Is Nehru Still Relevant to India?

Many authors (for example, Why are Nehruvian ideals still relevant to present times? The Hans India 14.11.23) make a fervent argument for Nehruvian ideals in the growth of the country. However, decades after Nehru’s death, we need to reassess the contributions of our past political figures. Nehru’s national ideology primarily reflected the political consciousness of the Westernized elite. Nehru is indeed the founder of the modern Indian state. But, given the background of his education and training, his view of traditional India was a mix of genuine pride, much ignorance, and some disdain.

Nehru threw his weight behind the seven principles of a ‘New India’ based on modernity: national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialization, socialism, scientific temper, secularism, and non-alignment. However, most of these goals had no or only a limited basis in Indian civilization. In stressing the role of industrialization and higher education in forging unity, he ignored primary education and cultural heritage as enduring bases for national unity. Nehru confirmed the contemporary European thinking of placing agriculture as a primitive activity.

His Fabian Socialism remained diverse and confused because Indian experiences did not match the theories. Scientific temper was a straight Orientalist view that education, science, and technology were primitive in ancient India. Secularism, the notion of state neutrality, and the separation of the public social sphere from the private religious sphere were again straight imports of European Christian ideas battling their religious issues. Nehruvian secularism was an ambiguous and complex concoction and was hostile to the Hindus. Non-alignment was a key point, but Nehru’s foreign policy was, however, not adequately neutral. In his concern for the world stage, Nehru did not give India’s neighbors the degree of attention and priority they deserved.

Modernizing as the best solution was the conviction of Western superiority in the march of progress. Modernity’s constituents, such as rationalism, individualism, liberal democracy, the state, technology, a scientific worldview, utilitarianism, and economism, were not all logically related. They had come together in Europe because of historical factors and had different combinations in different societies. India could have developed its own distinct model of modernization. Despite his patriotism, Nehru’s firm fixation on the West as a solution to India’s problems probably caused more damage than benefit eventually.