 How India was imagined by the national liberation struggle leaders? How are nationalist leaders imagined India? What is that idea of India? Nehru embodied that idea fully. Further, he was not only fighting for that idea of India, he was also a builder of that idea after independence. That is, he was implementing that idea of India. He was probably the only great leader of the national movement who had an opportunity to participate for a long period in the process of building an independent idea in India based on this idea of India. It is not surprising, therefore, that Gandhi ji chose Jawaharlal Nehru as his successor. The second reason for choosing to speak on Nehru is that these days he is being demonized. There is an effort to wipe out his memory. A textbook came out in Rajasthan last year where on the Indian national movement where Nehru's name was not mentioned, he didn't exist. So there is an effort to wipe him out and simultaneously there is an effort to vilify him through nothing short of what I can call abuse in the social media. So every kind of lie is being talked about him and spread about him basically to wipe out his memory. And the reason for that is that his memory keeps the memory of the Indian national liberation struggle alive. It keeps alive the idea of India which the current regimes want to destroy. The attack on Nehru understandably comes from two forces, the colonial and the communal, that is the two forces which were opposed to the idea of India who were opposed to anti-imperialism and to secularism. These are the forces that are now attacking India. The reason why I am talking about both of them is that the umbilical cord which links colonialism with communalism is often forgotten. It is forgotten mainly because communalism today masquerades as nationalism. They are now claiming we are the nationalists and people forget that they are not the nationalists. They were the agents of the colonialists. So I will show you how these two forces are the ones who are attacking Nehru and then I will show you that how that attack is completely baseless and wrong. The neo-colonial attack, that is the attack from the colonial side is made by people like Meghna Desai, Professor Tirthankar Roy, a well-known economist who eulogize colonialism, who say that during colonial rule there was rapid economic growth. They talk about what in the British days used to be said in textbooks, first line, Angreji Raj ki Barkhate. What were the great things that were done under colonial rule? And they say looking back at India from the rapid growth we have had since 1991, since the economic reforms, they say if only there was no Nehru. To use Meghna Desai's language, he says the first 40 years after independence were wasted years. Nehru has ruined our 40 years. So he said if only there wasn't a Nehru then we would have had great growth. This critique of the Nehru veneerah is completely ahistorical. Nehru's strategy of unstructuring colonialism through inward orientation, import substitution, self-reliant growth, protecting domestic industry. These were seen as the problems by Tirthankar Roy and Meghna Desai and the Neoclonals. What they do is a very interesting thing. They conflate, that is they mix up two kinds of globalization. The globalization that occurred under colonial domination in the 18th century and 19th century with the globalization that you have seen under independent Indian states like in India after 1991. They say these are the two good phases and the bad phase is the Nehruvian phase. Now this is completely ahistorical. These are two different kinds of globalization. If India had globalized in 1950s, we would have been a banana republic. That is we would have been a junior partner of some great power. We could not open out at that time because our economy was colonized, structured. So Nehru had to spend 30 to 40 years to unstructure that colonialism. Before we could open out to the world with some advantage to us. That opening up was not becoming a slave of the colonial power. So these were two different things and the second opening up was possible only after unstructuring. And India is not an exception. China also took nearly 30 years. They opened up in 1978. So did Indonesia. So did Egypt. So you needed your socar nose. You needed your Nasir. You needed your mouse. You needed your Nehruz before you opened up to the world. But these economists in a very unhistorical manner do not realize that today's globalization is on the backs of Nehru. It is made possible because of what was the Nehruvian strategy in that period, which I will show you in a very short while. Nehruvian policies are now projected, as I said, as an evil. Everything that it did. I'll give you so many examples. The public sector is bad. The mixed economy is bad. His emphasis on capital goods was bad. They said, why didn't we have consumer goods industries? They accused him of neglecting agriculture. They accused him of not doing the land reforms properly. They accused him of putting too much focus on higher education and ignoring primary education. Now, these have been repeated so often that people have started believing it. And I will show you that this is complete rubbish. But this is what is being said about him. That he did not, he ruined the Kashmir policy. If only he had not brought in Article 370, we would not have had brought this problem. Now, these are all lies. Nehru was not even in the country when Article 370 was introduced in the constituent assembly. When it was discussed and it was brought in, it was done by Patel, the hero of the current Nehru haters. So what I mean to say is that a lot of lies and untruths are being said about one of the brightest son of India. And therefore, I am grateful for this opportunity to talk about him. This was the neocolonial critique or the right-wing neoliberal critique. The communal critique is even stronger. In fact, it is vicious because for the communalists, Nehru was indeed the person who took away their only possibility of creating a Hindu rastra just at the point of partition of the country. That was the time they thought when Pakistan became a Muslim Pakistan, India could become a Hindu India. And Nehru almost single-handedly at that time, as I will show you, took away this dream of theirs and they