Author: A. Surya Prakash
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: April 2007
In what is clearly an indictment of PV Narasimha
Rao, one of India's greatest Prime Ministers, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi declared
a couple of weeks ago that the Babri Masjid would have been saved if a member
of the Nehru-Gandhi family had been in active politics at that time. Though
Mr Gandhi has belatedly tried to make some amends, this incident has once
again brought to the fore the feudal mindset of members of the Nehru-Gandhi
family, their insecurities (which prevent them from acknowledging the contribution
of leaders outside their family) and their persistent efforts to distort historical
truths.
Since Mr Gandhi has sought to give us a glimpse
of what would have been if a member of his family had been at the helm in
December 1992, here is a summary of this family's track record when it did
hold the political reins. Let us begin at the beginning. Acting on the advice
of Lord Mountbatten, the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, gave Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel the task of integrating all the 565 princely states in the
Indian Union. Even as Sardar Patel set about his task, Nehru, in a display
of pettiness typical of this family, moved "Kashmir Affairs" from
the Department of States to the Ministry of External Affairs, which was under
his charge. Patel executed his responsibility in a clinical and ruthless manner
and successfully completed the gigantic task of stitching together 564 princely
states into the Indian Union. Nehru took on the responsibility of integrating
one princely state (Jammu & Kashmir) and we all know the consequence -
this has remained India's most problematic State for the last 60 years.
But Nehru's Kashmir blunders did not end here.
In October 1947, Pakistan sent in thousands of heavily armed tribesmen into
Jammu & Kashmir in a bid to capture it by force. After Maharaja Hari Singh
signed the Instrument of Accession, the Indian Army marched in and began pushing
back the intruders who had captured Baramulla and cut off power supply to
Srinagar. Even as our gallant soldiers were driving out the intruders, Nehru
cried halt to the Army operation and, much against the advice of Sardar Patel,
took the fateful decision to lodge a complaint against Pakistan before the
United Nations Security Council on January 1, 1948.
With this single act, Nehru demoralised the
Army (which wanted just a few more days to throw out the intruders), allowed
Pakistan to retain 30,000 square miles of illegally occupied territory in
Jammu & Kashmir and internationalised the Kashmir issue. So, while Nehru
made a mess of the Kashmir issue, Patel coaxed, cajoled or bamboozled recalcitrant
princes like the Nizam of Hyderabad and a couple of pro-Pakistan princes on
the Gujarat coast to fall in line and accede their territories to India. But
for Patel's firmness, we would have lost Hyderabad and the coastal areas of
Gujarat to Pakistan in1948 itself and Hyderabad, in the words of the Sardar,
would have become an "undigested lump" in India's belly.
Let us now examine the report card of another
member of this family - Mrs Indira Gandhi.
In 1975, Mrs Gandhi imposed an internal Emergency
and turned a vibrant democracy into a dictatorship. Her Government wrecked
the Constitution through a series of horrendous amendments, jailed most of
her political opponents under draconian laws, ordered forcible sterilisation
of men in the reproductive age group and sent bulldozers to drive out the
poor from the cities. All this would never have happened if a non-Nehru-Gandhi
had been the Prime Minister.
Thereafter, between 1980 and 1984, Mrs Gandhi's
Government offered tacit support to Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale just to spite
the Akalis and allowed him to store deadly weapons in the Golden Temple. When
things went out of control, she ordered the Army to march into the shrine,
causing huge loss of human life and hurting the pride of the Sikhs. Thereafter,
Mrs Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards leading to a pogrom in
which more than 3,000 Sikhs were lynched in Delhi and other parts of northern
India at the behest of Congress leaders. None of this would have happened
if a non-Nehru Gandhi had been the Prime Minister between 1980 and 1984.
Coming to the era of Rajiv Gandhi, his approach
to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) eerily resembled the Sikh militancy
story. This too ended in the tragic deaths of hundreds of brave, young soldiers
and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. All this would never have happened
if a non-Nehru-Gandhi had been Prime Minister between 1984 and 1989.
There are several other decisions taken by
members of this family, which have resulted in much social, economic and political
strife. For example, Rajiv Gandhi succumbed to pressure from the Muslim clergy
and amended the law to deny maintenance to divorced Muslim women after the
Shah Bano case. Thereafter he felt compelled to appease Hindu sentiment and
so had the Ram Temple in Ayodhya unlocked and a 'shilanyas' performed. Yet,
Mr Rahul Gandhi showers abuse on Narasimha Rao and expects us to believe that
the family that blessed the 'shilanyas' would have saved the masjid! The list
is endless.
However, since Mr Gandhi has sought to run
down Narasimha Rao, we need to ask ourselves whether members of this family
have ever had the civility to acknowledge the contribution of national leaders
from outside this family, be it Sardar Patel, BR Ambedkar or Narasimha Rao.
When Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister we had mortgaged gold to the Bank
of England because we had run out of foreign exchange. By the time he completed
his five-year term, he had laid the foundation for India's emergence as an
economic superpower. I shudder to think what would have been India's fate
if instead of the cerebral Narasimha Rao, a Nehru-Gandhi had been the Prime
Minister between 1991 and 1996!
Narasimha Rao, along with Mr Manmohan Singh,
not only gave India hope but also unlocked the creative genius of Indians,
which had been bottled up during the era of the Nehru-Gandhis. The Nehru-Gandhis
will never acknowledge this, but we do not have to be so ungrateful. Now that
Mr Rahul Gandhi has sought to besmirch the image of Narasimha Rao, we must
demand the appointment of a Truth Commission to document the commissions and
omissions of every Prime Minister so that our post-independence history, which
is currently corrupted by the mythology promoted by the Nehru-Gandhis, becomes
a more honest narrative.