FOR the past decade, India has perhaps been the only country in the business of deriding its founding fathers. The ruling Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)–Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has left no stone unturned to damage the glorious legacy of the anti-colonial nationalist movement by pitting one leader against the other.
Amongst all the leaders, RSS–BJP’s chief picking is Jawaharlal Nehru and his legacy. Nehru’s idea of secularism and modernism has been a sticky issue for the RSS-BJP. Nehru was the first and perhaps the last mass leader of India with an internationalist cosmopolitan outlook.
His other great contemporaries in the Indian National Congress were wedded to one form of socio-political conservatism or the other. Nehru was bereft of all this. His notion of the Indian national movement was deeply attuned to global currents.
Take, for instance, his espousal of socialism. Before anyone in the Congress, including M.K. Gandhi, Nehru understood that the tide of the Bolshevik Revolution was most favourable to the struggles of the colonised masses.
As an accredited member, Nehru attended the Communist International (COMINTERN)-sponsored Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels, in February 1927.
Nehru’s idea of secularism and modernism has been a sticky issue for the RSS-BJP.
During the Madras session (December 1927) of the Indian National Congress, Nehru made it a mission to educate his colleagues within the Congress on the need to cultivate the youth and the working classes to narrow the gap between them and the Congress.
Nehru was also quick to respond to the inanities of Joseph Stalin. When Stalin adopted the line of ‘class versus class’ as the global operational principle of communists at the Sixth Congress of the COMINTERN, Nehru sidelined himself from the League Against Imperialism (LAI).
He thought that the anti-colonial nationalist struggle in India was not yet ripe for such a sharp ‘intra-national class struggle’. Imperialism was the chief contradiction for Nehru and the struggle of the working classes was one of the arrows in the quiver of the anti-colonial nationalist movement.
Even when Nehru distanced himself from the League Against Imperialism, he maintained a very comradely relationship with his friends in Europe. On the eve of the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930, he constantly wrote to his friends whom he had met during the deliberations of the LAI.
Nehru apprised them of the Salt March in India and the many ups and downs of the Indian national movement. Michele Louro, in her solid study Comrades Against Imperialism, notes that Nehru’s activism in Europe inspired his internationalism as he “doubled down on his anti-imperialist commitments throughout the turbulent years of the 1930s”.
The most notable example of it was his Glimpses of World History written in prison between 1930 and 1934. The book stood out to reveal Nehru’s anti-imperialist internationalism.
Secondly, when Nehru returned to London in 1935 and 1936, he strengthened his connections with old comrades and expanded his network to include new anti-imperialist colleagues such as V.K. Krishna Menon, one of his closest advisors on Indian international relations during the run-up to Independence and after.
Aditya Mukherjee, one of modern India’s most prominent historians, has done a great service by bringing out a fresh title on Nehru’s vision of India. Mukherjee begins his book with a counter to RSS–BJP’s demonisation of Nehru.
He writes that the Hindu communal forces which thought India’s Independence was a black day and refused to unfurl the national flag for many years, are spreading falsehoods about Nehru by updating an egregious book 97 Major Blunders of Nehru to a now expanded edition titled Nehru Files: Nehru’s 127 Historic Blunders (Nehru ki 127 Aitihasik Galtiya).
Before anyone in the Congress, including M.K. Gandhi, Nehru understood that the tide of the Bolshevik Revolution was most favourable to the struggles of the colonised masses.
Mistakes are committed by men and women who do something for a cause. People who sit on the fences are not known to commit mistakes. Nehru belonged to the first category whereas the RSS–BJP belonged to the latter.
With no contribution, intellectual, political or otherwise, towards India’s independence, the RSS–BJP combine has been targeting Nehru like a midget pricking pin on a colossus’ feet.
It must be remembered that the RSS, first founded as an organisation of a handful of disgruntled and communal Brahmins of Maharashtra, had its first major camp in north India only in August 1938 in Lahore, ten years after deliberations of complete independence began within the Congress.
