(This article was originally written for The National Herald, and an excerpt was published. This is the original, uncut English translation of the article done by Ms. Kirti Deolekar, which has never been published elsewhere in its entirety. As the Bharat Jodo movement gains steam, this article is as relevant or even more so today, than it was back when it was written.)
“You don’t fight fascism because you are going to win, you fight fascism because it is fascist.”
– Jean Paul Sartre.
Against the backdrop of the General Elections of 2014 and 2019, Rahul Gandhi may somewhat seem like Bahadur Shah Zafar the last Mughal emperor. But it is not so; rather it is much more complicated than that. We need to go a few decades back in history if we want to assess this complexity of the Nehru-Gandhi legacy. The lineage of Nehru and Gandhi family in the history of Congress started with Motilal Nehru and has presently halted at Rahul Gandhi. This genealogy includes Motilal Nehru and Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi’s wife Sonia Gandhi and now Rahul Gandhi. When we talk about the Nehru-Gandhi parivar, we should remember that the (sur)name “Gandhi” herein is related to Feroze Gandhi and not Mahatma Gandhi. In other words, the phrase Gandhi-Nehru of pre independence times is different from the current Nehru-Gandhi.
It is widely known that Motilal Nehru and Jawaharlal Nehru had the privilege of working in close association with Mahatma Gandhi. Indira Gandhi who was born and brought up in an atmosphere of nationalist fervour too was influenced by the Mahatma. However, the present Nehru-Gandhi appellation which became popular thereafter is attributed to Indira Gandhi’s husband Feroze Gandhi. This clarification, though somewhat elaborate, is the need of the hour because the right wing often uses the terms Gandhi-Nehru and Nehru-Gandhi interchangeably to create confusion and bring disrepute to both Gandhiji and Nehru and his descendants.
Nehru is indeed a common factor in the Gandhi-Nehru-Gandhi equation. Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of India; Mahatma Gandhi treated him almost like his own son. When Gandhi died from a right wing assassin’s bullet in 1948, Nehru was the only leader to possess his mentor’s mantle of near sanctity in the eyes of Indian masses. Nehru’s unparalleled contribution to the making of an independent India, his exemplary achievements in the pursuit of nation building has been a topic of much angst amongst the right wingers. Without understanding this, we will not know exactly what legacy Rahul Gandhi intends to carry forward and the infamy and hate that has come to him post Nehru’s death and during the initial stages of the former’s political career.
Nehru had spent 3259 days of his life in prison during the British rule having been sent to jail for nine terms. Two prominent names of the freedom struggle, which find a frequent mention amongst the leaders having a huge impact on the youth revolutionaries, were the feisty duo Subhash Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru. Enduring friendships with other comrades in prison enabled Nehru to rise above differences in policy. Having said that, Nehru had a deep aversion towards the right wing and fascism. Nehru, being totally aware of the dangers of fascism and Nazism, vehemently opposed Subhash babu’s unapologetic fascist alliances. This fundamental difference between Nehru and Bose led to a subtle yet major ideological conflict between the two stalwarts. Nehru was impressed by Bose’s heroism and secularism but committed to anti-fascism. He was so vehemently opposed to fascism that he refused to meet Benito Mussolini the fascist leader even when the latter sought him out. This was a matter of great political significance and was applauded even by the two British statesmen and the then consecutive Prime Ministers, Churchill and Chamberlain. Who was Nehru when he resolutely avoided a meet with the Italian duce Mussolini! A common freedom fighter from a country called India which was reeling under British rule. In comparison, the Italian dictator Mussolini was no less than a Roman emperor who had
played a key role during the famous Munich pact of 1938 among the diplomats Chamberlain, Daladier and Hitler. Nehru, a strong believer of liberalism and democracy, had declined the invitation at a time when people considered it a privilege to meet Mussolini. This was the ultimate measure of Nehru’s ideological commitment.
On the other hand, Subhash Chandra Bose, who also was dear to Mahatma Gandhi almost like his own son and with whom Nehru shared an equally strong bond, never expressed any aversion towards the fascist forces led by Mussolini and Hitler and was quite willing to take their support in the Indian freedom struggle. This striking difference between the two contemporaries, Bose and Nehru, made Nehru a dedicated and long-standing disciple of Mahatma Gandhi. In his struggle for a free India, Nehru never departed from the Gandhian tenet that good ends must have good means.
