Why the Nehrus survive

Dhiren Bhagat

The future of India is today, as it always has been, anybody's guess. So one can sympathise with the teams of subcontinen- tal specialists who have been called upon this past week to speculate about it on the box. `Do you see a bright future for India,' Brian Walden asked his team on Weekend World, 'or a pessimistic one?' Having left their tea-leaves at home, they did what they could. Fudge fudge, waffle waffle. ('Well,' concluded Walden, and I quote from Memory, 'you've all said much the same thing, which is hardly surprising as You're all experts.)

But if looking forward won't help, look- ing back might. At this point it seems an altogether more reasonable enterprise to trY to understand the historical circumst- ances in which Mrs Gandhi's extraordinary career played its way, to trace the para- meters within which she made her choices, and to work out what it was that caused her to propel Rajiv to power.

Mrs Gandhi was not an aristocrat, nor was her father, however aristocratic they appeared. Their ancestor Raj Kaul was a Kashmiri scholar who migrated to Delhi in 1716 and was well received at the Mughal Co, urt; with the decline of the empire the fortunes of the family dwindled and in 1861, the year Mrs Gandhi's grandfather was born, the family was being supported Y. his brothers, one a scribe, the other a schoolteacher. It was a western-style legal education that enabled the family to rise °nee again, to enter the new class of the tittle, a middle class that was being created throughout the country between 1860 and 1890, united by the knowledge of English and the new learning that came with it. It was as if the experience of an English education annealed these people, deadened the nerves that connected them to their communal origins. Modern India was not invented in 1947. Reading recent commentators, however, one might think that it was. In Midnight's Children Rushdie had spoken of India as 'the new myth' of the year of independ- ence, 'a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a Phenomenal collective will — except in a dream we all agreed to dream'. He had a good point about the dream, though he Was wildly off when he came to the date he assigned to it. Midnight's Children, how- ever, was a work of fiction and it didn't sem worth while correcting its facts. (Mrs Gandhi thought otherwise, and her lawyers obtained an apology from Rushdie for another appropriation of fact.) This week 1,n the Times he seemed to repeat the point: • • • whereas India itself is a mere 37 years old.' V.S. Naipaul in the Daily Mail (billed

as an 'authority on Indian affairs') similarly seemed to miss the significance of this Victorian class whose intellectual revolu- tion was far more important than anything India has seen since.

It was these people who invented mod- ern India. Hindu College, Calcutta, was founded in 1817 and by 1827, a year before he obtained an Assistant Mastership there, an 18-year-old prodigy, Henry Deorzio, was already addressing sonnets To India — My Native Land:

Well — let me dive into the depths of time, And bring from out the ages that have rolled A few small fragments of the wrecks sub- lime. . .

Not very original verse, perhaps, but the message in it was. Macaulay's celebrated Minute on Indian Education followed in 1835 and soon enough what Ripon was to call 'the daily growing body of Natives educated by us in western ideas and west- ern learning' was everywhere, clamouring for change, both within government and within Indian society. In 1870 Mrs Gan- dhi's grandfather's eldest brother became one of the first (western-educated) lawyers of his province. (A few years before that my great grandfather's eldest brother be- came the first M.A. in the Punjab: this is nothing exceptional: trace back the fami- lies of most members of this class and you will find many such 'achievements'.) The 20th-century nationalists have, on the whole, ignored this class but Anil Seal's The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (1968) has provided an excellent account of its composition and influence.

The first generation was educated in India, the next generation (at any rate, a lot of them) went abroad. In 1907 Jawahar- lal Nehru went up to Trinity, Cambridge. Four years later my grandfather went up to Pembroke, Oxford. Not surprisingly, they picked up the ideas that were in the air. (Both Nehru and my grandfather were exceedingly fond of Swinburne, an interest stimulated perhaps by the vogue for the poet around the time of his death in 1909.) Then something strange happened to this class which was destined to rule the country at some eventual date: they be- came infatuated with universal franchise (an idea that was in the air then) and in becoming so they hacked away at the source of their own power and position in Indian politics. Mahatma Gandhi's call for mass politics at the 1919 Congress seems to me to be the point when this class abdi- cated its political position. Of course the effects were not felt immediately: the men of this class still led the nationalist move- ment and when independence arrived they were the ones who got elected. But mass democracy made it increasingly difficult for their descendants (for the most part, urban creatures) to possess adequate power bases. And then there was the question of money. The reality of Indian democracy is that the capitalists control it. Three factors — low motivation to vote, huge Constituen- cies (ten times 'the size of Britain's) and general poverty, the fact that even if you cannot successfully bribe a voter to vote for you it is not offensive to offer him 70 pence in the' hope that he might be influenced — have between them pushed up the cost of elections to a figure which no honest man can afford. So candidates are routinely sponsored by both regional and national capital and members of our class are too mindful of their bourgeois honesty to submit to such an arrangement. Conse- quently they have retreated to the Civil Service (though it is no longer a preferred career), the professions and the British companies of Calcutta and Bombay.

