Jawaharlal Nehru

Nearly 50 years ago, India and China met in a brief, bloody border clash. This essay analyses that conflict in terms of its impact on the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru. It explains the roots of Nehru's interest in China, his hopes for relations between the two new nations, the origins of the border dispute, and its escalation into a full-fledged war. Nehru's policies are assessed from the viewpoint of his critics and admirers. The deeper structural reasons for the conflict between India and China are analysed. Finally, the essay also speaks to the shadow cast by the war of 1962 on the geopolitics of the present day.

When religion is being held up as a unique source of faith, we need to remind ourselves that there are other firm foundations upon which we can build moral and ethical projects, in both private and public life. If secularism, as we have recently been told, has multiple meanings, so too does faith. In our own recent history, there is perhaps no better practical instance of the effort to find a non-religious bedrock for morality than that of Nehru himself. Today, as we survey the shattered nationalisms of the Balkans, as we feel collapsing about us the ruins of Arab nationalism, as we see the precipice on which nations like Indonesia balance, it is more important than ever to see the force of what Nehru understood. It is exactly religion's persistence, its fulsome presence as we stumble into the new century that, far from undermining or disproving the force of Nehru's views on the subject, exactly underline their relevance and resonance for us today. On this particular point, he just was right.

As long as the belief persists amongst a sizeable number of political craftsmen that the Nehru-Gandhis are indispensable for the nation, the majority of the electorate will be stubborn enough to travel perversely toward the direction of the BJP, the pull of one irrationality will subdue that of the other.

The argument here, in brief, is that the political science of development has itself been implicated in the developmentalist framework of India's elites. Further, despite the rhetoric of socialism that accompanied that framework under Nehru, both the practice in India and the development theory that justified it were fundamentally conservative. The conservative elements in the developmentalist framework comprised an ideology of state-exaltation arising out of a 'fear of disorder' or an orientation towards the elimination of 'the cause of unrest'. So implicated were political scientists in the developmentalist goals of India's elites that they failed to provide an independent basis for critique that has become increasingly necessary as it has become more and more obvious that those goals have failed to transform India into the modern, industrial state of its elite's imaginings, have failed at the same time to provide for the basic minimum needs of its people, have failed to eliminate 'the causes of unrest' and have instead drawn the country into the ugly morass of state terrorism in the north-east, Punjab and Kashmir and have failed to provide a basis for accommodation between the Hindu and Muslim populations of the country.

Let us be honest, the Gujarat citizens are being honest to the Gandhi legacy, just as the BJP and its 'parivar' have drawn conclusions which are to their own advantage from the examples set by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Who can deny that it is 'karma' at work? We will be a divided nation and the polity will head towards total collapse because our founding fathers, and the political party which claims monopoly rights of the nation's freedom struggle, wrote a Hindu script for the nation.