it was open season on the man who laid the foundations of the Indian republic, a man whose vision shaped the trajectory of the country for not just the 17 years he was at the helm but for decades thereafter.

The long propaganda campaign against Nehru by the BJP and its multifarious outfits that make up the saffron brigade has been a constant over the years. Now, it has taken on a triumphal viciousness, characterised by a lack of concern for veracity. The foremost objective of the right-wing is to demolish Nehru. No effort is spared to show that all the ills of the country are the fault of the man who put India on the world map. The big problems for which he is blamed have at the top Kashmir, the slow rate of growth, the planned economy and the China defeat. The right also blames him for trying to turn India into a secular and liberal society, pandering to minorities..

Nehru’s legacy may be in tatters but that it endures in some measure may explain why the BJP (and its right-wing allies) is still so furious with Nehru and is trying desperately to dismantle it. The biggest casualty of this campaign of calumny is the scientific temper that Nehru obsessively tried to inculcate in a nation steeped in obscurantism, a path that set him quite often in conflict with Mahatma Gandhi. And it is here that India is facing its greatest tragedy. Rationalism is taking a backseat as the new regime pursues its putsch to rewrite history and chalk out a macho profile for a resurgent Hindu nation.

Schoolbooks are being rewritten, the university syllabus is being revised and in countless ways, the nation that Nehru built is being dismantled. One small example: for the first time in its history, a PM of the secular republic of India gifts 2,500 kg sandalwood (cost: Rs 19.1 million) to the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu. That was on Modi’s first official visit to Nepal in August.

For a vast number of Indians — sadly, from the older generations — it is the scientific temper that defines Nehru and with it the strong fabric that fashioned India into a secular nation. It is pertinent here to quote him at some length from his 1946 work Discovery of India:

“It is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on preconceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind — all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems... The scientific approach and temper are, or should be, a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting and associating with our fellowmen...”

Often, Nehru’s passion for the scientific temper is confused with his championing of science in India. That itself is an enduring legacy: the vast network of scientific research institutions and the technical institutions of higher education such as the IITs, all of which helped India to become a powerful force in the knowledge economy. Till his death in 1964, Nehru was chairman of the CSIR which set up dozens of topnotch research laboratories. Perhaps, all this was to be expected of Nehru who did Natural Science Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge.

But it’s his larger thinking on scientific enquiry that is so acutely missing in the current regime which harks back to a golden past to conjure up mythical technologies we are supposed to have mastered millenniums ago. Modi claims publicly, based on Indian myths and legends, that ancient Indians possessed the know-how for plastic surgery and modern genetics because one of the characters in the Mahabharata begat 100 sons outside her womb!

Even Nehru, surprisingly, did hark back to ancient Indian scientific traditions but with a sharp difference. He cited inspiration from the Upanishads and the Buddha’s teachings to emphasise the reverse of what the current regime propagates. In a 1958 address to students of Guwahati University, Nehru said: “...the spirit of the Upanishads and the teachings of Buddha, basically, were the method of science: search, inquiry and applying your mind to it, and may be something more than the mind but it was search by experience, by reasoning. Almost everything you see around you is a product of science. But I am particularly referring to the temper of science, the mental approach, that is, not an approach of a bigot, not the approach of a closed mind, but of an open mind, of inquiry, realising a special way of thinking as it used to be in India.”

By arrangement with Dawn