Nehru: Remembering a giant

India’s legendary freedom fighter, intellectual, world statesman and first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was pointedly not remembered on Wednesday, his 129th birth anniversary, by official India, exactly like the previous years of the Narendra Modi government.

Under none of his other successors was the illustrious Nehru subjected to crude governmental disregard. The question arises: Was the draughtsman of the blueprint of a democratic India a forgettable interloper in this nation’s annals, as our present rulers would have us believe, or is there something deeply flawed about the Modi era for harbouring such a thought vector? Apart from being the guiding beacon that showed the way in the making of modern India’s Constitution, Nehru underlined scientific temper, the eradication of mass poverty, illiteracy, and superstition through the establishment of leading state institutions — such as the Planning Commission, great places of learning like the IITs, great industries and bodies to engage in fundamental science research.

In a country that had seen over two million people being killed in the mayhem and mass dislocation produced by the religion-based Partition of India, Nehru worked to make secularism (which to him meant that the State would promote no religion) the nation’s creed. There were more Muslims in India than in the newly-created Pakistan, and they needed a sense of security. Appropriate policies were therefore crafted.

Alas, every single thing that Nehru stood for is under institutional and physical assault today.

H10