cannot forgive Nehru for that. And that is why you will see leader after leader, attacking among the nationalist leaders. The one leader that they attack most is Jawaharlal Nehru. I mean, every bottom-to-middle-to-top-level leader says, if only Patel had been Prime Minister, then India would be so different. That is, Nehru ruined everything, etc. In fact, one senior person, functionary of the RSS BJP, actually said that Godse shot the wrong person if it should have been Nehru who should have been shot. So this is the kind of hatred that is produced against this person and the lies that are spread about him. Now, before I outline how Nehru represented and implemented the nationalist vision or the nationalist imagination of the idea of India, very briefly let me tell you what is this vision? What is this idea of India? Because people are just talking about the idea of India without putting content into it. What is the idea of India? There is a shared vision by the whole spectrum of people who participated in the national movement, from the communists, to the socialists, to the Gandhians, to the liberals, to the nationalist capitalists. All those who participated in the national movement, leaving aside the loyalists and the communalists, they shared some consensus, a common view of what India would be. They had differences among themselves, but they had a commonality and that common view is the idea of India and briefly they are four things on which everybody was agreed from right to the left. Anybody who was anti-British, as I said, leave out the communalists, they were not part of it. If you leave them out, everybody was agreed on these four principles. These four principles were the following. First, sovereignty. India will be independent and anti-imperialist. That is, future India will not be a junior partner of one foreign power or the other, nor will it become an aggressive country colonizing other countries. It will be independent and anti-imperialist. Number two, India would be a democratic country. This was a fundamental idea that Indian nationalist leaders started arguing from the 19th century itself. In the 1890s, Tilak is talking about adult franchise. Europe was to get adult franchise decades later. Women got the right to vote much, much, much later than that. But in the 19th century itself, every individual of the republic irrespective of gender, caste, religion, whatever, tribe will have the same rights. So democracy was important. Now, related to democracy, the way they understand, if every individual of this republic had the same rights, it meant that future India must be secular. It must be inclusive. Everybody must have the same voice. That is why during the 100 years of our national movement, the phrase secular democracy was used coterminously. You cannot have democracy without secularism. And you cannot have secularism without democracy. So these are coterminous words. And in the national movement, therefore, they were used like that. And communalists were never called nationalists. It is the communalists who have now started calling themselves Hindu nationalist, Sikh nationalist, Muslim nationalist. In the national movement days, this very beautiful word was not associated with them. They were called what they are, communalists. That is people who produce or work on the basis of religion. The third thing was not the fourth, sorry, because democracy, secularism, sovereignty, the fourth element of the idea of India and the last one is a very important one was what we call a pro-poor orientation. There was not a consensus on socialism, but there was a consensus on pro-poor. From the early nationalist days onwards, Tadabai Naruji, Rana Day, R.C. Dutt, Tadabai Naruji's first book was called Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. Why are we opposing colonialism? Because it produces poverty. The poor were in the center of their imagination. This idea was taken further rapidly by Mahatma Gandhi. When he talks of Dharidranarayan, he turns the face of the people towards the poor in a manner very few could. And of course, then Nehru, then the socialists and the communists take this idea further. But there was a consensus was that whichever way you do it, whether you do it through welfare capitalism or through socialism or through whatever method, the poor must be kept into the picture. Now these were the four ideas which are the basic to Indian nationalism. And Nehru represented each one of them as I will show you in a moment. And the communal forces today deny each one of these forces as I will also say by the way. Now this imagination of India, I want to take two minutes on this that the early nationalists had was unique in world history. One must be proud of this fact. We should not be proud of things which it did not do. We should not be proud of claiming that we had Arjuna had nuclear tipped arrows as the Bengal governor said a few weeks ago. Now that is lies. It does not really produce pride. The pride should be that India imagined and nationalism at a time in the world when nationalism in Europe was emerging completely in a different manner. In Europe, where nationalism emerged, nationalism emerged by creating homogenous societies, one religion, one language, Catholic France, Protestant England, Protestant Germany. So one language, France was before the French Revolution was a multilingual country, but it was flattened out into one language. In this situation, unification of Italy, unification of Germany all occur on the basis of one language, one religion. At that time, in the 19th century itself, Indian nationalists imagined an India which will celebrate diversity. They said, as many religions as many languages, it does not matter. In fact, the British said, how can India be a nation? They said, you are not a nation. You are only a geographical expression. Even now we are referred to as South Asians. We are lucky that we are not given a number, you know, this longitude, that longitude. Because they said, you can't be a nation. In this region, there are hundreds of languages. How can you be a nation? But our nationalists said that that is what describes our nation, that we celebrate diversity. The second thing which was unique about this idea of India was that it was anti-imperialist nationalism. Whereas