Jawaharlal Nehru as a guide to India’s ‘undeclared emergency’
· Scroll
The 137th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru on November 14 provides us an opportunity to recover a Nehru for contemporary times. “There are no democratic institutions or traditions,” he wrote about the British Raj. “We have instead a well-established practice of ordinance and dictatorial rule and the suppression of the liberties of the person of speech, writing, assembly and the press.”
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The Nehru who battled the Raj, which he characterised as a “police conception of the state”, speaks with uncanny precision to the contemporary moment.
Nehru’s autobiography gives us a sense of the everyday nature of life under colonial rule, if you were an activist for India’s independence. Fighting for India’s independence meant that arrest was an ever-present possibility.
There was no “settled life of routine”, Nehru writes, as “there was frequent talk of my arrest”. However, “on the whole I succeeded in getting used to the idea” of arrest and therefore “whenever arrest came I took it more casually than I might otherwise have done”.
When trying to find a historical analogy for the Modi years, we often go back to the Emergency and characterise the contemporary period as the “undeclared emergency”. However, the Nehru corpus alerts us to another historical analogy – the period of colonial...