Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The task of the Drafting Committee would have been a very difficult one if this Constituent Assembly had been merely a motley crowd, a tessellated pavement without cement, a black stone here and a white stone there in which each member or each group was a law unto itself. There would have been nothing but chaos. This possibility of chaos was reduced to nil by the existence of the Congress Party inside the Assembly which brought into its proceedings a sense of order and discipline. It is because of the discipline of the Congress Party that the Drafting Committee was able to pilot the Constitution in the Assembly with the sure knowledge as to the fate of each article and each amendment. The Congress Party is, therefore, entitled to all the credit for the smooth sailing of the Draft Constitution in the Assembly.

  The proceedings of this Constituent Assembly would have been very dull if all members had yielded to the rule of party discipline. Party discipline, in all its rigidity, would have converted this Assembly into a gathering of ‘yes’ men. Fortunately, there were rebels. They were Mr. Kamath, Dr. P.S. Deshmukh, Mr. Sidhva, Prof Saxena and Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava. Along with them I must mention Prof. K.T. Shah and Pandit Hriday Nath Kunzru. The points they raised were mostly ideological. That I was not prepared to accept their suggestions, does not diminish the value of their suggestions, nor lessen the service they have rendered to the Assembly in enlivening its proceedings. I am grateful to them. But for them, I would not have had the opportunity which I got for expounding the principles underlying the Constitution which was more important than the mere mechanical work of passing the Constitution.

  Finally, I must thank you Mr. President4 for the way in which you have conducted the proceedings of this Assembly. The courtesy and the consideration which you have shown to the Members of the Assembly can never be forgotten by those who have taken part in the proceedings of this Assembly. There were occasions when the amendments of the Drafting Committee were sought to be barred on grounds purely technical in their nature. Those were very anxious moments for me. I am, therefore, specially grateful to you for not permitting legalism to defeat the work of Constitution making.

  As much defence as could be offered to the Constitution has been offered by my friends Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar and Mr. T.T. Krishnamachari. I shall not therefore enter into the merits of the Constitution. Because I feel, however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly upon the nature of the Constitution. The Constitution can provide only the organs of State such as the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary. The factors on which the working of those organs of the State depend are the people and the political parties they will set up as their instruments to carry out their wishes and their politics. Who can say how the people of India and their parties will behave? Will they uphold constitutional methods of achieving their purposes or will they prefer revolutionary methods of achieving them? …

  The condemnation of the Constitution largely comes from two quarters, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. Why do they condemn the Constitution? Is it because it is really a bad Constitution? I venture to say ‘no’. The Communist Party wants a Constitution based upon the principle of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. They condemn the Constitution because it is based upon parliamentary democracy. The Socialist want two things. The first thing they want is that if they come in power, the Constitution must give them the freedom to nationalize or socialize all private property without payment of compensation. The second thing that the Socialists want is that the Fundamental Rights mentioned in the Constitution must be absolute and without any limitations so that if their Party fails to come into power, they would have the unfettered freedom not merely to criticize, but also to overthrow the State.

  These are the main grounds on which the Constitution is being condemned. I do not say that the principle of parliamentary democracy is the only ideal form of political democracy. I do not say that the principle of no acquisition of private property without compensation is so sacrosanct that there can be no departure from it. I do not say that Fundamental Rights can never be absolute and the limitations set upon them can never be lifted. What I do say is that the principles embodied in the Constitution are the views of the present generation or if you think this to be an overstatement, I say they are the views of the members of the Constituent Assembly …

  If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do? The first thing in my judgment we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.

  The second thing we must do is to observe the caution which John Stuart Mill has given to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely, not ‘to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions’. There is nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness. As has been well said by the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell, no man can be grateful at the cost of his honour, no woman can be grateful at the cost of her chastity and no nation can be grateful at the cost of its liberty. This caution is far more necessary in the case of India than in the case of any other country. For in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.

  The third thing we must do is not to be content with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. These principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are not to be treated as separate items in a trinity. They form a union or trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy. Liberty cannot be divorced from equality, equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them. We must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is complete absence of two things in Indian Society. One of these is equality. On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality which means elevation for some and degradation for others. On the economic plane, we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty. On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and econom
ic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.

  The second thing we are wanting in is recognition of the principle of fraternity. What does fraternity mean? Fraternity means a sense of common brotherhood of all Indians—if Indians being one people. It is the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life. It is a difficult thing to achieve. How difficult it is, can be realized from the story related by James Bryce … about the United States of America.

  The story is—I propose to recount it in the words of Bryce himself—that:

  Some years ago the American Protestant Episcopal Church was occupied at its triennial Convention in revising its liturgy. It was thought desirable to introduce among the short sentence prayers a prayer for the whole people, and an eminent New England divine proposed the words ‘O Lord, bless our nation’. Accepted one afternoon, on the spur of the moment, the sentence was brought up next day for reconsideration, when so many objections were raised by the laity to the word ‘nation’ as importing too definite a recognition of national unity, that it was dropped, and instead there were adopted the words ‘O Lord, bless these United States’.

  There was so little solidarity in the U.S.A. at the time when this incident occurred that the people of America did not think that they were a nation. If the people of the United States could not feel that they were a nation, how difficult it is for Indians to think that they are a nation. I remember the days when politically-minded Indians resented the expression ‘the people of India’. They preferred the expression ‘the Indian nation.’ I am of opinion that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation? The sooner we realize that we are not as yet a nation in the social and psychological sense of the word, the better for us. For then only we shall realize the necessity of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of realizing the goal. The realization of this goal is going to be very difficult—far more difficult than it has been in the United States. The United States has no caste problem. In India there are castes. The castes are antinational, in the first place because they bring about separation in social life. They are antinational also because they generate jealousy and antipathy between caste and caste. But we must overcome all these difficulties if we wish to become a nation in reality. For fraternity can be a fact only when there is a nation. Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.

