Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) was the Prime Minister from the day of Independence, 15 August 1947 to his death on 27 May 1964. He was chosen as the ‘natural successor’ by Mahatma Gandhi. However, Nehru, unlike Gandhi, never attempted to build a team, the very essence of parliamentary democracy. Nor for that matter did he name his successor.
“Panditji knows best” was his guiding principle. He shouldered a forbidding workload as he headed the two ministries of Foreign Affairs and Atomic Energy, apart from being the Prime Minister. As Aakar Patel once wrote about Nehru: “He made too many speeches (often three a day) and spent too much time lecturing the West. He was careless with his time, once giving three hours to a high school delegation from Australia, while his ministers waited outside”.
This reflects the fact that Nehru never prioritised his work and never distinguished the frivolous from the serious. He never treated his ministerial colleagues or even the popular chief ministers with respect. Often, he would lecture them through his letters, which were crafted in general terms. There were no specific instructions to deal with the major problems.
He did not have a system of feedback. Gandhi’s Congress, being an umbrella party, had people of all shades of opinion and even before Independence, the views of both Nehru and Patel were radically different. However, after Independence, as Austin observed, the oligarchy of four — Rajendra Prasad, Azad, Nehru and Patel — provided a unified leadership leading to the smooth functioning of the Constituent Assembly and framing of the Constitution.
The 1950 presidential election of the party was a keenly contested affair. Patel supported Tandon, while Nehru supported Kripalani. Tandon won by securing 1306 votes while Kripalani received 1072. Nehru took it as a personal defeat in the manner of Gandhi’s response to Sitaramayya’s defeat by Subhas. Nehru resigned from the Congress Working Committee and other members followed him. Like Subhas earlier, an isolated Tandon resigned and Nehru took over the party presidency.
As the election revealed, Nehru did not accept the majority view and without trying to convince the majority by reason over a period of time, his action demonstrated his unilateralism and arrogance. He never tried to dissect Patel’s criticism of socialism that it failed to create wealth. Instead of practising a state-sponsored distributionist policy to which Nehru was committed, Patel preferred the Gandhian precept of non-possession and service to the poor.
Patel used to say that like the existence of 84 castes, there are 85 varieties of socialism and he was against class war and did not want liquidation of landlords or capitalists. He rejected nationalisation as it was inefficient. For Patel, the major concern was India’s industrial backwardness which he wanted to overcome by emphasising the need to increase production.
Disregarding Patel, Nehru followed the Leninist policy of “commanding heights” and a socialistic pattern of society leading to what Raj Krishna called “dharmshala capitalism” with a pathetic 3 per cent annual growth rate, which he described as the Hindu rate of growth. Hem Baruah, the PSP member from Assam in the Second Lok Sabha (1957-62) in a reply to Nehru’s observation that cars are manufactured in India, retorted that it was a unique car in the world… as all its parts except the horn are noisy. Another claim by Nehru, that an average Indian made 19 paise a day, was debunked by Ram Manohar Lohia, the indomitable socialist leader. He retorted that with that sum one could not buy even a bottle of Coca Cola and even that figure was a lie, as the actual earning was 16 paise a day.
Aakar Patel exploded the myth that Chacha Nehru loved children, as “Nehru did not really have time for or enjoyed their company” He quoted Crocker to prove his point. “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”.
This keenness to be a man for all seasons and really believing that the world is a stage in which we are all actors, kept him preoccupied with several unnecessary ceremonies and actions which he could easily avoid. Many of his activities should have been reserved for the Head of State and not the Head of Government. Rakesh Batabyal portrayed Nehru’s grand project, the community development programme ‘as a means to entrench democracy in villages’.
An eminent social scientist SC Dube commented that the future of Asia in the larger context would depend on its success. As part of the project, the Balvantray Mehta committee was formed and its report was accepted and put into practice in Rajasthan. Batabyal remarked that ‘the entire political text of the community development programme, as Nehru saw it, was clearly apparent in this beginning. It was a remarkable roadmap for a decentralised democracy — one where everyone, down to the village level, through the Panchayats, would have ownership of the ‘idea of India’ and India would be a large, open home to all its citizens”.
But as Batabyal himself remarked by 1960, it became a ministry and under bureaucratic control a travesty”. Batabyal added: ‘Nehru’s home-making efforts ended up promoting urban growth, something that he himself, having spent almost his entire political life for and among village folk never wanted’. This failure of Nehru’s grand project for genuine decentralised democracy left numerous villages in filth and squalor, thereby pulling all of India’s many success stories back to the narrative of poverty and cultural degradation.
In a severe indictment of the community development programme, Barrington Moore described it as a grand failure in the context of the First Five-Year Plan. The subsequent import of grain under the PL 480 programme from the USA, of which Nehru was a severe critic, was a humiliating result of his failed agricultural policy. He ignored the basic requirement of building a modern state with meaningful land reforms, universal elementary education, population control, and affordable health care. This wide gap between policy and implementation is a legacy of the Nehruvian era that followed the Fabian collectivist model.
Nehru neither had the patience with details nor a team to really lead the nation that was in its infancy. He continued with a top heavy urbanised colonial set up without any reform proposal. Neither did he empower the poor. In contrast, the East Asians did not set up IITs, but they put in place a network of institutions for proper basic education and skills, a point that was underlined by Galbraith in the 1990s when he remarked that it is impossible to defeat the East Asians as they have no paucity of technically qualified manpower.
The great advantage that India had at the dawn of independence — an organised political party and an efficient merit based bureaucracy — was squandered by Nehru with his superficial modernism and over centralisation of power and authority.
In the context of the promise of a “new India”, Ernest Barker included the Preamble of the Constitution in his famous work as the noble intent of a nation. But the Nehruvian years witnessed an unreformed colonial state apparatus with an inbuilt incapacity to take hard decisions. (To be concluded)
The writer is a former professor, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi.