India - Looking for the real Nehru

Swapab Dasgupta

It is hazardous to make sweeping generalisations of the national character. At the risk of being pilloried, let me reiterate the 11th century Arab
traveller Alberuni’s observation that Hindus (as Indians were then known) have no sense of history. Indeed, they can scarcely distinguish it from mythology. Whether it’s Akbar, Aurangzeb and Shivaji or Curzon, Gandhi and Nehru, history writing in India is aimed at upholding greatness or reinforcing villainy. Revisionism is invariably a law and order problem.

Last Friday, the 120th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, saw the re-publication of Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate by Walter Crocker, Australia’s high commissioner to India in the early 1960s. Written and first published in 1965, it is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is a candid and brutally subjective account of Nehru from a western, but not British or American, viewpoint. Crocker was a professional Nehru-watcher who admired his subject but didn’t go starry-eyed. Second, as a contemporary assessment, it hasn’t been distorted by the Indian penchant for posthumously adding a few inches each year to the height of venerated leaders.

The Nehru that Crocker wrote about doesn’t resemble the colossus painted by his inheritors and hagiographers. That he was a man of aesthetic refinement, good breeding and blessed with an innate sense of decency was never in doubt. Even his political detractors at the time conceded that there was something noble and Brahminical but at the same time austere and dandyish — he was India’s only prime minister to smoke in office — about him.

Yet, that doesn’t mean he liked children, as India has been taught to believe. Crocker comes perilously close to describing Nehru as just another clever politician: ‘‘Nehru certainly did some acting on public occasions and before TV cameras... The acting was never worse than the pose of Chacha Nehru with the children. This was at its worst on his birthday for a few years when sycophants organised groups of children, with flowers and copious photographing, to parade with him. It was out of character; his interest in children was slender.’’

That Nehru was intellectually superior and didn’t tolerate fools easily are attributes that have been diligently recorded. Less publicised was the strong impression that his enlightenment was often offset by blind hates. Among Nehru’s ‘prejudices’ Crocker records were ‘‘maharajas, Portugal, moneylenders, certain American ways, Hinduism, the whites in Africa...’’ The list explains why Nehru was so offensive at the opening of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute in Calcutta, 1961.

There he spoke of ‘‘bogus spirituality’’, the absurdity of ‘‘running away from the daily problems of life in the spirituality’’ — the profundities of undergrad radicalism — and then stalked off. Had a prime minister conducted himself so disagreeably today, he would either have had to grovel or face a riot. Nehru was fortunate his haughtiness could ride piggyback on the goodwill of the Congress and the national movement.

Nehru, it was said, ‘‘could be emphatic on a basis of insufficient knowledge’’. He may have begun with a caricatured hatred of moneylenders but it soon extended into distaste for the entire private sector. Like the fellow travellers of Stalin, he juxtaposed science with what he considered religious mumbo-jumbo and came to view everything Hindu with utmost wariness.

Like Crocker, he probably believed that the India of ‘‘cow worshippers and devotees of ayurvedic medicine and astrology’’ should be banished from public life. And like his upper-class English friends, he found self-made Americans, particularly John Foster Dulles, crass and tiresome. Predictably, he liked the Kennedys; they were different.

From such parodies were the three pillars of the Nehruvian order, secularism, non-alignment and socialism, crafted.

For a man who left the country ‘‘not better fed, clothed or housed, ...more corruptly governed...with higher taxes, ever-rising prices, ever-acute foreign exchange difficulties, and more unemployment’’ than when he took charge, India has been too kind to Nehru. It’s time we took the mythology out of history.