Shashi Tharoor, MP, is an ardent admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru, and thinks it is important to examine his legacy from the perspective of our times.
At a session on ‘Nehru: The discovery of India’ at the Kerala Literature Festival here on Friday, he said the moral urgency of reclaiming Nehru was so much greater because “we have a government in power today that is directly trying to repudiate everything that Nehru stands for and has done.”
Mr. Tharoor said that by 1950, Nehru was an unchallenged figure in Indian politics.
“The most important contribution that I would lay at Nehru’s feet in those first 17 years of India’s Independence would be his contribution to building Indian democracy,” he said.
It was because he had the power and popularity to do just the opposite.
He could have gone the other way like those post-colonial heroes who later turned out to be autocratic leaders.
Unlike them, Nehru groomed democracy and built democratic institutions, the Congress leader said.
“The second most important Nehruvian principle was undoubtedly secularism, which has been wrongly caricatured as moving away completely from religion. His secularism was not a denial of religion, he wanted to protect the pluralism of Indian society, where all faiths could flourish,” Mr. Tharoor said. The former UN official also justified Nehru’s decision to follow a socialist model of economy and a foreign policy rooted in non-alignment considering the pitiful condition of Indian economy and the global power politics.
On Modi
Mr. Tharoor, however, did not miss the chance to take a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking if we could imagine our current Prime Minister do at least some of the things that Nehru did.
He was unsparing of his criticism against Mr. Modi at another session on his book The Paradoxical Prime Minister too. Mr. Tharoor admitted that though he had initially given the “benefit of the doubt” to Mr. Modi and was not harsh on the PM, his perspective changed over a period of time because his words and deeds did not match much.