Nehru’s 97 Major Blunders

Title: Nehru’s 97 Major Blunders

Author: Rajnikant Puranik

Publisher: Pustak Mahal 2018 (First published 2016)

ISBN: 9788122316087

Pages: 223

The government machinery of post-independent India and its propaganda wing was always in overdrive in beefing up the larger than life image of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first Prime Minister. Great adulation was heaped on him and the propagandists built up a halo around his head, thoroughly ignoring his track record as prime minister. Nehru smoothed the pathways of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, first to party leadership and then to the administration. Three generations of the Nehru family became prime ministers of India whose iron grip on power was weakened only by the unfortunate assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The family’s influence has adversely affected the nation in myriad ways, both large and small. Sanjaya Baru, in his book ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’ informs that it is this family’s hold on power that prevents declassification of documents after the lapse of a certain time, say thirty years. This helps the polity to freely examine decisions taken in the past and learn from mistakes. This is not viable in India as even the youngest in that family would be upset by the prospect of possible skeletons tumbling out of the closet if such a rule was in place. This book is a polemic on Nehru and proves, or rather attempts to prove, that Nehru's career was trailed by an unbroken line of blunders and that his rule as the head of government was an unmitigated disaster. The term ‘blunders’ in this book is used loosely as a general epithet that include failures, neglect, wrong policies, bad decisions, despicable and disgraceful acts, usurping undeserved posts etc. Rajnikant Puranik has been a physicist, banker, software professional and has headed the IT division in several organisations. He has a M.Sc. in Physics and professional qualifications like CAIIB and PGDST.

Puranik’s moral anguish against Nehru is engendered by his disservice to the nation first as the President of the Congress party and then as the Prime Minister. India would have been on a rapidly ascending path to becoming a prosperous first-world country by the end of Nehru’s term or would surely have become so by the early 1980s had the nation not been stifled industrially by the populist, socialistic policies of Nehru and Indira. Nehru is often touted as the ‘Builder of modern India’, but the India he created was full of ‘broken-down side-lane like highways, rundown Fiats and Ambassadors, meagre Second World War armaments to take care of its security, perennial food shortages and left millions of people in grinding poverty. He laid the foundations of India's poverty and misery, condemning it to be forever a developing third-rate, third-world country. The author argues that Nehru wanted only to ensure power for himself and his family. He completely ignored primary education and brought on a series of poverty-perpetuating economic policies. This ended up in an abysmal rate of growth that is usually described as the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. The author takes exception to this and calls it the ‘Nehruvian rate of growth’.

People with middling political awareness and sense of history still adore Nehru as a great statesman and dreamer whose good intentions were thwarted by the dishonest coterie that surrounded him. Puranik states that a politician’s worth should be evaluated by the work he has done for the country and by nothing else like personal qualities or public perceptions. This book acknowledges that Nehru was personally honest, upright, knowledgeable, secular, cultured, hard-working and a man of integrity. He was courageous, popular and an unfailing nationalist. Unfortunately, he turned a blind eye against corruption by his party men, rather like Manmohan Singh. Moreover, his personal political ideology influenced his policies that eventually proved detrimental to national interests. No positive aspects of Nehru are discussed in this book and the author directs the readers to scores of such books written by sycophants and yes-men for that.

Nehru fans who are sensitive and having a low threshold for shock may better avoid this book which is in fact only a summary of his blunders. For a detailed narrative, Puranik advises the readers to go through his book, ‘Foundations of Misery: Blunders of the Nehruvian Era’. The blunders are categorised into those belonging to pre-independence era, integration of princely states, external security, internal security, foreign policy, economy, misgovernance, educational and cultural mismanagement, ill-treatment of other leaders, dynastic policies and miscellaneous. Even with all his pretensions, Nehru did not understand economics and was led by the nose by the so-called professors and experts with Leftist-Marxist inclinations and who pandered to his whims and fancies.

