I may be misunderstood as a Nehruvian for this article in the daily
Sakaal Times today.Today is Nehru's 120th birthday.
Rediscovering Nehru by Sankar Ray 14 Nov 08
(http://epaper.sakaaltimes.com/ST/ST/2008/11/14/index.shtml?ArtId=008_004&Search=Y)
With neo-liberal capitalism shaken, Nehruvian ideas deserve a fresh appraisal
W hile interviewing environmental activist, Medha Patkar, in 2004,
Robert Jensen from the School of Journalism, Texas, made a conscious
dig at the partial and biased perception on Nehru. When Medha referred
to the general criticism of Nehru for describing dams the "temples of
modern India", Jensen shot back: Nehru said that in 1955, but three
years later he changed tack and described big dams as "a disease of
gigantism". In other words, Nehru took three years to realise the need
for judicial water management. Pitiably, environmentalists of
different hues have a fascination to quote Nehru's words of 1955.
Nehru is misjudged and misinterpreted, especially by media pundits.
The late Janardan Thakur in his book Prime Ministers Nehru To Vajpayee
wrote: "Most of the evils that have corroded India in the last 50
years had their beginnings during the Nehru Raj." Implicitly, he
inferred, Nehru fostered corruption and questioned the latter's value
judgment. Such castigations reflect anathema, if not jaundiced view;
more sensationalism than substantiation.
Had Nehru patronised corruption, the imprisonment of the powerful
feudal lord and minister of civil supplies in the Congress-led Central
Province government in 1950, Rao Shiv Bahadur Singh, could not have
been possible. The jagirdaar from Churhat, Madhya Pradesh, had
allegedly accepted bribe for issuance of a forged document, which
permitted the closed Panna Diamond Mining Syndicate to resume
operations. Braving pressure from some bigwigs within the party, Nehru
did not budge an inch from his decision. The minister, incidentally
father of the present Union minister for human resource development,
Arjun Singh, was expelled from the Congress .
Or take the Haridas Mundhra -tainted US $ 3.2 million LIC scandal,
unearthed by Nehru's estranged son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi. Nehru
instituted a probe by the retired chief justice of the Bombay High
Court, M C Chagla. Finance Minister, T T Krishnamachari, and his
finance secretary, H M Patel, were indicted and removed from their
posts. The practice of downplaying scandals with 'action taken report'
was not in Nehru's parliamentary lexicon. The irony of history was
that the Gandhian Prime Minister Morarji Desai, Nehru's ideological
adversary, made H M Patel the Finance Minister in the first
non-Congress government at the Centre.
In fact, Nehru had to work in a corrupting milieu, which he wanted to
take head on but failed. "Most of my ministers are reactionary and
scoundrels but as long as they are my ministers I can keep some check
on them. If I were to resign they would be the government and they
would unloose the forces that I have tried since I came to power to
hold in check," Nehru had famously told the noted British scientist
and communist fellow traveller, John Desmond Bernal, in 1954 in
Peking. This revelation was culled from the Bernal Papers at the
University of Cambridge. Nehru was like the lonesome Casabianca in a
darkening bay.
N o doubt, Nehru was a prisoner of indecision quite often in crucial
moments. Nonetheless, his sincerity to curb corruption is above board.
And he was aware of the necessity for selfless and ethical commitment
for politicians in India, which was in tatters, thanks to the
unbridled loot of country's wealth by the British Raj. "If there is a
selfish leadership, dishonest administration, economic distress and
lack of a national purpose, such a society will always remain
unstable. If we protect dharma, it will protect us; otherwise we will
be neglected by it," Nehru had stated in a moment of confessional
mood.
Nehru's strength and weakness revolved around his emotionalism. His
opponents thrive on his tactless emotional expressions. Consider his
jehad against hoarders or black marketeers in 1945 in Calcutta. Shaken
by the appalling distress of millions of Bengal villagers after the
infamous Bengal Famine of 1943, he thundered that the Congress
government in independent India would publicly hang the hoarders from
the nearest lamppost.
Historical documents, such bas the Nanavati Papers, show that the
famine was a man-made one with some tycoons amassing huge sums in
collaboration with the colonial authorities. As a barrister, Nehru
ought to have understood that no law would permit a government to mete
out a harsh punishment to hoarders and black marketeers. Small wonder,
right-wingers inside the Congress like Acharya J B Kripalani used to
taunt Nehru by pondering whether there was any shortage of black
marketeers in the country. The likes of Kripalani had abhorred
Nehruvian concept of economic development. Ironically, the Supreme
Court had remarked last year that the only way to rid the country of
corruption is to hang some of the corrupt people from lampposts.
The 1950s witnessed an era of experimentation of 'independent
capitalism', based on a strong public sector with exclusive rights in
production and management of core sectors, mainly heavy and capital
goods, and restricted rights to direct foreign investment. This was in
contrast to the dependent variant, imposed by the US MNCs in Latin
America. Some Soviet scholars were cynical about the independent
strain of capitalism and believed that any development in nonsocialist
peripheral economies would be dependent. The hint was at the so called
Indian communists who overestimated transformative potentials of
Nehru-Indira policies.
The Soviet prediction was proved prophetic in 1991 when the
Congress-led government of P V Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh as
his Finance Minister introduced IMF-prescribed reform with hidden
agenda that were no beneficial to the economy. That was the beginning
of compradorisation.
Blasting 'Manmohanomics', wellknown Marxian scholar, Samir Amin ,
director, Dakar-based Third World Forum, wrote in Monthly Review, "The
1991 turn toward liberalism originated in the compradore leadership of
the Congress Party, but its political beneficiaries, as elsewhere,
have been culturalists who found a ready audience for their irrational
illusions in the social tensions and misery always attendant to
liberal reforms."
The NDA, he described as more rightist, ran "a Hindu-compradore
government, which wholly subscribed to the dictates of imperialism on
the offensive (accelerating economic liberalisation), failed. In the
2004 elections the premises of Hindu culturalism and liberalism
promoted by the compradore bourgeoisie and its imperialist masters
were jointly held responsible for the social catastrophe by the
majority of the Indian electorate," he added.
With the neo-liberal capitalism shaken to the core under the suicidal
over- financialisation, Nehru and his ideas deserve a fresh appraisal.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
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