In hindsight, Nehru was a man without foresight

For more than 25 years before Independence, Nehru and other Congress leaders of the time kept asking the British to leave India and demanding "swaraj" or self-rule.

But how did they "prepare" for the independence that they were demanding? Did they commission any historian to study the concept and working of "swaraj" before the advent of colonialism? Did they attempt to learn anything from 2,000 years of "swaraj", or from the reigns of Asoka and Akbar?

No. On the contrary, Nehru spent three years in jail (from 1942 to 1945) writing a book "The Discovery of India. instead of reading up on the travails of "swaraj" he forgot that after Emperor Asoka (who was his model), the Mauryan dynasty simply disappeared.

Nor did Nehru learn from Akbar.s system of governance, especially his revenue system which was adopted even by the British. He did not even learn the fundamental idea of sharing power from Akbar (25% of whose Viceroys were Hindu Rajputs and) who shared power with Afghans, Persians and his own Mughals.

These and other "irreverent" thoughts about India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, flowed from the lips of a man who knows better. For, he was in the first batch of IAS officers to pass out in Independent India in 1947/48 and who quit the civil service after seven years to join Hindustan Lever.

Clearly, Mr. Aspie Moddie, guest speaker at the last meeting, had seen Nehru from close quarters . and what he saw did not appeal to him. In fact, the picture that he painted was so far from being rosy, that his audience was almost taken aback by his ruthless honesty. The mild, seemingly docile octogenarian was addressing the issue, "Nehru, the discoverer and ruler, and modern India: A contrast".

Blaming Nehru both for partition and the creation of Pakistan, he said after the self-rule Act of 1935 allowed Indians to take over provincial governments, the Muslim League asked for two cabinet seats in UP, a state with a big Muslim population. But Nehru said "Not more than one".

'Instead of Discovering India, Nehru should have given a serious thought to the governance of free India'

The year was 1936 and even Jinnah did not believe in Pakistan at that time. Nehru.s refusal sowed the seed of doubt in the Muslim League. It lost confidence in him. That was also the first test of power-sharing. But Nehru failed the test; he had not learnt the fundamentals of powersharing in the world.s most plural society from Akbar, the man he admired.

And what about Nehru.s famous doctrine of "panchsheel"? This is Mr. Moddie's take on it: "Believe me, it was a bit of arrogance on our part.

We pretended to be the teachers of the world in international relations, when we knew nothing about international relations".

The above comments flowed during the question-answer session that the speaker had with his audience, while the following is a verbatim report of Mr. Aspie Moddie.s talk:

When you come to think of it, nearly all the history of the last 60 years has been conditioned by Nehru. And yet we have almost forgotten him, we hardly know him. My role today is to act as a kind of generational link between Nehru.s time, pre- and post-Independence, and the kind of India we are living in now, after what happened to the Nehruvian state in the intervening years.

Much has been forgotten in this unhistorical society of ours. I had brief personal links with Nehru. I met him as a post-graduate student at Allahabad University. His house Anand Bhavan was just across the road. In those days there was no security even for a man like Nehru and we students would hop across and meet him and other national leaders, J.B. Kripalani, Maulana Azad and others.

Making a hard-hitting point. Mr. Moddie, the guest speaker at the last meeting, was a civil servant for seven years from 1948

Later, I met him twice: after I joined government and when I was president of the IAS Association in the first year, Nehru came along one night for dinner at Metcalfe House in Delhi. That day, I requested him to autograph my copy of .The Discovery of India.. It.s here, before the Chairman. I don.t know if there is another autographed copy of "The Discovery of India" anywhere.

And then, when I was a District Officer on the Nepal border; we were on the verge of a famine and major changes were in the offing in the regime in Nepal. That.s where I met Nehru again.

So, it's not just a question of reading his books or studying India at that time. I have had a personal link with the man of whom I am to speak.

Let me begin with his "Discovery". I happened to be writing my last book, called "Witnesses to our Time". And one of the chapters is on "Nehru, the Discoverer of India"; there are two further chapters on the Nehruvian state. I would like you to hear (what) Nehru himself (said) and to note his words very carefully, to understand better the kind of man he really was.

