11-18-2006, 09:37 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Can we forgive him? </b>
Pioneer.com
Arvind Lavakare
Nehru's legacy stands discarded, but India is still suffering the damage he wreaked
<b>He was rich, Cambridge-educated </b>and one who had spent 3,262 days in jail for India's freedom. It would, therefore, have been the world's biggest oddity if, after leading the one-party Government of a newly liberated country for 17 continuous years, Jawaharlal Nehru did not leave behind some memorable imprints.
<b>His creation of institutions for higher learning in management, technology, medicine and nuclear research constitute one such inheritance.</b>
But<b> Prime Minister Nehru was also a confused man who, moreover, was arrogant enough to proclaim that he was "the last Englishman to rule India." </b>Add the unquestioned adulation he received from millions of long-subjugated people who saw him as the heir of Mahatma Gandhi and you have the essence of why his legacy turned out to be a near calamity.
As veteran journalist, the late Janardan Thakur, summed it in his book Prime Ministers, (1999), "Most of the evils that have corroded India in the last 50 years had their beginnings during the Nehru Raj."
Space is inadequate to elaborate Thakur's indictment. But let's capsulise Prime Minister Nehru's performance on this bullet list of his manifesto:
Â
<i>Democracy, freedom, liberty for the people
Guarantee of free, compulsory primary education to all of India's children
Passionate pursuit of securing the rights of women and the traditionally disadvantaged castes
A socialistic society based on the public sector commanding the heights of the economy.
Secularism that divested the state from religion so as to promote communal harmony, national integration and a scientific temper
A foreign policy of non-alignment whereby India would not take sides with one of the two blocs of the prevalent Cold War.</i>
Considering the wretched state in which colonial rule had left us, the second and third items on the above menu were admittedly beyond delivery by one man in one generation. But Nehru erred in believing that the behemoth state would do the job through laws and bureaucrats, when, instead he should have involved proven voluntary organisations in the tasks. The Ramakrishna Mission, for instance, could have been entrusted to teach the three 'R's to India's poor. This over-dependence on the state as the sole progenitor of the nation's all-round development was the antithesis of Nehru's espousal of democracy as a way of life just as it was the symbol of his economic socialism. Just how did he fare on those two items of his menu?
<b>Democracy for Nehru was largely a matter confined to the Parliament and addressing large rallies</b>. He overlooked the democratic spirit when it came to consulting Cabinet colleagues on grave national issues. <b>His partisan and unconstitutional means to oust the first democratically elected Communist Government of Kerala in 1959 </b>was described by Hiren Mukherjee, Communist MP, as "the striptease of democracy". The list of people detained without trial and without a charge against them was often long in his time.
<b>In October 1947, he refused permission to Lt-General Thimayya's plea to beat back the Pakistani tribesmen who had invaded Kashmir, although Vallabhbhai Patel supported Thimayya. Had Nehru given that permission, there would have been no Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir</b>. He also referred the Kashmir issue to the UN against the wishes of Gandhi, just as he later offered plebiscite in Kashmir on All-India Radio without his Deputy PM's knowledge. <b>He included Article 370 in the Constitution although Ambedkar and Congress leaders were against it</b>. At a Cabinet meeting prior to the first of the six rounds of peace talks with Pakistan held between December 1962 and May 1963, Nehru said that we were after drawing a new international line in Kashmir. <b>When someone asked "What about sovereignty?" Nehru said he did not understand the question - sovereignty over what? He truly has been the villain of the 'K' problem which has so debilitated our nation.</b>
<b>Nehru's economic socialism through public sector monopoly, licencing and controls was a disaster. For years together, product shortages were abnormally high, the country's GDP growth rate was abysmally low.</b> It was proof that though Nehru wrote a book bearing that title, he had never discovered India's entrepreneurial instinct.
A word about corruption in Nehru's time. He once declared, <b>"I will hang every black marketeer from the nearest tree."</b> Far from doing that, the big thugs were seen as honoured guests at Government functions.<b> And not many know that the first voluntary disclosure scheme came in the Nehru Raj when only one-third of the black money was confiscated and the rest was overnight converted into white. That licence to corruption is now ingrained in all affairs of our state</b>. <!--emo&:o--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ohmy.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Next, Nehru's foreign policy of non-alignment. It reflected his naivety regarding the benefits of strategic foreign alliances and embroiled him in international fora at a time when he should have expended every available second on burning domestic issues. His quixotic chase of world peace allied with his aversion to military matters led to a child-like pursuit of the Hindi-Chini bhai bhai mirage that ultimately shattered him body and soul after the ill-equipped Indian Army's shameful defeat in the 1962 war against China. Nehru it was who sowed the seed of today's soft Indian state.
Lastly, there's Nehru's secularism that thought religion would kill India. In his book Outside The Archives, YS Gundevia, Nehru's last Foreign Secretary, records that at an informal meeting with several senior civil servants, Nehru declared, twice, "The real danger to India was not communism but the Hindu right-wing communalism."
<b>That belief was perhaps why Nehru brought his radical Hindu Code Bill, 1956, thereby rejecting the Constitutional mandate of a Uniform Civil Code, and letting the Muslims continue with their misogynistic tenets. Indeed, he nurtured the fissiparous concept of minorityism.</b> By forgetting that <b>it was the religious fervour of the Muslim League and its followers that had vivisected Hindustan and by "punishing" the Hindus with legislation that the country's President himself didn't approve, Nehru became the first "pseudo-secularist" of free India and the first "appeaser" of its Muslims. That tribe has now mushroomed</b>.
