Relevance of Jawaharlal Nehru | UPSC Mains Essay Preparation PDF Download

Relevance of  Jawaharlal Nehru

structure

(1) Opening    —    What did Nehru seek to achieve?

(2) Body    —    Creator of a modern nation-state.

    —    Idea of the vastness of the canvas on which Nehru was trying to paint.

    —    Insistence on secularism as a guiding principle.

    —    Democracy in India has to be universal.

    —    Development of science and technology.

    —    Impact he made on Indian art and culture.

    —    His interest of maintaining world peace.

(3) Closing    —    He was maligned and misunderstood.

What did Nehru seek to do? What did he seek to achieve? What was his design—socio-architectural design—for India? One can answer these questions by reading his books and speeches over a period spanning nearly half a century. One can gather a great deal about his vision by reading through the various significant resolutions adopted by the Indian National Congress, beginning with its Karachi session in the thirties, followed by the Avadi session in the fifties and ending with the resolution passed by the Indian National Congress at its session in Bhubaneswar in the sixties. One can also get a clear picture of Nehru’s thought and vision, of his passion, of his design for India, reading through the Constitution of India, more specially the Directive Principles enshrined as part of our Constitution.

One can read all this and yet fail to grasp what the entire pattern was. To understand this pattern one has to step aside and look at it as a whole. Only then can one see how Nehru wove into a pattern his dreams for India.

Our society, thousands of years old, frozen in a static mould for centuries and changing little in its structure, suddenly came face to face with the complex problems of life and living. The society needed change; it was governed far too rigidly despite many protestant movements in India, by concepts of status determined by birth. It was torn by its hierarchical division. Such a society could not face the challenges of the twentieth century. Jawaharlal Nehru was aware that he could not even begin to make a dent on our social structure and on the ideas and value systems which sustained it without, at the same time, changing the economy. This, in turn, meant bringing about an industrial revolution in India in a short space of time and carrying it through without causing excessive human suffering. And finally, Nehru was engaged in the difficult task of creating, out of a religio-cultural entity called India, a modern nation-state.

Analogies must not be pushed too far. But in terms of European experience, Nehru was trying to bring about the total processes of social, economic and political transformation of India. If we recall the history of Europe, if we recall the struggles for the unification of Italy, if we recall the names of Cavour, of Garibaldi and of Mazzini, if we recall the great strivings towards German unification, if we recall Britain’s own efforts in this island for unification and the problems which it still creates, if we recall the whole gamut of problems which the Industrial Revolution created, if we recall the writings of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, of Green and of Mill, of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes, if we read all that Voltaire and Diderot said and if we put all these things together we might get some idea of the vastness of the canvas on which Jawaharlal Nehru was trying to paint. Only then can we measure his success or his failures, his relevance or irrelevance to India’s present and the future.

Jawaharlal had a picture of the total transformation of India. He was acutely aware of the severe constraints which had no parallel in history and within which he had to function. What were these constraints? From the moment of its birth, the Indian political system ensured the widest democratic rights and liberties. But the Indian economy presented a picture of a waste-land. Whereas in Europe the population as well as democratic rights and liberties grew with the growth of wealth, in India the situation was the other way round.

Yet we began well in India. The state itself was established; its Constitution was evolved with great care providing a realistic framework, and we were maintaining our unity in the midst of extreme diversity. Across our frontiers, another sate came into being and the two states started their career at the same time, but on different foundations. Nehru had the vision, the wisdom and the perception to see that a country like India with its linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversities could not survive unless its polity rested on the principle of secularism.

Without secularism as a binding force, as 

the common denominator uniting the citizens of India, we could not construct the polity of India. Nehru’s constant reiteration of it and insistence upon it are responsible for our continued survival as an entity, even if some like to call India a marvel of organised chaos.

If, despite Indian poverty, democratic institutions and democratic processes continue to survive in India and show extraordinary strength even in the midst of extraordinary difficulties through which we pass from time to time, and we are certainly passing today, it is because of Nehru’s insistence on secularism as a guiding principle, not merely of state policy but of our thought processes and behaviour patterns.

The second important thing which Nehru grasped was that democracy in India has to be universal. It could not be restricted; it could not be qualified by some elitist concept on the facile assumption that only those who are educated are capable of exercising the franchise. In fact, the experience of our elections during these twentyfive years has shown that there is no obvious correlation between political wisdom and formal education. And from time to time, the Indian electorate has shown that despite poverty and deprivation, despite a lack of formal education, it can act with remarkable wisdom in times of distress, in times of crisis, and more particularly, in recent times when the people of India have been experiencing extreme hardship and turmoil.

