In a recent episode of The Wire Talks, The Wire’s founding editor Sidharth Bhatia was conversation with historian Aditya Mukherjee on the sustained political obsession with Jawaharlal Nehru. Mukherjee said that Nehru is targeted because he embodied the core “idea of India” forged during the freedom struggle: secularism, democracy, anti-imperialism, social justice, and scientific temper – values fundamentally opposed to the current ruling dispensation. He explained how Nehru’s critique of communalism, global stature, and decisive role in thwarting Hindu majoritarian ambitions after independence fuel present hostility. The discussion also examines historical distortion, institutional capture, attacks on education, and the resilience of India’s democratic and civilisational traditions.The following is the full text of the conversation. The transcription has been done by Maseera Sheikh, an editorial intern at The Wire.Sidharth Bhatia: Hello, and welcome to The Wire Talks. I’m Sidharth Bhatia. Prime Minister Narendra Modi can hardly give a speech without mentioning Jawaharlal Nehru, not once but several times. The Congress has calculated that in his speech on Operation Samudrasetu, he invoked Nehru’s name 14 times, and in his speech on the 75th anniversary of the Constitution, he mentioned the former, the first Prime Minister, about 10 times. These mentions are obviously anything but complimentary. In each instance, it is to criticise Nehru for some infraction or the other, and for most of his policies. In the Sangh Parivar mind, India would have been much better had Sardar Patel, instead of Pandit Nehru, been India’s first Prime Minister. And in the process, as any child will tell you – a schoolboy will tell you – Modi and his fellow Sanghis completely ignore Indian history. But what is the reason for this obsession over 60 years after Nehru has passed on? To understand and explain this, my guest today in today’s podcast conversation is one of the country’s leading experts on Pandit Nehru, Professor Aditya Mukherjee, who is a retired professor of contemporary history from JNU. He is the author of a book, Jawaharlal Nehru: Past, Present and Future, and another, Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India. He’s the co-author of several books, including one on the RSS and on the Indian Independence struggle. Professor Aditya Mukherjee, welcome to The Wire Talks.Aditya Mukherjee: Thank you.Sidharth Bhatia: Obvious – the first obvious question: why is PM Modi so obsessed with Jawaharlal Nehru?Aditya Mukherjee: Mr Bhatia, you had also used a phrase, “Why is he so insecure?” You know, insecure would be putting it very mildly. “Obsessed” is the correct word. There is an attempt to demonise him, to erase him from history. You know, I just want to emphasise this, that it is not just a matter of not liking somebody; it is – you have to – I mean, there is a website, for example, called Dismantling Nehru. You know, they have found 97 “blunders” of Nehru, and the blunders keep increasing. It is currently 117. They publish books like that. Right? But you know, Nehru is a Muslim, as if being a Muslim itself condemns him forever. You know, he has a Muslim ancestry, he’s a womaniser, and most of all, I mean, you know, anything that has happened – any evil that has happened, he’s responsible, from the partition of the country to Vande Mataram. And now, even “vote chori” – the latest, you may have noticed, that they’re now accusing Nehru of doing vote chori, otherwise Patel would have been the Prime Minister of the country. Right? So, you know, there is an attempt to, again, also erase him. You know, the iconic Nehru Memorial Museum and Library does not exist; it is now the Prime Ministers’ Memorial. You know, all Prime Ministers. It’s a first in the world; I’ve never heard of a thing like that – you’re celebrating a museum for all Prime Ministers. Anyway, the idea is to minimise his presence. There are textbooks in Rajasthan on the modern and contemporary period – that is, pre-independence and post-independence – which don’t mention Nehru. He doesn’t exist. There’s a poster put up by the ICHR, the Indian Council for Historical Research, which is supposed to promote historical research in the country. On the 75th, celebrating the 75th year of India’s independence, they put up a poster in which there is Gandhi, there is Patel, there is Bhagat Singh, there’s everybody, but Nehru is absent from it. A person who fought the British for 30 years, 10 of those years in jail, doesn’t even come in here. And the person who comes in is Savarkar in his place. You know? So the situation is grave. I mean, there is a complete obsession.The reasons, I would say, are three. Firstly, Nehru was the antithesis of the vision that the current regime has. I will explain these three points in a minute. The second is that Nehru had the best understanding of communalism and critiqued it in a manner which, in fact, scholars since Nehru have essentially elaborated. He created the structure for understanding communalism and how to fight it. Right? And the third reason is that, unfortunately or fortunately, Nehru was a global statesman. I mean, he had a world presence, and the current Prime Minister perhaps has a deep complex about that. You know, he wants to compete when there is a huge competitiveness involved.But let me start with the first one, if I – if you permit. How is he an antithesis