THE VISIONARY
India’s first prime minister and the builder of the nation
The man who understood Jawaharlal Nehru best was Mahatma Gandhi. The shrewd saint and shrewder baniya that he was, Gandhi realised no one else in the Indian pantheon of nationalist heroes could serve as his successor. A whole host of heroes did recommend themselves, but they lacked the alchemical chutzpah required for the role. The secondariness of everyone else was obvious to Gandhi.
The uniqueness of Nehru, for Gandhi, lay in his ability to enact the modernity narrative. No one else could display his epic quality and novelistic nuance. Nehru became modernity incarnate. No man embodied its political, aesthetic and ethical dimensions so immaculately. More endearing was the charm and sheer vulnerability he brought to it. If there were an Oscar for modernity, he’d have swept it every year. No statesman anywhere was a match for his drama, humanity and warmth. Nehru went beyond the official definitions of modernity. He turned binaries into hyphens, hyphens into blends to create a smoothness, where style and content did not separate like wheat and chaff. He was Mr Modernity. If modernity had its man for all seasons, it was Jawaharlal Nehru.
Nehru remains an open hypothesis to be reinvented, questioned and constructed again. In playing out its vulnerabilities, in showing modernity and the enlightenment as constructs that can age, wear out, blossom, in emphasising its humanity. Nehru enacted out the agency, the ordinary possibilities of a modern citizen. Every experiment has his signature: town planning with Corbusier, planning with P.C. Mahalanobis, science with Homi Bhabha, design with the Sarabhais, institution building with the Indian Civil Service (ICS). One criticises his signature to eventually acknowledge the wideranging genius of the man. He was India’s greatest institution builder and what he actually built was a value frame, supple, elegant, muscular, not the iron frame of the ICS, but a more human and humane system which could stay durable. Correcting Nehru and finding flaws in the Nehruvian programme is an industry, but the very vitality of the industry shows the sheer vision and creativity of the man. Many of his colleagues shrink to irrelevance before him. His greatness lay in that he dreamt big and that his mistakes were big, but open to critique.