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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Essay |
A Dangling Conversation
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| The long-forgotten debate between Nehru and JP Narayan is a painful reminder of what’s missing in our politics today |
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Published : 1 November 2010 |
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ALL PHOTOS FROM DELHI PRESS ARCHIVE |
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| Former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s office at his former
residence in Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi.
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O MODERN STATESMAN was as much of a thinking politician
as Jawaharlal Nehru. Like Winston Churchill, Nehru had a
deep interest in history; unlike Churchill, he also had an interest
in political ideas and ideologies. In 1958, the British writer
EM Forster imagined Voltaire being reborn, and composing a
letter on the fate of humankind. But the philosopher, |
Forster imagined, would not know whom to address, since there was now “not a single
crowned head who would wish to receive a letter from him.” Scanning the world,
Forster (and Voltaire) saw only amiable but poorly read monarchs (such as Queen
Elizabeth II, who was “so charming, so estimable, but no philosopher”; so unlike
Frederick of Prussia or even Catherine of Russia, “ both Greats”). The rulers in
uniform were as philistine as those who sat on thrones; Voltaire could scarcely
bring himself to write to living generals such as Ayub Khan of Pakistan or Tito
of Yugoslavia. Forster, speaking through Voltaire, quickly reached the conclusion
that “only one head of a state would welcome a letter from him, and that was President
(sic) Nehru of India. With an exclamation of delight he took up his pen.”
Nehru was a serious thinker and eloquent writer, but within India there were
other politicians who could hold their own with him in argument. In his years
as prime minister, his ideas on politics, economics and culture were subjected
to sharp scrutiny. Thus, through the 1950s and 60s, the specific contours of democracy
and national unity were
intensely debated in all parts of the
country. Nehru’s Congress party
won successive general elections,
but had still to answer its critics on
the L eft and the Right who were
represented in parliament. It also
met with strong opposition in the
states; not least in the southernmost
state of Kerala, where Congress
dominance was successfully
challenged, first by the socialists and then by the communists. Apart from this
political opposition, individuals and groups within civil society were also vocal
in their criticisms of the policies of the Congress government.
A whole book could be written about the major debates on politics and social
policy that took place in the first decades of Indian independence. These arguments
covered a wide range of topics—among them, the ideals and institutions of
democracy; the relations between different religious communities; the respective
roles of the state and private enterprise in promoting economic development; India’s
place in the world; and the honourable integration of small ethnic minorities
within the nation-state.
This range of topics was commensurate with the scale of the enterprise, namely,
the building of a single, united nation out of so many disparate fragments; the
nurturing of a democratic ethos in a poor and divided society; the promotion of
industrial development in an agrarian economy; and the safeguarding of national
honour and dignity in an increasingly polarised international climate.
The quality of the interlocutors is worthy of note, too. Among Jawaharlal Nehru’s
finest—and fiercest— critics were the communist EMS Namboodiripad, the
socialist Rammanohar Lohia, the conservative Syama Prasad Mookerjee, and
the liberal C Rajagopalachari. These critics shared three attributes with Nehru:
first, they wrote extensively on public affairs; second, the speeches and essays
that bore their name were their own handiwork rather than that of a ghostwriter;
third, the ideas they expressed were then carried forward by the political parties they led or represented. These were, respectively, the then
undivided Communist Party of India for Namboodiripad,
the Jana Sangh (forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party)
for Mookerjee, the Samyukta Socialist Party for Lohia, and
the Swatantra Party for Rajagolachari.
Among the most significant—and most overlooked— of
these debates was the one between Nehru and a man who
had left formal party politics but who was intensely political
nonetheless. This was Jayaprakash Narayan, known
more familiarly as JP. Before Independence, Narayan had
been an active Congressman, and a hero of the Quit India
movement of 1942, when he eluded the police for months
on end and then, when captured, endured solitary confinement
and torture in jail.