Nehru found Gandhi’s obsession with non-violence intriguing but at times frustrating. He attached more importance to saadhya saadhan shuchita, the organic relationship between means and ends where the moral quality of the latter being causally dependent upon that of the former. While Gandhi considered the armed revolutionaries as ‘misguided souls’; Nehru, on the other hand, in his autobiography profusely praised Bhagat Singh and his companions and saluted their sacrifice. On 9th August 1929, Nehru had visited the Central Jail to meet Bhagat Singh, Batukeshwar Dutt and others with whom he held discussions about the hunger strike. In fact, when Bhagat Singh and his comrades bombed the Central legislative assembly, Motilal Nehru who was sitting in front did not harbour any rancour. Even so, on May 9, 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his ignorance and audacity tweeted, “When Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Batukeshwar Dutt and others were jailed fighting for the country’s independence, did any Congress leader visit them?” Such blatant lies are nothing but figments originating in right wing brains. For Nehru (and his successors) the distinction between revolutionary violence and fascism has always been far more important than the issue of non-violence. The reason for putting forth a detailed analysis of the moral compass of this Nehruvian philosophy is the ideological conflict that looms over our nation in the current times. The Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party know too well that a decisive victory over the Congress and Rahul Gandhi is not possible without demeaning, demonising and ultimately destroying the existence of the Nehru brand-name.
Political dynasties are common in India. While the culture of inherited political capital is deeply entrenched across most of the political parties (the Bharatiya Janata Party is no exception to this), however, all hell breaks loose with the entire right wing getting aggressive the moment the name Gandhi parivar crops up. It should be clearly construed that the Nehruvian legacy being the solid framework of the Gandhi parivar is the sole cause of the intense insecurities and acute attacks.
Against this backdrop when Rahul Gandhi entered the political foray, his image was tarnished right from the beginning with a huge deployment of ceaseless propaganda factories. Rahul Gandhi’s struggle was on three levels; a disgruntled old guard within the Congress party unwilling to cede space, a psychological warfare as also a large propaganda foundry of the fascists created by the Sangh and its ecosystem which gave rise to an overhyped image of Narendra Modi while mocking and maligning Rahul Gandhi to permanently emboss his image as a pappu.
The main aim of the National Democratic Alliance NDA was to form an anti-INC (Indian National Congress) coalition. The NDA was led by the BJP and included several regional parties. In 2004, when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee led NDA government suffered a defeat at the hands of Congress led United Progressive Alliance UPA, Sonia Gandhi was the chairperson of the Congress party. But being a foreigner by birth, she relinquished the prime ministership to Dr Manmohan Singh, an astute Congress leader, a statesman and
an economist. Although the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government in its six years of power made minimal attempts to dismantle the Nehruvian structure of democratic governance, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh machinery was working with full force underneath the radar. Since the pre independence times till 2004, the visceral hatred for Nehruvian philosophy and the immense obsession towards fascist ideology has prompted the RSS to put several decades of discreet hard work, employing various forms of psychological warfare, cyber warfare, whisper campaigns and other numerous social media outlets. Albeit the 2004 defeat of Vajpayee came as a big blow to the BJP, the political wing of the RSS.
However, if truth be told, one has to travel backwards in time and blame the socialists for creating space for the fascists in the political sphere. When Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in 1975, the veteran socialist leader and freedom fighter Jayprakash Narayan formed a united front, a vehicle for the broad spectrum of opposition to Indira Gandhi. After the Emergency in 1977, the Socialist Party joined with a number of other groups to form the Bharatiya Lok Dal, which fused into Janata Party as an omnibus opposition to Congress Party rule. The Janata Party defeated Indira Gandhi and won power at the Centre in 1977. The leaders of the Sangh parivar thus got their first ever taste of central power in Delhi through the Socialists. Lal Krishna Advani, who currently happens to be a member of the BJP’s Marg Darshak Mandal, was the Minister of Information and Broadcasting in the then Janata Party government.
Nehru – a moderniser rooted in tradition – was firmly against the ideological vision of Hindutva and no one knows this better than the Hindutva ideologues. The Socialists, given their deep and ideologically embedded hostility towards the Congress, have often entered into alliances with the ideologically regressive Hindutvavadis. Despite the war of ideas between the Hindutvavadis and Socialists, both of them have been in cahoots with each other with a single point agenda of defeating their common enemy, the Congress party which has its roots in Nehruvian liberalism.
Several socialist leaders like George Fernandes had vehemently spoken out against the Janata party’s coalition with the erstwhile Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the fascist body Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Ironically so, Fernandes went on to become Defence Minister in the 1998-2004 Vajpayee cabinet and played the role of NDA convener till 2008. This cycle continues till date. Nitish Kumar who belongs to a socialist class of politicians came into limelight of Bihar politics while opposing the Bharatiya Janata Party and Modi but engaged in tussling with his own ideological colleagues and ended up switching his loyalty to the saffron party.