of the worldview of the current regime? See, Nehru represented the consensus view – and I emphasise the word “consensus view” – of the freedom struggle, the 100-year-old freedom struggle. The view to which the moderates, the extremists, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Subhas Bose, Bhagat Singh, the revolutionaries – they all – there was an agreement on a certain vision, certain aspects of the vision which Rabindranath Tagore called the “Idea of India.” And for your listeners, because this word is thrown about, one may ask, “What is this idea of India?” I would like to take just two minutes to say what the basic constituents were on which there was an agreement, whatever may have been the difference between, let’s say, the Congress Socialists and Gandhians. But on these ideas, there was unity. And I’ll just read them out to you what they are.Firstly, India must be sovereign and anti-imperialist, which means not only must India win independence, but it must support globally any imperial domination. I mean, it is inconceivable in Nehru’s time, or in anybody of the national movements, that they would play ball with Israel while the genocide is happening in Gaza. I mean, it is completely inconceivable. You have to fight for them. As you recall that when India was very poor, unlike what it is now, immediately after independence, India took positions on almost every issue, whether it’s Vietnam, South Korea, the Suez Crisis, whatever. And when it was said, “Who are you? You go around with a begging bowl to intervene and give advice to the world.” Nehru’s answer was that, “We may be poor, but who has told you that the poor cannot have a voice?” And he did have a voice. India did have a presence in the global situation as far as fighting colonial or neo-colonial domination was concerned.The second thing in the Idea of India was democracy. It was seminal from the 1890s. Tilak, in the 1890s, was talking of adult franchise. Adult franchise, mind you, decades before it comes to the rest of the world. 1960s, the United States was still fighting over whether black could sit next to you. You know, they’re still having civil rights movements and stuff like that. So it was something seminal, and Nehru, Gandhi, most of the nationalist leaders – Tagore, etc. – laid down what they meant by democracy. And fundamental in that was a free press, civil liberties, and the right to organise, right to organise, right to mobilise, meet people, get into groups and organise, and lastly, respect for the opposition. Now, on all these counts, Nehru was way miles ahead of anybody else. You know, he fought for each of these. The free press – he didn’t put anybody in jail before they – any cartoonist in jail before they cracked the joke. You know, if the press were not critiquing him, he famously wrote articles with a pseudonym criticising himself. He says, “What kind of democracy is it if I don’t get any opposition?” And his respect for the opposition was legendary. I mean, he would attend each session of the Parliament. Even when he was ill, he would answer each question, whether it was on China, with the most difficult of questions. Now there is the Nehru archive, which has become digitally available – you can see it on your phone – you would be amazed at how much trouble he would take to answer each question and meet and try to explain to the opposition.Right? The third element – there are five elements of the idea of India – the third was secularism. And secularism and democracy were inseparable. That is why in the freedom struggle, if you look at the historical writings, you’ll find these two words are used conjointly. “Secular democracy” is the phrase used, just as “communalism” was used conjointly with “loyalism.” All communalists – Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and Sikh – were loyalists. Right? So secularism was therefore fundamental. You cannot be a democracy if you’re not secular. You cannot say that, “I’m secular – I’m a democrat, but I’m a democrat only for the Hindus, and the Muslims can go take a walk.” I mean, you cannot be. So these are conjoined.The fourth element was a pro-poor orientation. And this is something I would like to emphasise, from Dadabhai Naoroji in the 19th century. His first book is Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. You read any early nationalist – R.C. Dutt, Ranade, Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjee – you will find they start the critique of colonialism by saying that it causes poverty. The reason why we must overthrow the British is that it causes poverty. Right? This idea is taken forward by Gandhiji – the notion of the Daridra Narayan, turning our face towards the poor. And then further left by the socialists, by Nehru, by the communists, etc. But there’s a consensus on this.And lastly, the fifth element was that India would be a forward-looking country. You know, it would not be based on obscurantism, superstition, etc. It would be what Nehru called “imbibe a scientific temper.” Now, all these five elements – sovereignty, democracy, secularism, pro-poor orientation or a socialistic outlook, and a scientific temper – all of them were put in our Constitution because the Constitution was, after all, the crystallisation of our freedom struggle. All right?Sidharth Bhatia: And they are all antithetical to the current dispensation.Aditya Mukherjee: This is what I was going