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Jayaprakash Narayan, staunch critic of Nehru’s policies. |
In 1948, a year after the British left India, Narayan helped
form a new Socialist Party as a Left-wing alternative to the party in power. He served as the president of all-India
unions of railway, postal and defence workers, thus being,
in effect, the leader of more than a million men. After the
Congress defeated all comers in the 1952 elections, Nehru
called Narayan for talks to explore the possibility of the socialists
rejoining the Congress. The talks failed, but by this
time JP was losing interest in organised politics altogether.
He had become increasingly attracted to the programmes
of the Gandhian Vinoba Bhave, who was campaigning for
rich landlords to donate, to the poor, excess land ( bhoodan)
and, where possible, entire villages (gramdan). Narayan
was inspired to do a jivandan, namely, to offer his own life
to the service of this social movement.
In 1957, when India held its second general elections, Jayaprakash
Narayan was not formally associated with any
political party. However, he retained a strong interest in
the present and future of democratic institutions. While
the campaigning for the elections was on, Narayan wrote
an extraordinary letter to Nehru, who was both the serving
prime minister and the chief vote-getter of the ruling Congress
party. In this letter, Narayan suggested that the prime
minister function as a “national rather than a party leader”;
that, even while he ran the government, he should “encourage
the growth of an Opposition” so as to “soundly lay the
foundations of parliamentary democracy” in India.
During the elections, Narayan had tried, and failed, to get
Opposition parties to avoid three-cornered contests in individual
constituencies, since a division of the vote would
benefit only the Congress. “In doing so,” Narayan told Nehru
he was:
not guided by dislike of or hostility to the Congress
as you have repeatedly been suggesting but merely by
certain dispassionate political principles. According to
parliamentary democracy theory it is not necessary for
the opposition to be better than the ruling party. Equally
bad parties in opposition are a check on one another
and keep the democratic machine on the track… [A]s a
Socialist my sympathies are all with the British Labour
Party, but I concede that when Labour is in power the
Conservatives perform a valuable democratic function
without which the Labour government might become
a menace to the people. So, I realise that if my advice
had been followed by the opposition parties, it would
have led to some undesirable parties gaining somewhat
in strength. I was prepared, however, to take that risk
on the ground (a) that between the two evils of absoluteness of power and a little increase in the strength
of certain undesirable parties, the former was the
greater evil and (b) that there would be five years after
the election in which a sound opposition party could
be created.
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C Rajagopalachari, another critic of Nehru. |
In one of his speeches, Nehru had chastised Narayan for
“playing hide-and-seek” between the pillars of politics and
social service. The younger man, he said, “claim[ed] to have
given up politics” but “continue[d] to dabble in it.” Narayan
replied that he did “not see why only active party and power
politicians should express political opinions and no others.
Politics would then be reduced to a sordid party game with
which the citizen would have no concern.” There was a particular
responsibility for Gandhian “constructive workers”
to speak out. These workers, insisted Narayan, would:
betray their ideals if they did not boldly play a corrective
role, offering friendly, constructive, non-partisan
advice and criticism and, if need be, even opposition
in the form of non-cooperation and the like. Nor can
eschewing of party politics mean indifference to the
manner and outcome of elections. True, those who
have eschewed party politics are not expected to take
any partisan stand, but they may, with complete consistency,
raise general political and ideological issues
for the guidance of the electorate, the parties and the
candidates.
Narayan ended his letter on a somewhat despairing note.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, he remarked:
the verdict is inescapable that the present political
system has proved a failure. Therefore, the need after
the elections is for the leaders of the country to get together
in order to find out if there is a better alternative.
I think there is and, in the larger interest of the
country, we must seek it out. It is here that your leadership
is most needed, because without you this cannot be done.
Narayan’s letter extended over six typed pages; Nehru’s
reply was even longer. He had “quite failed to understand”
what Narayan meant “by my becoming a national leader,
rather than a party leader.”
What does a national leader do?” asked Nehru:
If it is meant that he should collect a number of important
people from different parties and form a government,
surely this can only be done if there is some common
dominant common purpose. Without such a purpose,
no government can function. Sometimes, such
national governments are formed in wartime, when the
only dominant purpose is winning the war and everything
is subordinated to it. Even so, they have not been
much of a success in parliamentary democracies. Apart
from a war, however, we have to deal with political and
economic problems, national and international. There
must be some common outlook and unity of purpose in
dealing with these problems. Otherwise, there would
be no movement at all and just an internal tug of war.