After the defeat of the Vajpayee government, the United Progressive Alliance was elected to power in 2004 and again in 2009. It was Sonia Gandhi’s efforts that saw several parties come together to stitch this coalition called the UPA. The two consecutive electoral victories, however, could not strengthen the principal party of the UPA. In fact, the steady downhill journey of the Indian National Congress had begun with the fall of Rajiv Gandhi government in 1989. After 1989, its organisational structure and mass support base was substantially strained due to personality cult and feudalism leading to years of stagnation. The Congress party which swore by Nehru, slowly and gradually swayed away from the progressive Nehruvian liberalism apropos literature, arts, cinema, science, technology, history, philosophy et al. Sonia Gandhi assumed charge of a tattered party which was akin to a termite-infested teak castle. Factionalism, in-fighting and power-seeking were the order of the day within the Congress ranks. Little wonder that the hawk-eyed Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its allied right-wing factions rose up in action to milk the opportunity. The Hindutva nationalists sensed that this was the most appropriate moment to launch an all-out attack on the grand old party and secure a conclusive victory over the Centre.
Cut to 2014 which witnessed a resounding victory to the Bharatiya Janata Party under the leadership of the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi while decimating the Congress to a pitiable condition. It was a humiliating loss for the Congress party and a crushing blow for Rahul Gandhi. The ground however had been set much before. The four years preceding 2014 bear testimony to the extensive RSS project of demolishing Nehru- from his family life to his eating habits to his personal tragedies, while simultaneously launching a pejorative and provocative campaign to relentlessly brand Rahul Gandhi as an uninitiated and ignorant pappu. (in northern India, pappu refers to someone naively dumb). In actual fact, Rahul Gandhi has obtained his M.Phil degree in Development studies from Cambridge, while there is no public evidence of PM Modi’s educational qualifications. In spite of this, there has been a consistent and effective use of buzzwords circulated through various media outlets to reinforce Rahul’s stature as a bumbling incompetent oaf and tag him as a chap unfit to rule the nation.
The 2019 election campaign did see a gutsy and prepared Rahul, his words were firm, his head was high. His interviews portrayed his oratory skills, learning, intelligence and his maturity. Unfortunately for Rahul Gandhi, the saying ‘first impression is the last impression’ proved true to the word. The 2014 debacle along with the pappu image was imprinted in the minds of the Indian populace almost permanently. The troll army of the BJP, the toxic propaganda machine of the RSS maligned the images of Jawaharlal Nehru and his great grandson Rahul Gandhi to unimaginable lengths and unthinkable proportions. Little wonder that Rahul Gandhi found his political leadership trapped in the vicious cycle of snap, a tiny rebound and again snap. In contrast, the vigorous campaigns projecting Narendra Modi’s incredible journey from an impoverished teaseller to vikas purush, a saviour of the nation hypnotised millions of people. The sum total of all of the above must have taken a toll on Rahul Gandhi as a leader and Rahul Gandhi as a person. It is not easy being Rahul Gandhi. It says a lot about him that he brushed aside the insults and innuendoes which came his way and stood tall. Any other mortal in his place would have surrendered and fled the scene. In fact, the last few years have amply demonstrated that neither Rahul Gandhi behaves like a (spoilt) shehzada nor Narendra Modi looks like a (humble) fakeer.
The very basis of almost everything that Indians today take pride in globally, comes from Nehru, but he has been projected as a villain responsible for almost all of the problems that India is facing today… thanks to the world’s largest party owned propaganda foundry commandeering the media at its round-the-clock service. The media has turned legitimisers of wrong doing by a ruling party. The judiciary and the election commission supposed to be the most powerful and autonomous institutions have been raided and pillaged. The authoritarian functioning of the government has time and again bypassed parliamentary scrutiny to enact various laws thereby undermining Constitutional democracy. Even so, the constant need to circulate photo shopped images, edited video clippings, so on and so forth in a desperate attempt to malign the Nehru-Gandhi duo, is enough to prove that the massive army consisting of PM himself, his entire cabinet, the Bharatiya Janata Party, RSS and all the right wing forces have not been successful in smashing Nehru’s philosophy and Rahul Gandhi’s leadership.
Rahul Gandhi’s political ideas are more aligned with the socialist vision of Nehru. He has a voice of his own, distinctive, and often at variance with the party’s. At a time when power over the entire country was at stake, he displayed the courage to rise above party level in a bid to clean politics. The courageous step of tearing of an ordinance copy on corrupt netas is an example which is frequently cited by his detractors to attack him. Rahul Gandhi, on the other hand, firmly believed in the Nehruvian principle that ‘power is useless if it cannot be used for benefit of the people’. This episode was later distorted to the maximum and portrayed as a major discord within the Congress party and “a ruthless projection of power by the Gandhi-Nehru scion”.
