An extraordinarily revealing essay on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru appeared in Time magazine way back in 1951: Pandit’s Mind
Reading it will help Indians, Hindus in particular, to obtain a glimpse of the real man lurking behind the heroic and larger-than-life image that is promoted by the Congress-engineered, state-mandated education curriculum. This Nehru rarely comes through in an India that has been flooded by hero-worshiping propaganda over six decades of nearly uninterrupted Congress rule.
The most striking aspect about Nehru was his thoroughly westernized mental makeup. One of the first few paragraphs sports the following declaration:
Western policymakers have hoped that Nehru—a man with known Western sympathies—is the Asian statesman who could lead a non-Communist Asia into the Western camp.
Still further into the article we find an elaboration of these western sympathies:
Like millions of Indians who follow in his train, Nehru is a paradox. He is not a typical Indian: he is a Westernized Oriental. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the godparents of Fabian Socialism, are in a truer sense his creators than Vishnu and Siva.
An Agnostic. In religion, Nehru is a typical Western agnostic. In politics, he is a Western liberal with Socialist leanings. The mind of Jawaharlal Nehru (born 1889) came into consciousness during a quiet period of Indian history. The great Mutiny of 1857 was only a rankling memory, and the Indian National Congress, which was to become the first instrument of liberation, was a polite assemblage in morning coats. It was Western influence that made Nehru a nationalist. Garibaldi was his hero long before Gandhi was. Nehru’s family were wealthy and progressive aristocrats; religion, to the men of his house, was “a woman’s affair.” [This was in marked contrast to the overwhelming majority of Indian nationalists who needed no western influence to feel a natural affinity and love for their Motherland. Sri Aurobindo, who started dreaming about and planning the liberatation of his motherland from the British at a very young age, Bankim Chandra who penned the stirring Vande Mataram poem or Lokmanya Tilak, these are some of first of such ethnic, natively-inspired (Hindu) nationalists who come to mind.]
Paradoxically, it was a Westerner who first brought Nehru to Hinduism: his Irish tutor was a Theosophist, and such an influence that at the age of 13 Nehru was inducted into the Theosophical Society by Mrs. Annie Besant* in person.
Nehru’s attitude toward religion has not basically changed. In later years he would say (like any Westerner who admires the Bible “as literature”) that he did not understand or feel drawn to the Bhagavad Gita, but “liked to read the verses.”
He went to Harrow and Cambridge, where he acquired the old school tie and what he himself called the “vague humanism” of the day. Nietzsche was “all the rage,” as were the prefaces of Bernard Shaw and the sexual case histories of Krafft-Ebing. It was an age which considered religion at best a polite convention and at worst, the opium of the masses. Like his fellow liberals, Nehru believed that science would solve all human problems.
In fact, the description that best fits Nehru’s mental makeup is that of a Leftist who saw Hinduism as the primary reactionary force standing in the way of his vision of a modernized and secularized India. The ruling Leftist ideology that continues to dominate India is a product of the Nehruvian mindset and its distorted view of Hinduism as a backward and superstitious religion, rather than the sophisticated and advanced Gnostic civilization that it actually was before the Islamic invasion and conquest of India. In this regard we see that the most remarkable piece of foresight displayed by the author of the article is the following statement:
Like millions of Indians who follow in his train, Nehru is a paradox. He is not a typical Indian: he is Westernized Oriental
And in truth, many decades following his 15 year rule over India millions of Indians have indeed followed “in his train” to become westernized orientals themselves, or brown apes of the west, to put it less kindly. While it was true in the past that Nehru was not your typical Indian, over these decades most educated Hindus have been brought up in an environment created by Nehru and his followers, one designed to replicate the Nehruvian mindset in each one of them. The Nehru-inspired Westernized Leftist establishment, via its virtual monopoly in the fields of education, media and politics in India (even the BJP is nothing but a left-oriented party today which pays lip service to Hindu interests and causes), continues the work of dominating and recreating Hindus in the image of its champion and ideal . The Hindus of India, though nominally independent, are still laboring under the yoke of the de-Hinduizing Nehruvian dispensation. It is the age of the “progressive” (read “alienated” or “nominal”) Nehruvian Hindu minority dominating over their own “traditional” (read, “genuine” or “practicing”) Hindu majority in India.
