It nevertheless does represent a good many of the positive achievements
of India in the Nehruvian years. For some years after his death in 1964,
Nehru was put forward as the personification of all that was positive and
enduring in the Indian nation, or the nation-state – not only by his old
party or its succeeding splinter groups, but by many of his old adversaries.
These positive and enduring things – most importantly, secularism and
state-led developmentalism, ‘Nehruvian socialism’ – then came under
attack: their opponents blamed Nehru for constructing, or presiding over
the construction of, an unviable and unrealistic model of India and
of Indian nationalism; their defenders urged a return to the Nehruvian
vision. Political groups to the left of the awkward sharing of power that
had made up Indian mainstream politics now stood forth as defenders
of the achievements of the ‘Nehruvian period’, and the ‘Nehruvian con-
sensus’, which they felt were certainly worth defending against the
onslaught of Hindu fundamentalists and economic liberalisers.
It is within the context of these debates that any piece of writing
on Nehru written today will be assessed. And yet there are a series of
questions that need to be asked before the debate becomes meaningful,
before it acquires political or historical relevance. Why and how did Nehru
come to be identified so closely with a period, a style of politics, an image
of India? How did he come to epitomise desirable leadership for the
emergent ‘Third World’; or amplify the superpowers’ Cold War anxieties
with non-alignment? Perhaps these questions can only be built upon the
answer to a prior and more fundamental one: how was it possible for a man
such as Nehru to emerge as leader of so complex a set of forces as those in
the Indian nationalist movement – with which he was often out of step
ideologically and practically – and how did he manage to sustain his
leadership in independent India?
This short historical biography sets out to try and answer these
questions – or at least to suggest possible routes to answers. It is useful, at
this point, to set out some of the recurrent themes that the book deals
with; if they seem somewhat abstract at this stage, their relevance will
become apparent as the narrative progresses. This introduction, then, is
thematic; the narrative is taken up in the first chapter.2 INTRODUCTION