India New England News

Monday, December 1, 2003

Biographer: Nehru's vision of secular India needs defending
Hindu nationalism a key problem in India, Shashi Tharoor says

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Jawaharlal Nehru, his legacy and the future of India were the topics as Shashi Tharoor spoke at Harvard University on his latest book, a biography of the great freedom fighter.

With the release of "Nehru: The Invention of India," half of Tharoor's eight books are in the non-fiction category. They range from "Show Business," an entertaining Bollywood novel, to "From Midnight to the Millennium," essays that form a portrait of India at 50.

"What connects all my books is the theme of Indian pluralism," Tharoor told INDIA New England. It is the vision of a pluralistic India that is Nehru's "greatest legacy," Tharoor said.

At the November 16 Harvard event, Tharoor was introduced as "an old friend I've known for well over three decades" by Sugata Bose, a history professor and director of the university's new South Asia Initiative.

Tharoor has worked for the United Nations since 1978 and is now Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information.

"Some of you may wonder how Shashi Tharoor, despite all his duties, finds time to write," said Bose.

He then recounted how Tharoor made an impression after transferring into Bose's Calcutta high school. "Suddenly, in every issue of the school paper, there would be half a dozen articles from a Shashi Tharoor," said Bose.

Tharoor told the crowd that, in the years after Mohandas Gandhi's death, Nehru came to be seen as "the embodiment of India." His reason for writing about Nehru now, Tharoor said, "is fairly simple: He is in danger of being repudiated in India and forgotten everywhere else." So, Tharoor said, "it is a good moment to recap his life." The 262-page biography is "meant as a book by layperson for laypeople," he added.

During the freedom struggle and after independence, Nehru's vision was of a democratic, secular, socialist India, said Tharoor. For this, Nehru spent a total of 10 years of his life in jail under British rule. Later, after serving as India's prime minister, Nehru left behind a mixed legacy on the economic scene. On the one hand, Tharoor said, Nehru's socialist economics doomed India to decades of poverty.

At the same time, Nehru's vision of creating a top-notch education system, including the Indian Institutes of Technology, succeeded in numerous ways. It helped spark the country's current business growth and the high-tech successes of so many people, Tharoor said.

The writer praised Nehru for his commitment to democracy. "He could have become a dictator if he wanted to - as so many Third World leaders did," Tharoor said. "What he did was go out of his way to show his respect for the institutions of state." These included not only parliament, but also such ceremonial posts as vice president, said Tharoor. "His respect for the judiciary was profound."

The result, Tharoor writes, is that "amid India's myriad problems, it is democracy that has given Indians of every imaginable caste, creed, culture and cause the chance to break free of their lot."

Nehru's vision of a secular India is one reason he is "all the more in need of defending than ever before," Tharoor said.

At the time of the freedom fighter's death in 1964, "Nehru's pluralistic view of India was something we all took for granted," Tharoor said, naming "identity politics" as the foe of that vision. This is a problem not just in India, but is "sweeping around the globe," he said.

For India, he said, a key problem is Hindu nationalism. "It misrepresents and departs from what I see as my religion," Tharoor said.

Tharoor's talk was sponsored by Harvard's South Asia Initiative and the Boston chapter of the American India Foundation.

The foundation supports Nehru's vision of a secular India, said Chirag Shah, formerly co-coordinator of the Boston chapter. "We condemn any type of religious or ethnic violence - and a key goal is to promote communal harmony."

Shah, who helped launch the local group, now works to develop other chapters of the foundation across the United States.