A Conversation with Prof Madhavan K Palat

Interviewed by Prem Ansh Sinha (Editor-in-Chief)

Edited by Alankrita Singh (Associate Editor)

Prof Madhavan Palat is a former professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has been a visiting professor of imperial history of Russia at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor for 41 volumes of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. 

An edited transcript of the interview, as taken on 20 June 2025, is as follows.

According to your arguments in “India’s First Global Thinker: Nehru in Comparative Perspective”, Pt Nehru’s nationalism was not against the West, rather, it was an attempt to create a universal Indian modernity based on global ideas. This brings to surface an epistemological tension in his vision: balancing cosmopolitanism while maintaining a distinct identity of the Indian civilisation. Do you think this attempt of Pt Nehru was teleological or overly idealistic?

Pt Nehru did attempt to have a nationalism which would not be hostile to any other nationalism. That is, no ‘othering’, as they call it. He tried to be inclusive all the way. He had no internal enemies, which is an important part of his nationalism. Secular nationalism did not tolerate internal enemies as it sought to unite everybody within the territory of India. All the other nationalisms within India, had ‘another’ and ‘other’; be it Hindu nationalism, which obviously had Muslims and certain others. Sikh nationalism, as opposed to others, Muslim nationalism the same way, and all the way in all the other regional nationalisms. The whole of India is composed of a series of nations—Bengal, Tamil, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra, you name it. They may not be sovereign independent nations, but they are still nations with all their features. India assembles all these nations into one larger nation. All these different nations have others to them.

Now, secular nationalism claims that there should be no other. It is not going to create an enemy out of anybody within the country, or, for that matter, outside the country. This has faced criticism from the theorists of nationalism who argue that if you have nationalism, it has to be distinct from other nationalisms, and in principle, opposed to other nationalisms. There has to be the other. So, how can you have nationalism without something else? How can you include everybody without ever positing an enemy? This was VD Savarkar’s point against secular nationalism. He said it is absurd, and you cannot do it, as you have to posit an enemy. If that argument is valid, the question is: did Pt Nehru have an enemy in mind, against which Indian nationalism was posited? Or was it just wishy-washy nationalism, ‘too idealistic’, as you put it, which did not have an enemy and therefore, could not be real nationalism? It had to be internally weak, unlike all the other tough nationalisms. 

If that is the case, what was the strength of secular nationalism, and how did it turn out to be so potent as to lead the independence movement and also to dominate Indian politics for more than half a century after independence? What was the substance of it, if it was as hollow as its critics claimed? I would say, it is not as hollow as that, and it did have an opponent in view. We do not talk of it as nationalism, which is British imperialism, and with it, all imperialisms. Now, we think that imperialism is not the same as nationalism, and the British always pretended that they were not nationalists. It is only a pretence. They were the most extreme nationalists, the first industrial nation. British nationalism and British imperialism were melded. Imperialism was an extension or continuation of its nationalism, and there is no way the British nationalists of those days could think of themselves except as imperialists. Without an empire, there is no Britain, and it cannot identify itself. Even today, they have great difficulties seeing themselves without an empire, and therefore they preserve the image and the value systems and so much of the rhetoric of empire. One could even say that the queen was kept for so long, so successfully, in continuation of the monarchy with all its pretensions, as a reminder of their empire. It is maintaining the image of empire, and the Commonwealth is one of the ways of doing so. 

If the empire and imperialism are seen as the ‘other’, then it makes sense. Secular nationalism did have its opponent. When it was uniting, it was uniting all Indians—true; but it was uniting them against imperialism. It was not trying to unite Indians against a domestic opponent, which is what all the other nationalisms were doing and are doing. That was its strength and the reason for its success. It failed with respect to Pakistan, but that was because there was an overriding geopolitical argument for the British to partition the country, and their argument throughout was that the machinations of the British led to the partition, not the fault of the Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs. All the other Indian nationalisms blame one of the Indians—curiously, they never blame the British, they always blame one of the communities. Muslims blame Hindus and vice versa; Sikhs blame one or the other or both. Only the secular nationalists clearly point their finger at the British for wanting the partition of the country and for inflaming these nationalist competitions. Secular nationalism was not an empty-headed nationalism or a hollow idealism of that kind, as it was strategically calculated to unite Indians against imperialism, which is what all nationalisms do—they unite the country against somebody, and here the somebody was clearly located outside, and that was British imperialism, equal to British nationalism.  

