Discussion

More on Verdicts on Nehru

SASHEEJ HEGDE

y topic of discussion is the question

anchoring Ramachandra Guhas recent contribution examining the posthumous reputation of Indias first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (EPW, May 7,
2005). The fledgling debate that the essay
has spawned is an attempt, rightly, to lend
some further weight to the prognosis. Guha
sharply poses the issue why has a man
who was so greatly adored in his lifetime
been so comprehensively vilified since his
death? (p 1958) while going on to
indicate the rudiments of an answer. The
assessment is that some fundamental and
compelling sense attaches to the figure of
Nehru, and the reader is given sufficient
glimpses of what that sense is and what
its implication are for politics, society and
economy in our time. The ensuing note is
another twist to an unfolding tale.
I must hasten to clarify that the intention
behind this slightly offbeat commentary
is not (only) to strike a methodological
note to the discussion.1 In fact, the spirit
in which Guha has concluded his essay
What is certain that if India still exists
a century from now, Indians will still be
debating what Nehru meant to the history
of their country (p 1962) necessitates
the reminders of my main text.

Rise and Fall of Reputations

First, a word about the rise and fall of
reputations. Broadly if a reputation is to
survive, two or three things are essential.
One is that the figure which is the object
of a reputation must cease to be responsible for the way his (or her) legacy is
bequeathed. If we were to put it in contemporary terms: since any management of
the qualities and endowments that go to
constitute a reputation is going to cause
problems, some of them personal and
difficult, it is essential that the critics, if
something goes wrong, shall not be able
to blame the figure underwriting a reputation. Clearly, there needs to be a strong
link between the managers of a reputation
and the reputation itself. But the link need

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not be such that the reputation itself is

made responsible for the management (or
vice versa). What that means is that the
management side of a reputation introduces considerations that are relatively
independent of the figure constituting a
reputation. The next essential for survival
is to fuse the qualities and endowments
that form the basis of a reputation into a
unity. To amalgamate orientations and
outlooks mastered over time and circumstance and which, incidentally, might
form the basis of a reputation is probably a breach of historical and contextual
sensitivity. But it is essential to fuse the
figure that constitutes a reputation into a
sort of spatial and temporal whole. Of
course, we must be careful not to exaggerate the unity of what I am calling the
figure and its reputation; and indeed the
unity might postpone for too long the
making of alternative or new interpretations. In any case, the fusing could say
something about the constitution of a
reputation not entirely separated from the
reputation itself. A third necessity follows
from this and is more a matter of feeling.
It is important to recognise that efficiency
in managing a reputation is not everything. Indeed, the figure underwriting a
reputation may not be able, and may not
wish, to enforce all that follows from the
reputation.
I realise that one could be talking of
reputations that are both spatially and
temporally distanced from the figure that
is constitutive of the reputation. And indeed
there is work to be done in exploring and
articulating the nature of our commitment
to a foundational figure (on this, more
below). But it must be maintained and
the foregoing schema also discloses that
a foundational figure both represent and
requires a unique standard. I think it is the
remarkable fecundity of the reconstruction offered in Guha to help place this in
perspective, both in the context of what
he deftly describes as the Verdicts on
Nehru and in the context of debating what
Nehru means to the history of this country.
Guhas essay helps us to think through the
issue of the currency of Nehru, and not

just in the eyes of the latters detractors

and admirers alike.

Beyond Prescriptive
and Descriptive
To be sure, there is a large amount of
critical writing on the problems of instituting and managing a legacy and/or ideological inheritance. One could be asking
a range of questions about what we, as
a people handling an ideological inheritance or managing a legacy, should be
aiming at, even whether we should be
aiming at anything at all; whether the
normative visions that are informing a
polity is a code for something else, indeed
whether, in the context of multiple visions
and multiple claims to inheritance, there
could be anything stable; about how are
comprehensive normative doctrines related
to such other values as efficiency, merit,
liberty, and the rule of law; and so on.
These questions can and have been
raised from a variety of standpoints, and
are open to historical, sociological and
normative-political modes of elucidation.
I am inclined to the view, however, that
much less attention has been devoted to
the more abstract question: What is the
character of our - any collectivity or
segment of a populations deeper commitment to treating a figure as foundational, a commitment which is held to
underlie particular protestations? Note,
not What are its implications? but What
does this foundational ascription amount
to? and What it is based on?
One way of capturing this difference is
by positing a dichotomy between prescriptive and descriptive interests in a foundational figure, that is to say, interest in a
foundational figure as aim as opposed to
interest in a foundational figure as a fact or as
a descriptive claim. But this framing is certainly problematic; and in fact, if one were
to formulate from within the evidence
presented by Guhas essay, it can never
obtain. Indeed, as the latter prognosis testifies (while of course not rendering itself
in these terms) prescriptive and descriptive views are hopelessly mixed up and
the terrain of Nehru is pushed and pulled in
all directions right, left and centre. Now
while a softening of the contrast between
prescriptive and descriptive interests in a

Economic and Political Weekly

August 6, 2005

foundational figure is desirable, one must

be wary also of an unwarranted oscillation
between these two types of interest.
There is the imperative yet to capture the
difference yielded by our abstract question. Let us formulate in the context of
Guha, although I will have to be brief given
the space constraint. The latters juxtaposition of different views of Nehru from
various ends of the political and ideological spectrum, both in his own time and
his posthumous reputation, as indeed the
reasoning offered by Guha for the same,
clearly implies that it is the character of
our deeper commitment to Nehru that is
in question. As already mentioned, it is not
a commitment that translates into a contrast between a prescriptive and a descriptive interest in this foundational figure.
Rather, it is a commitment which seems
to underlie an interest in Nehru as an aim,
and interest in Nehru as a background
commitment that underlies many different
aims/positions. I am inclined to push the
point even further: the interest in Nehru
as an aim must presuppose the importance
of Nehru as a background commitment
that underlies many different aims.
The boundary thus delineated is not to
be construed as a boundary between
empirical and transcendental frames of
reference. In an important sense there is
no such boundary, and so nothing outside
the realm of the contingent and the contextual. Nehru in the first instance, accordingly, is to be understood as a background
commitment, not in the sense of acts of
claiming but in the sense of claimable
contents that would be expressed by such
(possible) claimings.2 In what follows, I
shall try to give somebody to this suggestion, and in the process communicate a
sense of what Nehru could mean for us.

