BY SALIL TRIPATHI

In Review - Books: Biography

Far Eastern Economic Review, February 12, 2004

Two biographies revisit the life of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and show how he shaped the nation, writes Salil Tripathi

Nehru was both a visionary and a pragmatist (photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis) As India celebrates 54 years of being a republic, the powerful legacy of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is being questioned more than ever. Nehru, heir to India's Congress Party and father of the late Indira Gandhi, ruled over India for 17 consecutive years, during which, by sheer force of personality, he shaped how India thought, developed, expressed opinions, presented itself and dreamt.

Some of his ideas, particularly his economic policies, are being discarded by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which now leads the governing alliance but which in Nehru's time never garnered more than 7% of the national vote. The BJP is rewriting textbooks and challenging conventional history; some of its leaders are denigrating secular icons like Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, and projecting communal leaders.

Oxford University academic Judith Brown and United Nations diplomat Shashi Tharoor have published fresh biographies that build on the already hefty number of Nehru chronicles. Brown's biography is a serious, dispassionate work, written from a detached distance but admiring of Nehru's policies. It is aimed firmly at scholars and resists making instant judgments.

Nehru: The Invention of India, by Shashi Tharoor. Arcade Publishing. $24.95In contrast, Tharoor has written a lucid and accessible essay that is devoid of footnotes, but is refreshingly straightforward in its opinions and interpretation of Nehru's life. Tharoor writes that for the first 17 years of India's independence, the paradox-ridden Jawaharlal Nehru was India: "A moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent almost 10 years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi..."

Nehru was a scholar and a visionary, but practical enough to understand the limits of idealistic notions. He learned about nonviolence from Gandhi, but later as prime minister was willing to discard it and use force in tricky political situations. At other times, his idealism failed - for example, when China invaded India in 1962 despite Nehru's conviction that he alone understood Chinese intentions, and his certainty that the Chinese would never attack India.

He was democratic enough to criticize the cult he foresaw being built around him and autocratic enough to trust only a select few, often showing poor judgment. Brown is particularly critical of Nehru s dependence on V .K. Krishna Menon, his loquacious defence minister during the China debacle, who never tired of scoring imaginary points against the West at great cost to India's international credibility. Particularly notable were Menon' s marathon speeches at the UN, which usually prompted delegates to leave the room.

Just as in his 1982 scholarly study of Indian foreign policy, Tharoor remains critical of Nehru for confusing the country's foreign policy and strategic interests with his personal philosophy and idealism. The result? India offered its views on many things, but could not defend its interests.

On the domestic front, both writers credit Nehru for reforming Hindu practices by passing progressive legislation. But Nehru failed to implement a uniform civil code, something the Indian constitution aspires to. Brown does not discuss this adequately, whereas Tharoor adopts a more complex approach. Unlike the BJP, Tharoor does not directly blame Nehru for offering special concessions to the minorities - a flashpoint in Indian politics today. Instead, Tharoor points out that the way Nehru implemented secularism set in motion inequitable approaches that could later be seen as appeasement. However, both authors remind readers of Nehru's visionary outlook, praising him for firmly establishing India's democratic roots.

Nehru's s commitment to secularism - which is being challenged by the BJP - stemmed from his belief in India's composite, inclusive identity. As both authors note, that belief was so firm that the Mahatma's use of religious symbols exasperated him. Nehru often fought with Gandhi, at times offering to break off completely, only to return, chastened, realizing that the moral appeal of Gandhi far outweighed his religious preoccupation. Here, Brown makes excellent use of archival material, sourced from, among others, the Nehru Memorial Museum, the India Office Library and the Library of Congress, as well as Nehru s post-1947 papers from Sonia Gandhi. We sense Nehru's irritation when the unpredictable Mahatma suddenly goes on a fast, obstinately pursuing a morally pure but less practical policy. Nehru's loneliness, discussed more thoroughly in Brown's work, shows up in other forms, such as in his unwillingness to delegate work.

As both authors state, there was inevitably a gap between Nehru's ambition and performance, ideals and reality. Nehru's faith in Soviet-style planning put inexperienced bureaucrats in charge of running industries, leading to inefficiency and incompetence. Curbs on the private sector restrained business, redirecting entrepreneurial energy in the wrong areas, such as manipulating the licence raj, a debilitating system where the government decided which industries could be set up and how they should grow. Brown shows, too, how progressive legislation, like the abolition of untouchability in 1955 or land reform, remained on paper, as conservative forces worked around the new laws.

But the overall picture that emerges from the books, and which is an accurate one, is that with all his faults, Nehru got the fundamentals right: Given India's composite nature, it could only have functioned as an inclusive, liberal, democratic society. Brown concludes her biography tentatively, only saying that Nehru was "central to the making of modern India... He recognized some of the major issues confronting not only India but a whole generation of leaders in Asia and Africa, and was determined to grapple with them in ways the imperial rulers had never wished or had the authority to do."

Tharoor is more forthright: He identifies four pillars of Nehru's legacy - democracy, secularism, non-alignment and socialism. In his measured verdict, he says: "Democracy endures, secularism is besieged, non-alignment is all but forgotten, and socialism barely clings on." That's a fitting epitaph for the politician who dominated post-colonial Indian politics as none other, a politician who ensured that democratic roots held firm in his multi-faceted country and that India did not descend into a one-party dictatorship, as so many other former colonies sadly did.