Dreamer, Doer

Nehru set the model for prime ministerial leadership: nation's motivator, inspirer, preacher, task-master, chief priest, strategist, foreign policy expert, etc. We have one billion reasons to thank Nehru

Special to Hardnews 

Harish Khare Delhi

More than two generations of Indians, perhaps the majority of all Indian alive, think of Jawaharlal Nehru only as a historical figure - as the correct answer to the question: Who was India's first prime minister, or as someone after whom a famous university or a planetarium is named. This cultivated ignorance reflects badly on us, and perhaps explains the absence of grace and good manners in our current public servants.

Since we are fast becoming a historical in our political and intellectual discourse, Nehruvian ideas and values have come under challenge from Rightwing ideologues; this challenge has acquired a kind of fashionable acceptability because his family insists on retaining its controversial centrality in the political arena.

Jawaharlal Nehru was - and is - much more than the doings of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Let us catalogue a few reasons why. Today we take the Indian unity and a robust democracy as givens. For that we need to say a billion thanks to Nehru. If we survive as a democratic nation it is because, as our first prime minister, he was reasonably successful in undertaking the most arduous and historically unprecedented task of manufacturing the modern Indian State out of a motley collection of principalities, a depleted colonial administration, a highly stratified social order, and a poor and backward economy. Nehru was among the first nationalist leaders to think of India in terms of a modern State, as a governing arrangement in which the relationship between the ruler and the ruled was to be defined not by some divine rights, nor based on the feudal hereditary principle, but was to be firmly anchored in the principles of representation and majority rule. Governance is nothing but authoritative rule-making and rule-enforcement. At the time of Independence, India was relatively stranger to the idea of democratically-sanctioned governance. Nehru conceptualised and then operationalised a State system, responsive to the Indian people and their aspirations.

Nehru was also the first congressman to understand the need to fashion a foreign policy, define the principles of India's relationships with the external world. It was only natural that he should be his own foreign minister, chiseling outa sophisticated foreign service corps. Successive foreign ministers have only tinkered with the diplomatic accoutrements left behind by him.

After independence Jawaharlal Nehru infused in our collective consciousness the notion of national pride and autonomy, the idea that India has its own civilisational uniqueness and that we could not become any foreign power's camp-follower; it is this Nehurvian notion of strategic autonomy that, for example, is now sought to be asserted - differently by the Right and the Left - in the on-going debate about India's nuclear engagement with the United States.

Nehru's most significant achievement was to inspire and produce a body of individuals and ideas that could collectively be called a national elite; among these men and womenhe infused a sense of joy at the prospect of building a new India; he shoe-hornedromantic notions about possibility of progress, prosperity, potential and power of India into this elite's thought processes. His letters to the chief ministers, for example, were wonderful, systemic effort to inform, educate and inspire colleagues, about developments at home and abroad.