to say. The only people who did not agree with this were the loyalists and the communalists. They did not agree with any of these. And the predecessors of the current regime were those who were not part of the freedom struggle. They did not belong to this spectrum. You see, this wide spectrum, as I said, from the revolutionaries to the Moderates – the communalists and the loyalists were outside it. They were on a different platform altogether. So they did not share this vision. I mean, for example, I’ll just give you one example: scientific temper. I mean, it would be inconceivable that Nehru would fight, let’s say, corona with “tali-thali,” “gobar,” “gaumutra,” shining a torch saying “Corona go, corona go.” Or, you know, all of this has happened. What did he do? He set up the National Institute of Virology in Pune. You know? So I mean, one could get examples for all five of them, why they get irritated with Nehru is because he does exactly the opposite of what they do.Sidharth Bhatia: That’s quite a comprehensive thing. That brings me to the next question, and with the associated question that most of what you have said – in fact, all of what you have said – over the last seven decades, Indian students, as I was saying earlier, have studied it in distilled ways or in detailed ways. As a schoolchild may not take up history as her major in university – she might go off to do STEM and not know beyond standard 10, and somebody may go and do a PhD in history – but this entire range has studied some idea of this, that the freedom struggle and the people who fought for freedom came up with this, you know, “idea of India.” Surely the RSS students may also have studied this somewhere. Why are their minds warped in this direction?Aditya Mukherjee: You see, it is because, as you said, the common sense of the Indian people reflected this Idea of India. After all, it was a 100-year-old struggle. You know, the difference between the Indian freedom struggle, or the Indian revolution, and other revolutions is precisely this: A) it was a mass movement, and B) a mass movement over a long period of time, which means these ideas go deep down into the minds of the people. And that is why the RSS has to work double time, you know, to undo this, because it is deep down in the minds of the people. The problem they face is the following: they have actually won even the elections, and not only the state elections as they did in the 60s, but the national election. They have an absolute majority. That is, a party which believes in Hindu Rashtra now rules the country. But India is still not a Hindu Rashtra. And that is where – and again I’ll come back to Nehru on this in a moment – and it is because that they have not been able to, despite having political power, so to speak, change the nature of the Indian state, is now forced to try and change all the what we call the state apparatuses. You know, the institutions of the state, the education system, the media, the police, the bureaucracy, the judiciary – you have to convert all, and above all, you have to change civil society. Right? So you have to really let loose on all of these.And that is why the turn towards fascism. And Nehru was one of the first, as early as the 1930s – I can even, in fact, quote you what he says. He called this Hindu communalism the “Indian version of fascism.” And he says the following in his own words: “Communalism bears a striking resemblance to the various forms of fascism that we have seen in other countries. It is, in fact, the Indian version of fascism. It plays upon the basest instincts of man.” “I call it communalism,” he says, “I call it by another name: fascism. Ultimately, the result would be similar to what happened to Hitler and fascism in Europe, but I do not want India to follow that terrible path.” So it is this shift. And this – to create this shift – you are quite right that the mindset of the people was, as you said, for decades, the other way around. Now, how do you change it but by force? And that is why this shift is occurring in this violent manner. I mean, that is how I would like to – that is why they have to interfere at all levels. What you are taught in schools, what is in your textbooks… I mean, for example, they’ve just brought out the Partition Horrors Remembrance Day. You know, instead of celebrating independence, you now want to focus on the partition. And they have created an NCERT booklet – you know, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which creates school textbooks – they have a booklet on partition. And it says, “Do you know who is responsible for the partition? The British did not want it; they wanted to leave a united India. It is Jinnah and the Congress.” So you see, you get a complete inversion of history. And that is why you have to completely demolish the national movement if you now want to be a nationalist. That is their problem. They want to call themselves nationalists, but here we already have a powerful national movement. How do you demolish it?You can only do it the Kangana Ranaut way. You must have heard her when she said that India got independence only in 2014, and when somebody said what happened in 1947, she famously said that in 1947 “bheek mili thi.” So in other words, in one sweep, from Bhagat Singh to Naoroji, everybody’s become beggars. You see? So this is what is going on at the moment. A complete inversion of history is what is