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BY STEVE COLL*
The Washington Post, January 4-10, 2004
NEHRU: A Political Life By Judith M. Brown, Yale Univ. 407pp. $35 |
NEHRU: The Invention of India
By Shashi Tharoor, Arcade. 282pp. $24.95 |
Two new biographies reappraise modern India's
renowned leader and thinker. |
He was the privileged son of a north Indian lawyer enriched
by imperial business deals. At boarding and law school in Britain, he
idled selfishly. Even after he spurned his inherited wealth, accepted
prison and campaigned tirelessly for India's independence, Jawaharlal
Nehru could he aloof, dismissive and short-tempered. As his country's
first prime minister - serving from independence in 1947 until his death
in 1964 - he micro-managed his office, strangled the country's economy
in red tape and failed to prepare for political succession.
Yet Nehru transcended all his limitations, in part because he was so self-confident.
As his biographer Judith M. Brown writes, Nehru saw himself "in a unique
way" after Britain's withdrawal: as "the one who knew what the new India
should be like, the one on whom the burden of national reconstruction
rested most heavily." India thrived as a democracy because he was so insistent.
Selected and repeatedly endorsed for leadership by Mohandas K. Gandhi,
Nehru rallied after Gandhi's assassination in 1948 to become the founding
father of the newly independent India. He nurtured a flexible constitution
rooted in pluralism. He stressed science, modernity and rapid development.
He denounced religious and provincial demagogues. He bent on many of his
public stands to accommodate rivals peacefully. He defined India's place
in the world in part by demonstrating its surpassing capacity for self-governance.
By the time of his death, Nehru had proved as indispensable to independent
India as Gandhi was to the movement that achieved nationhood - just as
his sainted mentor seems all along to have understood that he would.
As India's rising Hindu nationalism and free market reforms have redrawn
the architecture of Nehru's secular and socialist state in recent years,
it has been fashionable among some Indian politicians and writers to revise
Nehru's reputation downward, to emphasize his dynastic style and suffocating
economic policies. But as these two new biographies argue, such revisionism
has often been narrow and partisan. Especially in comparison to mid-century
peers such as China's Mao Zedong or Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nehru
still shines in retrospect as a principled, tolerant and determined nation-builder.
As Brown describes in nuanced detail, Nehru's political life was inseparable from Gandhi's moral vision. An ardently rational man, Nehru found Gandhi's spirituality confounding, naive and at times dangerous. They quarreled in fascinating letters that Brown quotes extensively. Yet while they often had opposite opinions about politics, they remained allies. Each refused to break with the other.
In the end, Nehru governed India as a Gandhian. At the height of his political power, free to rule as he wished, Nehru concluded, as he wrote, "that it is more important to adopt the right way, to pursue the right means, than even to have the right objectives, important as that is. No method and no way which is bound up with the creation of hatred and conflict and which bases itself on violence, can ever yield right results, however good the motives, however good the objective." It is difficult to imagine many other 20th-century heads of state writing such sentences while in office.
Brown's political biography, drawing on access to new papers from Nehru's years as prime minister, offers a nourishing and balanced life, largely sympathetic but willing to acknowledge Nehru's errors. A longtime British scholar of Indian politics at Cambridge University, Brown writes with confidence and authority, although her style is bone-dry and there may be more detail here than some general readers would prefer.
A novelist and political essayist, Shashi Tharoor is the better writer, full of verve and flashing insight. He offers not a traditional biography, however, but what he calls a "reinterpretation" of Nehru's life based on a reading of previously published scholarship. The result is a short, accessible, intelligent and lively book, but also one that feels at times dashed off and opinionated, like an extended lecture.
Tharoor is more pessimistic than Brown about Nehru's legacy. He compares Nehru to Thomas Jefferson but fears that, in his high-minded idealism, Nehru forged India's political identity by "simply bypassing" intractable conflicts over religion and caste, much as Jefferson whistled past the graveyards of American slavery. As a consequence, Tharoor writes, "India has failed to create a single Indian community of the kind Nehru spoke about."
Yet Nehru once described his own "conception of India" as "a kind of composite state where there is complete cultural freedom for various groups." Decades later, caste, language and religious groups still compete as manipulative voting blocs in India's freewheeling democracy. This frustrates Tharoor and others who understandably seek for India a more integrated, modern politics. But as a Gandhian might say, a democracy can be measured not only by its ends but also by its means. In that sense, Nehru's "right way" of open election after open election remains India's enviable bounty four decades after his death.
Note: Steve Coll is managing editor of The Washington Post. He was based in India as The Post's Southeast Asia correspondent from 1989 to 1992 and is the author of the forthcoming Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin-Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
Jonathan Yardley is on vacation.
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