The author establishes the truth of his arguments with conviction and enough references from other books. The exposé of Nehru is impeccable on political blunders, but not that watertight in the case of industrial and economic sectors. The points raised on these counts are valid, but it needs more substantiation. Nehru was propped up by the undue intervention of Gandhi as a result of which he landed in the party’s presidency. Puranik makes a dressing down of Gandhi too, accusing him to be a ‘self-obsessed authoritarian harbouring an overblown self-image, with an inflated ego, believing his all-round quackery represented wide and deep knowledge and wisdom and that only he knew what was best’ (p.18). Both Gandhi and Nehru waxed eloquent on democratic principles, but scuttled majority opinion when the need arose to hoist Nehru on an unwilling Congress party. In 1929, Motilal Nehru persuaded Gandhi to intervene on behalf of his son to follow him as Congress President. In 1946, the situation was more serious. The new Congress president was sure to step in to the shoes of the prime minister of the country that was on the cusp of gaining independence. Twelve out of the fifteen state committees nominated Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as the party president while three preferred not to suggest any name. This was in fact a unanimous endorsement for Patel, but Gandhi made Nehru the president. Gandhi's logic was queer – he knew that Patel would accept his suggestion and would work under Nehru, and he was also convinced that Nehru will not work under anybody other than himself.

Of all the categories of blunders, readers would feel that Nehru’s foreign policy was the most pitiable fiasco. It was self-defeating with a laughable Non-aligned Movement and all such moonshine which helped only for Nehru's self-posturing in international fora. Dr. B R Ambedkar termed his policy as ‘trying to solve the problems of other countries rather than of our country’. He referred the Kashmir issue to the UN under the flighty advice tendered by Lord Mountbatten, thereby internationalising it and providing a perennial headache for all his successors. While Nehru spoke against the treatment of Africans in the European colonies, in contrast, with regard to the ill-treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka or Hindus in East Pakistan he was tongue-tied. This was actually a clever ploy because regarding Africans it required only talking while in the latter two cases, it needed action too. Nehru failed to exploit opportunities to score for the nation and instead vainly hoped for being lauded as a great statesman at the expense of the country. His largesse in agreeing to part with eighty per cent of the Indus Waters to Pakistan is a crime against the nation. The Gwadar port in Balochistan, which is the centre point of the CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor), was in fact owned by Oman. They offered to sell it to India for $ 1 million after independence, but Nehru declined. Then Pakistan purchased it in 1958. The enclave would have been inconvenient for India to maintain, but still, it would have provided a rich bargaining chip over Kashmir and other pending issues. Nehru was at his foolish worst in the relations with China. Before he knew what was happening, China inflicted a humiliating defeat on the ill-equipped and ill-prepared Indian army.

Nehru and his courtiers made meticulous planning on how to retain power and devised a modus operandi to elevate his daughter to the top post. They were not bound by lofty principles and liberally indulged in shady groundwork. His pocket historians had strangely erroneous notions on how history should or should not be written. If writing of what actually happened in the past could adversely affect the present, their solution was to give it a spin. That's why India's officially sanctioned history books downplay the oppression of eight centuries of slavery under the Muslim invaders. The amount of strategy in this deft policy is matched only by his meanness in politics. Forcing Purushottam Das Tandon to resign as Congress President in 1951, Nehru himself assumed the chair for four years till 1955. In that year, he infused U N Dhebar, a nobody in politics into the mainstream to fill that post. This was only a temporary device to keep the chair warm for Indira Gandhi until 1959. While he enjoyed the two powerful positions of prime minister and party president simultaneously, he forbade the state chief ministers from continuing as provincial presidents because he was so worried that they would assume a bigger clout in the states.

This book is an excellent anthology of all that was wrong with Nehru. It accuses him as the ‘Nabob of Cluelessness’ and an ‘all-round comprehensive failure’. Moreover, he is also alleged to have possessed a faulty understanding of issues, a distorted worldview, defective grasp of national security interests and faulty policies and remedies that flowed from them. Puranik has researched almost all books that criticize Nehru. He coins the term ‘dynacracy’ (dynastic democracy) to refer to the peculiar system of administration sponsored by him. In addition to the 97 major blunders, ten more are given in the epilogue. This book is definitely driven by political interests, but the truth exposed by the author can be food for thought for ordinary readers. Lack of an index is a serious drawback for the book.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star