much. But philosophers of defeat can also be too pessimistic. Nehru’s
one unambiguous triumph, that of having held the sectarian forces at
bay and of successfully defining India as a secular state, is now in some
circles beginning to be devalued. This is in many cases a variation on the
‘Westernised’ versus ‘indigenist’ argument: Nehru’s version of secularism
is considered unviable in a country that is allegedly ‘fundamentally
religious’ or ‘spiritual’ – an emphasis on the alleged separateness and
uniqueness of Indian ‘culture’ based on the facile stereotypes ‘Eastern’ and
‘Western’ that to some extent have been internalised by many Indians.
Anti-Nehruvians who are also anti-fundamentalists seek to draw on
Gandhi’s version of tolerance instead: routing their idea of tolerance
through a religious and spiritual appeal to the equality of all religions.
It is a caricature of Nehru’s views to claim that he left no place for religion
at all. On the other hand, he had a definite distrust of religion as a
motivating factor in politics. And Nehru himself used Gandhi’s version
of the message of tolerance when he felt it would go down better. The
problem was, and is, that Gandhi’s polyvalent messages were never very
consistent. ‘Hindus’ can claim that Gandhi’s position as a Hindu proves
the essential tolerance of ‘Hinduism’ and the need for others to line up
behind them.
Success or failure of a ‘project’ apart, the consequences of the Nehruvian
period for the long-term language of political legitimacy in India have
been tremendous. Although many of his principles worked through defer-
ral – what, for instance, was the positive content of Indian nationalism,
other than an impossible-to-define ‘composite culture’? This very deferral
was the source of its strength: ‘Indian-ness’ could be what one wished
to make of it. Unsolved problems and unresolved questions surfaced,
of course: towards the end of Nehru’s life, in particular, the exclusion or
marginalisation of some groups from the alleged ‘Nehruvian consensus’
became apparent. For all the rhetoric of social justice, poverty remained a
problem; women, though placed in some prominent positions by Nehru
himself, were far from in the position of equality that he had envisaged;
caste- and tribe-based job reservations had created new vested interests
in a set of perpetuated sectarian identities instead of leading to more
egalitarian social and economic interactions. ‘Communal riots’ still
occurred in the 1960s, albeit with less frequency and virulence than in
the pre-independence and immediate post-independence years. Indeed,
various divergent kinds of sectarianism emerged: linguistic, regional,
CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY 265