Nehru and the Spirit of India by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a timely intervention at a time when India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy is being contested in political and intellectual arenas. The deepest and most far-reaching of these invisible impacts is the ideological impression Nehru left on the very imagination of India as a nation. Ever since India gained independence, the RSS and the political dispensations associated with it, the Bhartiya Jan Sangh and its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have always questioned the vision and idea of India that has played a dominant role in the political and cultural imaginations of the nation.
One strategy adopted by the Hindutva ideologues in their discourse is to present Nehru as a secularist and marginalise his contribution to imagining the Indian nation and nationalism. Such a strategy seems to work perhaps because the idea of secularism is associated most often with state institutions and policy, and not so much with nationalism. This assumption operates much more in the grossly oversimplified discussions in the popular public discourse, particularly when nationalism and secularism themselves are presented as being necessarily opposed to each other.
The national and the secular according to Nehru
However, the specific history of Indian nationalism in…
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