Prof Palat, in your lecture “The Spiritual in Nehru’s Secular Imagination”, you emphasise Pt Nehru’s deliberate refusal to formalise secularism as a rigid doctrine, noting that he distrusted the word ‘secular’ for its potential to become a source of dogma, instead opting for an ethically grounded, spiritually balanced form of political reason, based out of his assumptions of human self-sufficiency and the segregation of religious domains. Some scholars suggest that it was secularism that gave rise to the wave of communal politics in the 1980s and 1990s, while others say that had the principles been more rigid, instead of being left vulnerable and under-institutionalised, the course might have been different. These are two extreme views, but with your extensive study of Nehruvian architecture, where do you find yourself here? 

I disagree with both positions. Pt Nehru was not rigid and dogmatic in the least, and the other demands that he should have been more dogmatic hardly hold water. Let me explain what makes him secular and the grounds on which he is secular, and what his principal arguments were. His purpose was, one, to overcome religious conflict, and second, to deal with the problem of religion at another level altogether, that of irrationality in a modern world. They are two different purposes, but they are related. Let me first take the problem of overcoming religious conflict. In a country that has to be united to fight off the British imperialism, overcoming religious conflict was an imperative at that time in the first half of the century, and after independence, it is still important to preserve the unity of the country and ensure its independence so it does not go through further partitions and further internal conflict. So, uniting the country by overcoming religious conflict became immensely important. 

Now, it is not due to any disrespect of any religion; as far as Pt Nehru was concerned, the problem of religious conflict was to be solved by asserting and ensuring the fundamental rights to the freedom of conscience, of assembly, and of expression. These are the fundamental freedoms that are already proclaimed in the rights of man during the French Revolution, and have been repeatedly proclaimed throughout the various revolutions in the course of the 19th century in Europe and elsewhere and in the 20th century after our constitution was formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In a sense, that has become a fundamental premise of all liberal societies that seek to unite—that they must have the freedom of conscience, assembly, and expression. The freedom of conscience means the freedom to believe in anything you wish to believe, which means any religion. In a liberal society, the freedom of religion is guaranteed, and religion is therefore respected. It is not denied. The freedom to express yourself openly in your religion is also allowed, and not merely allowed, but it has enforced that freedom through association and expression. You are perfectly free to propagate your religion; you can express your religious beliefs, you can assemble to do so, and privately you can exercise the freedom of your conscience. It is a liberal order and has been the premise of all liberal orders from the time of the French Revolution. India is doing nothing new; it is merely reasserting those principles, and so is the United Nations. 

All individual and group activity has to be compatible with the constitution that lays down these principles, and in this, the rights of the citizen are superior to those of anything else. The individual citizen is the one whose rights have to take preference over the rights of any group. Groups may, of course, assert and express their rights, but only to the extent that they are compatible with individual rights. The constitution does guarantee individual and group rights, but rights of a citizen are fundamental and superior to all; they are absolute. If the freedoms of religion are guaranteed in this fashion, one religion does not have an advantage over another. Just as citizens, they all have equal rights, and the fundamental principle is that each one is permitted to exercise their rights as long as it does not infringe upon the rights of another. As long as you can exercise your rights without doing so, it is perfectly acceptable. That is all that has happened. But it has been represented as Pt Nehru not respecting religious faith. It has been represented that way because those who think that one religion should have superior rights over another, always complain that they have lost rights. They have not lost their rights—they have the same rights as others, but they want an advantage over another, and it is those who complain that he is a ‘hater of God’ or that he is irreligious. He is not bothered about all of that. His point is, you can believe whatever you wish, but do not impose it upon others. 