At that time, I don't mind admitting, he was the darling of the masses and the classes. He had a remarkable combination of attractive qualities. He was a Kashmiri Brahmin, he was a student of Harrow and Cambridge, he was Gandhi.s heir and a future Prime Minister of India and he was described as "India's last English Viceroy" (there is some truth in that).

Let me read from his book before we look at the Nehruvian state in the next chapter. "What have I discovered?" Nehru asked himself. He gives the answer, over 694 pages, written at the Ahmednagar Fort prison between that fateful "Quit India" resolution of August, 1942, and his release on March 28, 1945 . three years that he was in idleness, writing his book "The Discovery of India".

He himself referred to it as "two years of dreaming". Dreaming - not hard homework for the future of India, the future governance of India. "Two years of dreaming... an emotional experience," not a hard, analytical experience of 2,500 years of Indian history before him. An "emotional experience that was quite overwhelming". For him it was "a great voyage of discovery, of infinite charm and variety".

If you read this book, you will find that the first half is a kind of dreamy, nebulous appreciation of India.s past culture and intellectual life. The second half is the condemnation of the "British raj". In my humble view, Nehru did not discover India at all. He failed to discover three important things.

First, that in the 2,500 years of India.s past history, we were extremely weak in governing ourselves. Of the 2,500 years, for only 500 years you could say that we had something like reasonably good centralised government. But for 2,000 years we were a country of hundreds of small states, small kingdoms, rising, falling. That was a lesson Nehru did not learn. Why? And despite his great admiration for Asoka and Akbar?

Second, Nehru didn.t learn that through all these centuries, India was extremely strong in two things . soft power (culture in the broader sense of the word: art, architecture, philosophy, literature and so on); and enterprise. Indian enterprise has always been extremely good; we have been one of the most enterprising nations of history. Nehru did not discover this facet about enterprise . and this was the reason for the failure of the Nehru-vian state.

Look at the Cholas. It was not an empire built militarily. It was an empire built across the Bay of Bengal in South-East Asia with these two strong attributes, culture and trade. Look back to the Mughal times. India and China between them had 45% at least, if not 50%, of the world.s GNP.

India's share of the world.s trade at that time was supposed to have been 20% of the world trade. In 1950, after Independence, our share of world trade was 2%.

But after ten Five-Year Plans, our share of world trade was reduced to 0.6%.

Why? because the Nehruvian state did not recognise this great strength of India (the spirit of enterprise) which you and I have now begun to appreciate in the last ten or 15 years.

Nehru asked, what have I discovered? Actually, he really failed to discover India in those three years of writing this book.

The common man's plaint about development planning - 'only clouds, no rain'

There is a thing called anecdotal truths by historians, not just truths which may lie in print and documents, but anecdotes. I would like to tell you three anecdotes. Two of them are at the beginning and at the end of the Nehruvian era and one is in the middle, but they sum it all up.

I was climbing in the Himalayas in the mid-1950s with a Swiss friend. It was summer and he was in khakhi shorts. We came around a bend in the forest and an old Kumaoni farmer being led by his granddaughter, saw this apparition of a white man in shorts; he stopped in his tracks and started making a short speech. He said, .Aapko maloom tha kaise raj karen, aap insaaf dete they, aap ghoos nahin lete the. (You knew how to govern, you used to dispense justice, you did not take bribes).

My Swiss friend asked, what is he saying? I said, I.m sorry but he has mistaken you for a Britisher. He was indignant. He said, no, no, tell him I am Swiss. I told him the farmer had never heard of Switzerland. However, I translated back to the old man and said, .Saab kehte hain ki veh woh Angrez nahin hain jo yahan raj karte the. Woh Switzerland ke hain, woo bhi pahadi desh hai. (Sahib says he is not one of the Britishers who used to rule the country. He is from Switzerland, which is also a mountainous nation).

A rare autographed copy of .The Discovery of India.. Signed by Nehru for Mr. Moddie in 1948

I'll never forget his answer; he said: "Koi baat nahin, wohi murti hai". (Doesn't matter, it's the same image).