In one such emotional speech after taking over the mantle as party Vice President in 2013, Rahul Gandhi made a statement, ‘my mother came to my room and cried…because she understands that power is poison’; for which later he was abundantly ridiculed and taunted. All said and done, if we happen to look back today, what do we see in reality? Unlike those who are in power now, Rahul Gandhi never lied, he never made false promises, he never created a false impression about his education. Having studied at Oxford himself, he never passed snide remarks by comparing Oxford Vs Harvard (remember the famous phrase Harvard Vs Hard Work!!). On the contrary, Rahul Gandhi’s journey since 2010 has been full of internal tussles with the sulking old guard plus an arduous battle against a vast league of external enemies. In this gruelling period during which as if the whole world had turned hostile towards him, his sister, his mother and ordinary Congress workers have stood firmly by him. Rahul Gandhi’s organisation was collapsing from within even before his rise. With no support from any quarter, his defeat was evident. It is amply clear from the above analysis that a completely false picture is created about him when he is referred to as a fifth generation dynast of the Nehru Gandhi family and a natural successor as party leader hence everything must have had been in his favour. His inevitable plunge into the political pool and the formal leadership that was later bestowed upon him has been anything but easy.
Cut to 2019 General Elections which were won (by Modi) on a complete lie. Considering the principle of saadhya saadhan shuchita, Rahul Gandhi who held a moral high ground throughout his political campaign should have emerged a winner. Because he did not paint any sort of a rosy picture, he made no promises of acche din of any kind. On the contrary, Rahul Gandhi even avoided boasting that the real acche din were actually the days when Congress had governed the nation, the realisation which was presently dawning upon the Indian populace. Nevertheless, there has been total denial in which our society has preferred to live in, wherein the people loved listening to a quack who created an illusion of a perfectly healthy condition and brainwashed them into believing that there was no illness prevalent at all. In contrast, leaders like Rahul Gandhi, who pinpointed the ‘nature of the disease’ and showed the courage to speak the bitter truth in spite of a massive propaganda machinery depicting a hale-and-hearty Vishwaguru Bharat model, are tagged as pappu and despised for a long time. Needless to say that when reality hits and the need of a real physician arises, such fearless and genuine leaders emerge popular. The Modi-led BJP government commands absolute power at present in India. With all constitutional bodies heavily compromised, it is futile to get any redressal from any commission or court. India’s democracy is under severe threat. Even so, the Sangh, BJP and Modi himself count a ‘failed’ politician like Rahul Gandhi, who had to quit as the party president, as their no.1 enemy. We need to discern the nitty-gritty to know why!
The fact is that a country as diverse as India cannot be governed in the name of one religion – one language – one culture. The economy of a huge nation like ours cannot be run in an obstinately unintellectual manner using Harvard Vs Hard work remarks. Once that moment of epiphany emerges, then comes the need of a real physician and a real medical science. The patient then becomes mentally prepared for a surgical intervention. Such an awakening is taking place albeit gradually as the people of India have realised that Rahul Gandhi is the real physician and Nehruism is the real medical science. Little wonder then that there is this utmost necessity to erase again and again… and again, the existence of Rahul Gandhi, a simple Congress worker who quit as party president and the philosophy of his long dead great grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru.
The argument put forward by critics, that Nehru shied away from wars or that he was a reluctant revolutionary and Rahul Gandhi is a staunch devotee of the same doctrines, is a perverse calumny. Emphasis needs to be laid on the evaluation of whom a war is fought against and what revolutionism
actually signifies. The public perception, that the fascist Hindutva philosophy is indeed Indian revolutionism, needs to be vehemently challenged (here a clarification that fascist Hindutva ideology is totally different from Hindu religion is in order). Bhagat Singh was a true revolutionary. Nehru was a true revolutionary. Their philosophy had the power to make a comprehensive transformation in the life of a common man. India could make massive progress in science and technology and achieve tremendous economic growth due to the visionary leadership of such revolutionaries. Talk about war and India has won three wars against Pakistan under the Congress rule which includes the decisive 1971 win with Pakistan splitting into two under the leadership of Indira Gandhi. The current Modi regime does not seem to have won any battle for India except conquering Bollywood. How’s that for irony! Slamming Pakistan in speeches (without even naming it) will not solve the Indo-Pak issue.
