Nehru: Politics of diversity

It is difficult to write anything on Nehru today, and interrogate his idea of India without the charge of sounding partisan: Any questioning of certain elements of this idea, such as the conceptions of history, modernity, secularism, locus and axis power, equality of citizenship, nationalism, parliamentary democracy, development and inter-state relations will likely subject one to the charge of being a fellow-traveller of Hindutva. On the other hand, proponents of the latter perspective would wish to define India by drawing resources from their ideological baggage, but it is difficult to tease out concrete policy measures from this baggage for a long time to come.

They will employ a critique of Nehru to beat their own drums rather than learn from it to craft a different India. Such articulate partisanship has little place for a critical retrieval of Nehru, particularly on the symbolic occasion of his 125th birth anniversary. Nevertheless, I wish to focus a little on one facet of India, which this country can ill-afford not to make central to the idea of India, ie, the role and future of India’s deep diversities, within a united India, and an increasingly closing world.

How do we understand the politics of difference? India and, increasingly so, many societies in the world are composed of large social groups who regard themselves as closely knit — making them distinct from others, and this difference is central to their self-understanding. Political practices that value such understanding take into account the distinct ways of life, beliefs, values and institutions, and everyday practices that jostle in the public sphere of democratic societies.

Those who consider themselves as members of such groups would like to pursue their own futures by taking their belonging to these groups into account. Such differences form and re-form themselves, although sometimes those who consider themselves as guardians of these groups wish to arrest these processes by claiming some of their elements as foundational and uncompromising. However, such inner tensions and conflicts within groups cannot trump their desire to find a place for themselves as different in the political processes and institutions of a society. However, the challenge of differences could be varied to different societies. 

In India, even in communities that have retained much of their integrity as in the North-East, what we find are fragments of ways of life, which are often construed by their adherents as comprehensive but cannot be understood without implicating them within a larger context. Being fragments, they necessarily need a wider whole, to make them viable, and even to flourish. At times the binaries that these fragments set up by othering, through the language of ‘tu tu, mein mein’, result in constructing walls across differences. Sometimes these stances of othering take recourse to a language of sovereignty and national self-determination, on the one hand, and sometimes to an expansive sphere of minority claims etc.

How did Nehru approach the issue of difference? There are some who have argued that Nehru proposed, and worked towards a liberal democratic order by informing it with diversity, and such diversity found a place in the experiment of India’s constitutional democracy. But the mantra of ‘unity in diversity’, that came to be popularised by the ideology of the State in India, is very vague and obtuse. How do we negotiate, unity across diversity or vice-versa? What happens if a difference, or element of diversity refuses to fall in line with the unity that is proposed? Can the State compel the dissident to fall in line? If it does, what happens to difference, around which one strives to form meaningful and significant ways of life? Any assault on difference, will undermine the basis that makes me what I am.  But, what happens to equality of citizenship, if differences are considered central? We have many a conflict around issues of customary law, territorial jurisdictions, uniform civil code, public employment policies, preferential considerations etc that highlight this tension.

While Nehru was prepared to discuss ‘difference’ in the mode of what he described as, ‘parlour politics’, when it came to designing institutions and politics, I am afraid, he decisively took the side of unity. Fortunately, the Partition provided a justification to his stance! Nehru did little to imbue his central pursuits with difference. Most of the time, he saw these expressions as distractions from worthy and worthwhile concerns and issues. At times he gave way to organise the myriad diversities in India through the federal arrangements, a mode of institutional politics that was hardly equipped to handle the several identities that jostled in the concerned regions.

The minority rights while trying to reach out to religious and linguistic minorities treated them as blocs, rather than make space for them to argue their distinct case in the public domain.

Nehru’s approach to difference and the politics that it called for is not very different from that of Hindutva, which, in the name of a thickly shared national bond, disparages expressions of differences. The partisans of the respective positions, however, want us to believe that it is foundational. Nehru, however, was sensitive to popular expressions of dissent, and not necessarily the reasons for the same. The big challenge that Nehru did not face is how to make a difference-imbued polity viable, allowing everyone equal participation in the pursuits of the polity. Nehru, of course had plenty of grace, cultivation and communicative abilities to drive differences to the periphery.

Other countries did not confront this problem of difference quite centrally for long, but this issue found an important place in the Indian national movement and the discourse that it spawned. It had palpable implications for the organisation of the economy and the cultural domain. India would have been at a defining edge today on this issue, when several countries are wrestling to engage with it as their most important concern, if Nehru had considered it more seriously. Nehru is credited by defenders, as building a strong State, and institutions of independent India which have enabled it to weather many a storm. He, undoubtedly deserves, credit for this. But eventually we need to ask the question, what is the basis of the strength of this State, and whether the institutions are inclusive and enabling to the vast diversity that constitutes this country? 

The author teaches Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University