And so, Nehru set his face against any doctrine of elitism in limiting or restricting Indian democracy.

Nehru saw clearly that if we were to span the centuries of backwardness the sovereign remedy lay in a proper application and development of science and technology in India and in making the correct choice of a mix of technologies appropriate of our country.

To develop science is not easy. To grow it in the socio-cultural environment of a traditional India is even more difficult.

Nehru was aware of these difficulties. He, therefore, was never tired of speaking in his own simple way about the scientific temper or of fighting irrationality. Those of us, whether in government or outside, who had to cope with irrationality and with theological moulds of thinking, had the satisfaction of knowing that in Jawaharlal Nehru we had a final court of appeal. We were never disappointed.

Thus secularism, rationality and a concern for the growth of science and technology imparted to an ancient India a new style of living and thinking. Nehru added to it the concept of planning. Whatever may have been the pitfalls of Indian planning, and there have been many, planning itself has so far endured. If we in India want to overcome our problems, it is only through the instrumentality of planning. Up and down the country, talking in simple language to millions upon millions of our people, Nehru made planning and the concept of planning understandable, and he made secularism and democracy look part of India’s heritage. And though planning has been attacked, both from the Right and from the Left, the broad fact remains that it is now the well established means and mechanism for a total transformation of India.

To assess the continuing relevance of Jawaharlal Nehru, one has not merely to look into what he thought and did in the field of political structuring and the creation of a national state in India, or to his contribution towards national integration, economic development and the growth of science and technology, but also to see the impact he made on Indian art and culture. About this one hears so little.

In this field Jawaharlal Nehru made a distinctive personal contribution. The picture of arts and culture of India on the eve of independence was a desolate one. Nehru realised, to utter a cliche, that man does not live by bread alone, though bread is essential especially in a country like ours. He took a personal interest in stimulating the handicrafts of India. Their variety, richness, beauty and quality can be traced to Nehru’s personal encouragement to a wide variety of men and women who are engaged in reviving these dying crafts.

The seventeen-year period of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Prime Ministership is too small a segment of time for any assessment. Anyone with the briefest acquaintance with history knows that the tasks which he set out to perform were extraordinarily difficult. These tasks had taken other countries centuries to complete.

As he reminded himself on the eve of his death, he had “many promises to keep and miles to go” before he slept; it was not as if he was not aware of what still needed to be done. It was not as if he was unaware that in order to carry out the transformation of our society one needed a new instrumentality. But he was brought up prior to independence to regard maintenance of unity in the midst of extreme diversity so paramount that he felt that the Congress party needed to be changed only with the great care. This is where he probably faltered most.

When one contemplates the entire panorama of history after the Second World War, one cannot fail to be struck by the durability of democracy in India as against its destruction in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is a measure of the continuing relevance not only of Nehru’s vision but of the work he did during seventeen years as Prime Minister.

Soon after our independence, we found the world divided and tortured by the Cold War, by a conflict of ideologies. Nehru rightly thought that the best thing for India was to keep out of it and to be non-aligned. But non-alignment was not the essence and substance of India’s foreign policy. Non-alignment is not, in a Kantian sense, a thing in itself. Non-alignment was the means, at a particular time and in a particular place, to advance, to promote and to protect not just India’s interests. For, Nehru interpreted India’s interests in a manner which did not conflict with the interest of maintaining world peace.

And this idea of maintaining world peace was not only a moral imperative. Nehru saw very clearly that in the world as it is constituted today, and as it emerged immediately after the Second World War, war had ceased to be an instrument of policy, that the age of Baron von Clausewitz was over, that one could no longer talk of war being the continuation of politics by other means. He saw that modern technology had made nonsense of this concept, that even the structuring of a system of a balance of power was impossible. For, after all, the sanction behind any balance of power is war. So you come back to the fact that in the world of nuclear armament war cannot achieve anything except annihilation of the contestants.

Nehru was maligned and misunderstood, more especially in 1952, during the period when Dulles appeared in the scene. But Nehru persisted. If today there is a feeling of detente, even if it is merely interpreted as an exercise in crisis management; if there is a degree of normalisation of relations; if one is talking more of other problems than in the days of the Cold War, then I think we can rejoice in the fact that India, through Jawaharlal Nehru, made some little contribution of this relaxation and the development of something like peaceful coexistence. However, it would be unwise to think that detente has necessarily come to stay as a durable feature of international life. One has still to work hard to make it certain.