Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, men who saved India

In a recent article, Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Lahore University professor, wrote: “It is time to reflect on what makes so many Pakistanis disposed towards celebrating murder, lawlessness and intolerance ... to understand the kind of psychological conditioning that has turned us into nasty brutes”. A one-line answer is that Pakistan did not have Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru at the time of its “moth-eaten” formation, to quote Jinnah. From this response follows the corollary — that the absence of Gandhi and Nehru would have turned Indians, too, into “nasty brutes” and their country would have resembled Pakistan in its dysfunctional state. The satisfaction which Indians draw today from the country’s stable, multi-cultural democracy would not have been a feature of the polity at all because, without Gandhi’s and Nehru’s sane presence in 1947, Indians would have been constantly at each other’s throats on the grounds of religion, caste, language and any other conceivable divisive factor.

It cannot be gainsaid that more than any other person, Gandhi saved us from an apocalyptic fate. He might have been unable to prevent Partition because he had become a “back number”, as he lamented, and could not convince even those closest to him, like Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, to agree to make Jinnah the prime minister. But his inestimable contribution was to prevent the pre- and post-Partition riots from spreading and intensifying by employing his brahmastra — fasting. If the Mahatma hadn’t been there to restore rationality among the “nasty brutes”, the country would not have known any respite from communal conflagration for years. The outcome would have been something like Lebanon in the 1980s and Rwanda in the 1990s with India being torn apart in seemingly endless civil strife.

Gandhi had to pay with his life for angering those who wanted the fratricidal mindset which led to the creation of Pakistan to be India’s defining feature as well, thereby ensuring that the minorities would have no more than second-class status and live “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation [a saffron echo of the two-nation theory], claiming nothing, deserving no privileges ... not even citizen’s rights”, as Golwalkar of the RSS decreed. But Gandhi’s assassination purged the country of the curse of violent sectarianism and ensured that it would remain united, unlike Pakistan, which broke up in 1971, confirming Jinnah’s confession on his death bed that Pakistan was the “biggest blunder of my life”, as recounted in Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of a Empire.

But it wasn’t Gandhi alone who saved India. A sterling role was played by Nehru in cementing the foundations of secularism by constantly reminding his countrymen of the country’s pluralism, and ensuring that democracy would strike firm roots. He could have easily become a dictator, not least because he detected authoritarian traits in himself. Writing anonymously in the Modern Review in 1937, Nehru warned: “Caesarism is always at the door and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?” (It was left to his daughter to fancy herself in such a role, but that is another story.)

But in the mid-1940s, the warning was necessary because, for one, India was making the transition from colonial rule to a democracy — a transition that Pakistan has been unable to make in a real sense — and, for another, Ambedkar had said that “Bhakti or the path of devotion or hero worship plays a part in its [India’s] politics unequalled in magnitude” elsewhere. Continuing, he said that “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics, Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”.

If the Mahatma exorcised communalism to save India, the man who wouldn’t be Caesar rendered the same service by assuring the non-Hindi-speaking people that Hindi would not be the sole official language unless those who did not speak the language wanted it. Nehru’s broadmindedness is obvious when compared with Jinnah’s imposition of Urdu on East Pakistan, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka’s choice of Sinhalese as the island’s official language, and of Buddhism as the official religion, which sparked a long civil war.

It is sad that there isn’t adequate appreciation today of the contributions of these two men, one of whom deserves to be called “great”, in saving the country.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator