Nehru's legacy holds no electoral dividend for Congress

The argument that a Bharatiya Janata Party government has no business marking the 125th birth anniversary of Panditji makes little sense, says Virendra Kapoor

What is it with the Congress leadership that it gets so hot under the collar just because others seek to acknowledge the contribution of Jawaharlal Nehru to the making of a modern India?

It is Narendra Modi the prime minister, and not Narendra Modi the BJP leader, who has most graciously sought to celebrate the anniversary of one of India’s foremost leaders. The very spirit of Nehru is vitiated when those claiming to be his direct inheritors treat the popularly elected prime minister as a non-person, and display petty-mindedness while wanting to delegitimise his well-intentioned tribute to the first prime minister of free India.

Would the Sonia-Rahul Gandhi duo have liked the government not to commemorate Nehru so that they could then have gone to town accusing the BJP of abandoning the great leader?

This is strange logic: heads the Gandhis win, tails Modi loses. For, Modi is damned if he accords due significance to the Nehru anniversary; he is damned too if he does not. But Modi is unbothered by the predictable churlishness of the Family.

You cannot expect better from those who, having persuaded themselves that ruling India is their birthright, are yet to reconcile to the loss of power, especially to a self-confessed ‘tea boy’. 

As for Nehru's contribution, several pundits have most generously recalled his life and times to accord him a pride of place in the pantheon of leaders who led the freedom movement. Since history is written by the victors, there was little attempt to dissect his numerous failings, little or no inquiry into his intellectual make-up, his private life which, given that he was a public figure, remained, surprisingly, largely private.

But Nehru was no god. He had his faults, he too made mistakes, huge mistakes indeed.

However, the fact that he was a consummate politician who ensured the marginalisation of everyone who could pose a threat has not received adequate attention. The recent disclosure of a letter which Motilal Nehru wrote to Gandhi in 1928 commending his son for the top job in the Congress is only the latest confirmation that the father-son duo worked in tandem to win over the Mahatma.

It was no coincidence that a year later, in 1929, at the Lahore session of the Congress, Jawaharlal was duly anointed its president.

Gandhi had his own reasons to ignore the superior claims of Sardar Patel because: a) he was a fellow Gujarati, and, b) Patel was never hesitant to disagree with Bapu on strategic and ideological issues. But Jawaharlal, as the well-known columnist T C A Srinivasa Raghavan recently pointed out, was always eager  to play the yes man to the Mahatma even if he disagreed with him violently on key issues.

Also, Gandhi and Nehru in their personal habits and beliefs were as different as chalk and cheese. One celebrated all the externals of the Hindu religion; the other shunned it with disdain. One’s social and economic philosophy was rooted in the Indian soil, the other believed in the western thought and practices. Besides, Motilal had a good equation with the colonial rulers which was an added reason for his influence over Gandhi.

It might be useful to recall here that more than four-fifths of the Pradesh Congress Committees wanted Patel rather than Nehru for prime ministership. Gandhi vetoed the majority, instead nominating his westernised yes-man to the exalted office. (Arundhati Roy points out how Gandhi, while still in South Africa, lodged a protest for being clubbed with the natives, whom he called `Kaffirs’, because his unsaid desire was to be treated like the Whites.)

Notably, Nehru had made it plain that he would not work under Patel, but to his eternal credit Patel agreed to be Nehru’s number two at the instance of the Mahatma. The rest, as they say, is history.

Suffice to say, without Patel the map of free India would have been much different, much constricted. Patel virtually ignored Nehru’s objections and quelled the anti-India uprisings in Junagadh and Hyderabad. Nehru was obsessed with winning brownie points from the western leaders; Patel, in sharp contrast, did not allow extraneous concerns to stand in the way of what he believed was good for India.

While still at it, let us concede that the denigration of Patel and other totems of the freedom movement, including B R Ambedkar, had begun in Nehru’s time itself -- recall how Nehru tried to stop the President of India, Dr Rajendra Prasad, from attending the funeral of Patel -- though his authoritarian daughter took it to absurd lengths, refusing to even garland the statue of Patel on the latter’s birth anniversary.

Meanwhile, the ugly manner in which the Gandhis are asserting their monopoly over the Nehru legacy would suggest that a) he believed in family succession even in the political arena, and b) that tom-tomming the claim over Nehru would somehow help revive the Congress party.

Sorry to say, there are no electoral dividends forthcoming from emptily harping on the legacy of Nehru, especially when the self-avowed legatees are what they are, namely, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. 

Another house for Mr Twenty Per cent

Election time is particularly propitious for amassing unaccounted wealth. A senior minister in the United Progressive Alliance government, one of the few to have managed to retain his seat, had some Rs 40-odd crore lying around after the poll. So, where does he park this extra cash?

Where else but prime real estate! He bought an old house in an upscale South Delhi colony within days of his party’s drubbing in the parliamentary poll with the small change that was left from the election. And intends to soon pull down the run-down structure to build a no-expense-spared modern mansion.

His name? Well, we can provide a clue. He is known in corporate circles as Mr Twenty Per cent.

With supporters like these…

Have you ever wondered why the same set of people take out a small morcha, with placards reading Priyanka Lao, Congress Bachao (Bring Priyanka, save the Congress), every time the party suffers a particularly nasty rejection from voters? Invariably, they gather at 24 Akbar Road, the All India Congress Committee headquarters, and disperse soon after the media has taken note.

More significantly, the man who leads this small crowd is none other than someone called Jagdish Sharma. Who is he, you ask? Well, he is a factotum of Robert Vadra, Priyanka’s husband, in case you did not already know, who by dint of that fact was given membership of the Delhi Golf Club, and plays golf regularly with his boss.

Sharma was also involved in a couple of lawsuits over the control of land-rich trusts, one such litigation had the late V C Shukla on the opposite side.

Now the million dollar question is: if Sonia does not want Priyanka to lead the Congress party, how come her son-in-law’s Man Friday is holding morchas at regular intervals seeking her induction at the top of the party hierarchy? Is there something that we do not know, but only Vadra and his prized flunkeys do?