A vote that honored Jawaharlal Nehru

By Shashi Tharoor
Thursday, May 27, 2004

The voters of India confounded all the pundits and pollsters this month to place the country in the hands of a new governing coalition led by the Indian National Congress, which has just provided India with its sixth prime minister.

Its first, Jawaharlal Nehru, would have been proud, but not for partisan reasons. His greatest satisfaction would have come from the knowledge that the democracy he tried so hard to instill in India had taken such deep roots.

On May 27, India marks the 40th anniversary of Nehru's death at the age of 74. An earthquake rocked New Delhi that day, and many saw this as an omen. Cynics waited for his survivors to fight over the spoils; few predicted that the democracy Nehru had been so proud of would survive.

But it did. There were no succession squabbles around Nehru's funeral pyre. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a modest figure of unimpeachable integrity, was elected India's second prime minister. The Indian people wept and moved on.

Nehru never doubted that they would. He had spent a political lifetime trying to instill the habits of democracy in his people: a disdain for dictators, a respect for parliamentary procedures, an abiding faith in the constitutional system. He himself was so wary of the risks of autocracy that at the crest of his rise, he wrote an anonymous article warning of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. "He must be checked," he wrote of himself. "We want no Caesars."

As prime minister, Nehru carefully nurtured the country's infant democratic institutions. He paid deference to the ceremonial presidency; he never let the public forget that these notables outranked him in protocol terms. He subjected himself to cross-examination in Parliament by the small, fractious but undoubtedly talented opposition, because he was convinced that a strong opposition was essential for a healthy democracy.

He took care not to interfere with the judicial system; on the one occasion that he publicly criticized a judge at a press conference, he apologized the next day to the individual and wrote an abject letter to the chief justice of India, regretting having slighted the judiciary. And he never forgot that he derived his authority from the people of India; he started offering a daily audience at home for an hour each morning to anyone coming in off the street without an appointment, a practice that continued until the dictates of security finally overcame the populism of his successors.

By his speeches, his exhortations, and above all by his own personal example, Nehru imparted to the institutions and processes of Indian democracy a dignity that placed it above challenge from would-be tyrants.

Democratic values became so entrenched that when his own daughter Indira suspended India's freedoms with a state of emergency for 20 months, she felt compelled to return to the Indian people for vindication, held a free election and comprehensively lost it.

Another confident government, secure in its assumption of popularity and increasingly accustomed to seeing itself as a natural party of governance, has now bit the dust. But the graciousness with which Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee immediately accepted the electorate's verdict and used it as an opportunity to affirm the transcendent values of democracy is itself an advertisement of India's democratic maturity. Nothing so much became his Bharatiya Janata Party in office as its leaving of it.

The American editor Norman Cousins once asked Jawaharlal Nehru what he hoped his legacy to India would be. "Four hundred million people capable of governing themselves," Nehru replied. The numbers have grown, but 350 million voters have demonstrated yet again to the world how completely they have absorbed his legacy. Four decades after Nehru's death, that offers "the world's largest democracy" a genuine cause for celebration.