The BJP fears that one day or the other, Modi’s quackery might get exposed and the BJP-RSS campaign against Rahul Gandhi and his great grandfather will backfire, thus there is this constant need for the RSS to destroy Rahul Gandhi. Whilst the need of the nation is to reinforce Rahul Gandhi, pull down his opponents within the party, and bring down his external enemies. Amidst an environment full of pretence and lies, the Indian public has witnessed the ease with which Rahul Gandhi quit as party president, his upright, well-meaning and honest poise remaining unaltered all through; if this isn’t revolutionary nature, what is?
On the one hand there is Rahul Gandhi who has many thousands of tales to tell about the role of the Nehru Gandhi family in India’s growth story but he has seldom boasted about them in his addresses nor attempted to gather any political mileage; and then there is Narendra Modi who does not miss a single chance of bragging about his life journey which started as an impoverished tea seller(!?) and continued begging for food till the age of 35(!?). On the one hand there is a politician who, thanks to the hate-filled propaganda mechanism, the nation could never really love and accept; and on the other hand there is a master of political theatre whose popularity, charisma and his leadership image is at its highest imaginable, thanks to the same clearly articulated image-building propaganda machinery. Regardless of the infinite humiliation that came his way, Rahul Gandhi has always faced the people as he is! Is this act less revolutionary I say!
The software and telecom, which BJP used to build a massive hate-filled cyber warfare promoting falsity from WhatsApp through various social media platforms to malign Rahul Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the entire Nehru Gandhi clan, was brought into India by Rajiv Gandhi. While Rajiv Gandhi believed in the idea of using technology to expedite the process of modernisation, BJP has used the same technology to promote nonsense about supernatural powers attributed to cow dung – cow urine, and validate this nonsense by using State sponsored dubious ‘scientific research’.
To top it all, Prime Minister Modi himself passed rude comments on Rajiv Gandhi invoking unproven allegations on the latter, but despite this, Rahul Gandhi did not lose his balance to counter the accusations by singing praises of his father’s achievements. Rahul Gandhi, whose life has been anything but a bed of roses, whose loved ones have sacrificed their lives and whose political record is a testament to the fact that he was never a power seeker, has shown self-restraint all through his addresses and interviews. If this repose does not signify the DNA of the ideology of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, what does?
Lately India’s electoral democracy has been a topic of much suspicion. When rational and open-minded citizens, who genuinely want India to progress, see how elections are fought and won, how EVMs and Election Commission aid and abet in favour of one party, how no court or commission pays any heed to
objections raised; they get agitated with Rahul Gandhi. Such perceptive lot expect an incisive Rahul to get his act together, while his foes keep ripping him off. Taking this further, it can be said that the inevitability of Rahul Gandhi to be in Indian politics today is proven beyond doubt. Right now it would be a futile exercise to judge whether Rahul Gandhi is sagacious or not, or whether he can reach the greatness of Nehru or not. In the post-independence period of ‘amrit kaal’, India has reached a stage where it is engulfed in the toxicity of unbridled despotic monarchy with zero check on immorality. At a time like this, the least that is required is a single meter scale to measure the toxicity level. This sole measuring scale is none other than Rahul Gandhi. Only time will tell what glorious history does Rahul Gandhi leave behind him, or how much of an Indianness does the Nehruvian philosophy embody within itself. However there is hardly any doubt that Rahul Gandhi, who has had to live his political life like a cursed prince-turned-tragic hero in a historical era marked with despair, has consistently refused to use references of his glorious dynasty for gaining sympathy for himself or garnering political mileage for winning elections. His composed stance continues to act as a barrier against the present tyrannical fascist power. Only time will tell whether or not the disastrous impact of this totalitarian power on people’s lives and livelihoods would result in drowning the cacophony erupting out of the “motivational speeches delivered by the world’s best orator”!
In 2019, Rahul Gandhi decided to contest from Wayanad, the Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala along with the traditional Gandhi stronghold of Amethi. He won from Wayanad with a margin of 4.31 lakhs while losing in Amethi. Fascist Hindutva has been seen on the rise in the North but the South has continued to embrace the progressive Indian culture. Against this backdrop, Rahul Gandhi’s constituency and his victory is quite telling! Although this does not prove anything, it does signify that India is a country of varied cultures and North Indian culture has several differences from that of South India. Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly asked this question across all media platforms whether we want India to move forward as a nation promoting a liberal, pluralistic democracy, or divide our country and plunge it into an abyss of darkness. The Discovery of India written by Jawaharlal Nehru poses the same question and partially answers it while providing a penetrating analysis of the Indian culture.
To conclude, Rahul Gandhi was never a question mark for India, neither in 2014 nor in 2019. However, moving forward henceforth in the history of India, there is every possibility that Rahul Gandhi could emerge as an answer.
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