Today the Congress party, under the leadership of the Christianized Gandhi family (the mater familia of the Gandhi and the Congress family is a Roman Catholic as per her wikipedia profile and her daughter is married to a Christian), has taken this process a step further by removing all the safeguards or obstacles that stand in the way of the Evangelical onslaught on Hinduism (http://in.christiantoday.com/articles/anti-conversion-laws-to-be-repealed-by-new-govt/4082.htm). The cynical calculation at work here is that the Christian vote-bank is the only one that the Congress can today count on to bring itself to power, while all other vote-banks can either be turned away or fragmented by competing parties. In a sense Sonia Gandhi, like Constantine who became the first Christian Roman emperor, seeks to destroy India and its cultural ethos just so that her dynasty can remain in power perpetually. But while Constantine was a true Roman, Sonia Gandhi is not even an Indian or a Hindu. So even if the former might have had some doubts about his new-found religious zeal, the latter most likely has none.
Another point that is evident from the article is that even in 1951, hardheaded Americans, who have since the very beginning based their foreign policy on pragmatism and national interest, could see that Nehru had a very poor grasp, if any, on the power-dynamics of world politics. It would have been somewhat amusing to imagine the Pandit scurrying about supporting China’s aggressive actions in Tibet and Korea, as well as canvassing for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council for that empire-in-making, were it not for the grim reality of the present day, when India finds itself once again at the mercy of the dragon, with the empire threatening another war and continued dismemberment of the nation (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124578881101543463.html).
And yet, even after Communist China revealed to Nehru its true imperialist face by invading India in 1962, till the very end, he considered Hindu nationalists as the greatest threat to India. From the link http://globalshake.org/hindus-talibans/
…an encounter Nehru had in 1963 with young and senior foreign ministry officers. His foreign secretary Y.D. Gundevia reminded Nehru that the communists had won power in Kerala in 1957 and asked: ‘But what happens to the services if the communists are elected to power, tomorrow, at the Centre, here in New Delhi?’
Gundevia records: ‘He pondered over my long drawn out question and then said, looking across the room, ‘Communists, communists, communists, why are all of you so obsessed with communists and communism? What is it that communists can do that we cannot do and have not done for the country? Why do you imagine the communists will ever be voted into power at the Centre?’ There was a long pause after this and then he said, spelling it out slowly and very deliberately, ‘The danger to India, mark you, is not communism, it is Hindu right-wing communalism.’
Among nations past and present none has perhaps been so unfortunate as India, no people more unlucky than the Hindus, because at the most critical juncture in their history, just when it seemed that the heavy and long-suffered yoke of foreign oppression was about to be lifted in 1947, their destiny fell into the clutches of an alienated Hindu who strained his every nerve to confer every possible advantage on their greatest enemies, and at the same time exerted all his power to bludgeon into meek submission those Hindu nationalists who worshiped the nation as their Mother. It is a testament to the sheer blindness and naivete of the people of this nation, Hindus in particular, that they should not only have continued to honor this man as their uncrowned king for the rest of his life, despite all his catastrophic blunders, but that they also continue even today, after more than half a century has passed, to entrust their freedom and their existence into the hands of uncompromisingly hostile and nakedly power-hungry members of the dynasty that has been established in his name.
Were the British then right after all in their insistence that Indians are not in a position to govern themselves and that a nation incapable of self-government deserves to remain a slave to external powers? There is no shortage of candidate imperialisms that are even now working overtime to validate this claim. Islamic Jihadism, Christian Evangelism, Sinic Imperialism, are all three of them increasing their strength and their activities in India. Time will soon reveal whether Nehru’s legacy fulfills itself in a completely de-Hinduized and dead India.