being attempted.Sidharth Bhatia: Tell me, in your experience and in your research, do you think that in RSS shakhas etc., this narrative has been taught for many, many decades – that Nehru was a villain? I mean, let’s concentrate on Nehru for the time being. Has this idea of Nehru – because years ago, much before the BJP became the government, years ago I happened to come across people who were steeped in the RSS philosophy, and they were not people who went to shakhas, by the way, they were adjacent to the whole shakha idea, who used to say this very freely, that “if only Patel had become PM” and “Nehru family is the one family we detest.” So, do you think it is inculcated, and the kids are brainwashed at an early age in the RSS world?Aditya Mukherjee: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There is so much evidence on this, so much writing. For example, give you an interesting example for your listeners… as you said, the attention span may not be long. There is this view that has been spread in the RSS circles for decades that Nehru, Jinnah, and Edwina Mountbatten used to attend college together, a college called Harris College in London. And Edwina used to date one day Nehru, the other day Jinnah, etc., etc., and it is she who played this game, and that is what led to the partition of the country. There is no such college as Harris College. Their age gap is such that they could not have been together in college. I mean, it is complete imagination. And these are examples. So it is not new. This has been – and the reason, one of my beliefs, is that one reason why Nehru is selected so much – after all, if you wanted to attack somebody who was secular and who really stood for the Idea of India, it should have been Gandhiji far more. I mean, nobody comes close to him for arguing, after he died, for the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity and stuff like that. Right?But why Nehru? I believe because they believe that Nehru took away the “low-hanging fruit” from them. You see, if you look at the period ’46 to ’48, which we call – it’s like a holocaust-like situation in India. You know, from the Kolkata killings in 1946 onwards, then the partition riots, millions made homeless, lakhs of people killed. In that situation, the Mahatma is murdered. And Nehru understood this, and this is what he has to say, and this is what he did, and that is why he’s hated so much. He says – he says the effort was to change the nature of the Indian state by seizing power; a group is trying to do that. His words are the following: “It would appear that a deliberate coup d’état was planned involving the killing of several persons” – and now documents have shown that it was not only Gandhi – “and the promotion of general disorder to enable a particular group concerned to seize power.” The group he’s referring to is RSS. “The conspiracy appears to have been a fairly widespread one, spreading to some of the states and so on.” And he takes this on head-on. He sees this. He’s writing to the Chief Ministers, you know, that there is this danger of a coup happening. And what does he do? He converts the first General Election into a virtual referendum. When he travels about 40,000 kilometres – with no 8,000 crore plane – and he addresses roughly one out of 10 people directly, as I’m talking to you. You know? So it’s a massive effort. And he’s not doing it alone, of course. He’s doing it with still – the aura of the national movement is still there. And all over the country, the issue that is raised is, “Do we want India to be a mirror image of Pakistan? Do we want, instead of a Muslim Pakistan, do we want a Hindu India, or do we want a secular India?” And the first election, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Ram Rajya Parishad, and all the small parties like that put together could get a total of only 10 seats out of 489, and only 6% of the votes. In other words, they were decimated. So here was the opportunity they wanted – to convert that situation of extreme Hindu-Muslim enmity that had emerged to create a Hindu state – and here was Nehru standing in the way in a big way. You know? And this is just one example.But he consistently produced a critique and punctured almost all the ideas they promote. For example, the notion of “Hindu nationalism” – after all, they are now calling themselves nationalists. As early as 1933, this is what Nehru had to say about their Hindu nationalism. He says, “It’s very easy for a majority communalist to masquerade as a nationalist.” And then he critiques that. He says, “That is not true. The policy of the Hindu Mahasabha” – that is what it was before the Jan Sangh, etc., were born – “is one of cooperation with the foreign government so that by abasing themselves before it, they might get a few crumbs. This is the betrayal of the freedom struggle, denial of every vestige of nationalism, suppressive of every manly instinct in the Hindus.” This is very important because they are the “macho,” the “muscular,” the masculine nationalism that they talk about, isn’t it? He says, “It is suppressive of every manly instinct in the Hindus. Anything more degrading, reactionary, anti-national, anti-progressive, and harmful than the policy of the Hindu Mahasabha is difficult to imagine.” You see? You know, we have easily accepted this notion of “Hindu nationalism.” The phrase was never accepted in the colonial period by