At the Lahore camp, no resolution(s) on India’s independence was adopted. Instead, incendiary speeches were made to stoke communal hatred between Hindus and Muslims.
The pusillanimity of the RSS is revealed when one sees the launch of its first magazine Rashtra Dharma. In late August 1947, Rashtra Dharma was launched in the safe and sanitised environment of free India.
Nehru had already written three important books during the colonial period which fired the hearts and minds of nationalist Indians against the British. The RSS understood that whilst the British ruled India, nationalism and patriotism had a punitive cost, losing one’s skin and bones. Nehru paid that cost by serving close to ten years in British Indian prisons.
The RSS’s tenacity to stick to the communal precept and maintain complete aloofness from the national movement is proved by a now-forgotten story of Gopal Mukund Huddar. Huddar was the most trusted aide and likely successor of K.B. Hedgewar (the first chief of the RSS).
By some quirk of fate, Huddar visited Europe in the mid-thirties. This was the time when the battle against fascism had begun in Spain. Huddar was soon consumed by the anti-fascist whirlpool. After hearing speeches of communists and radicals, Huddar jumped into the Spanish Civil War against the forces of General Franco.
He joined as a fighter the Saklatvala Battalion, a British battalion named after Shapurji Saklatvala, a prominent Indian communist in Britain and a relative of Jamshedji Tata. The experience of the Spanish Civil War and interaction with the communists in Europe radicalised Huddar to such an extent that he wanted the RSS to join the struggle against British imperialism in India.
On his return to India, he soon fell out of favour with his mentor Hedgewar. The latter on his part chose M.S. Golwalkar to continue to steer the RSS in a dirty communal direction. Very soon, Huddar broke with the RSS and joined the Communist Party of India (CPI) and fought for India’s freedom.
Coming back to the book, in another major chapter Nehru and the Communal Challenge, Mukherjee shows how steadfastly Nehru defended the secular ideal and was only behind Gandhi in assuaging riot-hit areas.
When rioting broke out in Bihar, Nehru rushed to the scene between November 4 and 9, 1946, along with the entire top leadership of the Congress. The list included Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Maulana Azad, Acharya Kriplani, Jai Prakash Narayan and Anugraha Narain Sinha.
Immediately on reaching Bihar, Nehru declared, ‘‘I will stand in the way of Hindu-Muslim riots. Members of both the communities will have to tread over my dead body before they can strike at each other.’’ In his maiden Independence Day speech, Nehru clarified that India will be a secular State and not “a mirror image of Pakistan”.
He declared: ‘‘The first charge of the government will be to establish and maintain peace and tranquillity in the land and to ruthlessly suppress communal strife… [I]t is wrong to suggest that in this country there would be the rule of a particular religion or sect. All who owe allegiance to the flag will enjoy equal rights of citizenship, irrespective of caste and creed.’’
In the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, the Nehru government swiftly banned the RSS. The ban was lifted only after written assurances were made by the RSS to function as a cultural organisation.
A few months into the ban, the RSS was so rattled that Golwalkar wrote to Nehru: ‘‘During this period the RSS having been disbanded the intelligent youth are rapidly falling into the snares of Communism. With the alarming happenings in Burma, Indo-China, Java and other neighbouring States, we can envisage the nature of the menace.
“The one effective check of the RSS no longer exists. The Communists had always considered the RSS as their main obstacle… News of their progress is alarming.’’
Nehru was also attuned to the political economy of Hindutva. He understood that crumbs thrown by the then-powerful landlords and capitalists sustained the forces of Hindutva and filled the empty potbellies of the upper caste pracharaks.
In 1952, Nehru declared: ‘‘Behind the façade of religion, vested interests, particularly the zamindars and the capitalists, were fighting against the economic policies of the Congress.”
