Why Nehru needs to be rescued from Rahul Gandhi
On Wednesday, Rahul Gandhi spoke about Jawaharlal Nehru. It was an impassioned speech, as the Congress vice-president is wont to do from time to time, but what was alarming was how he interprets his great grandfather, as a soldier of love and brotherhood, rather than as a muscular builder of modern India. He spoke of how he visited Naini Jail and how he read what Nehru had written in the visitors' book, thanking the British for making him realise his love of motherland. Nehru's legacy for the Congress, he said, is of love, and only that can counter the politics of hate today.
Both he and his mother recounted all of India's achievements and ascribed them all to Nehru, whether it was IITs, IT, space exploration. Both have decided to protect Nehru's legacy from ''usurpers''. What they don't understand is that the greatest tribute to Nehru is be like him. Nehru liked to cast himself as a reluctant politician - which Rahul still seems to be even after ten years in politics - but he was a consummate leader. Nehru was a man of ideas, but he was also a man of action; he was a born aristocrat but he was also a man of masses. They only have to read Walter Crocker's marvellous little book, Nehru: A Contemporary's Estimate to know how hard he worked.
Crocker, Australian High Commissioner to India, talks of how Nehru would give an average of 25 speeches a month outside Parliament, both in English and Hindi, all extempore. He writes of his gruelling schedule, beginning with a janta darbar at 8.30am every morning, extending into long working hours in office, cut through with events ranging from meeting world leaders to inaugurating flower shows. Those were simpler times, but he was ever accessible and ever human, whether it was picking up litter after some MPs at a Constitution Club high tea or angrily shooing away photographers who were blocking the view of spectators at a reception for Mount Everest climbers.
Nehru was human and humane, but he was not the new age love guru that Rahul would have him be, someone who passively oozed affection for the British even though they jailed him (for nine years in various jails), or whose legacy of brotherhood alone can counter what he terms is the politics of hate. Rahul does Nehru a disservice by recasting him as a primarily as a warrior of love, thereby ceding the space that Narendra Modi would be only too happy to occupy. If Nehru was the man who built the foundations of modern India, Modi would like to be the man to erect the highways, the bullet trains, the ports, the industrial corridors.
In Madhav Khosla's lovely new book, Letters for a Nation, a remarkable collection of letters Nehru wrote to chief ministers between 1947 and 1963, he quotes Sarvepalli Gopal's assessment of India's first prime minister: his romanticism and tendency to aestheticise; his faith in the perfectibility of man; his commitment to civil liberties; and his belief that the basic cause of conflicts was class differences. To them he adds a fifth - Nehru's role in the making of India, not just administering of it. It is a role Modi would like to play, but surely the Congress cannot call that usurping. What the leaders of the party and the Nehru-Gandhi family can do instead of complaining is to do what Nehru did - get out there, talk to people, win back their trust, build India brick by brick.
When Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India: "'I was not much of a politician, although politics had seized me and made me its victim,"' people just thought it was a great man being modest. When Rahul says he wants to change politics in ways no can imagine, people think it is a modest man with misplaced intimations of greatness.