the nationalists. They were called communalists. It’s Christophe Jaffrelot who first popularised it, because in the West they don’t understand “communalism,” so they talked of Hindu nationalism. And now the press, the media, everybody’s talking about Hindu nationalism. It’s a contradiction in terms. How can you be a Hindu nationalist in a multi-religious country? You know?Sidharth Bhatia: So that actually brings me to – exactly what brings me to this. So let’s say the media… I have my views on the media, but to put it very briefly: the media, A) may be controlled, but B) there may be young people in the media or influential people in the media who have their own interest in promoting this. They may actually believe it because they have very little understanding of the old historical process. They may not have read it deeply. And what I find fascinating, in a sense, is that people who have been through that whole education system that India has over the last few decades before these changes – even if they have reached – I have met people from IITs, and I use the word – I mention IITs for a specific reason, you’ll understand – who believe in this entire thing. Or at least some of this entire thing, to say, “Oh my God, Nehru was the villain in so many cases”, “Patel should have been PM”, and “we need a tough leader” and all that. And the irony of an IITian saying this after having been through that subsidised engineering education and gone overseas is simply mind-boggling. And they don’t get the irony. So when you have that, the narrative broadcast on a daily basis becomes that of these Hindu nationalists because there is nothing to oppose it. This is what has been absorbed in their systems. Isn’t that so?Aditya Mukherjee: It would be completely wrong to say that there is nothing to oppose it. The education system, particularly at the higher levels,… the critique of the communal position started from the 1960s. Some of the best historical work, some of the best sociological work, political scientists – all the names that you know of in Indian academia oppose them. Right? And the best institutions oppose them. And therefore they attack. Why do you think they’re attacking JNU in a manner that Hitler attacked Frankfurt? You have to kill those institutions where questioning arises, where people raise these questions, and their views are accepted. So I do not think that the Indian intelligentsia has completely gone over.The IITs are a very peculiar case for the following reasons. One, despite the recent efforts to bring in the social sciences into the IITs, it has not been a great success. Even now, it is all about scoring the maximum marks so that you can go abroad. The last thing they’ve picked up is the scientific temper there. They have acquired the skills to do certain mechanical jobs – you know, become engineers and be a cog in the machine in the United States – but certainly they have not picked up the scientific temper. And as studies have shown, they have not ended up even pursuing science. Their notion – those who migrate – the reason they give (and this is one of my side interests, to study them), “Why do they migrate? What is the reasoning they give?” They always say that “science is universal, you can’t pursue science in India because even your chemicals are spoiled, everything is ‘kharab’, so we have to pursue science, we have to go abroad.” Now, George Sudarshan – you must know of him, the great physicist/mathematician – wrote an article trying to understand this. And he said – this is published, I can give you the reference – he said that Indian scientists who go to the United States do very well; they are among the first to get their PhDs, etc. And by the way, the latest statistics are 95% of Indian scientists who go into STEM areas to do their PhDs in the US, stay there. So, this “filtration theory,” let’s forget about that one. So he says they are the first to get their PhDs, and then there’s a bit of a difficulty. They get their postdocs, they still become professors, etc., and then that’s it – no breakthroughs. One Har Gobind Khorana every 10-15 years out of a billion people. You’re selecting those who get 99.9 or something. Look at the cream that travels – entire batches of IITs from all over the country, even Regional Engineering Colleges, sitting in the United States – and look at the output. And his answer was that this is because Indian scientists are one player in the symphony, the orchestra that is played by the American establishment, of which the conductor is the American establishment. He says you cannot pursue even science, like the social sciences, in the abstract. It cannot be pursued with no link to your society and your people.And there are examples given. After all, the big breakthroughs in science that we talk about – from Bose to J.C. Bose – did occur in India. Some in Dhaka, some in Kolkata, some in Chennai. But that apart… they’re saying that… I’ll give you an example. I met a top IIT topper in Delhi – a school topper, IIT topper, my age, in the United States. And I asked him, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m the Vice President of such and such company,” one of the world’s biggest companies in telecommunications. And he said that, “I am at the moment designing an earphone which you can put inside your ear and keep it for hours, and it will not hurt.” And I said, “Wow, what a breakthrough. I mean, your