nationalism, when it emerged in Europe, it emerged with the rise of capitalism. And as you are aware, capitalism arose in the world simultaneously with imperialism. Each nation state, as it emerged in Europe, as capitalist countries, they also became imperialist country. France, Germany, Italy, just think of them, England, USA, Japan, each nation as it became capitalist also became imperialist. So their nationalism was aggressive, aggrandizing, grabbing other people's rights. Our nationalism was humane, liberating. It was a different kind of nationalism about which we should be proud. And that nationalism is what, through the school of democracy, we would like to defend. That is the nationalism we are talking about. That is the nationalism we should be talking about. Not the nationalism which you see on the streets today, in the name of which we lynch, we kill people. That was not our nationalism. That nationalism emerged from this European view of homogenous one country, one race, one this thing. The logical conclusion of which was Hitler and Mussolini. Our nationalism's logical conclusion is the opposite. The last item I want to say before I come directly to Nehru is that this notion of idea of India went deep down into the minds of the Indian people. Now the reason why it went down deep was because our national movement was a mass movement and a prolonged movement. A movement over a hundred years involving millions of people. The chief method of our national movement was to hold meetings, mass meetings, under a tree, in a school, in a building, in a town hall. So you were talking. You were communicating with millions and millions and millions of people. I am contrasting it to a guerrilla movement or a revolution made by a professional army. It was not that. It was not a coup. It was a movement over a long period of time made by its own people. That is the ideas of the movement went deep down into the minds of the people. Which means that these issues became non-negotiable for the people. So the Indian people said democracy, secularism, independence are non-negotiable. And that brings me to the last difference with Europe. If democracy, anti-imperialism, proper orientation, secularism are non-negotiable. Then the transition to modernity that was to happen in India had to happen with all of these things. It could have happened the way it happened in Europe. Now what is the contrast? In Europe, when industrialization occurred, there was no question of democracy. Democracy was decades away. Working class rights was decades away. Read Charles Dickens and you will know about the condition of the working class in England. So this was not a consideration. It happened with slavery in the United States. It happened with colonies. Each country which became capitalist in Europe had colonies. That is to the extent that they did not build capitalism on the backs of their working class and peasantry. They did it on the backs of the colonial people by taking tribute for them. It happened through heavy land tax. Like in Japan, 50% land tax that they took the surplus out of the peasantry. It happened through forced collectivization like in the Soviet Union. Millions had to die for that. That is, it did not happen with democracy. So it was to be a great experiment, a unique experiment. How to do a transition to modernity with democracy, with independence and with an eye on the poor. But as I said, that if these were non-negotiables, it meant nobody in India at independence could say, let us try another model. Now let me just give you two examples. Nobody at Independence in 1947 said that let's follow a model of an authoritarian state in partnership with industrial capital or industrial bourgeoisie. Let us quickly put through development first. And after development occurs, then we will talk of democracy. This is the South Korea model. A strong authoritarian state which suppresses any trade union activity and is enabling rapid growth of industry through strong control, authoritarian control. Nobody in India argued that, not even the capitalists, not even the Tata Billas argued that. Nobody argued that, because anybody who argued that would be in the dustbin, because for a hundred years the Indian people have said that democracy is inviolable. We cannot fool around with democracy. The second idea of this thing was that nobody argued that now that we are independent but very poor, let us tie up with the most advanced country at this time and have quick development. We will be junior partner to that person, but let us have development first and then we will talk about independence. The model is Japan. Japan grew from one of the developing countries to the second largest economy under American hegemony as the base for America, for Vietnam. Without any doubt about this, do not for a moment forget that they themselves describe themselves as semi-sovereign. This was not going to be possible, because as I said, in the idea of India, sovereignty was number one. When India was attacked in the 1950s, a poor country with a begging bowl image asking for help from all over the world for food, for this, for that, at that time when India took open positions against the United States on the Korean war situation on Vietnam, etc. They said that who are you to speak? You cannot even look after your own economy. Nehru very famously supposed to have said that we may be poor, but who has told you that the poor cannot have a voice? So we had this voice and the voice was of the National Liberation struggle. Nehru as the leading member of the National Movement, it fell upon his shoulders to implement the idea of India in independent India. Unfortunately, because the father of the nation, unfortunately, as you know, was murdered within months of independence by communal forces. And Patel, his right-hand person, the deputy prime minister, the home minister also died in 1950. So it fell upon Nehru's shoulders primarily, not the only one. He had the support of a galaxy of leaders of the National Movement with him, but it certainly fell upon his shoulders primarily to build this idea of India. But at the very birth of the nation, the biggest challenge to the idea of India came. It came in the period 1946 to 1950, the period that one can describe as a holocaust-like