It is not surprising that under Prime Minister Narendra Modi the ruling BJP should choose the persona of the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the 125th anniversary of whose birth fell last Friday, and not any policy approaches of the present era, as the site of ideological warfare against the Congress, which it seeks to supplant as India’s first party on a long-term basis.
The reason is that it was in Nehru’s 17 years as Prime Minister that the country passed from being a colony when it resided in an area of darkness, and was deprived of socio-economic development to modernity, relative development, and rationality, and came to be counted as one of the world’s technologically more advanced countries.
To run down this spectacular legacy which is admired worldwide, and carve out a new narrative that leans toward Hindu nationalism, is not easy.
The attempt thus had to involve the artificial raising of Nehru’s comrades and contemporaries such as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who sometimes differed with the former from a traditionalist standpoint, to a higher pedestal than him.
But that’s a mug’s game. Just as the world’s statesman-saint Mahatma Gandhi cannot be reduced in stature, Nehru, the international statesman who gave vision to all of the third world, or for that matter “Iron Man” Patel, cannot be run down either to serve partisan ends.
We are speaking of the greats here. Whatever the strategies of its opponents, the Congress will do well to learn from Nehru and Patel and not seek to ossify their memory.