  These are my reflections about the tasks that lie ahead of us. They may not be very pleasant to some. But there can be no gainsaying that political power in this country has too long been the monopoly of a few and the many are not only beasts of burden, but also beasts of prey. This monopoly has not merely deprived them of their chance of betterment, it has sapped them of what may be called the significance of life. These down-trodden classes are tired of being governed. They are impatient to govern themselves. This urge for self-realization in the down-trodden classes must not be allowed to devolve into a class struggle or class war. It would lead to a division of the House. That would indeed be a day of disaster. For, as has been well said by Abraham Lincoln, a House divided against itself cannot stand very long. Therefore the sooner room is made for the realization of their aspiration, the better for the few, the better for the country, the better for the maintenance of its independence and the better for the continuance of its democratic structure. This can only be done by the establishment of equality and fraternity in all spheres of life. That is why I have laid so much stress on them.

  I do not wish to weary the House any further. Independence is no doubt a matter of joy. But let us not forget that this independence has thrown on us great responsibilities. By independence, we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything going wrong. If hereafter things go wrong, we will have nobody to blame except ourselves. There is great danger of things going wrong. Times are fast changing. People including our own are being moved by new ideologies. They are getting tired of Government by the people. They are prepared to have Government for the people and are indifferent whether it is Government of the people and by the people. If we wish to preserve the Constitution in which we have sought to enshrine the principle of Government of the people, for the people and by the people, let us resolve not to be tardy in the recognition of the evils that lie across our path and which induce people to prefer Government for the people to Government by the people, nor to be weak in our initiative to remove them. That is the only way to serve the country. I know of no better.

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  Chapter Fifteen

  The Multiple Agendas of

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  As prime minister for the first, formative years after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru had a defining impact on the politics and society of his country. In India, the 1940s and 1950s were the Age of Nehru, just as the 1920s and 1930s had been the Age of Gandhi. To be sure, Nehru was not as original a thinker as Gandhi. On the other hand, Gandhi never held political office. As head of government from 1947 to 1964, Nehru had a colossal influence on the directions taken—and not taken—by this new, large, diverse and very conflicted nation.

  Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad in 1889. His father, Motilal, was a successful and wealthy lawyer who doted on his only son. He was sent to Harrow, which he did not enjoy very much; and to Cambridge, where he developed what was to become a lifelong fascination with modern science. He also qualified as a barrister. Returning home shortly before the First World War, he ran a desultory law practice before throwing himself full-time into nationalist politics.

  Nehru venerated Gandhi. The older man, in turn, showered more affection on his disciple than on his four biological sons. The two men differed in temperament and attitudes to modernity. Nehru was indifferent to religion; Gandhi believed deeply in his own version of God. Nehru thought that industrialization was the only solution to the endemic poverty of India; Gandhi called instead for the renewal of the village economy. Nehru had great faith in the powers of the modern state to uplift and reform society; Gandhi was sceptical of state power, trusting instead the conscience and will of individuals and communities.

  Beyond these differences were some fundamental similarities. Both were patriots in the most inclusive sense, who identified with all of India, rather than with a particular caste, language, region or religion. Both abhorred violence and strongly preferred democratic forms of government to dictatorships. It may have been these parallels, as well as Nehru’s own independent appeal to the young, that led Gandhi to anoint him his political successor.

  In December 1929, having just turned forty, Nehru was elected to the first of four terms as president of the Congress. Through the decade of the 1930s he was the party’s voice abroad, taking the message of Indian freedom to not always receptive audiences in the West. In the elections of 1937 and 1946, both held under colonial auspices and under a restricted franchise, he was the chief vote-gatherer for the Congress. When India became independent in August 1947, he was the natural choice for prime minister.

  Nehru shared one other thing with Gandhi—the desire, and ability, to set down his ideas on the printed page. He founded and for a time edited a daily newspaper, the National Herald, and wrote often for other Indian and foreign periodicals. He also published three major books: Glimpses of World History (1934), An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946). These books are all extremely well written. They have all been continuously in print since their first publication.

  Nehru the writer is known chiefly through his three books. Notably, all were published before Indian independence. They are thus far less pertinent to his statecraft than his writings and speeches after 1947. These, however, are little known. They lie in volumes and anthologies assem
bled by diverse hands and published under the imprimatur of government departments and trusts that do not know how to reach their books to a wider audience. (By contrast, Glimpses, Autobiography and Discovery were published by canny and aggressive commercial presses in India and abroad—they are currently available under the Penguin Classics imprint.)

  Of these obscure writings of Nehru, the most important are his Letters to Chief Ministers. Soon after Independence, he inaugurated the practice of writing every fortnight to those in charge of running state governments. The series ran continuously from October 1947 to December 1963. In the 1980s these letters were published in five fat volumes (each exceeding 500 pages)—these are long out of print, and not easily available in libraries outside Delhi (my own set was assembled, one by one, from various second-hand book dealers).

  That these Letters to Chief Ministers are so little known is a shame. They cover an astonishing range of subjects. Economic development, linguistic and religious politics, the ethics of governance, the Cold War, the passing of literary giants—Nehru writes about all these, and more, in a tone that is alternately reflective and exhortative. The letters represent Nehru’s attempt to make sense of sixteen tumultuous years in the history of India, and the world. They are contemporary history at its best. And, as the excerpts below show, they continue to speak to us today.