National, yet international

A compendium of letters written by Nehru to Chief Ministers shows the scale and power of his thinking

December 15, 2014 10:15 pm | Updated 10:15 pm IST

LETTERS FOR A NATION — From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers 1947-1963: Edited by Madhav Khosla; Allen Lane/Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 7th floor, Infinity Tower, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon-122002. Rs. 599.

LETTERS FOR A NATION — From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers 1947-1963: Edited by Madhav Khosla; Allen Lane/Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 7th floor, Infinity Tower, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon-122002. Rs. 599.

In nearly 17 years as Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote something like four hundred letters to the chief ministers of the States of India, on topics ranging from Indians’ conceptions of themselves as citizens through the institutions of the nascent democracy to national planning and development, and then on to war, peace, and India’s place in the world. Panditji set a fortnightly deadline for each letter, and seems to have kept to that almost throughout. His tone is reflective, as befits one who says he was never quite at home in politics, and he explores many of the predicaments, uncertainties, and pressures of politics.

A passionate and iconic leader of the Independence movement, Panditji was horrified by the slaughter during and after Partition; he is persistently saddened, and at times almost bewildered, by Indians’ self-identification through clan, caste, and community, and by the bitterness and violence thence engendered. Yet he is blunt about the exodus, forced or otherwise, of Hindus from the then West Pakistan, and even harsher about the expulsions from the then East Pakistan; he adds that the problem is ‘that communal and narrow outlook which has led to the conception of an Islamic State in Pakistan.’

India, however, cannot run away; there was no question of not accepting the refugees. Furthermore, despite a ‘cruel destiny which seems to pursue us and nullify all our efforts’, the task is to make the institutions of a democratic state, soon reconstituted as a republican democracy, work and work for all citizens. Panditji says it was a great mistake in Punjab to divide the armed forces on communal lines after Partition, and as early as 1953 he was troubled by the diminishing recruitment of India’s religious minorities into the public services, including the military. In a 1958 letter he notes both that minorities might hesitate to take public-service entrance tests because they fear that ‘things are weighted against them’ and that the kind of ‘high-flown’ Hindi required in the tests would disadvantage speakers of, for example, Urdu as well as those who used various Hindi dialects.

Nehru knows how serious these issues are, even though he says in 1961 that he is against reservations or quotas in the public services in view of the risk that the functioning of public institutions would be compromised. For Nehru the answer lay in the creation of a good education system for all the country’s children and young people. Yet he recognised that the institutions of state were in trouble. Caste and faith, even assuming they had played little part in the running of the colonial government, soon came to dominate appointments and promotions, and as early as May 1948 Nehru was worried about the spread of corruption. Both those factors, as Panditji notes, prevent institutional improvements; in any case they had not been of interest to the colonials, who could, at least to some extent, control any public discontent which maladministration might cause. For them it did not matter if public institutions functioned at a ‘rather low standard.’

Independent India, where institutions of state belong to the Indian public, has no such luxuries available to it; Panditji says he accepted the resignation of Shanmukham Chetty, the first Finance Minister, over a ‘grave error of judgement’ in the withdrawal of tax cases against various industrialists, though he does not doubt the minister’s bona fides. Secondly, Nehru cautions the chief ministers against their practice of passing repressive public-order legislation, using such law for personal or party-political purposes, and attempting to override State High Courts. In addition, he knows how different India could be: ‘I am quite sure that our real and basic growth will only come when women have a full chance to play their part in public life.’ Yet he had to keep exhorting political parties, via the chief ministers, about that, and the story since then speaks for itself.

Other highly significant issues figure too. Nehru was clear that the zamindari system must end and that its abolition must not affect smaller landholders; we have, however, to wonder what happened to his idea of cooperative farming. Panditji also rejects — explicitly — the political rigidity of the Soviet Union as well as planning for the sake of planning, but he insists that economic benefits must reach all if democracy is to mean anything substantive. That would need an element of planning, including substantial measures, such as a merger of Bihar and Bengal to create an industrially strong region; Nehru also suggests that similar might be applied later to some of the southern states. For him, planning of that kind had to be based on reliable and detailed evidence, and we can only guess what he would have thought of the fact that today many major policies, such as those on health care, are based on unreliable and seriously incomplete information.

Inevitably, the stresses tell; Nehru says that in the food crisis of the early 1950s, the United States, the USSR, and China all offered food aid with strings attached, and he sharply reminds the chief ministers that those of them in food-surplus States were refusing to help their fellow-Indians in food-deficit states. That kind of State self-absorption shook him again when the States Reorganisation Commission accepted the linguistic division of India. As for foreign affairs, Nehru used military power repeatedly from 1947 onwards, and he specifies the ways in which India was isolated at the United Nations in 1948, while the so-called great powers protected their own interests. He was, as we know, shattered by the Chinese attack in 1962, but here too he shows how the attack, which followed China’s bitter estrangement from the Soviet Union may well have been intended to intensify global polarisation; for Nehru, the Chinese plan was to remove India as an obstacle to great-power status by driving it into the Western camp, thereby also giving the USSR a potential incentive to restore closer relations with China.

The book concludes with four eulogies, for Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Asaf Ali, and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai respectively. Even through his shock and pain over the loss of Gandhi, Nehru cites investigations revealing planned assassinations — which he calls terroristic activities — towards a coup d’ état , and he is left aghast by those who celebrated Gandhi’s murder. He adds that the international reaction to the assassination showed him the universality of Gandhi, a person ‘intensely national and yet completely international.’ This sensitively edited collection shows the scale and power of Nehru’s thinking; his description of Gandhi could well have fitted him too.

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