If we can venerate Gandhi without handing our economy over to a charkha, why can’t we admire Nehru without becoming socialists?

Jawaharlal’s memory is best served by separating Nehru from Nehruvian. Nehru is synonymous with inspirational vision, a scientific temperament that sought to lift Indians from prejudice and superstition, and unflinching commitment to democracy through a decade when its nuances were a work-in-progress. He nurtured and protected institutions that interlinked freedom of citizen and state. He remains a foundational pillar of modern India.

Nehruvian is the broth of policy, statecraft and stagecraft — it was widely noted that Jawaharlal also ruled via the microphone — which India’s PM used to steer our country during its first 16 years of independence.

Failed Theories: Economic…

Gandhi’s ideas, incubated initially through Leo Tolstoy, but shaped more broadly by the tactical compulsions of his magnificent challenge to British rule, were relevant to the environment in which he awakened Indians from the long slumber of fear and depression. Nehru’s economic philosophy, influenced by the Soviet left but adroitly distant from the dictatorial trap of Communism, seemed credible in 1950 from the perspective of promise. They look far less impressive on the balance sheet of delivery.

Nehru’s governing compass was firmly set on two lodestars. He wanted a state-driven or state-owned industrial base navigated by a Planning Commission. Abroad, he offered non-alignment, which sought world peace by expanding its meaning into the free range of non-viability. That, perhaps, is the best that can be said for a non-doctrine. Shaken by the colossal barbarity of the 1940s, Nehru believed that the desire for peace would be so overwhelming among postcolonial nations that they would abort any impulse towards war over regional disputes.

…and Geopolitical

Paradoxically, India paid the heaviest price for such strategic naïveté. Nehru backed defence minister Krishna Menon’s thesis that military spending was a diversion of resources from welfare investment. Between them, Nehru and Menon weakened Asia’s most powerful fighting force, the Indian Army, to the point where it was under-armed and under-clothed for a war in the Himalayas.

The trauma of military defeat in 1962 broke Nehru: he could not long survive in the shards of a shattered dream. Not a single non-aligned country came to India’s aid in this hour of crisis. America, a declared villain of the non-alignment movement, did. Worse, when Ayub Khan, riding his delusions, attacked India in 1965, some of the biggest stars of non-alignment gave Pakistan military aid.

Nehru’s distrust of capitalism prevented the rise of an innovative and competitive private sector. In theory, Nehru did not want India’s wealth to be shared between the traditional inheritance sector and a new acquisitive class. He also shared the Marxist notion that capitalism, driven by multinationals, was an engine of neo-colonisation. What he could not imagine is that the dead hand of the state would prove worse than either.

By the 1960s, both socialism and peace were in tatters. The Indian economy moved from the virility of hope to floundering collapse. Militant trade unions, revved by infantile domestic versions of Marxism, ravaged what remained of the private sector’s confidence in a highly developed state like West Bengal, with consequences that still keep a hugely progressive region in regression.

Mistake as a Lesson

Congress socialism, under Indira Gandhi, in thrall to Nehruvian precepts, expanded the havoc by extending nationalisation. Such was the intellectual inertia that the ‘politically correct’ left would not permit any correction in course. In 1975, imprisoned in a political and economic catastrophe, Indira Gandhi even abandoned her father’s democratic legacy by imposing Emergency. But she could not stop milking socialism for votes. It was cynical in the extreme.

Nehru was neither an ostrich nor a Moses. He did not ever suggest that he had pronounced the 10 commandments for the economy. He had the clarity to recognise a mistake. He did not place his ideas above the needs of his country. He accepted America’s military help in 1962. He would have accepted the need for a fresh economic policy if he had lived into the 1970s.

If he had been present in the current Parliament, he would have warmly applauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s declaration that the age of poverty alleviation was over and the era of poverty elimination had begun. Nehru dreamt of the rise of Asia ever since, as a schoolchild in Harrow, he wrote to his father Motilal expressing delight in Japan’s naval victory over Russia in 1905. It was the first time an European power had been defeated by an Asian country in the modern era.

Nothing would have pleased Nehru more than the thought that the 21st century belonged to Asia. Let us remember him as he would have liked to be remembered, and not as a tool in that mirage called nostalgia manipulation.

The writer is national spokesperson, BJP

For a counterview, read Mint’s ‘The economics of Jawaharlal Nehru’ at goo.gl/JlM5W0