Nehru’s comment was prescient. Perhaps he was aware of the Indian capitalist class’s closeness to Hindu nationalism. In 1927, G.D. Birla was offered the presidency of the Hindu Mahasabha. He refused the offer because of his business commitments.
Birla had also proposed the Partition of Bengal and Punjab on religious lines. Later, in 1938, in a letter to Gandhi, Birla proposed two (communal) federations of Hindus and Muslims within India. Today, when the Indian capitalist class has emboldened itself to an unprecedented degree, it has bared its fangs and has started biting the fundamentals of the Indian Constitution.
Mukherjee writes that with the power of the zamindari elements now diminished, the Indian crony capitalist class ‘‘is performing the role of backing of communal forces through funds and control over media on an infinitely larger scale’’.
I see the prefix ‘crony’ as unnecessary. History has shown that in the long run, the capitalist class has always betrayed lofty ideals of social progress. Late Ratan Tata’s showering of flower petals at Golwakar’s and Hedgewar’s feet during his visit to the RSS headquarters in Nagpur testifies to this proposition.
The RSS–BJP combine has also accused Nehru of pandering to minorities. The maintenance of personal laws by minorities is their chief complaint against him. The raisin-sized brains of the pracharaks are too diminutive to understand the pains of a partitioned minority.
The maintenance of personal laws at that time was necessary to instil confidence in the minorities. Hindus enjoy personal laws in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, Hindu men are allowed to have multiple wives whereas a Hindu woman can only have one spouse at a time. The Organiser and the Panchajanya have never complained about it.
Moreover, Nehru was aware of the problems with the personal laws of the minorities. Egged by his progressive friend and jurist A.A.A. Fyzee, Nehru sought to have a parliamentary solution to the problem.
He was pained by two facts: firstly, Muslim women leaving their faith were denied the right to divorce; secondly, the practice of Triple Talaq or instant divorce.
In 1962, Nehru convened the Committee on Muslim Personal Law. In the event, writes Pratinav Anil in his latest book Another India, ‘‘Zakir Hussain, the then Vice President’s discomfiture, together with the unease expressed by Aligarh [Muslim University]’s leading lights, killed off the initiative.’’
The Indo-China war and the subsequent passing away of Nehru also added to the delay and the final death of the commission.
In his last chapter ‘Scientific Temper’, Mukherjee reiterates Nehru’s strong insistence on cultivating a scientific temper, a term coined by Nehru in his Discovery of India.
Nehru had said: ‘‘The scientific temper points out the way along which man should travel … 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 evidence, the reliance on the observed fact and not pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind—all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life and the solution of its many problems.’’
Unfortunately, the people of India, in huge numbers, are turning to deceptive charlatans to solve their many problems. A recent apocalyptic report by the Mint has revealed how young and educated India are turning to ‘therapists’ and ‘fortune tellers’.
Energies, alignment of chakras, third-eye opening, manifestation, dimensions, angels, demons, tarot, aura cleansing and planetary positions are catchwords of today’s urban youth.
India’s market of the occult was pegged at US $60 billion in 2023 and is estimated to grow at an annual compounded rate of 8.82 percent between 2024 and 2032.
If Nehru were alive today, such a trend would have pained him to an unimaginable extent. Apportioning the blame onto the RSS–BJP combine will not serve the purpose. Many Congress leaders have been seen at the feet of Asaram and the charlatan lad from Bageshwardham. Digvijay Singh was seen performing havan with Computer Baba, whom the BJP had given a cabinet berth!
I will stop here. Aditya Mukherjee’s book is a must-read for young Indians, especially for those who turn to the occult for solving the smallest of problems.
Nehru, despite the herculean task of fighting the British Empire, did not turn to healers and magicians. The people in the Congress must also read this book to understand what Nehru actually stood for.
The book will also be like a splash of fresh water on Nehru’s eternal being whose body has been rubbed with a soap of hate and lathered up with lies and misinformation by the RSS–BJP.