08-16-2004, 09:42 PM
Nehru flawed, not bigoted
By Chandan Mitra
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->He towered over all leaders of modern India, and even as certain archaic economic ideas of Mahatma Gandhi steadily lost relevance, Nehru's beliefs continued to be regarded as inviolable. Indira Gandhi discarded many liberal facets of her father's ideas, but none dared question the fundamentals of the Nehruvian ideal. The few that did remained on the fringe: Having failed to combat him, Communists adopted him, while the Jana Sangh on the right never gained sufficient acceptability to be considered mainstream.
Today, Nehru is no longer sacrosanct. His economic philosophy is in ruins. The Sindri fertiliser factory, at whose inauguration he coined the famous phrase "temples of modern India" has closed and the false gods of socialism are starving within many such shrines.
External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh may continue to recommend a crash course in Nehruana for IFS officials, but his prospective students are only likely to snigger at the thought. Non-alignment has been given a decent enough burial beneath the Berlin Wall rubble and the movement India's first Prime Minister helped found at Bandung has been reduced to a talking shop.
Nehru's neighbourhood policy had collapsed within his lifetime and many say it was the heartbreak caused by China that heralded his demise. He was forced to reverse his own Kashmir policy in 1953, soon after Jana Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mookerjee died in Sheikh Abdullah's prison. Shortly thereafter the Sheikh himself became a sarkari mehmaan. It is said that on the eve of his death, Nehru wanted to reach out to Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan to propose a bizarre, shared sovereignty scheme for Kashmir using the Sheikh as mediator.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
By Chandan Mitra
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->He towered over all leaders of modern India, and even as certain archaic economic ideas of Mahatma Gandhi steadily lost relevance, Nehru's beliefs continued to be regarded as inviolable. Indira Gandhi discarded many liberal facets of her father's ideas, but none dared question the fundamentals of the Nehruvian ideal. The few that did remained on the fringe: Having failed to combat him, Communists adopted him, while the Jana Sangh on the right never gained sufficient acceptability to be considered mainstream.
Today, Nehru is no longer sacrosanct. His economic philosophy is in ruins. The Sindri fertiliser factory, at whose inauguration he coined the famous phrase "temples of modern India" has closed and the false gods of socialism are starving within many such shrines.
External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh may continue to recommend a crash course in Nehruana for IFS officials, but his prospective students are only likely to snigger at the thought. Non-alignment has been given a decent enough burial beneath the Berlin Wall rubble and the movement India's first Prime Minister helped found at Bandung has been reduced to a talking shop.
Nehru's neighbourhood policy had collapsed within his lifetime and many say it was the heartbreak caused by China that heralded his demise. He was forced to reverse his own Kashmir policy in 1953, soon after Jana Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mookerjee died in Sheikh Abdullah's prison. Shortly thereafter the Sheikh himself became a sarkari mehmaan. It is said that on the eve of his death, Nehru wanted to reach out to Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan to propose a bizarre, shared sovereignty scheme for Kashmir using the Sheikh as mediator.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->