Mainstream WeeklyOn the occasion of 61st death anniversary of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru
On 27 May 1964, I was eleven years old when the news of Jawaharlal Nehru’s death came. There is a taluka named Shindkheda in Dhule district of Maharashtra, where I had gone to spend summer holidays at my aunt’s house. And my aunt had bought a good radio of that time from the Philips company. So, before 2 o’clock in the afternoon on 27 May 1964, I was shocked to hear the news of Jawaharlal Nehru’s death being broadcast by suddenly stopping the radio broadcast.
Because some time before that, my father, being a freedom fighter and a committed worker of Congress, had gone to the Lok Sabha elections. I had also gone with him for an election campaign. (I started wearing Khadi by imitating him) And at my father’s election rally in a village near our village, people from the opposition party created a ruckus and threw some stones. One of those stones hit the right corner of my right eye, and I was bleeding. Someone brought turmeric powder from somewhere in a hurry, filled it in that place and tied it with a cloth. I don’t remember what happened after that. Maybe I fainted.
So, before Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of India for the third time, I was listening to the news of his passing away in this world with a wound, with great sadness and strange curiosity, as my right eye was partially saved. And I was sad for a long time.
That afternoon of 27 May 1964, and for many days after that, after my grandfather’s death, was perhaps the first occasion due to which I remained in a very sad state of mind for a long time. And whatever photos, information, news related to Nehruji from the Marathi daily newspaper of that time, I had cut out with scissors and pasted them with glue in my notebook. But after the seventh class, due to change of place of study, and after the eleventh class examination, due to admission in Amravati Homeopathy Medical College, all the collections made with great care from my class first to eleventh, were left at the age of fifteen! Today, after 61 years, everything suddenly looks like a movie.
The reason is that for the last 11 years, the rulers sitting in Jawaharlal Nehru’s place have been running a program to destroy his idols. Being of our age, after 16 years, we have also been in the anti-Nehru camp for a long time because we came under the influence of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia. But the people of the Sangh, and mainly the current Prime Minister, criticize Nehruji every now and then due to the disease of Nehru phobia. And we ourselves were carrying a feeling of neglect towards Nehruji during the most important period of our lives for twenty-five to thirty years.
After the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, seeing the RSS’s sole programme of putting the Muslim community in a completely insecure mindset, I was forced to reconsider all my beliefs. And I got a chance to rethink about Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore and all the important social-political leaders and their ideas. And perhaps today, on the pretext of Jawaharlal Nehru’s 61st death anniversary, I openly accept my point and the credit for keeping a country like India with a multifaceted culture tied together goes first to Mahatma Gandhi and second to Jawaharlal Nehru.
Otherwise, the present ruling party has vowed that during the centenary year of independence and the establishment of the Sangh in 2025, no stone will be left unturned to transform this country of multi-faceted culture into a Hindu nation.
After the demolition of Babri Masjid, the RSS started a program a hundred years ago to do politics on religious places ranging from Kashi, Mathura, Sambhal and almost all mosques to Qutub Minar, Taj Mahal, Red Fort and all the buildings constructed during the reign of Aurangzeb and other kings. Initially slowly, and now with great fanfare, the history of more than a thousand years of rule of Muslim rulers has been removed from the syllabus.
Just like in Pakistan, the history of the freedom movement against the British has been removed and the history of Muslim rulers and Pakistan is being taught. Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jahangir had come to Hyderabad (capital of Telangana) for her treatment. I was also in Hyderabad at that time and in a meeting with her, she very emotionally told me, "Suresh Bhai, stop India from becoming like Pakistan." I had said that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its political unit in India are trying with full intensity to take India on the path of Pakistan.
But in the present times, the ruling party of India and the media institutions in collusion with the fascist ideology of their parent organisation have decided that they are constantly trying to convert this country into a Hindu Rashtra!
That is why it is natural for Jawaharlal Nehru to hate those who challenged the crowd by brandishing his lathi during the riots in Punjab, Delhi or Calcutta. And those who handed over 59 half-burnt bodies to VHP for procession on the streets of Ahmedabad (despite the protest of the then Godhra Collector Jayanti V Ravi) after the burning of S6 coach of Sabarmati Express on 27 February 2002, by placing them on open trucks in their possession and handing them over to VHP for procession. And those who did not let our army out of the airport of Ahmedabad for three days (Lieutenant General Zameeruddin Shah, author of the book ’Sarkari Musalman’, has himself written this fact).