If all religions exist like this, and one is not superior to another, how does a religion exercise its freedom? It functions within an autonomous sphere. All of society consists of a series of autonomous spheres, of which religion is one, and the state regulates those relationships and their functioning exactly the way a state is empowered to, required to, and we expect it to regulate every other sphere. We expect it to regulate the entire field of corporate activity; otherwise there would be complete chaos. We expect it to regulate a domain like sports; that is another autonomous sphere. Autonomous means, internally, they have their own rules of functioning that are respected as long as they do not violate any fundamental rights. Academia is another autonomous sphere, and one of our constant demands is that the state should respect the autonomy of the academic world, and it functions best when it is autonomous but regulated by the state. Without regulation, nothing will work. And this across the board, any profession, any sector, are all subject to state regulation and state leadership, but that does not mean state direction of its internal functioning. Religion is just one of those autonomous spheres. In fact, if I can push it to the extreme, crime is another autonomous sphere. It functions on its own and by its own rules, and in a way, the state practically regulates it and also participates in it, in one way or the other—if you look at the story of Gangland warfare, the state is not independent of it, but that is pushing it to the limit. 

The religions are now made autonomous; they are no longer the regulatory principle of the society. The constitution is the regulatory one, not the religion. Many people think that religion should be, especially their own religion, in which they find that they are subordinated to the constitution. There, nobody prevents them from observing their religion and propagating it, but the constitution is superior, and that is all that secularism means. This process of secularisation has been going on the world over, and it is not dogmatic; therefore, regulating the relationships and the functions of these institutions is all necessary so that they do not violate the principles of the constitution. But Pt Nehru had another objective in view that he considered essential for the modernisation of the country, which was his intellectual concern that people should not be embedded in any form of irrationality and blind faith—if you can consider religion as an aspect of blind faith. Blind faith, superstition, or any form of acceptance of principles that have not been subjected to scientific investigation, he considered irrational. If you wish to arrive at the truth, use a scientific method. If you can, that is fine, but if you claim anything that cannot be subjected to scientific method, you are being irrational, and it must be open to everybody to investigate and comprehend the procedures by which you arrive at any truth. There are no mysteries to knowledge, and these are all basic 18th-century principles of enlightenment which he was applying and which we all accept. These are the things we were taught in school with the greatest regularity, all the science we are taught is precisely this. Science applies to all forms of knowledge; history has to be scientific, literature has to be scientific, and philosophy has to be scientific. Namely, you have to go through a rational argument and provide evidence for what you are saying, and that evidence has to be subject to the tests of verifiability and falsifiability. 

He wanted to promote science as the best means to the approach to knowledge, and with that, religion took a knock. Those who claimed that this is our faith had to answer the question, if this is your faith, on what basis have you arrived at it? And then they get trapped, because how do you say that it is your faith? How did you get that faith? How is it that you got the faith but not I? Why is it that your faith is not accessible to me? The principles of physics and chemistry are accessible to me or to you if I have studied it, so why is it that the principles of your faith are not accessible? In that case, it is knowledge that is the question, and if you are just indulging in some form of superstition. Now, Pt Nehru was not irreligious. He was respectful of religious feelings, and it is important to note—what he disliked about what we call religion was the priesthood, the dogma that comes with it, and the organisation that enforces it. These were the things he rejected because they create closed systems that you neither have entry to nor any communication with. All closed systems, therefore, are anathema to him. On the other hand, anybody who is fully committed to a cause, in the manner that the truly religious were and are, he admired them immensely. If you are prepared to give your full life and your total concentration to any cause, you have what we call a religious feeling, and he appreciated that very much. He gave many examples of that kind, including people like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and so on. He admired them, and that is why he admired people like Jesus and Muhammad. He did not so much admire their respective religions; he admired certain people within them, like St Francis of Assisi. Buddha was somebody he admired enormously, and intellectually speaking, he was practically a Buddhist.

