‘The Wasted Decades’: A grudging recommendation for the Nehru-bashing season

It is difficult to discuss a book that you significantly disagree with when it is written by a friend whom you like and respect. But there is a positive side to this: Disclosing this increases transparency and credibility, which I hope will remain irrespective of what I say about and around his book on Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and their Congress-era socialism. The book is neither the first nor the last, in praise or criticism, on independent India’s first and thus far its longest serving political family.

This much can certainly be said about the Nehru and Indira years: their reigns were a colourful grey, giving people all sorts of opportunities to look at the politics of those times as if it were a Picasso painting and interpret it in so many ways – often based on personal experiences or predilections. But they cannot exorcise Nehru’s ghost. His worldview won’t die. I am reminded of lyrics from Hotel California by the Eagles: “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast.”

Nonetheless, I recommend Aarnab Mitra’s book, The Wasted Decades (Garuda Prakashan), for reasons beyond friendship with a former colleague whose character I trust. The book is a one-stop shop for those wanting to know why Nehru is criticised so much, and spares you the trouble of reading many similar books because he has done some efficient digging for you. It is also useful because Mitra has unearthed valuable facts that help you understand the times Nehru lived in and the social circles he had to contend with. The book is also lucidly written in a journalistic narrative, while drawing on academic material that adds muscle to his arguments.

On the downside, Mitra’s easy style sometimes veers toward the polemical, which undermines the work's credibility in an avoidable way. I also choked over the endorsements the book has won from social media favourites, often clubbed in the “right-wing nuts” category. I am tempted to modify that old saying: “Never judge a book by its cover – or by its endorsements.”

Once these health warnings are taken like a pinch of sodium chloride, the book covers a lot of history, making it readable. Criticism of Nehru runs on familiar lines that can be summed up like an old-world telegram: “Nehru was foisted on India by Mahatma Gandhi, who steamrolled Congress party majors. Patel was sidelined. Kashmir was lost to Nehru’s mistake. China took advantage of his naivete. He ignored primary education and agriculture. He backed dynastic rule and created a licence-permit raj that made India miss a global economic boom and sink into corruption.”

None of these telegraphic insights should be dismissed or accepted at face value. A historical work on the current favourite of Nehru-bashers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, may in the future offer a similar telegram. “Modi was propped up by the anti-constitutional RSS. He overpowered the BJP’s old moderates. His Kashmir policy failed. China took away a big chunk of Ladakh. His farm policies bombed. Demonetisation was a disaster. He encouraged religious zealots. His brand of crony capitalism brought back the licence raj through regulatory subterfuge.”

Be it Nehru or Modi, history provides us with 20-20 hindsight, while exigencies and half-visible facts often guide day-to-day politics. Critics are dime-a-dozen, on the Right as well as the Left.

Where a book scores, as Mitra’s book does, is in digging up rare, relevant nuggets of information and providing some graphic details that are convincing enough even for Nehru’s fanboys to know that independent India’s first PM and his successor daughter had a tough reign in which their flights of fancy took India forward on some grounds but also ran into headwinds that they should have been sensible enough to be aware of.

Mitra uses classic techniques to reinforce arguments. The book emphasises some topics over others, devoting greater length and detail to them. It uses counterfactuals (ifs and buts that generate coloured conjecture) to make what-might-have-been look better than what was. It uses ideologically loaded language (e.g. socialist logic is ‘rhetoric’) and glosses over major achievements in a by-the-way manner.

But Mitra does give credit where it is due. Nehru is somewhat grudgingly praised for establishing the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which were decades ahead of their time. Indira Gandhi is acknowledged for the White Revolution, which transformed India from a milk-short nation into an exporter of dairy products. Evidently, the secret of political cocktail making is the proportion in which grudging appreciation and hard-hitting criticism are mixed. Everything else depends on your preferred personal high.

I particularly liked (in a depressed mood) the way the book details the socialist controls under the Licence Permit Quota Raj that led to economic shortages across India. Mitra is gracious enough to point out that the so-called Bombay Plan, backed by industrialists, helped the Congress-era public sector companies create an ecosystem for private companies. It is a part of democracy’s curse that every political party needs three things: funds to conduct elections, goodies/posts to keep cadres motivated and votes that come as cheaply and easily as possible. Why should the Congress be singled out? The BJP has its own funds-schemes-slogan formula, though elegantly couched in doubtful, controversial legalese.

Facts, however, are hard to ignore, as they often reveal the times and the attitudes of the leaders concerned. The book points out that Gulzarilal Nanda, an economist who was briefly India’s acting prime minister before Lal Bahadur Shastri succeeded Nehru, correctly criticised Nehru’s economic policies when they were merely on paper. It also notes how informed, well-intentioned critics like economist P.R. Brahmananda (who pointed to basic demand shortages that stymied Nehru’s heavy industry policy) were dismissed as “CIA agents”. I also discovered the disturbing truth that Subhash Mukherjee, the Kolkata doctor who in 1978 produced the world’s second test tube baby, just 70 days after Louise Brown, the world’s first in vitro fertilisation (IVF) baby born in the United Kingdom, never got recognition from the Left or Congress governments. In fact, he was humiliated by disbelievers and committed suicide three years after his magnificent achievement.