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has remained aloof from the Indian freedom struggle as part of a conspiracy. On the contrary, the British army, police recruitment, intelligence agencies, whether it is IB or CID and the new NIA, CBI, ED and other important investigative agencies are being used by the people who used to call them parrots (when Congress was in power) and are now using them according to their own convenience. They are using them to take action against their opponents.
And the most serious thing is that till now we have heard stories of governments being formed and toppled in Kashmir with the help of agencies. But in India, after forming governments in states like Goa, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh with the help of these agencies, the election system of our country has become a sham. And most of all the governors, the Raj Bhavans of Chennai, Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata, Hyderabad have become BJP offices. The governors of both the places are not cooperating with the governments there even a bit. Therefore, the need has arisen for the Supreme Court to intervene.
And in the seventy-five years of independence, after seeing examples of forcing constitutional institutions to take decisions according to their own will, the possibility of losing trust in the judiciary, police and administrative sector is increasing day by day.
In this context, the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru is remembered again and again.
The man who, seeing his popularity and being well aware of the dangers of it, wrote the article "We don’t want any dictator" under the pseudonym of Chanakya not only for fellow countrymen but also to warn himself about these dangers. And on the contrary, when Ashish Nandi published a psychoanalysis of Narendra Modi in an English magazine after the Gujarat riots, Modiji has put up a claim of a few crore rupees. (Don’t know what happened to that case?)
For him, democracy was not just a system of governance, it was a sanskar (culture), which should be included in the governance as well as the social psyche. He considered himself the prime servant of the country. Along with regular press conferences, Nehru used to write letters to the chief ministers every month. Along with national and international events, he also discussed topics like the government’s responsibility towards culture and art in these letters. After him, the practice of the Prime Minister writing regular letters to the chief ministers ended. In the last eleven years, even the press conference of the Indian Prime Minister has become unimaginable. His interviews are not famous for accurate answers to sharp questions, but for beautiful answers to poignant questions like whether mangoes should be eaten by sucking or cutting them? Do you keep a wallet in your pocket or not? Which tonic do you take to not get tired?
It should never be forgotten that this situation has not come about on its own. This situation has been created through systematic efforts. That debates on TV are competing with fights at the street corner and stand-up comedy, or rather horror shows. Expecting accountability from the government is not a democratic right but is considered treason. A strong effort is being made to forget that democracy is not just a game of numbers, but a system that runs on the basis of institutions, decorum and traditions. It is a system that communicates respectfully with the minority. It is not a system that gives the majority the freedom to act arbitrarily or a debating society that runs for the entertainment of the well-off people.
The irony is that the rapid expansion of the aspirational middle class, which considers democracy a burden or just a game of numbers, has happened as a result of the so-called developmental policies of liberalisation and privatisation adopted by the Congress government. But was it not equally important to maintain the social psyche that understands the importance of democracy along with privatisation and liberalisation, respects the plurality and unity in diversity of Indian society; and make these things the sanskar of the new generation?
Without asking this question, it is impossible to understand why Indian democracy is rapidly turning into a mere formality and majoritarianism. Why is the memory of Nehru and the awareness of his contribution vanishing from the minds of the new generation? This question will have to be asked by Nehru’s party, the Congress, to itself, and also by those who understand the importance of Indian democracy and want to protect it. Many of them were convinced till 2014 that the institutional basis of Indian democracy had become so strong that a dictatorial attitude cannot harm it. In 2015, when he said in a TV debate that ’the current Prime Minister does not need a formal declaration of emergency, he and his supporters are capable of creating an atmosphere of fear without any such declaration’, not only the BJP spokesperson, but also the most popular anchor sahab in the liberal, democratic sections got angry. Not only them, leading scholars of India and abroad were also convinced that the institutions of Indian democracy have become so strong that the establishment of dictatorial mentality is now impossible.
Events in the last few years have exposed the limitations of this belief. And how our Election Commission, the bills passed in our Parliament, and our judiciary after the demolition of the Babri Masjid have started taking decisions under the pressure of the majority community? And the scholars who justify it, in a way this country is becoming an undeclared Hindu nation.
And today, in memory of Jawaharlal Nehru, instead of just performing a ritual by reciting his praises, we really need to take a vow to come out in the field with a resolve to build a truly secular, socialist India and throw ourselves into the field with a resolve to fight these communal forces!
(To write this article, I have mainly copied a lot of material from the book ’Who is Bharat Mata?’ edited by Professor Purushottam Agarwal. Therefore, I especially thank Professor Purushottam Agarwal.)
Dr. Suresh Khairnar, May 27, 2025, Nagpur