Here was a grassroots man from the middle of Kumaon and ten years after Independence he was telling this foreigner, .You knew how to govern .. I have never known anybody to tell me or to tell anybody else, "Aapko maloom tha kaise raj karen" in the last 50 years. No one has said this.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the year 2005, again in the interior of Kumaon, I met another old man. I tried to talk to him about what was going on in development. And his short answer to me was: .Saab, paise bahut aate hain upar se, district mein. Gaon mein bhi paise aate hain. Lekin kuch hota nahin, kuch dikhayee nahin deta hai. Yeh sab upar ka hawa hai. (Lots of money comes into the district. Money comes to the village, too. But nothing is done, nothing is seen. It.s all a lot of air up there).

Look at that expression, .Yeh sab upar ka hawa hai.. All this talk about development and so on and so forth.

You and I read the learned planners and economists of the country and the man at the grassroots tells you, .Yeh sab upar ka hawa hai. . Only clouds, no rain.

The third anecdote is from the middle, in 1975. I happened to meet one of the leaders of the country. From one of the families that have ruled and been the king-makers of Madhya Pradesh; at that time he was handling Mrs. Gandhi.s Allahabad High Court case. He was attacking a senior government secretary. I chipped in and said, look, I don.t know the facts of the case, but I do know this gentleman is not corrupt; the trouble with you politicians is this, that when you ask an officer to do something and it is not done, you jump to the conclusion that he is in somebody else.s pocket.

He cut me short, .Moddie saab, aap nahin jaante, is desh mein har baat ke liye sauda hota hai.. I said thank you, I will never use the word corruption again. The true word is .sauda. (deal). We have been living in a "sauda" society under a "sauda" government.

These three anecdotes sum up, for you, from the grassroots and from the mouth of the politician himself, what has been the true situation.

To return to Nehru. If you were to judge him as ruler after his book, "The Discovery of India", maybe we can touch on just three things (within the limited time available to me).

First, he and his generation gave us the Westminster model of the Constitution. Second, he gave us a socialist pattern of planning economic development. And third, the security of India. He was, after all, the Prime Minister of India at that formative time.

Looking at the Constitution, I would give Nehru and his generation full marks for a liberal democracy, for universal franchise. I emphasise universal franchise because I remember at that time I seemed to be in a minority of people who believed in universal franchise. My class of people didn.t trust the people of India and, I.ll be frank with you, I don.t trust my class of people. I.ve just given you two voices of the people of India that were authentic.

After a few years Nehru, who was a believer in centralised government even though he talked about panchayati raj, yielded to a historical fact, that of linguistic states. He yielded unwillingly, but he had to yield.

May I tell you something as a historian. if you look at maps of India over several hundred years for the last 2,000 years, especially before the Mughals came, you will find that India has always been linguistic. The states conformed to more or less the language groups. Nehru had, I will give him credit for this, recognised this, though he was not in favour of this. But this is the reality and this is a reality which now comes home to us (in the shape of a question) as to whether India is capable of functioning with coalition governments of so many linguistic groups in the world.s most plural society.

But having given us the Constitution in the early .50s, Nehru was also responsible for the 9th Schedule of the Constitution. The 9th Schedule of the Constitution, I may remind you briefly, is an attempt by the politicians to do what they want, to remove things from the scrutiny of the judiciary. In other words, it is not .appeal-able., you cannot take it to the courts. And one of the things that was put into the 9th Schedule of the Constitution was this legacy of the British, the Land Acquisition Act. All of you know the recent consequences of the Land Acquisition Act.

Then, there has been an almost total failure of the police and judicial system which, in my time, was taken for granted. In other words, law and order didn.t matter. Development was the great mantra. But look at the state of law and order now. One hundred and seventy districts of India have no writ of government, the Maoists rule them.

Look at the rate of convictions of our police-judicial system. India.s national average is only 6%. I discussed this with a Supreme Court judge who was trying to defend the system about two years ago. I asked him, what is the rate of conviction in Western democracies. I am not talking about dictatorial countries, about Pakistan, Russia and so on. He said, 70%. Seventy per cent convictions in good democracies and 6% in India on an average; which means that in half of India it is less than 6%.

We have no internal security in this country . this is part of the legacy of those years.

Coming to the last point I would like to make about the Constitution. There have been over 80 amendments in just 50 years. I am not aware of any democratic country which has had so many amendments in such a short time. Therefore, I end this part of my talk by putting to you the question: .What is the resemblance of the Constitutional democracy that we have now, with the Constitution that we framed in 1951?. Perhaps you would like to get a speaker to tell you about that.

