Hindu right wing and Jawaharlal Nehru
Yasser Latif Hamdani
A recent article by the eminent Pakistani physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn lays out why by burying Pandit Jawaharlal Nehrus legacy in India, the Hindu right wing is hurting Indian secularism and therefore making India a mirror image of Pakistan. Reading the article one is struck by two things: First is how ignorant the Hindu right wing is not just of Nehrus great contributions as the first Prime Minister of India but also to the fact that Nehru has done more to entrench Hindu majoritarianism, perhaps unwittingly, in India. Second is how off the mark people like Hoodbhoy even with the best of intentions are, just like the Hindu right wing, in properly analysing the legacy of a towering figure in South Asian history.
There are of course the stock myths, some bordering on utterly ridiculous, that the Hindu right wing deploys against Indias first Prime Minister. Of course these are so pathetically ridiculous that they deserve no reply. There are of course much better and more valid criticisms of Jawaharlal Nehru that can and should be made. Some of these criticisms might even help rehabilitate Nehru in the eyes of the Hindu right wing though that this is not the primary intention of the present article.
It must be remembered that it was a much younger Jawaharlal Nehru who had been an ally of the Hindu Mahasabha when the amendments to the Nehru Report were being debated in 1928. Mr. Jinnah had worked out a compromise whereby Muslims would give up separate electorates in return for 33 percent reserved constituencies. The elder Nehru, i.e. Motilal Nehru, was on board with the idea. Hindu Mahasabha opposed it. Meanwhile, for reasons that are still unclear to me, having read through the proceedings, the Congress left wing and young Turks led by Nehru threw in their lot with the Mahasabha. Perhaps a good historian and I mean a historian not a lawyer or a physicist should investigate why this happened because at this critical juncture a compromise would have helped avoid a lot of heartache for all concerned. It is clear why the Hindu Mahasabha did not want to accede to the demand. The idea of having an organized Muslim bloc, despite joint electorates, was unacceptable to their vision of India and its ancient identity.
In 1937 Nehru displayed arrogance of the highest order, when after having contested elections in a de facto alliance with the Muslim League, he insisted that the Muslim League members who would join the United Provinces ministry would have to join the Congress Party. In his famous correspondence with Jinnah, he insultingly told the latter that Muslim League was just one of the many Muslim parties, referring to the Islamic theocrats like Majlis-e-Ahrar and Jamiat-e-Ulema-Hind. In an exchange with Dr. Mohammad Iqbal in 1935 on the issue of Ahmadis, Nehru had taken a principled stance but from this point onwards in order to cut Muslim League down to size, Nehru seems to have given Majlis-e-Ahrar and JUH a carte blanche. Majlis-e-Ahrar attacked the Muslim League for having Ahmadis in the League and that is something I have written in detail about elsewhere. The greatest tragedies emerge out of not a clash between good and evil but between good and good. While Nehru and Jinnah did not see eye to eye on many things, they agreed on ideas of religious freedom, civil liberties and minority rights. It is a great tragedy that they, of all the people, could not agree for a future that would keep India united and yet provide the effective safeguards for minorities and specifically Muslims.
The twin-headed majoritarianism in the subcontinent that plagues both Pakistan and India is a negation of Jinnahs vision and a triumph for Nehrus politics, despite Nehrus own secular liberal leanings
It must be remembered Jawaharlal Nehru is the one person actually responsible for the creation of Pakistan at par with Jinnah or any of the so called protagonists of Pakistan. Nehru had, by 1946, come to see the existence of Muslim majority areas on the fringes of British India ruled by parochial regional parties, areas that Congress Party by and large failed to penetrate but Muslim League did. So when the Cabinet Mission Plan was seen as the only hope for the great Indian marriage of diversity and accepted by Jinnah and Azad, it was Nehru who dropped the bombshell by relying on an absurd interpretation of the grouping clause that him and Gandhi thought up. He then declared thoughtlessly that Congress was going into the Constituent Assembly unfettered by any agreements. In 1947 Nehru insisted more than anyone else that the provinces of Punjab and Bengal be partitioned. In the process the idea of an independent, sovereign and secular Bengal that had been endorsed by Jinnah was buried by the Congress. In many ways all of this makes Nehru the greatest saviour of Hindutvas because had Jinnah had his way, a federation of India would have emerged with semi-autonomous Muslim majority areas acting as a strong counter-balance to the Hindu majority centre in Delhi. A united India of Jinnahs conception whether Akhand Bharat wallahs want to admit or not- was the biggest nightmare for Hindu majoritarianism. Nehru had thus rescued them from a constitutional counterpoise that would have checked their millennial ambitions forever.
The writer is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School, USA
