Wanted: Jawaharlal 2005

One man and his legacy sit at the center of the Congress renaissance. One man is the avowed mentor of Manmohan Singh, Natwar Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Arjun Singh. That man is Jawaharlal Nehru. But alas. The present day Nehruvians are not serving Nehru well. They have failed to reinvent Jawaharlal’s idealism and intellectual power for a new century. They have reduced Nehru to a caricature, his legacy to a formula and thus destroyed his potency for future generations.

What features marked the Nehruvian persona? Not simply the clichetic secularism-socialism-non-alignment triad. These were just the outward manifestations, the reductio ad absurdum of an urgent intimate engagement with the world. Nehru’s persona was a transparent human-ness, a vocational moral purpose, a constant process of tortured transformation, heartfulness, above all, the free contest of ideas. Has Manmohan Singh lived upto these ideals? He’s delivered the occasional speech about ending inspector raj and administrative reform. He’s visited Kashmir to speak about “peace with honour”, he’s met the naked protestors of Manipur. Yet there’s been not a single defining speech, no impassioned discourse, no comparable phrase to “we made a tryst with destiny”. The good Dr Singh has emerged as administrative reformer, not a leader of people or a winner of hearts.

Of course, these are different times. The pressures of a coalition government and the watchful eye of Big Mama from 10 Janpath restrict Manmohan. Yet the manner in which certain UPA ministers are transiting from cabinet to jail and back to the cabinet, should have at least called forth an emotionally charged statement from the gentle sardar. What would Nehru have done? In spite of the muck cluttering his feet, Nehru would have reached for a grand sword of honesty. Nehru would have set a moral parameter in a speech or perhaps in a visit to an unknown part of India, he would have balanced the ignominy of having to reinduct Shibu Soren with a dramatic act of integrity. Manmohan has meekly allowed the Soren episode to take place, shrugging his shoulders at the inevitable pressures of coalition government. Nehru would not have been so meek. He would have made sure his own voice rang out far louder than the miserable tainted ministers of his cabinet.

Foreign Minister Natwar Singh says he grew up reading Discovery Of India. He never tires of reminding the nation about non-alignment and Panchsheel. Yet to reiterate non-alignment as a mark of Nehruvianism is short-sighted. Nehru was not a formula. Nehru should not be frozen in time. If Natwar wants to keep Nehru’s moral foreign policy alive why does he not speak out more relevantly against the military junta in Myanmar, or the need for Pakistani democratisation or the clash of Muslim and Christian across Europe?

Mani Shankar Aiyar is another self-confessed Nehruvian and has published his beliefs on secular fundamentalism. But is secular fundamentalism true to the spirit of Nehru? Panditji’s first cabinet reflected a diversity of opinion, from Shyama Prasad Mookerjee of the Jana Sangh to B.R. Ambedkar. Nehru was a consensual figure, whose writings on religion reflect constant search. His recorded conversations with Maulana Azad in prison are openly uncertain, there are few thundering certitudes. Aiyar knows full well that official secularism is now under furious attack. Initiatives such as providing job reservations for Muslims (as the Andhra Pradesh government attempted to do) has been seen as yet another cynical trap to keep Muslims in a weakened fearful ghetto, to forever retard their ability to join the mainstream as equal citizens. Aiyar would be truer to his hero’s legacy if he added contemporary muscle to secularism, if he took Nehru into the next century by arming secularism with new rooted vigour. Nehru would have hated becoming an orthodoxy.

HRD Minister Arjun Singh also regards Nehru as his mentor. But Singh has failed to remain true to another precious Nehruvian ideal, namely, the free contest of ideas. Simply replacing one set of historians with another, or changing the personnel in academic institutions does not constitute making India a space where free debate can breathe and dissent can flourish. Merely vanquishing the “evil” Murli Manohar Joshi does not mean that the battle of ideas can now become a war of personal vendetta. Arjun Singh too is in a time warp and has failed to understand that the last thing Nehru would support would be a Stalinist repression of the freedom of speech or screeching “saffron!” every time someone says something he hasn’t heard before. Nehru upheld the freedom to say the “right” thing, but as he wrote to his daughter, also to say the “wrong” thing.

So as the year ends, the Congress is in power, Big Mama is calling the political shots and there are some very decent folk turning the files of this government. But where’s the idealism, the tortured human-ness, the open emotion of Prince Charming of ’47? Not there. In a frenzy of rediscovered Nehruvianism, we’re still missing Jawaharlal.