Nehru’s India

Title: Nehru’s India – A History in Seven Myths
Author: Taylor C. Sherman
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9780691245775
Pages: 284

When India became independent in 1947, her economy was in shambles brought on by a world war and two centuries of colonial loot. The new nation needed to show the direction in which to move forward, especially for its economy and international relations. Jawaharlal Nehru, being the first prime minister and a well-read man, sought to guide India during the first seventeen years of post-colonial India till his death in 1964. Even though the paths he trod were reversed later because of the great economic pitfalls along the way, it was critical for the new republic to stay united under a strong man. Although panegyrics of Nehru praising him as the architect of modern India and a visionary emanated from certain quarters – mostly patronized by his own party – the grave flaws in his socio-economic and political perspectives were starting to come into public scrutiny. Nehru’s premiership is associated with a set of ideas, policies and institutions related to non-alignment, secularism, socialism, the strong state, democracy and high modernism. This book argues that these supposed tenets of the Nehruvian period are nothing more than myths. Taylor C. Sherman teaches in the department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has authored other books on India and its secularism.

Sherman claims that Nehru fulfilled the role of an educator, patron, mediator and symbol to the Indian people. He is often lauded as the architect of modern India on the basis of his image as the titan of post-colonial India. The author points out that this image was created by the Congress party to ‘persuade him to stay on in power’, especially after 1958 when he expressed the desire to retire or take a sabbatical. This book is a product of the left-liberal ecosystem pervading every nook and cranny of the Western academia. This book is a paean to Nehru depicting him as a great man who can do no wrong. Every shortfall or anomaly in his character is glossed over or ignored or alleged to be someone else’s fault. Even his political tricks like threatening to resign when confronted with stubborn opponents in the party are naively taken at face value and immense inferences are drawn from these false premises. Sherman criticizes everything in Nehru’s India – even the very idea of India – except the great man himself! She argues that Nehru was no architect of modern India because he had no blueprint in his head or articulated in five-year plans. Then comes the surprising but wrong conclusion that Nehru wasuncomfortable with blind devotion and consistently resisted the iconization that is central to a cult of personality (p.205). She conveniently does not mention that Nehru awarded himself the Bharat Ratna in 1955 – India’s highest civilian honour – or cause his own birthday to be celebrated as the national children’s day. Any way you look at it, these two acts cannot be taken to be an exemplar of humility! When a tunnel was opened in 1956 to connect Jammu with Kashmir Valley, Nehru ‘allowed’ it to be named after him as the Jawahar tunnel! Still, the author claims that this was not an attempt to develop a personality cult around carefully crafted imagery to maintain absolute power (p.16). Nehru personally chose the country’s first ambassadors to prominent nations on the basis of their ‘eminent’ status in the national movement as well as their wit, charm and intellectual abilities (p.23). But the author forgets to explain why he chose Vijayalakshmi Pandit – his own sister – as the ambassador to the US. The book is riddled with so many of these omissions.

Unashamedly reflecting an air of colonial haughtiness, the author hints that India was not doing enough to prop up secularism in the Nehru era and that it should have accommodated more Muslim demands. She claims that Indian secularism is largely figurative and was focussed on the celebration of exceptional individuals and reverence for great monuments. But this iconic approach did not tally with the everyday in practice. India introduced permits for controlling the re-entry of Muslims who had already migrated to Pakistan in 1948. Around 2000 Muslims were doing this each day. Nothing in this gesture was related to patriotism, but a clever ploy to prevent their real estate from being reassigned to Hindu and Sikh refugees who were forcibly evicted from their homes in Pakistan. The Hindus and Sikhs were not allowed to re-enter Pakistan. This just measure is portrayed as injuring secularism! After Hyderabad was annexed by military force, the government sought to reduce the number of Muslims in the state service from 85 per cent to 50 per cent. This is construed as another failure of secularism (p.64). What the author deftly conceals is that Muslims constituted only 13 per cent of Hyderabad’s population but the Nizam had exclusively stuffed them in his services. Moreover, the book employs the old imperialist ploy to drive a wedge between Dalits and other Hindus and to club the former along with Muslims as a minority community separate from Hindus. In her study of secularism in the 1950s, the author implies that Dalits and Muslims had a stake in secularism (p.59). The book further claims that India’s non-alignment was only a political trick to work with superpower competition to its advantage. India was enmeshed in the Anglo-American economic system which provided two-thirds of India’s imports in 1964 while the USSR provided only a tenth. Aid from the US was six times more than Russian aid in 1945.

