LETTERS FOR A NATION FROM JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TO HIS CHIEF MINISTERS 1947-1963 Edited by Madhav Khosla Publisher: Allen Lane Pages: 334 Price: Rs 599
More than anything else, the public discourse on Jawaharlal Nehru is about his apparent irrelevance today. The much-maligned phrase "minority appeasement" is traced to him. He is credited with having spawned a "command economy" that created nothing but inefficiency and corruption. He is seen as someone who did lasting damage to the country's foreign policy because of his adherence to a romantic vision of non-alignment. He is also seen as someone responsible for denying us the joy of having the best prime minister we never had - Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. And his favorite Planning Commission is dead and about to be buried. Nehru's debit side now has countless such entries, at least in popular perception. I started reading the book with pretty much the same baggage. Having seen the benefits of more than two decades of economic liberalization, people of my generation had begun to question whatever principles and policies Nehru stood for. After reading his letters to chief ministers, however, I get the impression that we have been unfair in drawing such harsh conclusions.
The letters clearly bring out the fact that Nehru believed in processes rather than being restricted by dogmas. He was engaged in, as the editor of the volume writes in his introductory remarks, "making a nation, rather than merely administering it". He wanted a nation built around "a liberal society structured around individual freedom, a state respectful of procedures and norms, a model of leadership where strength and self-inquiry might cohere." While doing so he kept reinventing himself even as he learnt along the way. He was a supporter of the concept of a planned economy all right, which entailed giving primary importance to the public sector units. But contrary to common belief, he did not want to stifle the growth of the private sector either. So when a group of industrialists met him to apprise him of the problems of a controlled regime, he did acknowledge publicly that members of the business community had a valid point. Nor did he want public sector enterprises to be a constant drag on national resources. In a letter to chief ministers in 1961, this is what he had to say on the subject: "The public undertakings that we have set up are great achievements, but they have been described by an eminent authority as 'post office socialism'‌ I think it means that we look upon them as we look upon the post office which should balance its income and expenditure. That is not good‌ Our public enterprises have to be run with the greatest efficiency and the greatest profit." It is a different matter that these enterprises did not quite live up to Nehru's expectations. But Nehru cannot be faulted for his vision as he saw it then. If there was one point to which he kept referring in his letters, it was on communalism, an issue that is as critical today as it was in the era immediately after Partition. In his view, majoritarian communalism posed a far bigger challenge because it could take on the garb of nationalism. But Nehru hated all forms of communalism. What he aimed at was "a sense of balance and of assurance of a square deal and future prospects in all parts of the country and in all communities of India. If the tendency is to upset any balance or to emphasize one aspect at the cost of another, the result is a lack of equilibrium and dissatisfaction and frustration among large groups." What is derisively referred to as minority appeasement now was nothing but an attempt to produce a sense of balance. There may have been distortions along the way while implementing that vision, during his time and subsequently, but there was nothing wrong with the vision of making all groups stakeholders in India's progress. Reading Nehru's letters written in the 1950s and early 1960s, one gets the impression that while the country may have moved on from the Nehruvian era, we have not managed to fix
many of the issues he had raised six decades ago. Adequate representation to women in legislatures was a recurring theme in his letters. That is still work-in- progress. He had talked about pending court cases and how justice delayed is justice denied. Unfortunately, the backlog at every level of the judiciary has only increased since then. He constantly talked about the shortage of skilled manpower. We are still struggling with that issue. Letters for a Nation affords us a chance to rediscover Nehru. As the country celebrates its first prime minister's 125th birth anniversary, should we not give Nehruvian ideals a second chance?
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