Nehru argued that by being a “party leader” he had not
sacrificed any policy that he may have followed had he been a “national” leader. The economic and foreign policies of
his administration were, he believed, in the best interests
of the nation. They were not merely a reflection of the Congress
party’s prejudices or preferences. If the government
that Nehru led had made any compromises, this was “not
because of the party, but because of the facts that encompassed
us. We have to function as a Government dealing
with these facts and not with theoretical propositions."
Nehru then turned to the question of a robust opposition
to the Congress. “So far as I understand parliamentary democracy,”
he said:
it means that every opportunity should be given for an
opposition to function, to express its views by word or
writing, to contest elections in fair conditions, and to
try to convert the people to its views. The moment an
opposition is given some kind of a protected position,
it becomes rather a bogus opposition and cannot even
carry weight with the people. I am not aware of any
pattern of parliamentary democracy in which it has
ever been suggested that the opposition should be encouraged,
except in the ways I have mentioned above.
Nehru disagreed with the view that the opposition in the
legislatures was not adequate. Of the 500 or so members of
the Lok Sabha, about 150 were members of opposition parties.
They were “virile and active,” but being in a minority
were generally voted down. “ Presumably, you would like larger numbers in the opposition,” said Nehru to Narayan,
adding: “ Even if there were larger numbers, it would be voted
down. And how am I to produce the larger numbers? ”
Narayan had asked Nehru to look beyond the confines of
the party system, a challenge the older man threw back at
him. Apart from the opposition parties in the legislatures,
he pointed out:
in India there are all kinds of disruptive and reactionary
forces. There is also the inertia of ages. And it is
very easy for the inert mass to be roused by some religious
or caste or linguistic or provincial or like cry,
and thus to come in the way of all progress. That is the
real opposition in the country, and it is a tremendously
strong one. And that is what you seem to ignore completely.
We have constantly to battle against it…
Nehru ended with a qualified defence of parliamentary
democracy. It was, he admitted, “full of faults,” but had been
adopted in India because “in the balance, it was better than
the other possible courses.” He did not agree with Narayan
that it was a failure. Like any other system of governance,
parliamentary democracy depended on the quality of the
human beings who staffed it. “I do not think that the present
system is a failure,” said Nehru to Narayan, “though it may
fail in the future for all I know. If it fails, it will not fail because
the system in theory is bad, but because we could not
live up to it. Anyhow what is the alternative you suggest?”
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Prime Minister Nehru addressing his audience
on Independence Day. |
The correspondence between Nehru and Narayan lies
in the private papers and manuscript section of the Nehru
Memorial Museum & Library. Although there have been at
least two serious biographies of Narayan and at least half
a dozen of Nehru, this exchange has been entirely overlooked
by them. If I exhume and rehabilitate it here, it is for
at least five reasons. First, for its intrinsic interest, for the
passion and intelligence with which each person articulated
his view of what democracy meant. The ideas of both
men emerged from many years of political engagement, but
also from wide reading and the enlargement of one’s vision
that comes from travel to other countries. Their intelligence
was complemented and reinforced by their sincerity.
These were busy men, leading very full lives, who were so
engaged with the political system of their country that they
devoted so many hours to debating it in private.
Second, the exchange was part of an ongoing conversation
that was intellectually as well as politically productive.
At the time of the first general elections, for example, the
two men had argued about the extent to which the Congress
party as a whole reflected the socialist ideals of the prime
minister. The arguments provoked by the polls of 1957 were
to continue. Nehru challenged Narayan to come up with an
alternative to the parliamentary system; two years later,
Narayan wrote his Plea for the Reconstruction of the Indian
Polity, a precocious tract that bore fruition three decades
later, when its ideas on panchayati raj and decentralised democracy
were (in part) incorporated in the 73rd amendment
to the Indian Constitution mandating the creation and sustenance
of institutions of village self-government.
