Nehru's 97 Major Blunders

  It was unfortunate that rather than working and co-ordinating with Dr Ambedkar to get rid of the curse of untouchability in India, and bring succour to the vulnerable sections, Nehru chose to get rid of Dr Ambedkar himself. Nehru even campaigned against him in elections to ensure his defeat! Dr Ambedkar was a multi-dimensional talent, and his services could have been used for many other critical areas too—he was academically and experience-wise most suited to become Finance Minister. It would actually have been great if Sardar Patel had been India’s first PM, and after him, Dr Ambedkar.

  Most Indians wish the communalism had been firmly curbed within a decade of independence, and secularism and communalism were made non-issues by 1957. Had Congress done the actual work on the ground of overhauling our criminal-justice-police system and babudom, launched vigorous educational campaign on the issue, held netas and those in administration and police accountable for disturbances and riots, punished the guilty and made examples of them, and adopted a non-compromising attitude to the issue, the curse of communalism and of ill-treatment of dalits would have vanished within a decade of independence. It was not an unachievable target. But, when you yourselves allocate seats and win elections on communal, religious and caste considerations, where is the remedy? Most of the so-called secular parties have been great talkers, but, non-doers. They want to keep the secular, communal and casteism pot boiling to win votes, because, in practical terms on the ground, they are incapable of solving any real issues.

  In fact, this whole debate on parties, people and groups being secular or communal, casteist or otherwise, pro-dalit or anti-dalit, pro-women or male-chauvinists, traditionalist or modern, conservative or liberal is irrelevant to the issue of safety of vulnerable sections of the society, that is, minorities, dalits, women and children. The real issue is “governance”, which includes enforcing “rule of law”. Therefore, if a party claims to be secular, the touchstone of its credentials is “governance”. If its “governance” is poor it is unfit to be called a “secular” party. Like one measures GDP, per-capita income, literacy, poverty, human development index (HDI), quality of living index and so on, one needs to measure GI, “Governance Index”, for each of the states and for the central government. It is this GI which would actually reflect the SI—“Secularism Index”. SI can’t be measured by your decibel levels and your protestations. It has to be measured by your real actions on the ground—a tough call.

  Blunder–53 :

  Ungoverned Areas

  Large swathes of tribal and other areas remained ignored, neglected and ungoverned during the Nehruvian era and later, leading ultimately to the huge Naxal-infested red corridor cutting across sections of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Bihar.

  Further, it was not just tribal areas that were neglected and ungoverned. There were vast swathes of countryside and small towns in UP, Bihar and many other states that were, and remain, hopeless, depressing, lawless, dangerous Omkaralands.

  Northeast was another region which was neglected, and left to be inundated with Muslims migrating from East Pakistan/Bangladesh, hugely and detrimentally disturbing and vitiating the political, cultural and religious lifestyle there leading to serious strife—creating problems where none previously existed. On top of it Nehru gave a carte blanche to the Christian missionaries to engage in illegal conversions with generous funding from abroad. With Christians in majority, and egged on by the missionaries and foreign forces, demands for independence from India began to be made.

  What is the root cause? Dirty politics, colonial babudom and misgovernance. In fact, wherever there has been the Indian government outreach into these areas, it has been more to exploit and make money than to serve and provide services.

  Further, Nehruvian socialism meant economic stagnation, and no surplus to enable deployment of resources or investments in the so-called ungoverned areas, nor policies to encourage private investments for infrastructure in those areas.

  Economy

  Blunder–54 :

  Throttled Industrialisation

  Stress only on the public sector and restrictions on private sector throttled growth in industrialisation and employment during the era of Nehru dynasty.

  Not learning anything from Japan and others, who had dramatically prospered with their outward-looking, export-led growth, India under Nehru went in for inward-looking, import-substitution model, denying itself a world-class, competitive culture, incentive for production of quality products, share in the world-trade, and the consequent prosperity. Instead, India invested heavily in the inefficient public sector, over-regulated and strangulated private enterprise, and shunned foreign capital.

  Many industries were barred for the private sector. When entrepreneurs in the countries in Southeast Asia, like South Korea, were being encouraged to expand and set up industries and their government was offering them cheap credit, here in India we were doing the opposite: GD Birla was refused a license for setting up a steel plant; scores of business proposals of Tatas were rejected; Aditya Birla, looking to the hostile business environment in India, chose to set up industries outside India; ...the list is endless.

  Gurcharan Das mentions in ‘India Unbound’ of Kasturbhai Lalbhai establishing Atul chemical plant in collaboration with American Cyanamid in the wilds of Gujarat, building a whole township, and provided jobs to many tribals. When invited to inaugurate it in 1952, Nehru agreed after considerable reluctance. Why? Because, it was in the private sector!

  Blunder–55 :

  Neglect of Agriculture

  Nehru and his team were seemingly innocent of the basics of economics that without a prosperous agriculture, you can’t have agricultural surplus, and without that, you can’t feed the growing urban population and sustain industrialisation. Yet, they neglected agriculture, which adversely affected industrialisation, and resulted in mass poverty.