He appreciated religious feeling, or what Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’, but he despised dogma. And with dogma, the priests, who claimed to be the repositories of that dogmatic knowledge, and the organisation that promoted it. That is what he objected to; otherwise, he appreciated and admired it in many cases, and he was even called religious by one of the Khilafat leaders, Maulana Mohammad Ali. He said, “I think you are deeply religious”, and he has that in his autobiography, and Pt Nehru said that perhaps he was. He was sceptical about himself in such respects; he was not indifferent to it at all. But he did not create a dogma out of secularism, some others might have. He wanted to be inclusive through it, and the practical politics are that all minorities must feel secure in post-independence India, especially the Muslims, who would suffer the greatest trauma, and he ensured that as best he could, and he said that everybody should respect everybody’s religion and that the state would regulate it. The point at which you call the dogma and the excess came after, when the Muslims were used as a captive bank of votes, and they were a trade-off between their conservative religious leaders and the votes. As a result, no further investments were made in their educational progress and so on because the conservative leaders did not want that. But they got the votes because the Congress claimed that they were the only protectors of the Muslims, and that is what led to the enormous campaign against the Congress for what they called ‘pandering’ to Muslims.

Professor, in the same lecture, you explained how Pt Nehru not only appreciated and admired Buddhism but also incorporated Buddhist symbols due to his firm beliefs in the Buddhist principles of ethical self-regulation and scientific temper. How much did Pt Nehru’s beliefs in Buddhism, according to you, influence his initial perception of the Chinese people, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and his engagement with Mao's Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? 

I do not think that the two are related. He had a very positive approach to China and expectations from it on multiple grounds. There is a long civilisational association between India and China, and of course, Buddhism was the connection there, but there were many other aspects to that civilisational connection. He saw India and China as very comparable. They had about the same length of history, vast territories, and internal diversities; of course, China has less diversity than India, but what he expected them to come together on was that both were victims of imperial domination in the 19th century and both fought to throw it off in the 20th century, and therefore, they would come together jointly in the campaign against imperialism. That expectation was belied in the form that China became hostile to India, saw it as a competitor, and went to extreme lengths to attack India when India had no such expectations whatsoever. The geopolitical reasons for China doing so are heavily discussed in all the literature, as you know, but I can certainly suggest two aspects of that. One is that when China finds itself isolated, and it finds that India is feeling triumphant or somehow has an advantage over China, then it is a warning that China gives to India not to take advantage of their temporary isolation. Between 1960 and 1962, this happened when the Soviet Union and China split up, and India saw itself in an advantageous position. The United States was friends with India, and the Soviet Union was realigning itself after breaking up with China, therefore, India would have certain advantages. At the same time, India was also host to the Dalai Lama and accepted him, which the Chinese were nervous about, and there was a strong suspicion that India might be the launching pad of a Tibetan insurrection. 

Not that India did anything about it, but there were those fears. When you have fears, they become a material fact. So, they gave a warning to India in the form of the 1962 attack, stating that they can assert themselves against India, and we will not have the friends that we expect to have. And that proved to be right; India was in a helpless situation and could not face that invasion, but not that anything happened—the Chinese just came in and went out—a bit of a slap in the face but no more than that. It did it again in 2020 in the Galwan episode when Trump attacked China, and there was a certain feeling in India that China is now isolated. Till now, China was almost an ally of the United States, and China had prospered so enormously with that alignment. Now, if that was breaking with China on its own, as Trump’s policy seemed to indicate, then India felt more celebratory, so China once again attacked. It had not done so between 1962 and 2020, and suddenly, the strange attack occurred. In both cases, it is because of geopolitical tensions and has nothing to do with unreal expectations. If it was unreal expectations and that Pt Nehru was up ahead in the air and all that is said about him, then what have all the other prime ministers done, the tough ones? Everyone proclaims themselves very tough against Pt Nehru, but they all faced exactly the same problems, and nothing has changed on the ground. The line-up globally is exactly the same. In fact, things have become slightly worse today than they were then. So, it had nothing to do with Pt Nehru’s false expectations, his idealisations of China, his naivety, or his weakness, because everybody who came after him was all tough people, or at least proclaimed themselves to be very tough. Not a single change on the ground, and it is the same with Pakistan. 

Sir, I remember watching a conversation of yours with Mr Jairam Ramesh on the release of his book on VK Krishna Menon. You say, and Mr Ramesh agrees with it, that the 1962 war was more of a military failure than a political failure. So, can we not say that military successes are not political successes; they are military successes? How do we distinguish between the two, and how can we say that the military is not a part of the political will?  

