Nehru, les débats qui ont fait l'Inde

So, Nehru was one of the leading figures of India's nationalist struggle and he was then India's first Prime Minister. 
As India's first Prime Minister, he had a huge role, a decisive role in shaping the new country's identity, its foreign policy, its relationship with Pakistan and also its kind of outlook towards the world. 
So in that sense, he was influential not just in India, like foundational to the creation of India, but also influential world over in shaping India's outlook to the world and its place in the world. 
And he's also very relevant now in Indian politics. 
He is a figure of great controversy. 
His legacy is being questioned like never before.  
Absolutely. 
And maybe just to add very briefly, Nehru was also an intellectual. 
In what was then known as the Third World, you had that quite frequently where you had politicians who were doing great things like bringing their nations into liberations after colonisation. 
At the same time, they were also thinking about society, about politics and what to do in the 21st century in this new global age. 
And Nehru was one of the foremost global thinkers, if not the first global thinker who was, you know, futurising the past in a new way.  
So for us, it was because of how controversial Nehru has become and how contested his ideas have become. 
For us, this represented a way of really getting to grips with how his ideas were formed and how they really made their way in the public sphere and created, in a sense, space for themselves. 
Because Nehru, you must remember, before he became this ultra-dominant figure in India, in his early years, he was really forced to contend with other similarly positioned figures and kind of champion his ideas. 
And for us to really look at those exchanges and to figure out how Nehru's ideas came to be what they be and how they came to become dominant, this, we found, was the most effective method of getting to the heart of the issues concerned. 
Particularly, in our cases, they represented, in a sense, the most honest and the most in-depth exchange of ideas that really happened in the run-up to independence and in the early years of independence. 
And they are relevant not just to India, but also to South Asia, especially more widely, and especially so for Pakistan.  
And maybe also just to add a little bit, whenever you have these founding fathers, people who birthed nations, there's a lot of commentary that happens about their lives and their views. 
And the further you move away from the time period where they lived, the more the differentiation between what is being commented upon and where they stood blurs. 
So we felt that that had really happened with Nehru. 
There's like hundreds of people who've written commentaries on Nehru and what he thought, but nobody was going back to the original letters. 
So we thought, like, why not bring them back into the public sphere and have people read and be able to form an opinion by themselves by reading those exchanges? 
And we picked those exchanges strategically by highlighting exactly the flash points that are relevant to Indian politics today.  
The book moves into one of the foremost debates that Nehru had with a Muslim scholar called Muhammad Iqbal. 
Muhammad Iqbal is seen as one of the sort of philosophical founding fathers of Pakistan, the nation state that emerges at the same time as India in the north, and that is meant for Indian Muslims. 
And these two men, who are not particularly religiously trained, are debating the role of religion in the public sphere. 
Now, that's a debate that we thought would be the most interesting because both the countries, Pakistan and India, have struggled to integrate the place of religion within their own constitutional frameworks. 
In Pakistan, it's clear, very much clear, because that's why they're unable to frame a constitution for the first decade that the country comes into being, because they're arguing over what place religion should have in that new constitutional framework. 
In India, they make a sort of faster decision, but at the same time, leave a lot of questions unanswered. 
By edging out religion from the public sphere, they don't remove religion from Indian society, but they just merely bracket it so it comes back in an even stronger manner. 
And we feel that if we turn into the debate that Muhammad Iqbal and Nehru are having, we get a very clear picture of the different positions that were prevalent at the time, and they can instruct us today on what the role of religion should be in South Asia.  
Yeah, and especially so in India, when you've had a resurgence of religious nationalism, a resurgence of orthodoxy, it's a debate that speaks very directly to the contemporary moment in India, and especially so because blasphemy, one of the points that they talk about, has come into renewed focus, both in India and in Pakistan, and it's something that we felt was so incredibly topical that it was one of the most important points in our book.  
I think, again, this was one of these questions that was so important and so foundational to India's outlook towards the world in the 1940s and 1950s, and things have come full circle, and again, one of the key points in India's definition of itself and its positioning in world affairs is in relation to China. 
So that way, it's something that's extremely topical and extremely relevant. 
Back then, India had, as a newly independent post-colonial nation there was a sense of romanticism. 
