6

HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND

ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63

The ascendancy that Nehru had achieved in Indian politics by 1955
had a disturbing corollary. In a manner of speaking, people were now
willing to let Nehru win; it was too difficult to oppose him, given both
his international prestige and his domestic popularity. Moreover, the lack
of a coherent counter-ideology to Nehru’s meant that it was easier to
concede that vision as the legitimate one for India. This, in effect, was the
consensus of the left and centre in Indian politics – and criticism, such
as there was, could be largely confined to Nehru’s failure to deliver
on Nehruvian promises. There also opened out a strong divergence
between politics at the centre, in which Nehru’s leadership was largely
unchallenged, and regional politics, where various divergent trends that
pulled away from the centre became apparent: regional, linguistic, caste,
community or a combination thereof. These trends were not allowed to
become dominant: Nehru’s India was a federal system with a strong bias
towards central authority; the strong centre was a prerequisite for the
success of the central plank of Nehruvian policy: planned economic
development.
Nehru was, perhaps, a victim of his own success: the lack of legiti-
macy given to openly sectarian arguments was largely a result of his own
personal victory in a debate involving the higher ranks of the Congress
Party in the early years after independence, centred primarily on the
category ‘Hindu’, but arguing more generally for an open-ended and
inclusive definition of Indian-ness. One result of this victory was that the