Yes, I agree. That is an artificial distinction; to say it is a military failure and not a political one, they are necessarily related. Pt Nehru’s political strategy has been laid out very clearly, that is, no conflict with China, and if there are going to be tensions, and you build up the armed forces, the only way of doing so is through a successful industrialisation of the country which will enable you to sustain a large military establishment. A poor country cannot maintain a military establishment of the dimensions people expected; it cannot supply it, and it cannot find the munitions, the arms, and all the modern technological gadgetry. So, he said, we do need a modern army, but the only way of doing so is to go through a successful industrialisation. It is not a matter of just buying equipment; it is the famous case of you not handing over computers to monkeys. There is no use in just acquiring modern hardware; you have to be able to keep it up in a war, and the only way is to produce it yourselves. To produce them you require a huge industrial establishment to do so, and that is why he gave priority to industrial development and the rest to diplomacy, not to more confrontation. When the confrontation occurred, of course, the military failed—it could not succeed, though it could have done better in some senses. 

If a conflict occurred, India was always the weaker, because India had chosen a pattern of development which was not the Chinese one. Democracy makes everything slower. We have to cater to so many different types of demands all the time; Chinese have just wiped them off the state. I must remind you that China went through the largest famine in human history in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward, more than even the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s industrialisation famine under Stalin was about five to seven million dead, whereas the Chinese one was at least thirty million. India, on the other hand, has had no famine after independence, all the famines were before that. The priorities were different, and Pt Nehru’s consistent argument was that we cannot sacrifice one generation for the benefit of the next one, and so we will have to go along. There is no way the military is going to be effective unless you industrialise effectively, and you cannot industrialise effectively at such a cost he was emphatic about, and he repeatedly brought up the Soviet example by saying that this is not the model we must follow. So, if there was a conflict, we would be the loser; that is the kind of skirmish that China wanted. It is not the kind of conflict where you have a total war. If there was a full-scale invasion of India, then that would be a different matter because then, of course, India has the resources to fight back, but the kind of war that China prefers to have—up in the mountains for small pieces of territory to make a dramatic impact and then to withdraw—is all that we have seen of China so far, and there, India will be at the weak end. 

Sir, let me ask you a question about one of your past answers: can it be said that Pt Nehru’s ideas about secularism emerged or found their roots in the partition of India? Was there any pre-1947 idea about secularism and post-1947 idea about secularism that got shaped by the horrors of the partition? 

No, they were the same. The ideas, the fundamental principles, and the philosophical foundations are all the same, and it is foundational toward the whole of Gandhian philosophy and strategy that Pt Nehru later adopted; that is, Indians must be united against the British power. All of them have to be united, and secularism is one of the means of doing so. You have to unite regionally, you have to prevent caste conflict, and you have to unite the classes in conflict. The class conflict and the desire to unite the classes led to the Left accusing them all of being stooges of the capitalists. The desire to prevent the caste conflict led to them accusing MK Gandhi of not doing enough to overcome it, or even Pt Nehru. Their fundamental principle is that one Indian must not attack another Indian, and the moment you stir up one Indian interest against another Indian interest, the British have an entry point to divide you and sponsor one against the other. In order to prevent that from happening, they kept on compromising—the Poona Pact with Dr Ambedkar, for example, for the Dalits. They are always being accused of compromise, but compromise is what won the day. It united the country; otherwise you would have had full-scale civil wars in India, and the British would have had a wonderful feast. They could pick up anybody they wanted, promote one against the other, and it would have ended up like the Arab world. That is what was prevented, so secularism was within that mould. 

After independence, it was important to retain the unity of India. Pt Nehru never took the unity of India for granted; he said that we never know, and there were multiple challenges. He constantly exhorted his countrymen to unite exactly as before 1947, so secularism was required for his secular policy—notably, he seldom used the word—but it was required to maintain the unity of the country. There was a foreign nationalism against whom they had to fight, which was British imperialism, and it was only when India became more confident of its unity after it faced the Khalistani challenge and after breaking up Pakistan that Indian unity became secure; nobody could challenge it. It is only after that secular nationalism has declined in power and Hindutva nationalism has risen. It was from the 1990s after the Khalistani challenge was seen off. So, the long-term consequences, or the long-term processes, were that once the security of Indian unity was established, or seemed to have been established, secularism was waived, and Hindutva nationalism asserted itself. It has less to do with pandering to Muslim interests or the weakness of particular leaders; those are all short-term ones. The long term, I would say, I put it this way. 

