60 years of Independence and democracy

Written years ago by @ShashiTharoor, but still one of the best columns on Indian democracy I've ever read

By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column “Shashi on Sunday” in “The Times of India”
August 12, 2007

When Nehru died, an earthquake rocked New Delhi. Cynics waited for his survivors to fight over the spoils; few predicted the democracy Nehru had been so proud of would survive. But it did. India kept Nehru’s faith. There were no succession squabbles around his funeral pyre.

In three days’ time we will mark the 60th anniversary of our independence. It’s a historic moment for all sorts of reasons, not least of them being that many observers in 1947 doubted we would ever see that landmark. And who could blame them? The new nation was born on a subcontinent wracked with violence, ripped apart by a bloody Partition. Independent India came into being as flames blazed across the land, corpse-laden trains crossed the new frontier with Pakistan, and weary refugees abandoned everything they had ever had to seek the hope of a new life. Circumstances less propitious for a fledgling nation could scarcely have been imagined.

Yet six decades later, the country that emerged from the wreckage of the British Raj is the world’s largest democracy, poised after years of rapid economic growth to take its place as one of the giants of the 21st century. An India whose very survival seemed in doubt during the conflagration of 1947 offers lessons in democracy-building that the rest of the world would do well to heed.
The odds against constructing a working democracy in India were great indeed in 1947. With a million dead, 13 million displaced, billions of rupees worth of property damaged, and the wounds of communal violence still bleeding — not to mention the challenges of administering a country newly freed from colonial rule, integrating the princely states and reorganising the divided armed forces — India’s leaders could have been forgiven for demanding dictatorial powers. Indeed, in many developing countries, nationalist leaders were to make precisely that argument, saying only autocratic rule could weld a post-colonial shambles together into a modern state, and claiming that the divisions engendered by democracy would only impede development.

Fortunately for India, our leaders were greater men than that. With the Mahatma’s assassination six months after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru had no serious rival for power; the only credible alternative, Sardar Patel, died in 1950. But instead of seizing absolute power or embarking on autocratic rule, Nehru consciously went the other way. He himself was such a convinced democrat that, at the crest of his rise in the 1930s, he authored an anonymous article in the Modern Review warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. “He must be checked,” he wrote of himself. “We want no Caesars.” And indeed, his practice when challenged within his own party was to offer his resignation; he usually got his way, but it was hardly the instinct of a Caesar.
As prime minister, Nehru spent a political lifetime trying to instil the habits of democracy in his people — a disdain for dictators, a respect for parliamentary procedures, an abiding faith in the constitutional system. He carefully nurtured the country’s infant democratic institutions, paying deference to the country’s ceremonial presidency and even to the largely otiose vice-presidency; he never let the public forget that these notables outranked him in protocol terms. He wrote regular letters to the chief ministers of the states, explaining his policies and seeking their feedback. He subjected himself to cross-examination in Parliament by the small, fractious but undoubtedly talented Opposition, allowing them an importance out of all proportion to their numerical strength, because he was convinced that a strong opposition was essential for a healthy democracy. And he obliged his ministers and civil servants to be just as respectful to Parliament.
That was not all. Nehru took care not to interfere with the judicial system; on the one occasion that he publicly criticized a judge at a press conference, he apologized the next day to the individual and wrote an abject letter to the Chief Justice of India, regretting having slighted the judiciary. And he never forgot that he derived his authority from the people of India; not only was he astonishingly accessible for a person in his position, but he started the practice of offering a daily darshan at home for an hour each morning to anyone coming in off the street without an appointment, a practice that continued until the dictates of security finally overcame the populism of his successors.

During the 17 years of his prime ministership, Nehru got India accustomed to such attitudes and conduct. By his speeches, his exhortations, and above all by his own personal example, he imparted to the institutions and processes of democracy a dignity that placed it above challenge from would-be tyrants. Democratic values became so entrenched that when, of all people, his own daughter Indira suspended India’s freedoms with a State of Emergency for 22 months, she felt compelled to return to the Indian people for vindication, held a free election and comprehensively lost it.

When Nehru died, an earthquake rocked New Delhi. Cynics (at home and abroad) waited for his survivors to fight over the spoils; few predicted the democracy Nehru had been so proud of would survive. But it did. India kept Nehru’s faith. There were no succession squabbles around his funeral pyre. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a modest figure of unimpeachable integrity and considerable political and administrative acumen, was elected India’s second prime minister. The Indian people wept, and moved on. A year earlier, Welles HangeAn had written a celebrated book titled After Nehru Who? Eleven prime ministers later, that kind of question is not even raised. Indian democracy will always find someone.

The American editor Norman Cousins once asked Jawaharlal Nehru what he hoped his legacy to India would be. “Four hundred million people capable of governing themselves,” Nehru replied. The numbers have grown, but a billion Indians have demonstrated repeatedly to the world how completely they have absorbed his legacy. Forty-three years after Nehru’s death, that offers our nation, this August 15th, one more cause for celebration.