The second thing on which Nehru is to be judged is planned development. He wanted a .fearless people., but what have we got? We got a suppressed control .raj. for decades after that, for 50 years. We got the Emergency, we got the criminalisation of politics and in development we got what Prof. Rajkumar described as .the Hindu rate of growth.. The Nehruvian state could only produce a GNP rate of growth of 3% per annum for most of its years.

Then we got a remarkable admission from Nehru.s grandson when he became Prime Minister. I call it the .Rajiv syndrome.. Rajiv pointed out, here in Bombay city in 1985, at the time of the centenary of the Congress, that 85% of the money which had gone into the great irrigation systems planned for the country did not reach the farmers.

What happened to the Nehruvian state? It ended in bankruptcy in 1991

Strangely, there have been subsequent studies, one by a friend in Bangalore, a former head of IIM, Ahmedabad, who has done a similar study for the public services of India. And he arrived at the same figure . that 85% of the people of India are dissatisfied with public services. And so you could say that the Nehruvian state has not satisfied 85% of the people of India.

What happened to the Nehruvian state? It ended in bankruptcy in 1991.

You can ask yourself, where are we now? Are we still in the Nehruvian state, are we in another state, or are we in some kind of .khichdi. in between?

Lastly, I come to the security of India. Let me give you one more anecdote, because anecdotes really go to the heart of the matter. Gen. Rudra, one of our leading generals in the first decade or two of Independence, wrote of a remarkable incident in his autobiography.

A great privilege to have you with us. President Rumi presents a memento to Mr. Aspie Moddie at the conclusion of the last meeting

We had a British commander-inchief in the first few months after Independence. He did the proper thing. He asked Nehru and the government of India what they perceived to be the national threats to security. A perfectly valid question. It is for the government to decide what are the perceived threats to national security. Not for the commander-inchief. The commander-in-chief responds.

Nehru lost his temper. He knew nothing about military matters or geo-political matters. He said, .What threats? We believe in ahimsa. We believe in peace. There are no threats.. And, I am told, he added, .We don.t need an army..

Within two months that threat came in Kashmir and that army saved what was left in Kashmir. That was only the beginning. Then followed 12 years of a disastrous policy, ending up in that book called .The Himalayan Blunder..

Most people think that the Himalayan blunder was the failure of policy with China. It was not only a failure of policy with China, it was a failure of policy in Kashmir, it was a failure of policy in Nepal, the whole of the northern border. That itself is a remarkable story. I can tell you that Nehru was weak, ignorant, incompetent when it came to India.s national security of that northern border.

What have we landed up with today? We are in a worse situation. In the 1950.s, Chou-en-Lai at least recognised the McMahon Line; today, China does not recognise the McMahon Line.

In the 1950.s he was prepared to negotiate with us; there might have been an exchange between that little strip in Ladakh which we lost, which was where Nehru made the excuse .not a blade of grass grows., and a settlement of the frontier. We missed that.

So where are we today? We are encircled by terrorist states, we are encircled by states around our borders which themselves are insecure and failed states, we are encircled by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka.

Let me remind you that the British secured the security of India by buffer states. We have lost all those buffer states. They are all weak, failing states, states threatening the security of India. I won.t say anything about the Chinese geo-strategic encircling of India through the oceans, as well as Tibet.

So, once again, where are we now? We are perhaps in a limping, liberalising state, trying to emerge from the Nehruvian state after ten Five-Year Plans. But we still have a strong culture of the "sarkar".

Please remember that the decision in 1991 to liberalise was not a decision of conviction, it was a decision of compulsion. We were bankrupt, we had no option.

Our security, internal and external, is much worse than what it was in the last effective year of the .British raj., 1945. Thank you.

Earlier, introducing Mr. Moddie, First Lady Pervin Jehangir said he had been a life-long student of history and of governance.

Though he had passed out with the first batch of IAS officers in 1947/ 48, after a stint of seven years as a civil servant he preferred to join Hindustan Lever. He was on the Lever board for ten years.

A former senior consultant to the West German government on its development projects, Mr. Moddie has written a number of books on a variety of subjects. He is one of the founding fathers of the International Institution for the Study of the Hindukush Himalayas.

The vote of thanks was proposed by Suresh Jagtiani.

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