situation. Holocaust is the period of German fascism when 6 billion Jews were killed. That is the period which is called holocaust. It created like a storm, a thunder. Now this period in India was like that, 46 to 51. It started with the Calcutta killings, followed by the killings. These are communal killings, killing of Hindus in Noakhali, followed by killing of Muslims on a massive scale, including in the rural areas in Bihar. And then came the partition of the country where 5 lakh people were killed, 6 million people became refugees, homeless. One of the world's largest migrations in such a short period of time ever in history occurred in that period. So you can imagine the raised emotional temperature on the religious question because the country has just been divided. People's families, parents, children have been murdered. They have been thrown out of their homes, etc. In that situation, the Mahatma is assassinated. And in that situation, Nehru rose to his full stature to resist the challenge of the communal forces. And I will describe it when I say that he embodied the idea of India. This, I will begin by showing how he resisted communalism in a manner that unfortunately we are nowhere near doing in that same manner. In 1947, he says, within weeks of independence, he says, I will stand in the way of Hindu-Muslim riots. Members of both community will have to tread over my dead body before they can strike each other. Nehru stakes his life on this question, that there will not be communal rioting. He said in November in 1946, this is what he said. And when in Bihar, these killings were occurring on a large scale in 1946, he landed up in Bihar with his virtually his whole cabinet. He took Siddharth Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Maulana Azad, Jaiprakash Narayan, J.B. Kriplani, the whole cabinet to Bihar. And he said, we will stay there till the communal riot ends. What a contrast, what a contrast to what happened in Gujarat. What was the response of the leading Prime Minister at that time? What was the response of the Nehru? Or more recently, what was the response to Musaffar Nagar? When you saw ethnic cleansing for the first time, when Muslims from an area were thrown out permanently, it was not a riot situation, the riot situation, they go away and then they come back. The area from rural areas, Muslims have been thrown out. What was the response? Now I want to contrast this to what Nehru's response was. On 19th August, immediately after independence, four days after 15th August, he says, he clearly states, our state is not a communal state, but a democratic state. Note that he's contrasting democracy and communalism. As I said, in the nationalist thought, secularism and democracy are one word. So communalism is therefore the opposite of democracy. So our state is not a communal state, but a democratic state in which every citizen has equal rights. The government is determined to protect these rights. And it is this task that Nehru takes upon himself with his full might. Nehru saw Gandhi's assassination, not as an act of some individual who's, you know, just one individual who's a madman. He saw it as an effort of an organization and he named it. He said, it is the effort of the RSS to change the nature of the state. He wrote to the chief ministers on 5th February, 1948. Shortly after Gandhi's murder, he wrote to the chief ministers. He says, it's a deliberate coup data. A deliberate coup was planned involved killing of several poor people, apart from Mahatma, and the creation of a general disorder in order to enable the RSS to seize power. The attempt was, here is a situation of communal, communalism, communal feelings at a peak. And that situation was to be used to create a Hindu India as opposed to a Muslim India. And the RSS saw correctly as that being their best opportunity. Because the national movement was totally opposed to it, 100 years of that. So how could they build a Hindu India at independence? But here was an opportunity. The partition created the opportunity. It was this threat that Nehru was not going to allow to happen. What does he do? He, with the full support of Sardar Patel, puts bans the RSS, puts 25,000 of those of RSS people in jail. More important, and this is important, because it has never happened since, unfortunately. He converted the first general election, the 1951 election, 50-51 election into a referendum. One issue, referendum, that will India be a secular India? Or will we be a Hindu India? A mirror image of a Muslim Pakistan. And he campaigned all over the country. He traveled 40,000 kilometers. With no helicopters and this, that and the other that you have these days. He traveled 40,000 kilometers, addressed 35 million people. That is one out of 10 people he addressed directly with the single agenda. That are we to build a secular democratic India? Is that what our dreams of a national struggle has been? Or are we going to be a reflection of Pakistan? And the results were dramatic. Peaceful, fair election held within few years of the Holocaust like situation. It's a matter of great pride that within three years of this huge violence, migration, etc., we held a peaceful election. And in that election, the Hindu Mahasabha, the newly founded Jansang, which has changed its names after that, the Ram Rajya Parishad, etc. All of them put together got only 10 out of 489 seats. They got 6% of the votes. 