The Great Fight Over India’s Myths

There is no shortage of books about India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who led the country from its independence in 1947 until his death in 1964. From British historian Judith Brown’s authoritative Nehru: A Political Life (2003) to the more recent—and more adulatory—Nehru: The Invention of India by Shashi Tharoor, the Indian opposition lawmaker and former United Nations diplomat, each makes clear that there is little question that Nehru helped forge the modern Indian state.

As prime minister, Nehru tutored the newly independent India in parliamentary democracy and helped knit together a diverse land through imaginative language policy, under which those attending school would learn Hindi, English, and a regional language. He fashioned a distinctive foreign policy, forging a path that sought to steer clear of superpower conflict. And he helmed the country through many challenges, from resettling refugees from Pakistan after the Partition of India to integrating India’s princely states into the nascent union.

Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths, Taylor C. Sherman, Princeton University Press, 304 pp., $39.95, October 2022.

Like any political leader, Nehru was not without flaws. Even sympathetic observers have admitted that his faith in a mixed economy, which allowed private enterprise while reserving a role for the state in promoting economic development, did not result in sustained growth or significantly reduce poverty. His neglect of the military and attempts to appease China despite a border dispute led to the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Nehru’s achievements, nonetheless, seem to far outweigh his questionable political choices, especially given what nearly 200 years of British colonial rule wrought in India. But that is not the view of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In recent years, Nehru’s legacy has come under sustained attack. This criticism is mostly polemical: The current government finds it politically expedient to demonize Nehru in the public sphere while it enacts policies that shake the very foundations of the Indian state. These attempts to undermine Nehru’s legacy—as well as that of his Indian National Congress party, the BJP’s principal opposition—will no doubt gain momentum as national elections approach next year.

Historian Taylor G. Sherman’s book Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths enters the conversation against this political backdrop. Sherman, who teaches at the London School of Economics, writes deftly about Nehru and what he bequeathed to India. Despite the somewhat provocative title, her well-researched book does not seek to discredit the former Indian leader but rather to provide a nuanced assessment of his achievements and failures. Sherman demonstrates that while Nehru initiated a host of visionary programs, they often met political, institutional, and societal barriers to implementation. This more complex assessment of Nehru is a far cry from the caricature that the BJP is trying to foist on the Indian electorate, which casts Nehru as inept and idealistic to a fault.

Sherman challenges the notion that Nehru was the sole architect of modern India, which is treated as an article of faith among some of his admirers. She focuses on seven policy areas, arguing that the leader’s views were hardly monochromatic for any of them. In Sherman’s telling, Nehru was a patron who delegated tasks to those he trusted to carry out his vision; these subordinates did not always share his perspective, and were sometimes clumsy in implementing his goals or thwarted by local authorities. (For example, despite Nehru’s own commitment to secularism, he could not ensure that its principles took hold at the grassroots level.) In each case, Sherman shows how myths have developed about Nehru and how careful scrutiny of the available evidence is necessary to understand his policies in their historical context.

Sherman argues that Nehru’s doctrine of nonalignment—still embraced by India today, though lacking much of its lofty rhetoric—failed to produce coherent policy outcomes. Despite Nehru’s commitment in principle to the doctrine (and despite Soviet overtures), India remained squarely situated in the Anglosphere in the initial years after independence, with links ranging from trade to defense acquisitions. Meanwhile, Nehru’s appeasement of China fit his worldview, yet proved to be a disaster that culminated in the 1962 border war. Among other matters, Nehru devoted insufficient resources to military preparedness. When China’s battle-hardened People’s Liberation Army attacked, the Indian Army found itself underequipped to withstand the onslaught.

Nehru’s vision of nonalignment belonged to a specific historical context: He was determined to keep India from being drawn into superpower conflict during the Cold War and sought to prevent the militarization of the country, instead focusing on economic development. Today, the BJP consciously avoids using the term nonalignment in favor of pursuing so-called strategic autonomy. By distancing itself from nonalignment, the ruling party aims to convey to its supporters that it has thrown off the shackles of Nehru’s era. But far from adopting a principled foreign policy, India’s current government has taken a callously instrumental approach to its diplomacy. The narrow pursuit of India’s own interests seems to trump all other considerations.