  Neglect of agriculture resulted in famines, and turned India into a nation of hungry millions, and an international beggar.

  Most countries like Japan and others who rapidly progressed and joined the first-world, first concentrated on agriculture and universal education. Nehru neglected both. Nehru copied the Soviets, without realising that all communist countries faced famines thanks to their stress on heavy industries at the expense of agriculture.

  I had quarrelled with him [Nehru] regarding his neglect of the village economy, especially agriculture, and protested to him about his almost total neglect of irrigation which was the key to Indian agriculture... Nehru told me disparagingly, ‘You are a villager, you know nothing.’ I retorted, ‘If you had one-tenth of my regard for the village, the Indian economy would have been different.’...I am not sure if he had any convictions, except for aping the Russian model.

  —S. Nijalingappa, ‘My Life and Politics’

  Copycat Nehru’s another fad was cooperative farming—trying things on the lines of Russia. Genuine farmer-politicians like Charan Singh opposed it. The policy miserably failed, and was finally abandoned by the Congress.

  Blunder–56 :

  ‘Builder of Modern India’

  Admirers claim Nehru was the builder of modern India. Is one referring to “modern” India with broken-down, side-lane-like highways, run-down Fiats and Ambassadors, meagre second world-war armaments to take care of its security, perennial food shortages, famines, millions in grinding poverty, both hands holding begging bowls? He did set up a string of research labs, but they did little, and became money sinks.

  Pathetic communication networks and transport severely affected economic growth, fight against poverty, mobility and national integration.

  Many countries, including those in Southeast Asia, which were much behind India at the time India got independence, marched far ahead of India. When you look at their airports, their roads, their metros, their city-buses, their well laid-out cities, their infra-structure, their cleanliness, their everything, you wonder why you have remained a country of crumbling roads, overcrowded l
ocals, overhanging scary ugly mess of mesh of electrical, TV and internet cables blotting the skyline and brutally assaulting even the “chalta hai” sense of terribly intolerable tolerance of the “have given up” generations; a country of absent pavements or encroached pavements or pavements that stink from the use they are not meant for, and where mercifully for the walkers this is not so, they are but patches of broken down pavers, punctuated by uncovered, or partially covered, or precariously or deceptively covered man-holes, awaiting their catch; a nation of stinking slums and impoverished villages, open drains and sewers, rotting garbage, squalor and stink all around, children and men defecating by the road-side—all testimony to criminal absence of the very basics of being civilised...

  Most of the Indian towns, cities and metros are dirty, foul smelling and hideous. They look like a defacement of spaces and a blot on the landscape. Cities in the West, Southeast Asia, China and elsewhere get better, cleaner, smarter and spiffier year after year, while ours get worse, more congested, more difficult to live in and more squalid.

  How's it that we got so left behind? What is it that we did, or did not do, after independence, that everything is so abysmal and pathetic? And all this unmitigated misery despite the overwhelming advantage of India as a nation with first-rate people, plentiful natural resources, grand civilisational heritage, rich culture and languages, unmatched ethical and spiritual traditions, and, above all, relatively better position in all fields—infrastructure, trained manpower, bureaucracy, army—at the time of independence compared to all other nations who have since overtaken us.

  Why did we fail to leverage such rich assets of a gifted country? Well, all thanks to Nehruvian policies. Nehruvianism is responsible for keeping India forever a developing, third-world country.

  The question is: Can a country attain greatness even if its leaders are Lilliputs; and vice versa, can the country's leaders be considered great even if the country goes to dogs—or remains wretchedly poor and achieves only a fraction of what it could have?

  As a conundrum it could hardly be bigger. Six decades of laudably fair elections, a free press, rule of law and much else should have delivered rulers who are responsive to the ruled. India’s development record, however, is worse than poor. If democracy works there, why are so many Indian lives still so wretched? Social indicators leave that in no doubt. A massive blackout last summer caught global attention, yet 400m Indians had (and still have) no electricity...Twice as many Indian children (43%) as African ones go hungry...Compared even with its poorer neighbours, Bangladesh and Nepal, India’s social record is unusually grim...

  —The Economist, 29 June 2013

  Blunder–57 :

  Grinding Poverty & Pathetic Living Conditions

  Thanks to the Nehruvian economic policies, millions of Indians were condemned to grinding poverty.

  We have the largest number of poor—a third of the world's poor! As per the World Bank’s estimate, while 69% Indians live on less than US$2 per day, 33% fall below the international poverty line of US$1.25 per day. In terms of GDP per capita, India stands at 129 among 183 countries as per IMF tabulation for 2011. Per capita income in India is little more than half that of Sri Lanka, about a sixth that of Malaysia, and a third that of Jamaica. Things have been improving, but precious decades were lost in poverty-perpetuating Nehruvian economic policies.