Nehru also was profoundly influenced by the idea of Asianism, by the idea that India was going to play, alongside China, a leading role in decolonising Asia, and so he had an outlook towards China that many people criticised for being too romantic, too supine in many ways, and the more the Chinese criticised him, because the relationship started fraying quite quickly over demarcation of the border, and even more so about the starker question as to who was going to lead Asia, more or less, who was going to be the leading power in Asia. 
The more Nehru was criticised by the Chinese and by the communist world more generally, the more he bent over backwards to prove that he was not aligned with the Anglo American bloc, to prove that he was not an imperialist. 
He bent over backwards to accommodate Chinese interests, and of course, that phase ended with the war, the Sino-Indian War in 1962, after which Nehru died, and many say that actually one of the things that exacerbated his decline was the realisation that, actually, the fundamental thought behind how he had positioned India and the world was found to be flawed. 
To that extent, this debate represents a very foundational moment in South Asian history.  
What I found most interesting about the debate, just to add a little bit to what Tripurdaman has just said, is debates over ideological purity that have come back in contemporary politics. 
So when we look at the moment that we've faced in the 1950s, we had three of the most populous countries on earth who subscribe to some form of communism, India, China and Russia, and they all come up with a very similar solution, which is to say that communism of some form is going to be the solution. 
They don't get well with each other in their global affairs, and the reason that they don't get along well is to do with the idea that they don't believe that they're ideologically pure enough, and they each accuse each other of betraying that ideological purity. 
The Chinese critique that is articulated against Nehru is to say that, well, he's been planted by the Americans. 
He's actually a capitalist, because if you listen to his accent and you see where he went to school, Harrow and Cambridge, then clearly he can't be an ideologically pure communist, he must be a traitor to the communist cause. 
So it's just interesting to see that we, or for contemporary politics, that we again are in a moment where people are accusing each other of betraying that ideological purity, and Nehru lived through that, and particularly the India-China relationship is marked by it very strongly.  
Foremost among, I guess, there are two foremost issues that are really highlighted in that chapter. 
The first is how crucial these battles over where the line between authoritarianism and democracy lies, and the question of freedom of speech is very, very important in this context. 
And the second, of course, is the arguments that are being made, because if you see the person who is trying to prune the right to freedom of speech, or to reduce the right to freedom of speech, is Nehru, and the person who's opposing it the most strongly is a figure called Shyam Prasad Mukherjee, who is the founder of what is today the BJP, the ruling party. 
If you look at the arguments that are being deployed in Indian politics today, and have been for the last decade, they are exactly the opposite, because the roles are completely reversed. 
It's the ideological descendants of Mukherjee, who are now in power, who would argue that actually freedom of speech is being misused and should be pruned further, and the ideological descendants of Nehru and the opposition arguing that actually we should have a greater expanse of freedom of speech.  
The first thing this chapter highlights is the shifting sands of Indian politics, that ideological positions are extremely malleable and extremely fluid, and quite dependent on where one stands in relation to government and to power. 
The second thing, of course, is that the issues that have been brought up over the last decade are historical in nature. 
It's a debate, and it's a question that India has been wrestling with since independence as to where the boundary between democracy and authoritarianism lie, and how much freedom of speech is appropriate in a post-colonial society where the state also has, one, concerns about security, two, concerns about sovereignty, the establishment of political sovereignty, because we still have to understand that there are many Indian states where there are ongoing insurgencies, ongoing separatist movements, ongoing challenges that the Indian state has to face. 
Third, how do you control speech that you see as inimical to security or inimical to social harmony, because one of the other things India struggles with is social conflict, whether it's based on caste or social conflict based on religion. 
In the greater utilitarian consideration, where do these boundaries lie? 
It's something that we've been wrestling with in India for 75 years, so it's not just a question of what is happening now, but there is a historical trajectory to the current debates as well, which shouldn't be lost.  
And maybe to very briefly add on what Tripurdaman has just said, the 2024 election is also a mirror on the bigger question on the purchase of Nehru's secularism. 
What's the value of Nehruvian secularism in the 21st century? 
And that's going to be, for me, the most revealing part of this election, and our book provides pointers for that, because we look at the debates that Nehru fought over in order to argue and position his idea of secularism vis-à-vis debates around religion that he was having at the time.