On his visit to England, Prime Minister Narendra’s Modi’s praise of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, came as a surprise. In much the same way it did when, at the historic India-Africa Forum Summit in New Delhi, Mr. Modi failed to make any reference to Nehru, who has been described as the architect of India-Africa relations. The praise and the miss displayed the strategic manner in which the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, have tactfully used and baited Nehru. “I will only say that many freedom fighters of India found their calling in the institutions of Britain,” Mr. Modi said in London as he addressed British MPs. To emphasise the long-standing relationship between the two nations, he mentioned how his predecessors, from Nehru to Manmohan Singh, have passed through the doors of England. Predictably, many in the Congress party have >accused Mr. Modi of selectively praising Nehru on the international stage while pointedly ignoring him at home. In the praise and the miss lie the problem that Nehru poses for the Sangh Parivar. Nehru’s idea of India — privileging citizenry, secularism and rationalism — is of course at odds with the Right’s ideology, with its cultural nationalism and strident majoritarianism slant. Modern, independent India draws heavily from the ethos that Nehru was devoted to and one which he consciously fostered. But even as the Sangh bristles against Nehru’s liberal legacy, the BJP’s top leaders seek to place themselves in a chronological line, as democratically elected successors to those who ruled India previously. The office of the Prime Minister of India draws much of its aura from the man who first occupied it. For a latter-day incumbent, that matters. Therefore the invocation of Nehru by Mr. Modi on overseas visits.
For the BJP, Nehru is also code for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. In this context, to put down Nehru is to attack the party’s current political opponents, the Congress led by Sonia Gandhi. Therefore the routine personal jibes, >the references to his western demeanour , his easy camaraderie with women. The exercise of putting down Nehru, for the BJP, is also a way of absorbing into its iconography certain freedom fighters who, it claims, had been deliberately undermined in a Nehruvian conspiracy. If this claim involves much licence with historical fact, the Congress too makes it far too easy for the BJP. Its recent tributes to leaders like Sardar Patel have been reactive, to counter the BJP’s appropriation of them. Indeed, the Congress’s relationship with Nehru is deeply problematic too. By constantly drawing a straight line from its current leadership to Nehru, the Congress shrink-wraps him as a notable family elder, not the man under whose watch the idea of a liberal, democratic, inclusive India found utterance. In doing so, it straitjackets his legacy so that it becomes that much more easily attackable.