hair must be standing on end with excitement.” You see? You do not make breakthroughs if [it’s just that]. But if you were creating a drug which would prevent malaria, which killed half your community or your parents, or typhoid, probably you’d make something different. In other words, science is not unrelated to society. And when you link the two… which is what has happened with the IITs. One IIT professor – Sidharth, I must narrate this story to you – we bumped into each other in a service station, in a car service. And as all Indians, you know, we don’t have to be introduced; we start chatting, quickly find out each other’s caste and villages and slot them, etc. So that was all done. And then once he realised I was a professor, he says, “Professor Mukherjee, I’m delighted today.” So I thought, you know, some student of his must have made some breakthrough, some discovery. He says, “Professor Mukherjee, my whole class has gone to the US.” You know, as a JNU professor, I almost fainted. Look at what we have created.Sidharth Bhatia: No, so that is what I was trying to actually get at. The irony of an IITian who went to an institution which was subsidised, which was set up by Nehru, believing in this propaganda. And that is because – you’re absolutely right – that so much work is being done in India and there is pushback, but that’s not in the direction I was… perhaps I should have concentrated on this to say, “Why does this person not then apply his mind to say, ‘Hello, where have I come from?'” That couldn’t have happened without Nehru. Because at some stage, they must have got to know this over their five years of study in IIT, and yet they believe in this RSS propaganda. Now, one could argue that their minds are, in that respect, completely hollow, and something has to fill them. But haven’t they been to school? Haven’t they been to college? I can’t understand.Aditya Mukherjee: You’re so right that the product of what Nehru started… You know, if you look at the 1950s, the First Plan and the Second Plan are not only about creating what he called the “temples of modern India” – the bridges and the dams and the steel plants. The 50s and 60s are the period when every institution that we know of – not only IITs and IIMs and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, National Physical Laboratory, National Chemical Laboratory, etc., but Sangeet Natak Akademi, National School of Drama, the Film Institute, the National Institute of Virology… every institution was created during that period. And the product of that is today – India is what it is because of that. More than half of our GDP comes from the service sector, and the service sector comes from the knowledge economy. Right? Now the thing is, but it’s not only that you’re ungrateful; it’s a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding of history, a lack of understanding, for example, of what colonialism is. I get amazed that if you ask an intelligent person today, “What is colonialism?” they say colonialism means you export raw materials and import manufactured goods. But that’s not what it is. Colonialism is the transfer of whatever is the critical factor for production at a particular historical time. In the pre-industrial world, colonialism was grabbing other people’s land and labour. After the Industrial Revolution, colonialism is draining capital from other countries – a drain of wealth. Today, knowledge is the critical factor of production, and colonialism is the transfer of knowledge from one part of the world to the other. And those who are participating in this transfer are celebrating it. You pat yourself on the back while actually performing a colonial act of transferring the critical factor of production from India to the United States.Sidharth Bhatia: Clearly. Clearly. Yeah, please go ahead.Aditya Mukherjee: You know, when I said that 95% of Indians who go there, stay there… in the United States, in the 1960s, this whole process started. Because the IIT products began to come out only in the 60s, right? And we began this transfer. In the 1960s, only 14% of PhDs in these scientific areas, the STEM areas, that were awarded in the United States were by foreigners. Today it is 40%. You see? So two out of five who contribute to the knowledge economy in the US, which is what keeps it at the top, are outsiders – people like us. So we hand it over to them, and they rake it in, and we pat ourselves on the back. It’s quite amazing.Sidharth Bhatia: So one question that I have searched an answer for is: while Mr. Modi and the entire RSS infra-ecosystem will have no hesitation in attacking Nehru – and you have explained very cogently what the reasons were – and that has been transferred now to the Gandhi family with some additional criticism because the Gandhi family, and Rahul Gandhi especially, are a real threat to them – they perceive them as a threat. Why is Indira Gandhi missing from their critiques? I thought that she’s not… I mean…Aditya Mukherjee: Oh, no, no. Emergency is brought up repeatedly.Sidharth Bhatia: Only the Emergency. That is to highlight their own role in it. But otherwise, there is no – I have not read a single real statement saying “Indira Gandhi was a villain” or whatever. The Emergency is to taunt, but everything else she did – bank nationalisation, privy purses abolition – that should go against the Jan Sangh/BJP philosophy. But is it…? I agree Indira