‘tribal’ and so on. These undoubtedly would have been seen as failures
by Nehru himself: a perpetuation of the ‘medieval’ and a failure to embrace
the ‘modern’ (in Nehru’s day, these terms were far less problematic than
they are considered today). However, more positively, a commitment
to secular democracy, and to social justice, became integral to public
standards of legitimacy in independent India, even if they were not always
followed. And it was these public standards that gave many otherwise
marginalised groups the hope that some form of redress was indeed
possible. These were the standards that were and would be invoked in the
post-Nehru years to describe the essential values of India’s democratic,
secular society. This returns us to an earlier point about the ‘Nehruvian
vision’: however impossible it was to materialise, it was an enduring set
of goals – its legacies, the disputes and defences conducted in its name,
were more important than its failures. And in the absence of a clear
content to an Indian ‘nationalism’, it provided direction and coherence
to an Indian ideal that was otherwise no greater than the sum of its
fragments.
And yet, whether Nehru succeeded altogether in being a Nehruvian or
not, the debates about the validity of Nehruvian ideas are to a large extent
independent of him: the author, in several senses, is dead. We might wish
to separate what might be considered an iconography of Nehru – which
operates not by a serious consideration of his ideas, but by linking the
necessity of nationalist adulation of a hero of the ‘freedom struggle’ with
a policy – and a reasoned debate regarding what the Nehruvian legacy can
provide by way of resources for the present and the future. And we may
look back at the life and career of an intellectual and politician whose
political activities tended constantly to undermine the possibility of the
achievement of his vision as an intellectual.266 CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY