RESTORING GANDHI - NEHRU NEXUS

P.N. HAKSAR

It is rather difficult to write about Jawaharlal Nehru. So much has been written about him. And he himself has written a great deal, both about himself and also the world in which he lived and worked. The new generation of my countrymen, who are now in the state of being and becoming, should read not so much what others have written about Nehru, but what Nehru himself reflected, thought and wrote. I hope too that they would also read everything that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wrote. I would add to the reading list the names of Subramania Bharati and Rabindra Nath Tagore. All these readings, to my mind, are far more relevant to our country today than the wisdom and the searchings contained in the Vedas, the Sastras and the Puranas.

The fundamental preoccupation of our distant and ancient thinkers was with three questions: first, who am I? Second, whence have I come? And third, what is my destiny? But now, if we could only transcend ourselves and our small egos, one would ask: where is our society and our country going? What is India's destiny? And how can we attain dignity and greatness? It is to this sat of latter questions that Gandhi, Nehru, Subramania Bharati and Rabindra Nath Tagore addressed themselves. And they continue to be of contemporary relevance.

It is a matter of deep and profound regret that Gandhiites and Nehruites have formed separate churches. From the history of churches, one knows how the messiahs get vulgarised the moment they are entombed in churches, mosques, temples and gurudwaras. The Gandhi-Nehru nexus needs to be restored if we are to celebrate the centenary of Nehru’s birth in any meaningful manner. The life, work and thoughts of the two are indissolubly linked together and constitute an interacting and integrated system. Gandhi articulated the imperatives of the moral and spiritual universe. Nehru articulated the imperatives of the rational and scientific universe. But the two together constituted the entire universe of mind and Spirit of our national movement dedicated to the search for a new identity for our country.

The spirituality of Gandhi and Nehru constituted the finest expression of humanism. The essence of this humanism lay in the vision of a society where love and compassion transcend hatred and violence; where, as Tagore said, “the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit”; and where the only justification for acquiring wealth is that it is held in trust for the poor and the deprived.

Openness, accountability

During the 17 years of his Prime Ministership, Jawaharlal Nehru did everything which he could personally do to uphold the principles of openness and accountability in the governance of the country; he unrelentingly lent support to the institutional bastions of our democracy; he made us all feel, whether we were scientists, bureaucrats, politicians or journalists, that we were partners in the great and exciting venture of nation-building. His greatest contribution was to resist the temptation to restrict democracy in our country. He never allowed spirituality to degenerate into ritualistic religious expressions.

It is no part of my intention to contend that Jawaharlal Nehru was an embodiment of perfection. Perhaps his biggest failure was his inability to create an appropriate political instrumentality through which the vision of India he had could be built, brick by brick. But then, he was obsessively concerned with the preservation of the unity of India. That unity, he felt, could be better preserved by carrying the Congress Party as he inherited it and in the midst of which he worked during his life. Restructuring it, he probably felt, would create unnecessary tensions and conflicts.

Whatever might be Nehru’s failures, the broad fact remains that the accumulated capital of his thoughts and reflections when related to Gandhi’s thoughts and reflections, constitute a beacon of light.

That very perceptive historian, E.H. Carr, has said that one looks back into the history because our present dilemmas and perplexities lead us to have a dialogue with our past. He has also said that history is a response to the question: how did things come to be as they are? Recalling the life and work of both Gandhi and Nehru is urgently necessary because the development process itself within India is bringing into the open the unresolved conflicts not only between the past and the future, but between the vision we had and the way it has been translated.

If the vision of Indian society informed by the concept of equality is a valid one, then the historical structuring of our society, sustained by structured inequality of varnashrama dharma, is in conflict with the -egalitarian social order. If the vision of growth with social justice is a valid vision, then the continuing and pervasive sense of injustice and deprivation contradicts assumptions about social justice. If pride in new India is not to be treated as a dirty word, then upholding of self reliance and informing our economic as well as technological policies constitute the very means and mechanisms through which pride and patriotism can find expression.

Nature of world

Perhaps the deepest perception which Nehru had concerns the nature of the world emerging after the Second World War which ended with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear bombs. Among all the statesmen and politicians who contemplated the emergence of the nuclear bomb, Jawaharlal Nehru alone understood the meaning and significance of the event.

Those of us who had the privilege of serving under Nehru and giving expression to India’s pride within the comity of nations felt a sense of exhilaration that we could uphold India’s national interest without contradicting in any way the imperatives of peace, security and development in a nuclear age. We did this even though we had hardly begun measuring our GNP. That is why the framework of our foreign policy constructed so meticulously by Nehru has proved to be so durable despite all the pressures, both domestic and foreign, exerted upon it.

The only moment of grief we experienced was towards the closing years of Nehru’s life when some of us thought that he was being ill served by his political colleagues, the foreign and intelligence services as well as by Parliament in the matter of handling Sino-Indian relations. Restructuring and renewing those relations on a realistic basis remains the unfinished task of the Nehru era.

It is no part of my intention to suggest that China can be absolved of all blame. In point of fact and despite Premier Zhou Enlai’s great knowledge and wisdom, his perceptions of Nehru’s predicaments were seriously wrong. But then our two countries must outlive the past. After all, geography does not change even though politics frequently does. And geography clearly demands that relations between China and India be seen in the wider context of interaction between the two countries in all the areas of mutual concern and interest. Only when viewed in this light can the border problem be seen in the proper context.

India today desperately needs the restoration of the vision of Gandhi and Nehru. Even more desperately we need not merely the articulation of that vision but an analysis of the constituent elements of that vision. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” remains a valid and evocative vision of Jesus. It remains valid even when we human beings engage ourselves in killing our neighbours or hating them. But the contemporary world of nuclear bomb, when seen in the context of explosion of science and technology, demands that even if we do not love our neighbour, we owe a duty to take care not to hurt him. Even under the ordinary law relating to negligence, it is legally enjoined upon all of us to ensure that our neighbour does not suffer damage by the consequences of our own action.

So, one way of looking at human history might be to see how society develops in such a manner that what was only a moral injunction uttered by Jesus or the Buddha or Mohammad now becomes a legally enforceable imperative. Viewed in this light. India – our country – is crying for movements, combining together the passionate urges which inform Reformation and Renaissance. The earlier Bengal Renaissance has petered out.

If nothing else, the sacrifice of the 18 year old girl on the funeral pyre of her husband in the village of Deorala in Rajasthan shows, if one has eyes to see, that a new movement for reform of society and renaissance of our mental processes is urgently required. In the measure we shall have to link that movement to the essentials of the Gandhi and Nehru framework. That is enough reason for having a dialogue with Nehru on the eve of the centenary of his birth. In that dialogue we shall discover Nehru’s passion for the application of reason and rationality to all matters relating to the public domain. We would also find an extraordinary feeling he had for what he described as “the inwardness” of historical processes.

Courtesy THE HINDU

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