<b>Clearly, "socialism" is the only Nehruvian ill that we have been rid of even four decades after the man passed away. How much more penance is demanded before we can forget him and, maybe, also forgive him?</b>
(The writer is a Mumbai-based commentator)
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Pioneer.com
Arvind Lavakare
Nehru's legacy stands discarded, but India is still suffering the damage he wreaked
<b>He was rich, Cambridge-educated </b>and one who had spent 3,262 days in jail for India's freedom. It would, therefore, have been the world's biggest oddity if, after leading the one-party Government of a newly liberated country for 17 continuous years, Jawaharlal Nehru did not leave behind some memorable imprints.
<b>His creation of institutions for higher learning in management, technology, medicine and nuclear research constitute one such inheritance.</b>
But<b> Prime Minister Nehru was also a confused man who, moreover, was arrogant enough to proclaim that he was "the last Englishman to rule India." </b>Add the unquestioned adulation he received from millions of long-subjugated people who saw him as the heir of Mahatma Gandhi and you have the essence of why his legacy turned out to be a near calamity.
As veteran journalist, the late Janardan Thakur, summed it in his book Prime Ministers, (1999), "Most of the evils that have corroded India in the last 50 years had their beginnings during the Nehru Raj."
Space is inadequate to elaborate Thakur's indictment. But let's capsulise Prime Minister Nehru's performance on this bullet list of his manifesto:
Â
<i>Democracy, freedom, liberty for the people
Guarantee of free, compulsory primary education to all of India's children
Passionate pursuit of securing the rights of women and the traditionally disadvantaged castes
A socialistic society based on the public sector commanding the heights of the economy.
Secularism that divested the state from religion so as to promote communal harmony, national integration and a scientific temper
A foreign policy of non-alignment whereby India would not take sides with one of the two blocs of the prevalent Cold War.</i>
Considering the wretched state in which colonial rule had left us, the second and third items on the above menu were admittedly beyond delivery by one man in one generation. But Nehru erred in believing that the behemoth state would do the job through laws and bureaucrats, when, instead he should have involved proven voluntary organisations in the tasks. The Ramakrishna Mission, for instance, could have been entrusted to teach the three 'R's to India's poor. This over-dependence on the state as the sole progenitor of the nation's all-round development was the antithesis of Nehru's espousal of democracy as a way of life just as it was the symbol of his economic socialism. Just how did he fare on those two items of his menu?
<b>Democracy for Nehru was largely a matter confined to the Parliament and addressing large rallies</b>. He overlooked the democratic spirit when it came to consulting Cabinet colleagues on grave national issues. <b>His partisan and unconstitutional means to oust the first democratically elected Communist Government of Kerala in 1959 </b>was described by Hiren Mukherjee, Communist MP, as "the striptease of democracy". The list of people detained without trial and without a charge against them was often long in his time.
<b>In October 1947, he refused permission to Lt-General Thimayya's plea to beat back the Pakistani tribesmen who had invaded Kashmir, although Vallabhbhai Patel supported Thimayya. Had Nehru given that permission, there would have been no Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir</b>. He also referred the Kashmir issue to the UN against the wishes of Gandhi, just as he later offered plebiscite in Kashmir on All-India Radio without his Deputy PM's knowledge. <b>He included Article 370 in the Constitution although Ambedkar and Congress leaders were against it</b>. At a Cabinet meeting prior to the first of the six rounds of peace talks with Pakistan held between December 1962 and May 1963, Nehru said that we were after drawing a new international line in Kashmir. <b>When someone asked "What about sovereignty?" Nehru said he did not understand the question - sovereignty over what? He truly has been the villain of the 'K' problem which has so debilitated our nation.</b>
<b>Nehru's economic socialism through public sector monopoly, licencing and controls was a disaster. For years together, product shortages were abnormally high, the country's GDP growth rate was abysmally low.</b> It was proof that though Nehru wrote a book bearing that title, he had never discovered India's entrepreneurial instinct.
A word about corruption in Nehru's time. He once declared, <b>"I will hang every black marketeer from the nearest tree."</b> Far from doing that, the big thugs were seen as honoured guests at Government functions.<b> And not many know that the first voluntary disclosure scheme came in the Nehru Raj when only one-third of the black money was confiscated and the rest was overnight converted into white. That licence to corruption is now ingrained in all affairs of our state</b>. <!--emo&:o--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ohmy.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Next, Nehru's foreign policy of non-alignment. It reflected his naivety regarding the benefits of strategic foreign alliances and embroiled him in international fora at a time when he should have expended every available second on burning domestic issues. His quixotic chase of world peace allied with his aversion to military matters led to a child-like pursuit of the Hindi-Chini bhai bhai mirage that ultimately shattered him body and soul after the ill-equipped Indian Army's shameful defeat in the 1962 war against China. Nehru it was who sowed the seed of today's soft Indian state.
Lastly, there's Nehru's secularism that thought religion would kill India. In his book Outside The Archives, YS Gundevia, Nehru's last Foreign Secretary, records that at an informal meeting with several senior civil servants, Nehru declared, twice, "The real danger to India was not communism but the Hindu right-wing communalism."
<b>That belief was perhaps why Nehru brought his radical Hindu Code Bill, 1956, thereby rejecting the Constitutional mandate of a Uniform Civil Code, and letting the Muslims continue with their misogynistic tenets. Indeed, he nurtured the fissiparous concept of minorityism.</b> By forgetting that <b>it was the religious fervour of the Muslim League and its followers that had vivisected Hindustan and by "punishing" the Hindus with legislation that the country's President himself didn't approve, Nehru became the first "pseudo-secularist" of free India and the first "appeaser" of its Muslims. That tribe has now mushroomed</b>.
<b>Clearly, "socialism" is the only Nehruvian ill that we have been rid of even four decades after the man passed away. How much more penance is demanded before we can forget him and, maybe, also forgive him?</b>
(The writer is a Mumbai-based commentator)
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