94% of the Indian people said they are for a secular India, not for a Hindu India in response to the partition. Now this was a stunning achievement. The communal threat had been pushed back for decades. But unfortunately, as we realize now, it was not extinguished. It was put back and they have again managed to creep their back into a situation where they have now again become the biggest challenge to the idea of India. Having fought back the communal challenge, Nehru took on the challenge of building and nurturing the critical institutions of a functioning democracy. That is the second element I'm now coming to. The functioning of the parliament, he regularly used to attend the parliament. Every meeting he would never miss a parliament session, contrasted to today. His functioning of the cabinet system. There are autobiographies of his ministers. For example, CD Deshmukh, who was his finance minister for six years in his autobiography says Nehru would never impose a decision. He would allow the cabinet members to have their say. He was training his people into democracy, his insistence on a free press and civil liberties. And most of all, his insistence on a vibrant opposition. Much is to be learned from this. Nehru is insisting that there is no democracy unless you have a very vibrant opposition. He says, I'm quoting him. This is this quotation will sound very, very appropriate to you. He says, this is too large a country with too many diversities to permit any so-called strongman. I'm adding whether with a 56 or 86 inch chest. It is too large a country. He says with too many diversities to permit any so-called strongman to trample over people and their ideas. In other words, no one man is going to dictate ideas in this country. It will have to be a democracy. I'll give you just two quick examples of how he respected the opposition. As you know, the famous Nehru plan, the Nehru-Mala-Nibbis plan, the second plan, when he proposed it, he asked his bureaucrats and his ministers to send it out for world opinion. So bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they sent it to people who were left, who were slightly left liberal, more or less Nehruite thinking people all over the world and the responses came very, very positive. And when Nehru saw those responses, he was furious. This was reported by Dr. Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister. When he's reporting what he found when he became the Planning Commission Chief and was looking through the files and he finds in the files, Nehru is furious at his bureaucrats and he's saying, what is the point of asking people who will agree with me? You send it to Milton Friedman of the Chicago School, who's completely opposed to my ideas. So for him, democracy meant critique. Give it to people who will criticize me so that I can learn. I'll give you another example. When Nehru found that he had become so popular that everybody was only praising him, there was no critique emerging. He wrote in a newspaper with a pseudonym calling himself Chanakya and he wrote a very damaging article critiquing himself. He's basically saying how Nehru is becoming too powerful. We must be very careful of he emerging as a dictator. Caesarism is not good. He should not be continuously re-elected for the third time, etc. So it is a lesson to be remembered. The dangers he's alluding to of Caesarism, of this emerging of this one leader, the furor, the dictator, has not lost salience. At Independence, Nehru was among the first to realize that political independence by itself was of no value unless you also had economic independence. And what was the situation in India at Independence? At Independence to make any investment. If you want to invest, you need machines. You need to have a factory, you need machines. Where will you get those machines? India produced no machines. More than 90% of the capital goods or machinery had to be imported from the same country or countries from whom you have just got independence. So you had political independence, but economically you were totally dependent on the same countries for technology, for capital goods, for machinery. Even machine tools, pliers, wrenches, ask your grandparents. Even all those were imported. India did not make 95% of machine tools were also imported at Independence. So therefore Nehru, in his famous Nehru-Maranovis plan, the second plan, creates a strategy of industrial growth which is heavily focused towards creating the capital goods industries. Why? To meet the first objective of the idea of India, sovereignty, that is to become truly sovereign, truly independent, you must do that. And what is the result? I'll give you one statistic. 61 to 65, this is the period of Nehru. He dies in 64, right? 51 to 65, excuse me. From 1951 to 65, the first three plans, India grew at 7%, the industry grew at 7.1% per annum. But that's not the important point. The increase in India's industrial production that occurred in this period, 1951 to about 69, 70% of that increase was because of consumer goods industries, things like textiles, sugar, things that you consume. Intermediate goods, things like steel, sulfuric acid, heavy chemicals, they increased by the quadrupled, four times increase. That was 70%. This is four times. That is several hundred percent. Most important, the capital goods industries in this period, 15 to 20 years, increased by 10 times, 10 times. The result is the following. At independence, I told you to make any investment, which means to grow, you had to import almost anything. So you were totally dependent on the first world. In 1960, only 43% had to be imported. And by 1974, only 9% had to be imported. Now, this is Nehru's success. This is the unstructuring of colonialism. By 1970, 90% of your growth you could do on your own. Now, this is the period these people are calling the wasted years. This is the period which gains India its sovereignty. This is the period which enables India to have an independent foreign policy. Why we could have the non-aligned movement? It is not long speeches in UN that gave you independence. It is not your diplomacy which gave you independence. It is your economic independence, which the Nehruvian strategy was able to do, which gave you that independence. And India could now head a hundred countries in the non-aligned movement to block a snook at both the superpowers. A poor country refusing to be in one block or the other and leading other countries into that path of independence. Now, that was a great success in not only foreign policy, but in India's maintaining of its own sovereignty, despite being a devastated economy, a poor country, a country colonized for 200 years, a major achievement. Then I come to one or two other actual achievements which are forgotten about these days. Nehru brilliantly anticipated the knowledge revolution. As you know, India missed the first industrial revolution. It missed the second industrial revolution, which happened during the Second World War, etc. But Nehru anticipated that the next big revolution would be in the sphere of knowledge. And therefore, from the first plan onwards, just look at the precociousness, all the institutions