  Says Darryl D’Monte in an article, Living off the land, that appeared in the Hindustan Times: “…Oxford University and the UN Development Programme brought out a Multidimensional Poverty Index or MPI which replaced the Human Poverty Index. The researchers analysed data from 104 countries with a combined population of 5.2 billion, constituting 78% of the world’s total. It found that about 1.7 billion people in these countries live in multidimensional poverty. If income alone is taken into account, at less than $1.25 a day, a standard measure throughout the world, this amounts to 1.3 billion. The startling fact that emerges from this analysis, which made headlines throughout the world, is that using the MPI, just eight Indian states have more poor people than the 26 poorest African countries combined. These sub-Saharan countries—like Ethiopia—are considered the worst-off in the world, with pictures of starving children there becoming symptomatic of a deep malaise.”

  Worldwide rankings for 2012 by the Mercer Quality of Living Survey lists 49 cities. No Indian city makes the grade. Mercer City Infrastructure Ranking, 2012 lists 50 cities. No Indian city appears in the list. Among the prominent cities in the world, the 25 dirtiest include New Delhi and Mumbai having mostly the African cities for company.

  Two cities in India, Sukinda and Vapi, rank 3rd and 4th in the world as the most polluted cities! Even our water bodies and rivers, including the most sacred ones, get dirtier by the year. The sacred rivers have been reduced to sewers. The waters of the Ganga are pure and sparkling when it starts from Gangotri, with a BOD, that is, Biochemical Oxygen Demand, of zero, and a DO, Dissolved Oxygen, of over 10. Water with BOD level of less than 2mg per litre can be consumed without treatment; that with BOD level between 2 and 3 mg per litre can be consumed, but only after treatment; and that with BOD level above 3 mg per litre is unfit even for bathing. Ganga-Yamuna water at Sangam in Allahabad has a BOD level of 7.3 mg per litre! It is totally unfit even for bathing!!

  To summarise a ToI report, "A pitcherful of poison: India's water woes set to get worse", India ranks third-lowest, a lowly 120, in a list of 122 countries rated on quality of potable water. By 2020, India is likely to become a water-stressed nation. Nearly 50% of Indian villages still do not have any source of protected drinking water. Of the 1.42 million villages in India, 1.95 lacs are affected by chemical contamination of water. 37.7 million are afflicted by waterborne diseases every year. Nearly 66 million people in 20 Indian states are at risk because of excessive fluoride in their water. Nearly 6 million children below 14 suffer from dental, skeletal and non-skeletal fluorosis. In Jhabua district, bone deformities are common among children. Arsenic is the other big killer lurking in ground water, putting at risk nearly 10 million people. The problem is acute in several districts of West Bengal. The deeper aquifers in the entire Gangetic plains contain arsenic. In UP's Ballia district, the problem is so acute that almost every family has been affected—most people are suffering from skin rashes, some have lost their limbs; many are dying a slow death due to arsenic-induced cancer. Bacteriological contamination, which leads to diarrhoea, cholera and hepatitis, is most widespread in India.

  The HDI, Human Development Index, is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income indices and was published by the UNDP, United Nations Development Programme. In 2016, India ranked 130 on HDI among 187 countries, below even Iraq and Egypt!

  The Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) report by the Naandi Foundation points out that 42 per cent of under-fives Indian children are severely or moderately underweight and that 59 per cent of them suffer from moderate to severe stunting.

  As per another study released on Mother’s Day, India ranks 76th among 80 “less developed countries” in the world on Mother-care Index, that is 5th worst.

  Health-care system—we beat even the poorest countries in Africa in infant mortality rates! The rate is a measure of number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births. Among 221 countries, India ranks 50—rank 1 being the worst—with an infant mortality rate of 46. That is, among 221 countries, 171 countries are better off than India. China’s infant mortality rate is 15.62, Singapore’s 2.65, while India’s is 46.07. Over 400,000 newborns die within the first 24 hours of their birth every year in India, the highest anywhere in the world, a study by an international non-government organisation, “Save the Children”, has declared.

  Take MMR, the Maternal Mortality Rate, which is the annual number of female deaths per 100,000 live births from any cause related to or aggravated by pregnancy or its management. The MMR includes deaths during pregnancy, childbirth, or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy. India
ranks 52—rank 1 being the worst—among 183 countries, with an MMR of 200 deaths per 100,000 live births. MMR is 37 for China and just 3 for Singapore.

  Take housing. Government’s recent housing survey reveals that 53% of Indian homes are without toilets, 68% are without access to clean tap water, 39% do not have indoor kitchens, and 70% make do with one or two room homes. Figures don’t reveal the real horror. Of course, all—men, women and children—suffer; but, the main sufferers are women: having to defecate in the open in the absence of toilets, having to fetch water in the absence of tap-water at home, having to cook without a kitchen!

  There are nearly 97 million urban poor living in 50,000 slums in India, 24% of which are located along nallahs and drains and 12% along railway lines. And, thanks to our lack of planning and neglect, the number of slums and the slum population is on the rise. The worst affected are the children—our future—in these slums.

  Singapore and Finland recruit teachers in schools from among the brightest 10% of graduates and offer them salaries on par with engineers. And, in India?