However, if we rule out the role of foreign pressures in the day-to-
day working of the government – in, for instance, the details of the
Hindu Code Bill, which could hardly have excited CIA observers too
much – there is of course another argument to consider: that Nehru could
have sought to push his governments’ and his country’s politics further
towards the left despite the constraints of working within a centre-right
party, had he been inclined to do so, because as the central vote-winner
for his party he could have used the ‘masses’ against the ‘reactionary
forces’. Here it might be said that he encountered what could be
considered a generic problem of parliamentary democracy. Nehru’s moral
authority and popularity with the ‘masses’ only came into play during
elections, and therefore could only be ascertained or drawn upon once
every five years, or if he was willing to precipitate elections and resort
to direct democracy by threats of resignation more often than he actually
did. Therefore this weapon of the ‘masses’ was only available to him
occasionally. In parliament itself, it was difficult to use it on a day-to-day
basis.
Behind this might be detected another potential reason – a paradoxical
distrust of the ‘masses’ in the ‘largest democracy in the world’ and in the
political thinking of a democrat. In the expectations of political leaders in
the years leading up to and following independence, the ‘masses’ were cast
in the role of supportive followers: they were expected to participate in
production, to endorse the national leaders, and – before independence –
demonstrate to the colonial rulers the importance of those leaders; but
their judgement in distinguishing various strands of policy could not
altogether be relied upon. Fears of mass irrationality on the lines of the
partition riots reinforced this tendency or converted ardent democ-
rats to a general tendency of not trusting the voters to think the right
thing. This perhaps explains the obligatory and somewhat formulaic
rhetorical populism that sometimes dominated Indian politics, and the
related danger of an iconography of great leaders emerging as legitimating
formulae in the place of reasoned debate. Nehru could not have been
unaffected by the misgiving that what he considered some sort of false
consciousness was actually a strong motivating factor. If he maintained his
original formulation that economic uplift eroded sectarian or primitive
values, he would also have had to admit that this remained an untested
hypothesis: the gains of economic development had failed to reach the
‘masses’.
CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY 261