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Nehru and Modi: An Odious Comparison

Sanjay K. Jha

Numbers didn’t give glory to Jawaharlal Nehru. Not even 4,398, the number of days that Narendra Modi surpassed this week apparently to become the longest-serving “elected” prime minister of India. Nehru earned fame and respect because of his sacrifice and service; the actual number that strikes awe into most Indians is the 3,259 days Nehru spent in jail for the national cause. Petty politicians flaunting superiority because of sundry factors are insulting the freedom movement.

Nehru is considered one of the ideal politicians the world has seen because of his exceptional moral fortitude and intellectual prowess. His political charm is eternal because of his value system – that gave birth to the idea of India – and success in building a modern nation-state.

How many days he served as prime minister is irrelevant to his saga of greatness. Even six decades after his death, veneration for Nehru among the intelligentsia as well as the masses hasn’t diminished; he remains at the top of any global chart of statesmen who left an indelible mark on history.

It’s undesirable, if not cheap, that the number 4,399 triggered frenzied celebrations in the BJP. This means nothing for the country grappling with myriad crises – social, economic, political and cultural. How many days Modi sat on the throne makes absolutely no difference to national life because every section of society – from students and unemployed youth to farmers and entrepreneurs – is in distress.

Modi’s tenure has anyway been the most controversial in India’s history. There is a fierce debate on his politics, value system and achievements. While Modi’s supporters think India started rising only after his ascent to power, such an assessment lacks conviction and rationale. Though Modi has dreamt up a spot among the best, the majority opinion rates his leadership as the worst.

The desire for a comparison with Nehru is truly scandalous. While Nehru surprised the world by building a thriving democracy in the formative years of an illiterate and vastly diverse nation grappling with wretched poverty and lack of infrastructure, the Modi regime is seen by international agencies, historians and political scientists as a disturbing phase of diminishing democracy.

Nehru built great institutions – academic to cultural – and created a robust industrial base, but Modi is condemned for creating monopolies and selling national assets. Nehru earned global praise with his non-aligned, conscientious foreign policy that made India a credible moral voice, while Modi’s timidity against America and China, and alignment with Israel, robbed India of her ethical lustre.

Nehru didn’t face a strong opposition but he was so democratic that he warned the nascent nation against the possibility of his own tyranny. Using a pseudonym, he wrote:

“Men like Jawaharlal with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in a democracy… A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy. He might still use the language and slogan of democracy and socialism, but we all know how fascism has fattened on this language … He has all the makings of a dictator in him – vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity, ability, hardness and with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient … his over-mastering desire to get things done, to seep away what he dislikes and build anew, will hardly brook for long the slow process of democracy. Caesar-ism is always at the door, and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?”

Fake certification

A comparison between the author of The Discovery of India and the author of Exam Warriors is a crime. Modi supporters may dismiss such critical assessments as biased. Let’s recall the views expressed by two prominent leaders – former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda and former Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar – who came forward to write articles on Modi’s greatness during the “4,399” celebrations this week. Though both Gowda and Nitish are the BJP’s allies today, both of them have viciously attacked Modi for communal politics and false propaganda.

In his latest article, Nitish wrote about the “public trust” that Modi enjoys and his success in setting “a new benchmark in democratic politics”. He went so far as to say that Modi consistently focussed on “transparency and accountability”, and public trust in institutions strengthened during his tenure. He also pointed to cooperative federalism and Modi’s zero tolerance to corruption.

The same Nitish had in the past accused Modi of fooling people with “hawabazi”, failing to bring back black money and becoming totally untrustworthy because of his tendency to make false promises and claims. He even said Modi lowered the prestige of the Prime Minister’s Office with his low-grade discourse, ripped into his hypocrisy on corruption and warned the nation against the evil designs of Sangh.

Gowda had said in parliament that Modi “asked his establishment not to go to the rescue of the minorities” and described the 2002 violence as “state-sponsored terrorism”. What’s most fascinating is Gowda’s reference to media in the Modi regime, as he wrote in his article this week:

“Nehru had to, at most, deal with half a dozen newspapers but Modi has to endure the scrutiny of millions every single second, because of social media platforms, on which criticism can be unverified, unfair and also terribly harsh and personal. Plus, he has to contend with round-the-clock criticism, and sometimes hostility, of mainstream press.”

A former prime minister advertising his ignorance by saying that the mainstream media is hostile to Modi should worry citizens. His illogic and sophistry either indicate the article was conceived by a juvenile mind, or indicate that Gowda has begun to value post-truth mendacity as a legitimate political tool.