of knowledge that you know of. The IITs, the All-Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, the National Physical Laboratory, the National Chemical Laboratory, the CISR, the Central Industrial Scientific Research, the Saiti Academy, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Just think of any institution, all planned in the 1950s. The fact that today India is able to participate in the global information technology revolution is because of Nehru, not in spite of him. This is what these economists do not realize. You are standing on his shoulders. But I'll give you one statistic. The expenditure he makes on scientific and research development grew from 10 million in 1949, 10 million to 4.5 billion in 1977. The stock of technical manpower in India increased by 12 times. India became the third largest country in terms of scientific and technological manpower. Of course, which went a great deal in maintaining our sovereignty. But of course, these days with our colonized minds, this manpower we are handing over to the West and patting ourselves on the back for doing so, thinking how wonderfully we have done that we are exporting our knowledge. The first world is raking it in. We are handing it out, thinking we are doing a great job. I'll give you one figure, not mine, this is American figures. 95% of Indian scientists who go to the United States to do PhDs in scientific subjects. Medicine, engineering, mathematics, nuclear science, et cetera. 95% stay there. In 1960s, only 14% of American PhDs were by non-Americans. But since the 1960s, when the products of India's, the temples of modern India that Nehru created, your IITs and AIMS, they started coming out from the 1960s. We started, all batches started going there. Today, 40% of American PhDs are by non-Americans, a large number of them from India and China. So the third world is handing it over, the critical factor of production knowledge to the first world, what's the so-called brain drain, and we think we are doing a great job. We pride ourselves and we do everything to send our children abroad. This is not slavery. This is not even forced migration, which happened for the indentured labor. This is voluntary migration. This is the colonization of the mind. You get yourself colonized and you think you're doing a great job, but this is not my subject. I won't speak on it today. The third achievement, I mentioned this knowledge issue because this whole counterpoising of Nehru saying that he only did higher education, to primary education is a lie. As early as 1931, the Karachi Resolution, which Nehru drafted, they said in that resolution, it said that free and compulsory basic education will be a part of India's constitution. It was wished at that time itself, 1931, before independence, free and compulsory primary basic education. The primary school education system, public that existed in the Nehruvian era, is a complete contrast to the situation today. Today, you have even at the primary level, even in the villages, people preferring to go to rapacious private sector schools who are money making machines. And those who can't do that, which is the overwhelming number of the Indian poor, get no education at all. This is new. Ask your grandparents. They all went to public schools. My father went to a public school. By public, we mean government schools. Everybody went to government schools. So the fact that we have not built on that Nehruvian effort that was made in the 50s, 60s and 70s and have gone on the opposite side. And now the result is that there is no public education in the public sector, in the government sector, virtually in most parts of the country. I, as a person who spent nearly half a century in education, can say it with confidence that our education system is gone completely for a toss, especially for the poor. There is no education system in this country for the poor, virtually. Now that is not because of Nehru. That is because what we have done after that. But now the blame is being put on Nehru. That he ignored primary education. That is why we do not have primary education. This is a historical and we cannot allow that. Then we come to this other big shibboleth, big lie that Nehru ignored agriculture. I want to spend two, three minutes on this. Nehru at the very beginning realized that sovereignty required not only that we could grow through investment, that is we could make our own machines, etc. But it also meant that we had food security. Because at Indian agriculture, over the colonial period, 200 period, completely stagnated. We were having negative rates of growth in Indian agriculture in the last 40 years of colonial rule. At independence, 14 million tons of food had to be imported between 1946 and 1953 just to avoid starvation. So something needed to be done and that is what Nehru does. He pushes through the land reforms in India and I am underlining this within a democratic framework. Again, not done in history ever. It is in sharp contrast to land reforms done in Soviet Union, in China, costing millions of lives, millions. The land reforms in those countries cost millions of lives. It did not in India. It was not done in the Japanese way where Army of Occupation, General MacArthur's army comes and does land reforms for you. It was done democratically. And therefore it was slower. It had its problems. This is not to say that this was a perfect land reform. But it was the back of the Zamindari system was broken within 10 years. By 1957, there was no Zamindari system left in India. Co-operative and institutional credit which was non-existent earlier, people had to borrow from the local shroff at 100, 200, 300 percent rates of interest. That increased 15 times between 1950 and 1965 from 0.2 billion to 3.65 billion. The credit that was made available, institutional credit. He created an virtually an army of village-level workers. VLWs as they were called. Block development of officers, et cetera, et cetera. Nehru made no dichotomy between industry and agriculture. He said, you cannot have agricultural growth unless you have industrial growth. Unless you have tractors, you have electricity, you have pumps, you have chemicals, you have fertilizers, you cannot have agricultural growth. So industry and agriculture must grow together. Nehru