When it comes to secularism, Sherman shows how politicians during the Nehru era—including those in the Congress party—showed scant interest in protecting the rights of India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims. Recruitment to government offices showed blatant bias, and apart from iconic buildings, many Muslim monuments and mosques were at best neglected and at worst vandalized. Despite Nehru’s attempts to extend relief to Muslims displaced by the Partition of India, local notables stymied his efforts. The policy limitations he faced stemmed from a variety of factors, including a lack of administrative capacity and the inability of high-level officials to compel local authorities to follow through on instructions.

Over the decades, the BJP has suggested that Nehru and his successors pursued a sort of “pseudo-secularism,” appeasing India’s religious minorities. To be sure, some of those who followed Nehru in the Congress party have pandered to certain subsets of India’s Muslim community. In 1986, for example, then-Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi used his parliamentary majority to court the Muslim vote by overturning an Indian Supreme Court judgment that granted alimony to a Muslim woman, overriding the strictures of Muslim personal law. But ultimately, the historical evidence does not justify tarring Nehru with this particular brush. Today, the BJP actively seeks to marginalize Muslims and deny them equal rights under the Indian Constitution; the ruling party has attacked Nehru’s successors to justify its own policies.

Those committed to free market reforms in India have critiqued Nehru’s supposedly unyielding commitment to doctrinaire socialism—essentially calling him an ideologue. But once again, Sherman demonstrates that apart from Nehru’s penchant for Soviet-inspired five-year plans that set out specific economic targets, India hardly embraced socialism under his leadership. At the time, the country largely did not nationalize crucial industries and instead exhorted business leaders and entrepreneurs to become good nationalists and work to improve the country’s economic lot. These policies ended up favoring a handful of firms, leading to a mostly oligopolistic market that did little to benefit the Indian consumer. Today, the BJP also appears to favor a handful of business houses—most notably, those owned by Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani—making its critiques of Nehru’s policies ring rather hollow.

Sherman’s most telling discussion has to do with how Indian democracy functioned under Nehru’s watch. The conventional account suggests that apart from a few lapses, democracy swiftly took root under Nehru and proved resilient. Sherman writes that electoral democracy with universal suffrage did emerge quickly in India, drawing on the work of Israeli historian Ornit Shani. However, she shows that even the Congress party was not above resorting to political chicanery despite its significant popularity; its stalwarts also used the powers of their office to pursue financial gains. As early as 1956, when the government passed the Companies Act, a provision in the legislation permitted corporate donations to political parties.

Such dubious practices, now rampant in India, appear to have long antecedents. Under BJP rule, the most obvious example is the promotion of electoral bonds, which individuals and companies can purchase from a government-owned bank and then donate to the political party of their choice. With no transparency requirement, well-heeled people and groups can direct financial resources to their preferred party or candidate—presumably with the goal of influencing policy choices.

The BJP has made a concerted effort to distance itself from Nehru’s legacies, from diplomacy to economic policymaking. Given the first prime minister’s lionized role in founding the nation and setting it on its democratic course, it seems that the BJP has needed to tear down some of Nehru’s myths in order to build its own. The ruling party has characterized Nehru’s policy failures as his alone, including the handling of the border dispute with China and his attempts to regulate the economy. The strategy is designed to divert attention from the BJP’s own shortcomings, including its deeply flawed policies toward Beijing. The ruling party has created its own version of Nehru, depicting him as vainglorious, hopelessly idealistic, and committed to flawed policies. And so far, it has worked, appealing to many people in the BJP’s electoral base.

In the face of this narrative, Sherman’s book does not fundamentally undermine or celebrate Nehru’s contributions to the early Indian republic. Instead, it provides a nuanced account of the extraordinary political leader and his time in office. As any leader of his stature and tenure, Nehru pursued several questionable policies. But he helped build unity in the wake of India’s independence and laid the groundwork for India’s industrialization and a host of institutions. A segment of India’s reading public will no doubt read Sherman’s book with the care it deserves, but amid the current political environment—and as the national election approaches—it is possible that it will not receive the attention that it should. The BJP does not seem interested in recognizing Nehru’s achievements, nor willing to learn from his errors.