The Currency of Nehru

I have maintained that a figure both
represents and requires a unique standard:
what is that standard which Nehru demands? The explication of this question,
doubtless, cannot be separated from the
criterion set out above, namely, that our
interest in Nehru as an aim must presuppose the importance of Nehru as a background commitment that underlies
many different aims. Thinking out the issue of the latter therefore is pretty crucial,
as well as offering a way of exploring and
articulating the currency of this foundational figure. I will have to be brief to the
point of being abrupt.3

Economic and Political Weekly

As one who spoke for the secular compacts of political citizenship, Nehru may
be approached above all as a state-making
project - or, better still, in a more contemporary idiom, a practice of governance
which had its sensitive and insensitive
aspects. There is a certain naivet in representing this practice as indeed the idea of
India traceable back to the 1940s and 1950s
as merely a response to the question of
maintaining intact, of surviving into modernity, a country so diverse in its languages,
religions, and castes as India. Nehru, in
sum, also developed powerful and interesting arguments about the power of law
to become a master tool of institutional
imagination in a democratic society, addressing the problem of the relation between equality and the trumping force of
moral and constitutional order, as well as
the wider question of how to construe the
relation between political power and the
plurality of faiths. In all of this Nehru can
be seen as insisting on attention to the
distinction between democracy and
democratisation, more particularly between articulations of democracy in moral
and constitutional orders meant to constrain the state and the democratisation by
the state of the communities over which
these articulations are supposed to hold
sway.4 While the former is the bottom line
of liberal political theorising, which shaped
the social imaginary of influential strata
including Nehru, the crux of the institutional imagination pursued by Nehru means
essentially the latter possibility.
Without that distinction, Nehru seems
to be saying, it would be impossible to
separate various articulations of difference, in any kind of political life and other
fields of policy-orientation and which is
fundamental to political morality and
democratic culture, namely, treatment as
an equal, and an underlying principle of
equality which I am inclined to see Nehru
terming as the principle of equal concern
and respect but which may or may not
be what the principle of treatment as an
equal requires of us in some domain or
in some particular set of circumstances. In
fact, it is the latter reticence which necessitates advancing beyond democracy into
democratisation in the senses stated above.
Of course, this is not peculiar to Nehru;
and one might even assert that the possibility is part of the self-understanding of
modernity and the modern idea of moral
order. But if we are right and I think there
is something here to develop then there
is today in India a failure both of argument

August 6, 2005

and of political process on a very broad

front indeed. We need to come face-toface with Nehru again (and this goes
squarely for his detractors and his admirers
alike). Between Nehru as aim and Nehru
as background commitment which underlies many different aims, there is then a
subtle and very specific issue about democracy and therein lies the currency of
Nehru, indeed the political and intellectual
challenge that is Nehru. EPW
Email: sasheej@sancharnet.in

Notes
1 Guhas assessment cannot be separated from
the considerations that he has forwarded in an
earlier article titled The Absent Liberal: An
Essay on Politics and Intellectual Life (EPW,
December 15, 2001). While I will not be
explicitly concerned to disintricate this embedding, one needs to be sensitive to this element.
The discussion which the latter essay spawned
in these very pages missed out entirely on its
Nehruvian integuments; Guha himself, to my
knowledge, also did not venture the clarification
(not that he was expected to do so).
2 A delicate point, which is not quite the same
thing as orders of exposition. For, whereas
explanatory priority requires that one can grasp
the explaining concepts first, independently of
any sort of grasp of the explained ones, I am
claiming that in rendering something as normative, something over and above explaining, one
can make various aspects of it explicit without
specifically mentioning background commitments, but that when one does, what one sees
is that a background commitment can amount
to and is itself based on many different positions.
I certainly realise that this claim can be stretched
to an objectionable kind of positivity, although
it is still defensible. My thoughts on the question
have been clarified by Robert B Brandoms
Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing,
and Discursive Commitment (Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA,1994). To
be sure, Nehru in the sense proclaimed by our
main text would require some descriptive
support from a thesis about his life and work.
Although I do not elaborate, my next section
has been structured accordingly.
3 Of course, I could have dispensed with (or
edited even more drastically) the foregoing
sections, but have resisted the impulse. Having
only recently taken to articulating systematically
an interest in Nehru, I am not sure whether I
could have sustained the analysis beyond a
point. Most immediately however, while Guha is
very right in asserting that Nehrus posthumous
reputation has also suffered from the neglect
of scholars and scholarship (p 1962), I also
think that whatever work that exists could do
with some analytic prodding and philosophical
embellishment. The overtures of my first two
sections are an effort in this direction. Besides,
the currency of Nehru is too large a question
to be limited to a discussion. I hope to formulate
something more comprehensive in the future.
4 I owe this formulation to Akeel Bilgrami see
his Secular Liberalism and Moral Psychology of
Identity, (EPW, October 4, 1997) but am grafting it wholesale onto the space of Nehru. There
are some questions of translation and interpretability here, which are being glossed over.

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