Devoted left-leaning “Bhakts” of Nehru-era policies were as rude and presumptuous as their contemporary right-wing equivalents. Moral of the story: Authoritarian leaders are often praised by sycophants while they rule and slammed after they are gone. 

How does ideology even matter?

It does, actually, in a psychological way. Nehru and his family have always been progressive. Conservatives do not like it. Revolutionaries do not like them either. Nehru and Indira were equally reviled by the Left and the Right extremes. Their dynastic rule was feudal in style but modern in content. Remember, even the reviled Emergency rule led to a crackdown on child labour and bonded labour, which was a hard fact in India as late as the 1980s. Social milestones are often overlooked in economic analysis.

Bold politics is like stroke play in cricket. Your assessment of the field positions and the way you play your strokes determines many outcomes. If Nehru failed in his brotherly friendship with China, Modi may be slammed someday for his pro-US tilt that said “bhai-bhai” in hugs rather than slogans.

The Freudian slip in conservative criticism of the Nehru-Indira era administration is the preference for the “State” over “the masses”. Nationalists who prefer the State over “populism” are confident of their worldview but have lost more elections than they have won since India turned a republic in 1950. They are reluctant populists. The Sardar Patel bias among them simply glosses over the fact that cadres of the Indian National Congress listened to Mahatma Gandhi because he was popular among the masses, and that Nehru and Indira had to be “tolerated” by Congress party conservatives (called the Syndicate during the Indira years) simply because the imperious leaders were democratically popular. A right-wing honeymoon happens when leaders are popular without being populist. If Modi’s welfare schemes are patiently studied, you could say he is just defining new frontiers for left-wing populism while swapping the Congress-era support for industrialists Tata and Birla for latter-day businesses featuring industry conglomerates like the Adani and Ambani groups. The latter is a common link that connects the BJP and the Congress periods.

Mitra’s book rightly points to flaws arising from the priorities of the Nehru-Indira era, such as an emphasis on higher education over primary education, and, of course, substantial ignorance of the farm sector in the first two decades after Independence from British rule. The flip side of this argument is that the IITs eventually became a goldmine for the country and a matter of international pride. Also, after a late start, the Green Revolution and the White Revolution in the Indira years put the farm sector back on track. Even the bias toward heavy industry proved a boon for the manufacturing sector, especially for private “middle engineering” and pharmaceutical companies that thrived on the public sector’s steel output and research facilities. For the record, India even turned into a steel exporter at some point, though not a major one. Given the reforms of 1991 that empowered them further, some of the Nehru-era public sector companies have gone on to become successful, listed companies with a global presence.

Mitra is correct in his assessment of Nehru as a self-confessed Westernised man, sometimes described as a ‘wog’ (Westernised oriental gentleman), or a ‘coconut’ (brown outside, white inside). This argument, while emphasising the Congress party’s cultural alienation, misses the point that Nehru’s British-inspired love of institutions (an independent judiciary and a free media), adherence to electoral democracy, and his love for new technologies came as part of the same baggage. Point to ponder: One man’s Westernisation may be another’s modernisation.

There are also practical ground realities of politics. Funding for elections came from an urban bias for manufacturing industries, while easy votes based on kinship and secularism came from minority Muslims and the Dalits. Nehru and Indira also had to contend with three serious wars (the China, Kashmir, and Bangladesh wars) in an era of economic shortages. The biggest elephant in the room at the time was India’s demographic explosion, aided by better nutrition and healthcare in controlling fatal diseases. India's population grew significantly – from about 361 million in 1951 to approximately 683 million in 1981. This 90% surge, roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States, created unemployment and abject “absolute” poverty, requiring an emphasis on food production and the socialist redistribution of income for both humanitarian and political reasons. Corruption had to be “tolerated” both as a priority for poverty alleviation and as a pragmatic necessity in election logistics. Congress was admittedly a late starter in using foodgrain buffers. However, poverty alleviation programmes that took off in the 1980s (thanks to the good work of the intervening opposition Janata Party era’s policies in the late 1970s) went on to spawn employment guarantee schemes.

Have things changed in the Modi era? Is the BJP’s vote strategy based on Hindu religious pride in a constitutionally secular country any less than the Congress party’s “vote bank” politics that also addressed abject poverty? Many of Modi’s policies are driven by circumstances that favour the manufacturer and mining lobbies – not much different from the Nehru-Indira era.

What we have, then, is a political economy of centrist manoeuvres that shift right and left, adjusting to the winds of the times while retaining some tilts out of habit or circumstance. This is precisely why it is difficult, especially in a pluralist, multi-cultural, geographically diverse country, to make an honest assessment of a leader’s reign. In the end, what leaders will not do reveals more about their characters. Dozens of books will be written about the Modi years. Because ideas and choices are like ghosts you cannot kill, while outcomes shine lights of many colours – interpreted by personal fantasies and half-forgotten memories.

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