While Modi has never addressed a press conference in India and refused to answer questions in parliament, Nehru made conversation his most powerful weapon in politics. The truth is that the mainstream media, which freely examined Nehru and other prime ministers, is now just an instrument of sycophancy. Both the articles, written by a former prime minister and a former chief minister, exposed the farcical nature of public discourse in today’s India.

Virtue and vice

In 1952, both Indian and foreign observers certified that India’s first election was free and fair. Even the opposition parties didn’t whisper about any kind of rigging. Unlike Modi’s endorsement of the exclusionary and discriminatory special intensive review, Nehru had entreated the first Chief Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, to undertake house-to-house surveys to ensure no eligible voter is left out. Many women still couldn’t be enrolled because their conservative families refused to reveal their names.

Nehru wrote to all chief ministers in 1951: “There could be no greater folly for a government, such as we are, than to use the repressive apparatus of the state to benefit any party. That itself will arouse antagonism and loss of support for that party.”

Most opposition parties today accuse Modi of “vote chori”, pointing to the manipulation of electoral rolls, alleged rigging through electronic voting machines and the use of other unfair means in elections. These parties have been saying all democratic institutions have been captured and Modi intends to impose dictatorship.

Modi hasn’t offered any credible resolution so far. Nehru had all along cautioned the nation against this, writing: “This is too large a country with too many legitimate diversities to permit any so-called strongman to trample over people and their ideas.”

Finally, the difference between the two leaders is manifested most vividly on the question of secularism. Modi parrots “sabka saath” and allows discrimination and violence against minorities.

But Nehru wrote: “If any person raises his hand against another person on the basis of religion, all the resources at the command of the government will be used to put him down with an iron hand.”

He insisted that no amount of economic policies and development projects would be of any use if the people were divided. Arguing that communalism in India bears a striking resemblance to fascism, Nehru wrote that an ideological battle along with state power must be used “to uproot this despicable communalism. It must be obliterated from the land so that it may not take roots again. This poison … has permeated the land.”

Modi wouldn’t have been the political pygmy that he is if he tried to learn something from Nehru instead of defaming and demonising him without any sense of remorse.

[Sanjay K. Jha is a political commentator. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]

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Modi’s Obsession with Headline Management Won’t Buy Him the Immortality That He Craves

N.R. Mohanty

The shameless celebration on Wednesday (June 10) projecting Narendra Modi as the ‘longest serving elected uninterrupted prime minister’ raised chuckles among those who know the truth. Prime Minister Modi — and the servile leaders in his party and the larger National Democratic Alliance (NDA) conglomeration — tried to project that he has crossed the milestone set by India’s iconic first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in terms of longevity in the high office.

By discounting the almost five years that Nehru was the prime minister of independent India before the first general election was held in 1952 on the basis of the newly adopted constitution of India, the leaders of the entire NDA block have shown that they are not in a position to differentiate between reality and illusion.

Let us remember that members of the Constituent Assembly of India, no less, had elected Nehru as the prime minister; after all, the Constituent assembly — with its members elected by the members of the popularly elected Provincial Legislative Assemblies — was as much a representative body as there could be in the given circumstances.

If Modi and company reject the Constituent Assembly’s mandate as not representative enough, then that amounts to their questioning the legitimacy of the constitution itself, as this sacred document of independent India was framed and adopted by the same Constituent Assembly.

Clearly, the spectacle that the NDA presented on Wednesday was cringe stuff. Nehru was an intellectual and political colossus. Modi, with all his bluff and bluster, is a bonsai plant which can never reach the stature of a banyan tree.

Forget the optics. Think of the substance. Just compare Nehru’s tenure with that of Modi: you can see who was the real saviour of Mother India and who is a mere pretender.

Nehru became the prime minister when the country had barely 17% literacy and the average life expectancy at birth of an Indian was below 30 years. Nehru had inherited an economy that was in a moribund state for two centuries.

For the record, the growth rate of the Indian economy was an average of 0.1% between 1900 and 1947. Nehru had the unenviable task of building an economy from such ruins of an extractive colonial empire. He went about the task with single-minded dedication. The fact that India under Nehru managed an average annual growth rate of 3.5% was not a mean achievement (though Raj Krishna pejoratively called it as ‘Hindu rate of growth’ and Modi ridiculed it as ‘Congress rate of growth’).

Stuart Corbridge, John Harriss and Craig Jeffrey, in their seminal work India Today: Economy, Politics and Society, had studied the economic growth of the post-colonial countries and had found that the average annual economic growth of the best performers was around 3%.

India’s 3.5% growth story was indeed remarkable, given that India was the most populous among those countries and, more importantly, India, under Nehru, had sustained a fully representative democracy based on universal adult franchise which no other post-colonial country could boast about during that period.

Contrast it with Prime Minister Modi’s track record.

