The Disputed Legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru

It is an integral aspect of what I shall call here 'intellectual honesty' that even when one disagrees with the views and actions of a certain individual, one is nevertheless willing to accept that s/he has made some lasting contributions, whether these are intellectual, social, political, economic, or literary. This point is related to the set of discussions that revolves around the 'disputed legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru' in various circles of contemporary Indian society. I shall not here come up with yet another list of 'what Nehru did', or 'what Nehru could have done', or 'what Nehru should have done'; several such lists have been doing the rounds since at least 1964. Briefly, Nehru has had his detractors from the left who claim, in effect, that he was not western enough (read Marxist); from the right who complain that he was, in fact, much too western; and from the centre who say that Nehru did not know where he really stood. (Given all this, it is quite a miracle how many of his contemporaries did consider Nehru to be a man of such great standing.)

What is forgotten in all such debates is a simple fact, which is all the more crucial because it is so easily overlooked. It was Nehru himself who made it possible for those who came after him to launch such criticisms against him. This he did by laying the foundations of a nation-state whose central features would be the existence of a multi-party system, a basic freedom of the press, and the possibility of engaging in mutual criticisms of one another's socio-political opinions. This comes out all the more clearly when we note that several post-colonial nations in the so-called Third World have often veered dangerously close to various forms of totalitarianisms, absolutisms, and dictatorships. Therefore, the point here is not how fore-sighted Nehru was in his socio-economic policies (I am not economist enough to comment on such matters), but that it was Nehru who ensured that this very criticism of his own policies would be possible within the Indian nation.

Therefore, the next time one launches into a diatribe against Nehru (irrespective of whether one leans towards the right, towards the left, or rests at the centre, or is just having a bad day and needs someone to shout at), one should remember that this very freedom to do so is part of Nehru's legacy to India. It is a gift that we Indians almost take for granted nowadays : this is precisely why it is so valuable to us, this gift of being allowed to freely criticise one another's socio-economic and socio-cultural views without any threat or intervention from any Big Brother figures, for many things that are valuable to us in life are specificially those ones that we have learnt to take for granted.