The book makes a survey of India’s economic policies and concludes that everything smacked of failure. Nationalization was claimed to be only a relatively small feature of Indian economic life in the early period of Nehru’s tenure. The top rate of income tax was 80 per cent, which most people evaded by paying bribes. The author examines the land distribution reforms assisted by Vinoba Bhave’s Bhudan movement. In the end, this philanthropic exercise is portrayed as a hypocritical one in which the land donated is shown as non-productive and inaccessible. This is a recurring theme in the book. Reading these lines, one would feel wonder at the mere fact that India is still existing intact as a nation. Rather than challenging existing hierarchies, Indian socialism attempted to co-opt them and awaken in elites a sense of trusteeship and responsibility towards their fellow countrymen. Instead, the elites simply enlisted the new institutions and worked them for their own benefit (p.113). Sherman rightfully points out that India succumbed to political corruption at this point in time of license-quota-permit raj. A single mill in Mumbai had to fill out some 577 forms each year. A license was only a permit which entitles the holder to apply for numerous other sanctions and permissions. Within this tangled bureaucratic complex, corruption naturally reigned. The primary inconvenience to the industrialists lay in all the efforts to evade government control rather than in submitting to it. The ruling party nonchalantly extracted its pound of flesh from the industry. Tata Steel (TISCO then) obtained permission from court to allow them to donate to Congress party because the ‘stability, security, profits and future expansion of the company were linked up with the continuance of Congress government’ (p.160).

This book is a propaganda piece of the American left academia that thrives in developing countries through NGOs and seeks to displace the national spirit in those countries. The contribution of the Ford Foundation to the development of many social projects in the 1950s is extolled at every opportunity while wholly Indian experiments are deemed to be failures. Contributions of Indian pioneers are narrated only if they are educated overseas at some point in their career. Sherman frequently appears unduly concerned about inequality in society and accuses paternalistic local societies for all the problems they have to endure. After a brief charade of appearing to be objective, the political agenda slips into the open. She alleges that the Indian government ‘assaults on free press, universities and courts from 2015 onwards’ and that some international organisations (meaning the cabal that funds the NGOs) have downgraded India’s democratic rating, as if this act was a huge indictment on India for which every Indian has to hang his or her head in shame. Mind you, the author never mentions the Emergency years (1975-77) but implies that democracy in India is eclipsed only from the year 2015. The book provides an interesting portrayal of modernity which is said to be a group of processes set in train somewhere around the fifteenth century and gaining pace by the nineteenth. These concerned economic connectivity and technical innovation, as well as state-making practices, changing understandings of the self and new experiences of time (p.178).

It has been a long time since I encountered a book on India written by a westerner who still retains the imperial and condescending outlook on our country. Such books invariably talked about peeling plaster in government buildings, pot-holed roads, frequent power outages and omnipresent filth on streets. This colonial memsahib is flustered with Indian archives which are said to be kept in a most careless and inefficient way. She limits the coverage of the Bengal famine of 1943 to just one sentence because it was engendered by Churchill’s apathy to Indians but castigates the Indian government under Nehru for mishandling the ‘perilously close to famine conditions in 1950 and 51’ (p.104). The author has made extensive research for this book, but the experience appears to be marred by lack of insight and the knowledge of how Indian society works.

The book is just a piece of the Left narrative and not recommended for general readers.

Rating: 2 Star