The Man Who Made India

My

grandfather never met Mohandas Gandhi, but he did the next best thing. A photograph taken in the 1950s, which hung in a room in his mansion, showed him bashfully stepping forward to place a garland around the neck of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man Gandhi chose to lead India after independence from Britain. If Gandhi is India's founding saint, for those of my grandfather's generation, Nehru, their first Prime Minister, was only a shade removed. They called him the "architect of the nation" and believed he would heal India's divisions and transform their impoverished country into a proud and independent world power.

Modern Indians regard Nehru with more ambivalence. As novelist Shashi Tharoor points out in his new biography, Nehru: The Invention of India, the architect of modern India turned his country into a democracy and an industrial giant but also shackled it to a heavily regulated socialist economy. If Nehru managed to fuse a disparate jumble of regions and principalities into a united nation, he also bequeathed India its most serious political problem, the insurgency in Kashmir. Although Tharoor's biography lacks the exhaustiveness and depth of some of its predecessors, its attitude is perfect for the times. Writes Tharoor, "What we are today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man."

Some Indians were never happy with Nehru. A Hindu-nationalist leader once accused him of being "English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident." The son of one of colonial India's most famous lawyers, the young Jawaharlal had British tutors and was educated at two of England's most élite establishments, Harrow and Cambridge. Gandhi's example transformed a mediocre Anglophile lawyer into a nationalist hero, but the two men's visions were hardly alike: Gandhi believed India's future lay in self-sufficient villages, but Nehru, influenced by Soviet socialism, wanted to urbanize and industrialize, filling India with steel mills, hydroelectric dams and engineering colleges. And Nehru's vision won out.

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One belief, though, was common to both men: a conviction that India would be no home for bigots. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu fanatic who claimed that Gandhi was making too many concessions to Muslims; Nehru offered shelter in his house for Muslims during the riots that followed India's independence. Islam, in Nehru's view, was a fundamental part of India's culture. His great treatise on his nation's history, The Discovery of India, written when he was put in jail by the British, describes the mind-boggling diversity of religions, cultures, kingdoms and empires that have coexisted in India as facets of a single timeless civilization that had lain dormant under British rule but was about to awaken with terrific force. His ability to convey this mystical vision of a great, united, democratic India to his poor countrymen gave him a sway over their loyalties that no Prime Minister has duplicated: they swept him into power three times. Although often indecisive and too willing to trust aides of dubious merit, Nehru never lost the gift of inspiring his fellow Indians. The phrase he used to describe his nation's independence—it was, he said, India's "tryst with destiny"—still haunts his countrymen with a sense of their potential for greatness; the speech in which he used the phrase, his midnight address to the nation at the moment of independence, is India's equivalent of the Gettysburg Address.

But, as Tharoor points out, even during Nehru's own lifetime, his halo began to fade. His concentration on industrialization, rather than reforming the primitive agricultural sector, led to food shortages by the late 1950s. The state-controlled economy bred corruption and stagnation. Kashmir was another growing problem; as Tharoor notes, most Indian commentators blame Nehru for his decision to take the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations, thereby turning it from a domestic matter into an international issue. (Tharoor's day job is as an under secretary-general of the U.N.) Then, in 1962, the Chinese invaded India—a crushing humiliation for Nehru, whose reputation as a world leader collapsed overnight.

A good part of Nehru's India, Tharoor notes, is gone already. Socialism is being slowly dismantled. The result has been a rapid acceleration in growth and prosperity—ammunition for those who would like to dismiss Nehru's legacy altogether. But religious fundamentalists have also launched an attack on two other Nehruvian institutions—religious tolerance and pluralist democracy—that have repeatedly demonstrated their value in holding India together. As Tharoor writes, "India's challenge today is both to depart from [Nehru's] legacy and to build on it."