Sir, let me bring up another question which was related to the partition of India. I think we do not have a lot of publicly available literature on what was going on during the partition; the focus was usually on the independence of India. In your lecture at the India International Centre (IIC), Nehru and Democracy, you pointed out that Pt Nehru was always sceptical and, to an extent, doubtful about what he used to say. It can also be interpreted as he did not think in binaries. Did he ever publicly or privately reflect later in life on whether the partition could have been averted? And when it comes to the letters that might have been written by him, what do you think was his emotional response to the partition of India? 

He would have liked to prevent the partition. He thought the partition was an absurdity and the way Muhammad Ali Jinnah presented his demands. He made all the arguments against the partition, and he said that if it is a question of Muslims having their own state and nation, that is manifestly not possible. Whatever territory you lop off and make Pakistan, there will be millions of Muslims left in India, and so many Hindus in Pakistan. By creating a Muslim state, you are creating a minority problem within Pakistan, and you leave a minority problem within India; nothing is solved. It has clearly nothing to do with solving a minority problem, and the way to solve the minority problem is not by partitioning the country but by mobilising your ideology against minority domination. That is why the partition was carried out in a manifestly irrational fashion. An ignorant lawyer was brought out from London, he put a ruler to the map and drew a straight line, and that became Pakistan. The line went through villages and in certain cases, many houses; it is such irrationality. Everyone thought it was impossible, yet it happened because the British insisted on it. But he also reflected the other side; he said if Jinnah was going to be such a powerful presence, and after the war Jinnah won all the elections in Muslim constituencies—of course, he won the elections because he and the communists were the only ones who were allowed to exist during the war and propagate their views. So, the Communist Party became extraordinarily popular, as did the Muslim League. The Muslim League tried out the communal riots, the Communist Party tried out the revolution in Telangana and so on. Of course, nobody was going to give the communists any chance, and the British were there to support the Muslim League, and therefore, they got Pakistan. They both became popular during the war because they were the only ones allowed to mobilise. 

Before the war, Jinnah lost everything in the 1937 elections. So, Pt Nehru thought that we could manage it. But when he saw the degree of apparent popularity and the way it was going, and Jinnah was making it impossible to govern India through a series of communal riots—and the British were assisting those, like the 1946 Calcutta Killings—it was then when he was convinced, and his own party was convinced. MK Gandhi had said that if everyone wanted the partition, then he was not going to stand in the way, and he was, in fact, asked why he did not carry out a fast unto death, and he said, if everyone wants the partition and if I fast unto death, all that will happen is that I will die and you will still have the partition. Pt Nehru’s further point was that suppose we make a compromise after compromise and get a united India, which he was very doubtful about because he saw the way the British were going, finally you will get it at such a heavy cost that you cannot do anything in India. He wanted to develop a modern India. He wanted to carry out huge land reforms and social reforms—what he called the social revolution—and with Jinnah at the helm of the Muslim League and them being run by landlord interests and so on, there was not a ghost of a chance. He would be hamstrung. He said, let them have another country, and we will get on with our own development as we wanted. What nobody expected was that having another country would lead to massacres of one million people and twenty million homes, and nobody expected that throughout their lives there would be a permanent war between India and Pakistan. 

That aspect of the Cold War they had not seen; that was maintained by the Cold War and continues to this day. Pakistan is a client of the United States, and as a client, the United States maintains an army there. It is a backward state which is exactly the same as when the British left—run by the landlords, army, and bureaucracy. But they needed a crime state; the army was there, and it continued the same way. So, Pt Nehru’s point was that it is best that we do not have such a state with us because we would not be able to do anything in this country. He had to carry out the zamindari reform, he had to industrialise, he had to democratise, and would all that be possible with the kind of politics you have in Pakistan? He said perhaps just as well, but nobody foresaw that it would be at this cost. I think all of them thought, including Jinnah, that you would have a partition and the two states would just live peacefully, like India within India. We have had a series of partitions with the state reorganisation; Andhra has been carved out, Maharashtra and Gujarat have been separated, Punjab has been divided, the Northeastern states have come, and that process is still going. It has never led to a war between them. You create a new state, and you just continue; in principle, that should have been possible. What is wrong with having a Pakistan if you want it? It does not mean you have to be at war with each other; you can just be there, like Czechoslovakia split up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In all probability, Britain will split up, and Spain might split up for the same reason, but that is all possible because there is an overarching union, which is the European Union above. But the geopolitical situation was such that the United States required a client here, and Pakistan was the one, and that structured completely different politics. 