Gandhi was as much, if not a stronger critic and knew how to punish the communal forces.Aditya Mukherjee: You know, so… and get an apology from them.Sidharth Bhatia: And get an apology from them! Absolutely. Put them in jail, get apologies from them, and still not buy into their narrative. So you’re right, it is a good question. But I think it is because – you’re right – she took away the cake from them. After all, even Vajpayee had to call her “Durga” and all that, Pakistan “gubia”, etc., etc. But still, I feel that because they have to masquerade as nationalists, they have to undo the entire freedom struggle. And the leaders of the freedom struggle – Gandhi, Nehru – are critical in that. And you’re right in making the other further point: that for the current political situation, Nehru is ideal. You know, the family connection is to be established – that it is the progeny of Nehru who continue to do “vuri” and stuff like that. You’re right. But the Indira Gandhi question is a good one; one will have to think about it a little.Sidharth Bhatia: I have a theory. I have a theory that secretly, they admire her for her toughness. For, of course, splitting Pakistan into two, but also for her toughness, for her resoluteness, and for her decisiveness. And they admire her. And the fact that she hammered them, literally, is something that appeals to them somehow. So I have a feeling that she’s worthy of admiration. She’s like a goddess. So this is worth pursuing in [the conversation].Aditya Mukherjee: Even if she was on the other side, isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying.Sidharth Bhatia: Correct. Correct.Aditya Mukherjee: That is the kind of person we should be – authoritarian and all that. And it is those aspects that they would like to imitate, isn’t it?Sidharth Bhatia: Yes, authoritarian and decisive against Pakistan. Both appealing. Now, you’ve read in this morning’s papers – this will come out only on Friday – but people must have read in the papers about MGNREGA – Gandhiji’s name has been taken out. Earlier, Gandhiji was reduced to a pair of spectacles and a “jhaadu” and Swachh Bharat; he became a symbol for that. But Gandhi’s other messages, as you said, he’s the man who was really all for Hindu-Muslim unity and was killed because of that by a member of this ecosystem. Why have they got it…? My question has been answered in a sense, but I would like you to expand on that: why Gandhiji? They can go – you think they can go this far and no further with Gandhiji, and that’s why they’re doing all this?Aditya Mukherjee: Yeah. I mean, their real target is Gandhi. After all, they killed Gandhi, not Nehru. Let’s be very clear. So they understand that. Though one BJP person in Kerala did say that Godse killed the wrong person, the shot should have been aimed at Nehru. But that is not the view of this ecosystem. They do believe that Gandhi is the real enemy in every way because he even takes away religion from them. You see, they can say Nehru is an agnostic, he’s westernised, this, that and the other, but you can’t even do that with Gandhiji. You see? The “greatest living Hindu.” So Gandhi is their biggest sort of… You know, what is the phrase for it? …thorn in the side. You see? They have to get rid of Gandhiji, but he’s the most difficult. And it’s not easy. I mean, you look foolish enough when you attack Nehru, but to do that to Gandhi, you’ll have to… it is much, much more difficult. And therefore, to some extent, Nehru is the first step.Aditya Mukherjee: But what you do with Gandhiji is rather than directly attack him, reduce him, as you said correctly, to a “sanitary inspector.” That basically Swachh Bharat spectacles on top of every dustbin. And that’s it. Nothing about his Hindu-Muslim unity, nothing about civil liberties, nothing about the fact that he goes to jail under Section 124A, the sedition section, for writing articles and insisting that “I have the freedom… the right to free press and I will continue to write” and going to jail for that. So, Gandhi is, in every way, all the qualities that I described for Nehru apply to Gandhi even more. You know, his secularism, his most important resistance to oppression of any kind, whether it be caste, whether it be class, whether it be national or gender – he stood up against any kind of oppression. And that is why he is the global figure for anyone who creates a movement anywhere, whether it’s Lech Walesa or whether it is Martin Luther King or whether it is the Tahrir Square – in Tahrir Square, they were distributing thousands of copies of Gene Sharp’s book on Gandhi, you know, “how to do nonviolent struggle.” So it would be a bit stupid on their part to take Gandhi on directly as yet. But undoubtedly, the effort is to do precisely that: undermine him from MGNREGA, take away his name… and as I said, you undermine Gandhi by undermining the freedom struggle. What was the freedom struggle? The freedom fighters were fighting among themselves… Nehru against Gandhi versus this… makes a mockery of our freedom struggle. One of the greatest mass movements in world history, they’re making a mockery out of it.Sidharth Bhatia: Do you fear that a new generation will grow up with this narrative in their systems?Aditya Mukherjee: They will try. But as Nehru says in The Discovery of India, correctly, that the national movement also draws from our civilizational history. It is not so easy to overturn a