India without Nehru
SABAVALA, SHAROKH
TURNING INWARD India Without Nehru By Sharokh Sabavala New Delhi Jawaharlal Nehru, the man, is today nothing but a handful of ashes. Nehru's image, however, lies deeply embedded in the...
...He could give till it hurt...
...Asoka Mehta, Narendra Deva and others...
...Great fighters for freedom have in the past been eliminated from the scene of their action by administrators...
...Nehru played the game of life according to rules that he had learned at the feet of a great master —Mahatma Gandhi...
...The service of India means the service of millions who suffer...
...Because of this one mistake, India's new Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, faces a much greater task...
...No wonder he made mistakes and chalked up failures...
...When Nehru had a chance to give the country a strong, unitary form of government, he chose instead a federal system which granted considerable autonomy to the states...
...he could also demand till it hurt...
...It is possible that Nehru did not think much of the men that his own Congress party threw up from the ranks over the years...
...trade unionists and sometimes even nonentities...
...The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye...
...Shastri and his administration will certainly move closer to the West than Nehru's administration—as distinguished from Nehru personally—had ever been...
...They were then banded together in what was the Praja (Peoples) Socialist Party, and made the mistake of assuming that Nehru needed them because he had already collapsed...
...Perhaps...
...While in his role as the leader of the Indian people, his success continued till his very last breath, in his secondary role as the Prime Minister of the Indian state, he perhaps chalked up as many failures as any other human being burdened with the responsibility of doing so much...
...He tried businessmen, economists, officials, technocrats...
...Rare are the human beings who attempt to combine these two functions in one...
...It is difficult for the Indian citizen to reconcile the fact of Nehru's being all that he was and then succumbing to the cruel hand of death...
...The calibre of the men who came to him did not measure up to his exacting standards...
...The government's economic policies in such spheres as foreign aid and investment, building of major industries in the state sector and preferring basic as against consumer industries, is likely to continue...
...He could not care less if a man was a Socialist or a Communist or of any other persuasion as long as he could do the job...
...His weaknesses stemmed from the fact that Nehru the fighter for freedom ultimately became Nehru the administrator...
...No wonder, either, that his body gave way on that fateful day last December when he was felled by a stroke...
...Today he is no more...
...It will rather withdraw within itself, and respond to the outside world only when directly involved...
...So he carried on with the material at hand, taking more and more burdens on himself...
...As a result, he lost his grip on the immediate situation...
...It will not, for example, be possible for India's accredited representative in the United Nations to act in the old manner of V. K. Krishna Menon...
...This led to theii laying down fantastic conditions before they would join the administration...
...He believed it was not right for anyone—even Jawaharlal Nehru—to name a successor...
...On the eve of independence, August 14, 1947, Nehru told the Constituent Assembly, which had gathered to frame a constitution for free India, that the "future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfill the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today...
...For 17 years Nehru ran the administration of this vast country virtually single-handed...
...In domestic politics, Shastri's administration will perhaps be less tolerant of extiemist positions represented by the Communist Party and the Right-wing revivalist Jan Sangh...
...Even Churchill, after winning the War for the British, was voted out of office...
...While it is true to say that what Nehru was to India no other man will ever be, it is also true to say that, whatever his shortcomings, Nehru has left things in fairly good order for the next man to continue the work of building a better society in India...
...He was, if anything, even more successful than Gandhi in winning the love, affection and devotion of the people of India...
...His Marxist theorizing crystallized into the concept of building a Socialist society...
...In foreign affairs, India's voice will undoubtedly be heard much less prominently than before...
...Nehru therefore had to develop his own methods for running a complex administration...
...Was he just being vain...
...Emotions do not—or at least should not— determine the paths along which governments function...
...Now that he is gone, will the fabric hold...
...This mighty effort of Nehru's to do everything himself was probably his biggest single mistake...
...Considering the fact that his training in such matters was merely theoretical, it is conceivable that he was responsible for certain acts of commission or omission which could now be dissected and classified in retrospect as successes and failures...
...minds of Nehru's countrymen today...
...But it was not too late for Nehru to withhold such advice in the future, and this he never quite learned to do...
...Moreover, the tasks Nehid has left for his successor are prodigious...
...He lived on— but he never quite recovered from his stroke...
...There will perhaps be more tolerance shown to the private industrialist, if only because the organized power of private business will now be more vociferous...
...For the people of India want something today, not the whole world tomorrow...
...But the odds were against him—and he should have known it...
...He believed he had nurtured democracy during the last 17 years in such a manner as to provide a new leader for the nation through normal democratic process...
...These men included Jayaprakash Narayan...
...While he may not have intended such advice to be a fiat from above, weak officials, always looking for an excuse to avoid responsibility, would give this advice the status of an order and carry it through...
...During the past 17 years, he "tried to implement these resolutions...