During the 2013-14 financial year, months before Modi took over the reins of power in Delhi, India’s growth rate was an impressive 6.9%. This cannot be dismissed as Congress’s false claim. This was as per the revised GDP series released by the Modi government. In fact, as it has been authoritatively established, under Manmohan Singh’s leadership from 2004 to 2014, the GDP growth rate averaged a robust 8.1%. In contrast, the Modi government, from 2014 to 2023, presided over a relatively dismal growth rate of 5.6%, as all the available data show.

When Modi was trashing the Congress growth rate in his celebratory address to the NDA constituents, he was certainly not ignorant of facts; as is his wont, he was spinning lies, which are being perpetrated by pliant economists enjoying the meagre rewards thrown at them by the saffron establishment.

In fact, the real economic achievement (or lack of it) of the Modi establishment has been convincingly articulated by the well-known economist Surjit Bhalla. He exposes the false claim of the Modi acolytes that India is the fastest growing major economy of the world.

He wrote in The Indian Express: “For the period of BJP rule from 2014 onwards, India’s rank in terms of GDP growth is ninth, in terms of per capita GDP growth, the rank is eighth, and it’s placed 16th in terms of per capita growth in US dollars. Bangladesh is the first in terms of US dollar growth, with an average per capita growth of 8.3 per cent per annum. Ethiopia is 2nd at 7.2 per cent. India is 16th at just 4.7 per cent. No matter how one slices the data, it’s time to dispense with the moniker of the fastest-growing major economy.”

In fact, Bhalla adds insult to injury when he says: “India has also moved from being one of the “Fragile Five” economies in 2013 to possibly becoming one of just two (along with Turkey) today.”

This is the true face of Modi’s India. Even after 12 years in power, in Prime Minister Modi’s zeitgeist, India is always a land of the future and never of the present. He is now selling the snake oil of ‘Viksit Bharat by August 2047’. That’s decades away; he won’t be around when that date arrives; for the present, he is seeking to entertain the domestic audience with the self-congratulatory headline-managing fantasy: that Modi has crossed the milestone set by Nehru. What a pity that our prime minister believes that when all else fails, immortality can be achieved through spectacular lies.

[N.R. Mohanty is a senior journalist. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]

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Why the RSS’s Vishwaguru Vision Collapses Under Its Own Hypocrisy

Sanjay K. Jha

Hypocrisy is inimical to scrutiny. It demands surrender and obedience. If you persist with inspection because reality is more precious than pretense, skeletons start tumbling out.

Some cupboards are full of skeletons. What’s the time required to understand this simple truth? Aren’t one hundred years more than enough? The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), busy in 100th anniversary celebrations, needs serious introspection about its character, philosophy, performance and achievements.

It needs to look within to find the alarming gap between its words and deeds; to discover why it is grappling with a crisis of legitimacy despite such enormous power and wealth. After all, something must be fundamentally wrong if the cupboard has more skeletons than laurels.

Speaking at the concluding function of its training camp in Nagpur this week, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said only India could give a uniting vision to the world driven by conflicts and self-interests. He explained how countries not directly linked with the war suffered and how brutal powers captured or devastated smaller nations, and bombed civilians, because of narrow self-interests. “Apna vikas aur shristi ka vinash (destruction of one’s own development and creation)” – Bhagwat used these poignant words to condemn nations that attack others, lamenting that the world listened to brute power, not the voice of conscience.

He said India can impose the voice of conscience and harmonise economic and moral contradictions when it really becomes the Vishwaguru. He claimed the RSS so sincerely worked on individuals to build such committed characters who could achieve these national and international goals. He stressed the virtue of “global fraternity” while defining the role of a world leader.

That will sound credible if the RSS hypocrisy is not scrutinised. Isn’t it true that their government, led by Narendra Modi, stands in a loving embrace with Israel, the country that symbolises self-interest, violence and conflict today? Hasn’t the Modi government failed to speak what is right in front of Donald Trump who has wantonly bullied and humiliated India? Where was the “voice of conscience” when innocent women and children were massacred in Gaza and Iran? Has the Modi government called out the forces responsible for the suffering of nations not directly connected with the war?

How can India become a credible voice of conscience and forge global fraternity when its own credentials in the context of democracy and constitutional principles of equality and justice are suspect? Bhagwat boasts of character-building, but who are the RSS products known for exceptional contributions to peaceful coexistence, a vision for a better world and commitment to justice?

Bhagwat expressed concern at the loot of natural resources, reminding us that even a tiny “tulsi plant” is a mother to Hindus. Did India see more trees cut under any other government than the current dispensation? Bhagwat rightly conceded India didn’t have the preparations required to become the Vishawaguru. Preparations require a constructive agenda, social harmony and a just system. A brutal and unethical rampaging can’t create that infrastructure.