This brings me to my third point, which is that while
the Nehru-Narayan exchange provides insights into the
thought of the two men and their times, it remains compellingly
relevant. The political predicaments they faced and
analysed are ours, too. Thus Narayan flags the need for a focused
Opposition to the ruling Congress party, and for democracy
to be deepened by the energies of individuals and
groups who are not themselves politicians. Nehru, for this
part, warns of the disruptive dangers of an excess of identity
politics, and presents a qualified defence of parliamentary
democracy as, if not the perfect system of governance,
at least less harmful than the alternatives. These concerns
and emphases appear to be as relevant in 2010 as they may
have been in 1957.
There must surely be few other illustrations from history
of such an exchange between the most powerful politician
in a country and its most respected social worker. But—and here is the fourth reason why this particular debate is so
significant—the argument between Nehru and Narayan
was entirely representative of the ways in which political
argument operated in modern India. For much of the 19th
and 20th centuries, activists of different shades argued with
subtlety and sophistication on how to win or exercise political
power and how to reform or reshape society. Think,
for instance, of the arguments between Rammohan Roy
and Christian missionaries on whether Hinduism could
ever renew itself; the debate between Tilak and Gokhale on
whether to focus on national freedom or social reform; the
debate between Tagore and Gandhi on India’s attitude to
the West; the arguments between Gandhi and Ambedkar
on moral and political routes to the abolition of untouchability;
and, perhaps most famously, the dispute between
Gandhi and Jinnah on whether Hindus and Muslims could
live peaceably together in a single nation-state.
The debates mentioned in the preceding paragraph were
antecedent to the Nehru-Narayan debate; contemporaneous
with them were other and equally compelling controversies,
as for example the arguments between Nehru
and Rajagopalachari on the role of entrepreneurship and
enterprise in the economic renewal of India, or the debate
between Lohia and Rajagopalachari on the role of the English language in a nation once ruled by the Englishman.
While these debates contained sometimes strikingly original ideas, these were not academic treatises, but political
interventions. Nor were these debates intended to project
a particular individual or political family. Rather, each intervention
was made on behalf of a particular policy or programme,
this presumed to be superior to some other policy
or programme.
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Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with Cabinet ministers
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, BR Ambedkar, Jagjivan Ram,
Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Baldev Singh, Vallabhbhai Patel, Rafi
Ahmed Kidwai, John Mathai, Syama Prasad Mookerjee and
others. |
The last reason for us to flag the Nehru-Narayan exchange
is that such debates do not take place anymore, at least not
among full-time politicians. No living politician can think
or write in an original or even interesting fashion about the
direction Indian society and politics is or should be taking.
The discussion of what Narayan, in his letter to Nehru, had
called “dispassionate political principles” has now been left
to the scholars.
The decline of this tradition of political argument is on
daily display in our parliament and legislatures. The Indian
democrat, however, lives in hope. The particular hope here
is that the tradition may yet be revived and renewed. The
findings foregrounded in this article may therefore be taken
as a call to my fellow historians to reconstruct, in far more
detail than I have been able to do here, the major debates
between the major political figures in independent India.
This, however, may not be a merely academic exercise, but
one that speaks directly to us in the present. India today is
a less-than-united nation, a less-than-perfect democracy, a
less-than-equal economy, and a less-than-peaceful society.
For those of us who might wish to close the gap between
the ideal and the reality, we could do worse than turn to
those Indians who have most seriously thought through
these issues in the comparatively recent past.
[This essay is adapted from Ramachandra Guha’s book Makers
of Modern India, just published by Penguin Viking.]
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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prasant kumar
21 November 2010
06:50 PM
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I agree with JP's stance as well as the author's view on the need to engage the non-political electorate in continuously raising general and political stands for the holistic development of our polity. in fact i would go on as far as to suggest that the often debated "biggest problem of our society" is neither poverty, illiteracy or corruption, but the attitude of indifference by the masses towards any discussion.
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