Prof Palat, in your lecture “Nehru’s Democratic Dilemmas”, you highlight Pt Nehru’s deep dismay with electoral politics, with his description of elections as “madness” and his concerns regarding the submergence of real issues. Beyond a moral fatigue, would you interpret this as a more fundamental critique of electoral democracy itself—particularly in its capacity to sustain reasoned public discourse within a postcolonial society like India?

He had his doubts regarding democracy in this sense, and that was part of a basic critique of democracy that was going on worldwide from the middle of the 19th century, and he found it applicable to India also. It is not a postcolonial problem particularly. It is very much evident in France or in Italy; in fact, Indian democratic politics are far more stable and regular than anything that France had to show until then—only after 1958 did France become stable politically. The Third Republic and the Fourth Republic were shocking; they never had a government for more than nine months, and Italy was even worse. It is not a peculiar problem of India and has nothing to do with postcolonial—I do not like that word, ‘postcolonial’, let us say independent India—unless you want to call Europe postfascist or something, which might be more valid, perhaps it is not postfascist; it is still fascist. So, it is a fundamental problem in democracy that what we assume to be all the democratic values of public discourse on fundamental issues by an informed, rational public meeting in the public sphere, or Habermas's argument, for example. Ever since mass democracy took over in various parts of Europe in the 19th century and in India during the Gandhian phase, it does not occur that way. Mass democracy does not allow for that rational, informed public discourse. It is very doubtful if it had occurred before; a certain range of it might have occurred, and a certain range of it continues even now, but the raucous mass mobilisation is so powerful that it overwhelms all the rational discourse that we are so keen on. 

People like Schumpeter have said that it is not as rational as you imagine it to be, that many people who claim to be rational are, in fact, extraordinarily irrational. They are very well-informed, intelligent, educated, and experienced, and they have occupied senior positions; but they are as irrational, or populist, or irresponsible as any mobster. It is all in Schumpeter’s argument, and many others have said so; there is no reason to assume that an educated man is more rational than an uneducated man. An educated man may give more rational reasons, he may argue it better, but he is also driven by fundamental emotional requirements and self-interest as anybody else. Pt Nehru had all his doubts, but he said that we can consciously work against those problems, and that is the only way we can work. If you try to restrict democratic expression, you are going to end up in a fascist mobilisation—which is also democratic because it mobilises masses—but to be chauvinist, authoritarian, and violent, we can work against all of that. Democracy has its problems, but it has its solutions too, and it is for you to work out the solutions. If you face problems in democracy, the solution is more democracy, not to attack democracy or to impose military rule or dictatorship, which has never solved any problem. But if you can mobilise a democratically committed political party and create popular support with parties in competition with each other, and they place their arguments before the republic, you can do it. The point is to try to do it, and he kept urging people to do so. And he was not wrong; it is possible, and that is why we are democratic. 

One final question to you, Prof Palat: you have been working very extensively on Pt Nehru for the past few decades. There must have been some biasses when you started working on the Selected Works. How do you think your understanding of Pt Nehru and the ideas of India has evolved over time? Do you think there has been any significant shift in your ideas, or did you have any preconceived notions that changed after spending years on the work? 