was an extremely well-read man unlike many of our leaders today. And he knew, he was not doing it out of some stupidity that he was pushing for industry at such a rapid pace because he realized you could not have an agricultural revolution either. An attempt is made to, repeated attempt to contrast Nehru with Shastri saying that after Shastri came, you had the green revolution strategy. Again, unlike. Brings in the land reform, the institutional reforms which was necessary for the green revolution. You could not have done it without the land reforms having occurred. And he realized that the limits of the institutional reforms was reached very fast and a technological solution was also needed and the new agricultural strategy, which is what is associated with the green revolution, the green revolution strategy was this intensive agricultural districts program. That is, you choose certain districts, put in a lot of inputs and have sort of examples of how you can bring in high technology. This was started in Nehru's time itself. In 15 districts, one in each state, he had already started this program which became the green revolution. As one of our top agricultural experts, G.S. Bhalla put it, I'm quoting him, Nehru's legislative technological transformation in India, the green revolution, came about not during Nehru's lifetime, but soon after his death. But the foundations for the technological development when laid in Nehru's time. So Nehru not only brought in the institutional reforms, but he also brought the possibility of the technological reforms which brought in the green revolution. And this is what led Daniel Tharner, a globally renowned economist and best known for his understanding of Indian agriculture, I'm quoting him, to disabuse forever, I hope, this notion that Nehru did nothing for agriculture. This is what Daniel Tharner, who's no lover of Nehru, who's an economist or independent economist, this is what he says. It is sometimes said that the initial five-year plants, that is the first three plants under Nehru, they neglected agriculture. This charge cannot be taken seriously. The facts are that in India's first 21 years of independence, more has been done to foster change in agriculture and more change has actually taken place in agriculture than in the preceding 200 years. So the first 15 to 20 years, more happens in agriculture than happened in the previous 200 years. And we say that the first 15 years were wasted years because of Nehru. So this is the kind of lie that we have to get ourselves out of. Finally, as we are running out of time, I come to the last, the fourth element of the legacy of the idea of India, of the national movement, which Nehru represented, which is the proper orientation. Nehru's success in keeping India on the democratic civil libertarian path against considerable odds. It was not easy. You must remember that India was among the few countries in the world, post-colonial countries, which could maintain democracy after independence. Almost all of them went into one kind of authoritarian, either military or civil regime or the other. India was an exception and you must credit Nehru with that. But the fact that he was able to do this by itself ensured that the poor were not altogether left out of the development process. That is, democracy is one of the biggest guarantees for the poor. This was dramatically brought out by Amartya Sen, where he says that wherever there is democracy and civil liberties, you cannot have large-scale famine deaths. And he contrasts China with India. He says 40 million people died in China, 40 million. And the world did not even come to know about it till decades later because there was only one Chinese news agency controlled by the government. Amartya Sen therefore says civil liberties and a free press is critical in preventing mass man-made disasters. That is democracy and civil liberties is critical for not abandoning the poor altogether. And Nehru's insistence on keeping that was very important. The fact that there are 70,000 newspapers in India, more than 700 satellite channels. There are 30 newspapers which have a readership of more than a million makes it very difficult for news not to travel. Even today, when as you know, the entire media has been silenced. Even then, the importance of civil liberties and democracy under Nehru was extremely important. But Nehru understood that while democracy is a necessary condition for people's empowerment, it was not sufficient. I'm quoting him in 1952. He says, if poverty and low standards continue, then democracy for all its fine institutions and ideals ceases to be a liberating force. It must therefore aim continuously at the eradication of poverty. In other words, political democracy is not enough. It must develop into economic democracy also. So Nehru was very well aware of that. And that is why he brings in this whole, as I said, the community development program, the Panchayati Raj institutions, efforts to keep the poor into the network. Nehru was also deeply influenced by Marxism since the late 1920s. His contribution to embedding very widely in India, making the idea of socialism widely acceptable, Nehru's contribution in that is very, very important. It is not only the communists and the socialists, but the overwhelming majority of nationalist opinion in India since the late 1930s accepted the socialist perspective. And that is why even a party like the Jansang, which later became the BJP, when it became the BJP in 1980, it says, when it was reborn, it said, in its new avatar, the Bhartya Janata Party declared its creed as, you know what? Gandhian socialism. The successors of the murder, murder of Mahatma, call themselves Gandhian, and people who think that communism and socialism is untouchable are calling themselves socialists. Because the people of the country had accept the socialist principle. But what kind of socialism? And that is important. Why was Nehru's idea of socialism so popular? Nehru was among the first, why did it have such wide acceptability? From film stars, you know, from Raj Kapoor to Sitar players like Ravi Shankar, they're all socialist. Look at the films of the 1950s and 60s. They're all socialist in principle. Now, how did this wide acceptance come? Because he broke from a