BJP’s anti-Nehru animus

Congress has moved away from Jawaharlal Nehru and his legacy in a decisive manner but without the sound of the breaking of the silken ideological links being heard. His successors, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi made drastic changes in the Nehruvian paradigm as effectively as Nehru himself jettisoned with a light touch Gandhian politics and economics while remaining a sentimental loyalist to the memory, if not the legacy, of the Father of the Nation. Today members of the Congress have literally no clue about Nehru the man, the romantic cosmopolitan who loved India ardently without for a moment being the exclusionary nationalist, something that even Indira Gandhi could not pull off. Her nationalist fervour had its primordial tones, and that is why she is loved more in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) than in the Congress. He was a gentleman liberal who would not bother to stand up for liberal tenets, and to top it all he was a faux socialist, who flaunted his left radicalism to snub his conservative colleagues in the Congress but he never became  a radical himself.

The BJP is however struck with Nehru in its gullet as it were. It has managed to appropriate many of the Congress icons, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Indira, Patel and Shastri. It did not want to adopt Nehru. He was a snob and the BJP leaders, who are natural conservatives, were not conversant with the parlour game of social and intellectual snobbery. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was an exception in the party. He placed himself without too much effort or agony in the Nehru mould though without Nehru’s polish and flair. The others in the BJP have always been on the hunt for someone who could rival Nehru, and some of the anti-Nehruvians zeroed in on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Qaid-E-Azam, the sophisticated Western liberal who seemed to have better secular credentials than even Nehru. LK Advani and Jaswant Singh turned to Jinnah as the counter-Nehru figure. Of course, in this quest for someone who could eclipse the Nehru aura, Advani and Singh lost favour with the hard core, small minded ideologues in the party and in the RSS. 

The next generation of BJP leaders led by Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi, Rajnath Singh, and to an extent even Murli Manohar Joshi, are engaged in this intellectual and cultural battle with the ghost of Nehruvianism. At the moment, a mellow Joshi is unlikely to reject Nehru as vehemently as he would have done some years ago. Sushma Swaraj will go the Vajpayee way and absorb the Nehru legacy without much ado. She is pragmatic and with fewer intellectual inhibitions and prejudices than the rest in the party. The others find it intellectually humiliating to accept the Nehru way. So the attack on Nehru continues and it comes from the new leaders.

Modi, Rajnath Singh, Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad are confident that they can fight the Nehru legacy without looking for an alternative icon. Modi reaches back to Gandhi and Patel, Rajnath Singh looks to Swami Vivekananda and surprisingly to Rabindranath Tagore. Jayaprakash Narayan hovers on the intellectual horizon of Prasad and his own legal background gives him the liberal view of rights and equality. As a matter of fact, Prasad seems to have found his own liberal anchor in the principles of jurisprudence. 

Jaitley is digging his heels in and trying to mount a challenge of his own. Speaking at the party’s national council meeting in Delhi in March, 2013, Jaitley stepped out and said that he did not agree with the Western label of Hindu rate of growth for the tardy economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s, and that it was really a Nehru rate of growth. Jaitley had squarely placed himself in the anti-socialism, anti-planning, anti-state control of the economy camp, and consequently became the champion of a free market economy. He has also adopted the Reagan tenet of the virtue of lower taxes and its tonic effect on everybody. It is not clear whether Jaitley will go the whole length required of a free market advocate. He is aware of the Indian situation where poverty is an overwhelming reality and market is not the panacea it might appear to be. Jaitley is also a conservative when it comes to the question of globalisation and its implications in the economic if not in the cultural sphere.  For example, he is convinced that foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail would be bad for India. 

Modi, the Prime Minister, is making himself at home on the international front on his own terms. He is socially at ease with the world leaders. And he is not hesitant to project Indian nationalism and he is in sync with the mood in the world. Nationalism is indeed the flavour of the moment in the world. But the liminal need of the BJP leaders to go past Nehru remains as overpowering as ever. The prime minister’s announcement on Independence Day of doing away with the Planning Commission was not merely an innocent gesture towards an innovative future. It was a rather unsubtle and aggressive flourish against a Nehruvian idea without referring to Nehru. 

The BJP is still angry with Nehru or with what Nehru is supposed to have stood for. Nehru did not believe in state socialism nor in licence permit quota raj. His notions of socialism are too democratic. He was also a believer in scientific humanism which is different from blinkered technological development. He is a proud Indian who dreamed of internationalism. And he inherited these civilisational values from his time in Harrow and Cambridge, and from his brush with theosophy with his pre-school tutor Brooks and his Urdu teacher Maulvi Mubarak Ali. And Nehru was only too willing to believe that others who did not go to Harrow and Cambridge could believe in the same values he did. This was the reason for his deep friendship with Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Maulana Azad. And he was able to work with Gandhi and Patel, with whom he did not agree, because that was what he learned from his education. The only way that the BJP can make peace with Nehru is to accept him and appreciate his worldview without necessarily accepting it.  

The author is editorial consultant with dna