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BJP's Nehru complex stems from poverty of RSS leadership

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Sourish Bhattacharyya
Sourish BhattacharyyaSep 09, 2015 | 09:01

BJP's Nehru complex stems from poverty of RSS leadership

No matter how hard the RSS-tutored BJP dispensation in New Delhi tries to obliterate Jawaharlal Nehru's legacy, it can't. Because it is everywhere, and all of us are beneficiaries of it. Unlike the BJP-RSS questionable contributions to the freedom struggle and the growth of institutions that have sustained free India, which can easily fit (and mostly for the wrong reasons) into an annex of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), Nehru's bequest is far greater and still in need of deeper study.

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By letting present politics skew their vision of history, the BJP-RSS megaphones would like the nation to forget that Nehru gave us just about everything we cherish as Indians today. It was not easy to be the country's first prime minister, handed an inheritance of mind-numbing poverty by a depredatory colonial regime and a deep communal divide drenched in the blood spilled during Partition. Nehru did not let these Himalayan odds either stop him from remaining a visionary, or getting swayed by the examples of contemporary demagogues, some of whom were his good friends, who turned into dictators.

He was a lifelong democrat, who truly believed that politics is the pursuit of gentlemen, and our democratic institutions owe their longevity to him (just as the RSS owes its survival to his liberal politics - a leader inspired by an exclusionist ideology like that of the RSS, would have happily permanently banned the organisation in the aftermath of the Gandhi assassination). Even his daughter, overcome by her insecurities and misguided by her sycophants, could not cause permanent damage to the democratic institutions that Nehru nurtured with a missionary's zeal. Even she called for general elections, instead of choosing to be a lifelong dictator.

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Nehru's greatest contribution to India's formative decades was the equidistance he was able to maintain between the rival blocs led by the US and the Soviet Union. In fact, he was one of those rare national leaders who were able to secure the support of both the antagonistic combines for his industrial programme driven by his vision of self-sufficiency. As a result, if the Soviets helped him build the Bokaro and Bhilai steel plants, the Germans backed Rourkela and Durgapur was built with British assistance.

It was the push that Nehru gave to industrialisation that saw India treble its industrial production and become the world's seventh largest industrial nation in his lifetime. It was not for nothing that he swept three successive general elections, which no prime minister after him has been able to pull off. Yes, Nehru's model of industrialisation had its flaws - it was in fact first seriously questioned by his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, and then overturned by the Congress dispensation led by PV Narasimha Rao - but he gave a newly independent, capital-starved nation, seeking to develop a spine to be able to stand up as an equal in the comity of nations, the growth engine it badly needed. Indian capitalists did not have the resources to engineer an alternative path of growth. What Nehru did to develop Indian industry was matched in scale only by his daughter's success in making India agriculturally self-sufficient.

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Being a visionary who understood that India's brain power had to be harnessed even as we were chasing challenging primary education objectives, Nehru laid the foundations of atomic and space research in the country; he gave the Indian Institute of Science the autonomy it needed to pursue groundbreaking research; he built the IIT-IIM network of international excellence that has more or less remained unaffected by the steady erosion of national values that followed his demise; and in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), he bequeathed another national institution that has set benchmarks in education and research.

The BJP-RSS combine will be hard put to find a leader with a similar roster of achievements, or even a record of sacrifice for the nation, so no amount of tampering with the NMML, or of propping up the inconsequential Deendayal Upadhyaya, will help. And of course, when there's nothing else to beat Nehru, there's the Netaji mythology that the parivar's flag-bearers assiduously pull out of the graveyard of history to besmirch a leader whom we have still not understood fully.

Last updated: September 09, 2015 | 16:25
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