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VIEWPOINT: KAUTILYA
Goodbye
Nice Guy
B.K. Nehru made American underwriting of Indian
socialism possible
By Jairam Ramesh
It
is hard to imagine today that there was once a time when India enjoyed
a special relationship with the US, when an Indian official had tremendous
influence over American politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, socialites
and intellectuals, and when an Indian ambassador enjoyed the confidence
of American presidents and their aides. Yes, there indeed was such a time
when India counted in Washington and when an Indian mattered. That Indian
passed away a few days back at the age of 92 virtually unnoticed.
 John
Lewis, the American economist and a great Indiawallah, once remarked that
the edifice of Indian socialism in the 1950s and 1960s was built with
massive American aid. It was B.K. Nehru who, in his various official avatars
in Washington, made that possible. But there was more to Nehru than America.
He had a long tenure in the Finance Ministry in the 1950s, was also governor
of Assam and Nagaland (1968-73), high commissioner to the UK (1973-77)
and governor of Jammu and Kashmir during 1981-84. Nehru was thus a member
of India's governing elite, a tribe that is fast becoming extinct, much
to the country's cost.
Bijju, as he was popularly called, was the son
of Jawaharlal Nehru's cousin. He became an unlikely Indian hero in Washington.
A member of the ICS, he was educated at the London School of Economics
(LSE) where he was a favourite of Harold Laski. The LSE along with Cambridge
produced an entire generation of Indian political leaders and economic
administrators steeped in British statism and Soviet industrialisation.
But unusually for a man of his generation and pedigree, Bijju became an
Americaphile.
Bijju's extraordinary relationship with the
Americans never came in the way of his awe and admiration for his uncle
and his rapport with his cousin who became prime minister in January 1966.
His special status among the Americans never came in the way of his friendship
with and respect for another great Indian official of that generation,
also a Kashmiri Pandit, also UK-educated, also an ardent acolyte of India's
first prime minister and confidant of his daughter but who was the high
priest of "leftist" ideology during 1969-1973-P.N. Haksar. Incidentally,
Indira Gandhi used Bijju to build an opening with Ronald Reagan in 1980,
just as Rajiv Gandhi was to use Haksar to open a dialogue with the Chinese
to pave the way for his historic trip to Beijing in December 1988-showing
the importance of "back channels" in diplomacy. Bijju's pro-American
image also did not come in the way of Chandra Shekhar offering him the
post of India's foreign minister in February 1991.
Bijju was unusual in another respect. Unlike
men in Indian public life, he wrote his memoirs and that too in a delightfully
self-deprecatory and remarkably racy style providing immense material
to students of economic history. His Nice Guys Finish Second was published
four years ago and pulls no punches. There is criticism of V.K. Krishna
Menon who single-handedly created the international image of Indians as
a sanctimonious, arrogant and boorish bunch. There is criticism of how
the North-east has been consistently mishandled and misgoverned. Most
of all, there is criticism of Indira Gandhi and her political colleagues
for needlessly removing Farooq Abdullah in 1984, an event Nehru believed
triggered the decline of India in the Valley. In fact, the detailed account
of his gubernatorial tenure in Jammu and Kashmir is very tragic, revealing
how much more there is to our predicament in that state than cross-border
terrorism. But why Bijju had regrets as reflected in the title of his
memoirs is unfathomable since he had had such a long and distinguished
innings at the top. Was there regret at his not being appointed secretary-general
of the UN in 1961? Was there some bitterness on being "dismissed"
as governor of Jammu and Kashmir in 1984 by his cousin to whom he enjoyed
unparalleled access? Was there regret that he was not inducted into politics?
In the last two decades of his life, Bijju's
pet subject became constitutional reforms. He is strangely silent about
this in his memoirs but fortunately P.N. Dhar has a lot to say on it in
his book Indira Gandhi, the 'Emergency' and Indian Democracy, published
last year. Dhar writes that Bijju's proposals were meant to address the
systemic problems of social fragmentation, political instability, competitive
populism and low economic growth. His idea was to revitalise local bodies
and to replace the Westminster model by the presidential form of democracy.
The first is happening but the second remains controversial. It would
be tempting to run down Bijju's ideas as the ruminations of the last of
the benevolent paternalists. The harsh reality, however, is that Indian
democracy gets outstanding marks for delivering on representation and
social empowerment but looks increasingly fragile from the point of view
of basic governance.
(The author is with the Congress party. These
are his personal views.)
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