...He was himseif able to keep the states in line on his own personal authority, but anyone else faces a herculean task in following this course and might be forced to make compromises at each step in order to placate one state or another...
...And Shastri, who has now taken on the burdens of Nehru's office, does not have the same amount of goodwill and support that Nehru had...
...It will not be possible to discard it or change it immediately—even given a desire on Shastri's part to want to change it...
...Or was he saying this with the full knowledge that even before the ink would dry on these words, he would be gone...
...it is a creed of tomorrow, of building a future, of prosperity embargoed...
...Was he defying death...
...While Nehru could tell the Indian people to wait—and in fact, compel them to do so—with confidence, his successor may not be able to do likewise...
...Of the men around him, none was towering enough to step into his shoes automatically, without a struggle...
...And yet, Nehru was but a man, subject to the cruel laws of sickness and death...
...Nehru's image, however, lies deeply embedded in the hearts of his countrymen and in the life of his country—so deeply, indeed, that India today squirms at the mention of another name as its "Prime Minister...
...He set into motion a program of building scientific laboratories and research centers to encourage a spirit of scientific inquiry...
...These are the thoughts raging in the...
...It is inconceivable that Shastri will make a clean break with Nehru's policies...
...He tried to divert the attention of the people from immediate problems to visions of the future...
...For 17 years Nehru was not merely the beloved leader of over 400 million Indians, but also the powerful head of the Government of India...
...In myriad spheres of administration, it will be found that Nehru was doing things himself...
...There is a general feeling that he left far too many questions unanswered...
...He was not a political haggler...
...Five days before his death, addressing a news conference on Friday May 22, he told correspondents: "My lifetime is not ending so very soon...
...Can it now be preserved in the face of new stresses and strains and in the absence of the main unifying force...
...Much of the fabric of government has been fashioned by Nehru in the light of his own personal convictions...
...He undertook much more than any one man had ever done before at a time when he could have retired in glory and spent the rest of his life with the books which were so dear to him...
...In the '30s, when the Congress Party had no idea of these things, Nehru made it pass resolutions visualizing the future economic system of a free India as Socialist...
...This may explain why he went all over the country in search of ministers for his Cabinet...
...But he would not admit it...
...Nehru's greatest failure is said to be his refusal to train and equip a political heir for the seat of power, a man who could immediately assume the task of running the administration of the country on smooth lines...
...Gandhi had passed on before government had really become a serious business, however...
...The emphasis on Socialism, which Nehru never lost a single opportunity of bruiting, is likely to be reduced in speeches and publications, although such State Socialism as already exists will probably continue to increase its momentum...
...If he had been destined to live for another 20 years, it would perhaps have been the right thing to do...
...Did Nehru know of the impending end...
...To the Indian citizen born 40 or more years ago, Nehru was the embodiment of a knight errant, lance-drawn, riding a white charger, surging forth into battle against the British ogre...
...And Socialism, whether Nehru's or any other brand, has nothing for the people today...
...Sharokh Sabavala, New Leader correspondent in India, also writes for the Christian Science Monitor...
...With his task increased and his power reduced, Shastri faces problems whose immensity could have been reduced by a few light touches from Nehru...
...Actually, Nehru did not name an heir because he was a democrat, not a king...
...From now on India is not likely to champion the causes of peoples around the world...
...As long as Nehru was around, he was the leader, the boss, the teacher all rolled into one...
...It might be months, even years, before Nehru would learn what had happened, and by then it was too late to do anything...
...But he did not do so, for he believed that whatever there was in him belonged to the nation...
...He was no mere mortal, and hence, not to be judged by ordinary human standards...
...Among them, he felt, there might be one who would not only wait for him to die, but perhaps take over from him during his lifetime...
...But Nehru remained on the scene for 17 long years after winning the battle of independence, and ran the affairs of a modern state...
...but he would not bargain...
...Rightly or wrongly, he would give advice even on subjects he was not well informed about...
...He brought an emphasis on industrial planning to government thinking both in New Delhi and in the states...
...Day by day he looked weaker, moving shakily and dying...
...A while back, Nehru did make several efforts to attract certain young men to his government...
...Nehru hated all political labels...
...That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and sufferings, so long our work will not be over...
...The unity of the country has owed more to Nehru's personal influence and dynamism than to any other single factor...
...In the end he was disillusioned...
...But they found that they could not do any horse-trading with Nehru...
...To this older generation, Nehru was a projection of its own personality—the supreme creation of the gods, a man fashioned in the image of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh...
...Thus early in his life he was influenced by the fact that the Russians had accomplished a great deal in a very few years...
...But Nehru's failures, such as they were, were the failures of a man who had none but the loftiest of motives and nothing but the good of humanity at heart...
...It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity...
...But the business of the world is not run according to the dictates of the hearts of people...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 12