Rahul’s prediction

Leader of Opposition (LoP)in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi has dropped hints about implosion in Narendra Modi’s system, arguing that abnormal pressures created by the political control of democratic institutions might have crossed the limit of tolerance.

Revealing that he was getting sensitive information from within the system, the Congress leader argued that the fear of people’s reprisal had triggered panic among the bureaucrats. He specifically referred to the Election Commission (EC), suggesting that a possible revolt against rigging might have struck alarm into the officials.

While the LoP can legitimately indulge in a psychological warfare against a weak government, Rahul Gandhi avoids hollow rhetoric and doesn’t make public statements without a reason. He has been predicting a severe economic crisis, of a kind not experienced before, at a time when the youth was already troubled by unemployment and paper-leak scandals.

Modi’s personal vulnerabilities too have acquired disturbing dimensions. While the tag of “Compromised PM” is enough to break any leader’s political spine, Modi’s disastrous foreign policy has doubtlessly invited dire economic consequences for the country. It is obviously not for nothing that Rahul is saying Modi will cease to be the prime minister within a year.

What, however, should instigate a fierce socio-political churning is the hint about internal strains in the “system of control” because that directly affects democracy in India. Rahul said he was getting the messages of the chief election commissioner. That means officials in the Election Commission are forwarding those messages to the LoP. This shows the extent of unease within the commission over Gyanesh Kumar’s decisions and style of working.

Almost every opposition party has time and again said elections were rigged and Gyanesh Kumar worked as a BJP agent. Rahul too has said those responsible for destruction of democracy will be punished even after retirement. All officers are obviously not aligned with the BJP and the fear of consequences for any wrongdoing is natural.

Officers in other departments are bound to feel similar unease, or suffer moral qualms, if something that is not legal or constitutional is being done. This should be true of the judiciary and the media as well.

People who worked closely with Modi are now talking about the impending economic crisis, data manipulation and absence of purposeful reforms. Corporate world is abuzz with resentment because of Modi’s unbridled love for a couple of business houses. There is suffocation in the academia because of distortion of history, unscientific concoctions, flawed priorities and mass recruitment of RSS-aligned teachers. Even in bureaucracy and police, the tendency to protect and promote incompetent and corrupt officers have generated immense dissatisfaction.

While coercion and blackmail can’t suppress the truth forever, any attempt for total control over individuals’ political consciousness is bound to fail. A time will come when the system will implode.

What happened in Sri Lanka, Nepal or Bangladesh are not alien fantasies India is immune from. The massive response to the casual cockroach remark by the chief justice of India was symptomatic of the anger and discontent brewing within the surface. The Modi government will commit a blunder by presuming that their doctrine of force is an insurance against public revolt.

Freedom and dissent

Remember that image of Rahul Gandhi sitting on the road just outside parliament house, surrounded by police and para-military forces a few years ago? He was stopped there along with other opposition MPs who wanted to march to the Rashtrapati Bhawan to submit a memorandum.

Visuals of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra jumping barricades only to be caught a few yards later also flit through the mind. She was part of the Congress protest against price-rise and unemployment but the police blocked the exit gate of the party headquarters disallowing anybody to step out.

Similar blockade happened when opposition MPs had to walk to the Election Commission for a meeting. There are countless incidents that show the Modi Government ruthlessly crushed dissent and demonstrations, particularly after it won a second term in 2019.

Massive protests were organised in almost every major city of the world against Israeli genocide in Gaza but Modi government took care to keep Delhi out of it. Even farmers were not allowed to enter the nation’s capital, forcing them to sit on the borders for a year.

Many people anticipated a similar crackdown on the Cockroach Janata Party but it was allowed to protest on the specific issue of Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. People’s anger, however, is not made to order.

The event vividly showed how anger against the Modi government was intensifying in every section of society. Men, women and youth talked about the rotten system, rampant corruption, attacks on democracy and the conspiracy of diverting attention by invoking religious and communal sentiments.

The debate about the nature, agenda and scope of this movement can continue but it has doubtlessly crystalised the anti-government sentiment, exploding the myth of Modi’s enduring popularity. The mainstream media’s decade-long efforts to conceal mis-governance and failures now stand unraveled.

The Congress party’s student’s wing NSUI and Youth Congress had turned paper-leak into a major political concern by its sustained nation-wide campaign. Rahul Gandhi also took up the matter. But the prime minister, who speaks on irrelevant subjects, remained silent. He probably believes political storms blow over with the passage of time, without realising that loss of credibility can’t be repaired by propaganda.

[Sanjay K. Jha is a political commentator. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]