Yes. The bias I had was, like many people have, that Pt Nehru was rather wishy-washy and at times not decisive enough. When I read his work, and now I have been editing his work since 2011, as if I were sitting next to him and talking to him practically. I have read everything that he was writing, reading, thinking, and talking about. I have watched him draft his speeches, his letters, and everything there is. I have been more and more impressed by him; he was not at all wishy-washy. The thing is, his form of expression was slightly convoluted; it is not clear-cut. In fact, being a professor myself, I would not have given him an A grade for the manner in which he wrote. Very literary—but the quality of sharp argument is not the best for a man to pass an exam well. Subhas Chandra Bose, on the other hand, was perfect; very clear-cut and very well-stated, and I can understand why he succeeded well in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) exams. Pt Nehru would not have, I think. The point is, Pt Nehru was a deeper thinker, and he always saw multiple sides of any problem, and because of that, he expressed himself in a way that always led to qualifications. It is not emphatic and straight. He did not say that this is right and this is wrong, of course; he did, but at a different level. For example, communalism was wrong, imperialism was wrong, and anybody who attacked the unity of India was wrong. But in everything else, he saw the complexity of an argument. In a country as complex as India, the reality is complex and full of contradictions. He saw the problems on all those levels, and therefore he expressed those complexities, which is what we call being wishy-washy. He sought compromise and consensus, which is why we call him as being weak and indecisive. 

His daughter, too, was that typical tough one who drew the line and said, not any further. She was that type. She was not a consensus builder—Pt Nehru was a consensus builder, and he considered that absolutely imperative after the partition. As I said earlier, he did not take the unity of India for granted. So, I have been more and more impressed when I see the complexity he was dealing with. On the same day, he would have to deal with a fellow like EMS Namboodiripad on one side and K Kamaraj on the other. BC Roy was there, the good old Kairon, who was the antithesis of all these people, and Sheikh Abdullah, and all those politicians in Uttar Pradesh, one after the other. He redeemed the whole lot, and the way he responded to each, arguing with each ever so consistently and carefully, indicates a high level of statesmanship. He was able to deal with Master Tara Singh and Sant Fateh Singh with the greatest rationality and the coolness of head. Anybody else would have got fed up with them, with the way they kept on at him, but he continued replying to their letters, arguing again and again, explaining why he was opposing the Punjabi Suba perfectly reasonably and rationally all the way. He always tried to persuade people to his side, and therefore, he did not create enemies the way his daughter did. And that, I was very impressed by. To rule a country like India, you have to bring people together; you cannot afford a Leninist revolutionary situation—you are going to have civil wars, and they will be extreme in India. And he succeeded; he held the country together, brought the people together, and he developed an undying consensus for democracy in India. We do not realise that we take it for granted that we are all democratic, but what do we owe it to? 

The British claimed that they created democracy in India; absolutely not. What the British had was fascism in India. What was created was by Indians, against the British, but who consolidated it? That was Pt Nehru. And we have taken that for granted to such an extent that we can afford to be so critical of him. There is no danger of army rule in India, everybody else has had it. There is no danger of direct dictatorship in quite the way that most other places have—we have had authoritarian regimes—but it is not the same as overthrowing the constitution and creating a dictatorship. Why is it that no army leader has dared to take power in India? It is because democracy is firmly entrenched. Every political leader in India—you can say everything about them, but the whole political leadership is elected. We might despise them as much as we want for all their inadequacies, but the one thing is that they are all elected, and nobody sees any other leadership as a legitimate one; nobody sees the army as a legitimate leader. He created a firm foundation of law in India, as firm as we can imagine it to be. I know how lawless the country is, but the constitution is grounded, the rule of law is grounded, and that is not due to the British. The British did not have a constitution or a rule of law; they had just a dictatorship, and what they called law was just arbitrary rule by them. It is not the British at all, and it is not an inheritance from the British. It was all created after that and against very heavy odds. And one of the greatest achievements is the reorganisation of the states, which has deepened Indian democracy. He was afraid that it might lead to further partitions, but the fact is that every part of the country can now feel democratically assertive through its own linguistic state by creating a nation within that linguistic area. Of course, India is blessed by having clear-cut linguistic areas so each one of them can become a nation of its own, which is attached to the Indian nation. Everyone feels comfortable having both. You have the benefit of having your own nation as well as the superior Indian nation. You have a larger space in which you operate, but you have the security of having your own space. Partly it is good fortune, and partly it is the creation of those early funding years.

Ends.