'I cannot really see her playing bridge in the afternoons: I do not ever see her in the cottage of her dreams.' That was Dom Moraes in his biography of Mrs Gandhi four years ago but it could have been any of us: no one could imagine Mrs Gandhi calling trumps at the Delhi Gymkhana. And that was the importance of the Nehru family within our class, within the nation. Theirs is not the only family from our class to have tried its hand at politics in recent times, but theirs was the only family from this class to have held on to a substantial power base and to have consolidated it. And this class is important because it is the only class to have fully appreciated the idea of a secular modern India: the Janata disaster (the power brokers in that govern- ment belonged to another class) is some- thing we should never forget, no matter how happy we were when Mrs Gandhi's Emergency government lost the elections. If India disintegrates in the future it will doubtless be because this class, which dreamt the dream of India in the last century, will no longer be around as an adhesive and the more parochial loyalties of the other classes will triumph. (In 1966, when Mrs Gandhi finally conceded the demand of the Sikhs for a Punjabi- speaking state, Hindu mobs began rioting. Three Congressmen were burnt alive in Panipat by Hindus instigated by the opposition party, the Jan Sangh, and Mrs Gandhi, ip a rare moment, lost her cool and stormed at a civic reception for the visiting Yugoslav Premier: 'They are not true Indians.') Mrs Gandhi had a troubled relationship with her own class. In the Fifties, Nehru accompanied by his daughter, visited Tokyo. The Indian community in the city was small enough to gather in one place to meet him. My mother noticed that in their otherwise faultless hospitality the Japanese had forgotten to provide the visiting Prime Minister with the red rose. he was accus- tomed to wearing in his buttonhole. But by the time my mother got to the meeting, the rose she had bought for her hero had blown a bit. After his speech. Nehru was signing copies of his books. My mother went behind the table at which he sat and stood between Nehru and Mrs Gandhi waiting her turn. Mrs Gandhi suddenly snapped: 'But that rose is too big.' Upset, my mother was about to run away when Nehru diplomatically pressed her hand in silent acknowledgment.

It was only in 1971 when Mrs Gandhi had led India to victory in Bangladesh that my mother forgave Mrs Gandhi. But four years later, when the Emergency was declared, my mother took back the for- giveness. And after Mrs Gandhi's victory in 1980 my mother did not know what to think of her. The political commentators of our class, however, did not share my mother's confusion. They made her out to be a simple villain, one who had a hold on the 'uneducated' Indian masses. Last year when the editor of the Sunday Observer in Bombay, wishing to balance the tone of political comment in his paper, looked for a political columnist who might be sym- pathetic to Mrs Gandhi's policies, he found it tough going. Finally he concluded that of the scores of columnists in the country the editor of the Times of India was the only man who fitted the bill, and unfortunately he wouldn't take the job. Till last week, the position was vacant.

What these commentators failed to rec- ognise was that Mrs Gandhi was not as free as their judgments implied. Consequently Mrs Gandhi has been praised and blamed for things she deserved neither praise nor blame for. To illustrate this, I shall look at the single most inexplicable action of her career, calling the elections in March 1977. Though everyone recognises that she was convinced she would win, it is nonetheless considered creditable that she thought democratic endorsement was important. A typical judgment, this is from the Times obituary: 'To her credit, however, she decided to call a general election in March 1977.

When Dom Moraes asked Mrs Gandhi if the desire to appear a democrat was what caused her to call the election he was cut short by one of the lady's famous freezes: "That's not a very intelligent question," Mrs Gandhi said chillingly.' Mrs Gandhi's cousin and. critic, Nayantara Sahgal in a recent book Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (1983) devotes a chapter to this vexed question, veers towards the correct answer and then falls short of a satisfactory explanation. According to Sahgal, the 1971 parliament had secured for Mrs Gandhi her own power base, the 1977 parliament 'would ensure Sanjay's if it brought in a

majority of his handpicked supporters! But this idea collapses under the objection Sahgal is honest enough to raise, that according to Mrs Gandhi (and other sources) Sanjay had advised against the election. Sahgal then concludes that though democracy was not Mrs Gandhi's 'style', it was 'an insistent craving'. Back to square one and the unintelligent question. Of course there are always a host of reasons why such a major decision is taken but important among these must surely

have been the imminent threat from dissi- dents within her own party which Mrs

Gandhi was facing towards the end of

1976. Some work suggesting this has been done by Myron Weiner of MIT (India at the Polls, 1978) and Angela S. Burger of

the University of Wisconsin. The fact is that in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Bihar, Congress state legislatcfrs had

met to protest against the socialistically phrased 42nd Amendment. Some 200

amendments to the 42nd Amendment had been sent to the Law Minister by Congress legislators. The Congress ParliamentarY Party had refused to accept constitutional amendments proposed by the government that would have transferred agriculture from the control of the state government to the central government and removed the right of property from the constitution: Confident she would win, Mrs Gandhi seems to have thought she could use the election as an opportunity to whittle awaY

the power base of these dissident legisla-

tors by refusing them seats. Sanjay's boys were to have been given most of the Congress seats. It was only after Jagjivan Ram's defection on February 2 that Mrs Gandhi panicked and revised the list of seats. But by then it was too late; perhaps it was all along.

Likewise when Mrs Gandhi often acted in an undemocratic manner (toppling state

governments, playing with communalism)

it was often because of compulsions (the opposition would have played with com-

munalism etc) that the newspaper reader was blind to because so often the newsPaP" er columnists were equally blind to them. This is not to say she did . not make mistakes, and conversely, that she did not achieve anything; rather that she achieved less and destroyed less than it is common to suppose. She held on.

An instance of the monumental blind- ness of liberal journalists of our class to the

obvious was on view on the box around noon last Wednesday. We knew Mrs Gan- dhi was dead, her successor had not been

sworn in. The resident editor of the Delhl Times of India suggested the Home Mims" ter would succeed her, the London corres- pondent of the Calcutta Telegraph that the Finance Minister would. What about Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, asked the moderator? 14°, they said sagaciously, he lacked the neces- sary experience. Within hours he was sworn in, the obvious candidate by reckoning, the last surviving descendant o the 19th-century new class who, thanks to his family, retains a rural power base.