narrow, sectarian, rigid interpretation of Marxism. One of our great historians, Professor Bipin Sandhra, has said that he broke away from what is called Stalin Marxism, an authoritarian variety of Marxism which led to a certain kind of state. That is not the Marxism that Nehru was arguing. He was, in fact, one of the first in the world, along with the very famous Italian Marxist called Antonio Gramsci, to make this break from Stalinism into a democratic idea of socialism. And he learned in this from the practice of Gandhi. He was, in the beginning, he was also very deeply influenced by that kind of socialism. The practice of the national movement along with Gandhi, he is able to transcend this. And he now begins to say that a socialist transformation requires, I'm quoting him, this is ignored because in our colonized minds all breakthroughs have to come from the West. If not from England, at least from Italy, Gramsci's at least whites can know. But if Nehru says the same thing at the same time, he does not enter our heads because it is, after all, one of our brown people. Now, Nehru is saying in the 1930s, the socialist transformation requires a societal consensus, the consent of the overwhelming majority of the people. It cannot be a minority revolution. It cannot be a dictatorship of the proletariat. That is, he's critiquing one kind of Marxism as early as 1930s. Now, the whole world has given it up. But Nehru has given it up then. He's saying socialism in India must be along with democracy. It must be the socialism of the overwhelming majority. It will be a socialism which is accepted by all people, by overwhelming majority. That is the socialism we want and that is why it was so popular. Nehru throughout his life maintained this nuanced, persuasive style of functioning. That is like a true disciple of his master Gandhiji who was appealing to all sections of society. He succeeded in keeping the gaze focused on the poor. So in doing that, he did not alienate everybody else. Otherwise, he would not have been able to make the changes that he was being able to make. So while carrying people along by creating a consensus, retaining a consensus, yet pushing the people towards more democracy, towards more inclusiveness, towards more equity, towards more gender equity, towards more religious integration, he was pushing society in that direction continuously. Today, after nearly 30 years or 40 years of rapid growth since the 1996 to 9% rates of growth, what do we find? We have now the resources to have the world's largest anti-poverty programs like Manrega which of course is now being, only the pandemic is again revived. Otherwise, the state was trying to throw away this kind of thing. Despite that, we are today, despite so much growth in Nehru's time, mind you, he's inherited a dying economy. A starving dying economy at independence, only the average life expectancy was less than 30. People used to die at the age of 20s, average, which means the poor died when they were 3, 4, 5, 6. So that is what he inherits. What Dwayna Tagore said when the British go, what we will inherit, he said we will inherit mud and filth. So it is this inheritance of mud and filth from which he has to build. But today it's not mud and filth. We've got these rapid rates of growth and yet nearly half our children are malnourished. Overwhelming majority of our poor and certainly of our Dalits do not have access to education. So it has been a complete, the obscene levels of inequality and crony capitalism that you are witnessing today is inconceivable, was inconceivable in Nehru's times, what you are witnessing today. So rather than blame Nehru, let us not, let us look at what was the successes of that period. I'll end with this just two minutes more. Today, half a century after his death, Nehru's legacy stands seriously challenged and that challenge is not coming from a backward, traditional people. It is coming from the leaders. It is coming from the state machinery, the modern scientific temper on which Nehru put so much effort. He had hoped that the temples of modern India will be modern science, modern technology, modern thinking. Scientific temper is being thrown away not by the people, but by the leaders. The top leaders of your country are pushing obscurantist lies, mythology, saying that in ancient India we knew plastic surgery. Otherwise, how did Ganesha get this thing? This is being said in the All India Science Congress by your top leader of the country. So your top leadership is pushing you back to medieval times. As a contrast, Nehru's effort was to pull people up to modernity, to civilization. I'll end by just saying that in meeting this challenge, the challenge to Nehru's legacy, the important thing for the citizens of this country would be to try and understand the values and principles of democratic, secular, inclusive, empowering values of our national liberation struggle. We must, and that's why I'm so proud that you are doing this Pagameh Azadi series. Because when you are in a desperate situation as we are today, where do we draw our inspiration from? And not only where, but why do we not draw inspiration from the greatest mass movement in world history that our own people produced? We were able to stand up to an empire on which the sun never set, the most powerful empire in the world with no technology, with no great, this thing. A handful of intellectuals starts that movement and is able to beat them. And then there is a sense of desperation of despondency that nothing can be done at this time. The press has been watered up. The police is oppressive. The state machinery is all has ganged up. And there's nothing to do. Let us draw inspiration that the same things happened multiplied by many times during the colonial rule. Same things, the same oppression, the same putting people in jail, the same encouraging riots, the same punishing of the people who were the victims of the riots rather than the people who created the riots. Identical things. You read your history, you will find it all happening in the colonial period. But if we learn from the examples of that period, and if you look at the best examples like Mehrouf that period, then we may be able to find clues on how to deal with the grim reality that we are faced with today. Thank you very much.