civilisational history. And what Nehru finds in our civilisational history is a “dialogical tradition,” an idea that was picked up by Amartya Sen and celebrated in The Argumentative Indian – the idea of justice, etc. The idea that from the ancient past, the people learned to live with each other and that the differences were resolved over time through struggles, through new religions coming up like Buddhism, like Sikhism, like Kabir, like the Sufi movement, like the Bhakti movement – that Indian people were evolving a mechanism of living together over time. That is what we draw from our history. And that history is not so easy to overturn overnight. Apart from the 100-year-old struggle, as I said, which went deep down into the minds of the people, it is a long 5,000-year-old civilisational history. And you’re not going to overturn it with a foreign idea. Let’s be very clear: the idea of their nationalism is a foreign idea. When nation-states emerged in the world, they first emerged in Europe, in the 17th and 18th centuries. The basic principle was “one language, one religion.” Catholic France, Protestant England. Not even Christian – Catholic France. Unification of Italy on the basis of one language, unification of Germany on the basis of one language. The British said that when the Indian national movement was coming up, he said, “Who told you you can be a nation? You’re not even a nation. You are a ‘geographical expression’.” That is the phrase that was used. “You are a geographical expression – South Asia. How can you be a nation?” In that situation, to imagine a nation which will celebrate diversity was a new idea, was a brilliant idea. And it was possible partly because of our history and partly because of the stalwarts who created this vision of Indian nationalism. That is Indian nationalism. What they are bringing in is this European notion, which, unless they were fought against by democratic forces, ended up with Hitler and Mussolini. It is not accidental that their gurus are Hitler and Mussolini. Their leaders went to Mussolini, met him, understood the structure, and tried to implement it here. Their biggest ideologues have said, “We must learn from Hitler, what racial pride is, see what Hitler did to the Jews.”Sidharth Bhatia: And now they’re friends with Israel.Aditya Mukherjee: Absolutely. And now they’re friends with Israel, precisely because this anti-Muslim aspect is very, very much there. So you’re not – you’re not deeply pessimistic that this will get into the systems of young children over the next few decades?Aditya Mukherjee: I’m deeply disturbed that such an attempt at a reversal of a great experiment in world history – after all, the Indian experiment was a great experiment – that there is an attempt to reverse it, it deeply distresses me. But that they are going to succeed… A) I think our federalism will save us. India is not up… you know, when I travel to Kerala, when I travel to Telangana, or when I travel to Tamil Nadu, Bengal, I don’t get the same despondency when I hear what is happening in the national capital and in UP and one or two other states. You know? So they have not been able to, as yet… this is not to be sanguine. I think we need to fight back. I think the Indian people… and this is what Cardoso said when he came to India in the 1990s – the Brazilian President who brought Brazil out of military dictatorship into democracy and globalisation. He said that “India has an advantage over Brazil.” And he met a group of intellectuals in Delhi in the 90s, and when somebody said “what advantage?”, he said, “Your advantage is that you have a long tradition of struggle beginning from Gandhiji, and your people will not permit India’s entry into the globalization process in a manner that you give up your sovereignty or you abandon your poor, unlike Brazil.” He said it is your democratic tradition and your tradition of struggle and resistance. The media doesn’t cover it, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t resistance. It happened on the ground – Punjab happened, the CAA movement happened.Sidharth Bhatia: In fact, if you think about it, the reason why a trade deal is not going through is because of this understanding that there will be resistance if they sign on the dotted line.Aditya Mukherjee: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.Sidharth Bhatia: So, but – you’re right. I mean, if you’re deeply disturbed, I think that is the general sense that some of the things do somehow make an impact here and there. And this reversal of decades of history just being overturned, or attempted at least… There is an attempt to overturn it. That it is being made – the very fact that it is being made – is a disturbing fact. I personally think, for whatever it’s worth, that you just can’t get rid of Nehru in this country. It is impossible. Gandhiji, of course, is at a different level and on a pedestal. But Nehru… you cannot get [rid of]. He is there in the system, just like you can’t, just because you have decided, get rid of the Mughals, you can’t get rid of the British… the whole British colonial structure. History does not vanish because you want it to vanish. That won’t happen.Aditya Mukherjee: Absolutely.Sidharth Bhatia: So let’s hold on to that thought for the time being. But you have explained the reasons, which is what is, for me, for our listeners, a very important thing. We see it happening every day, but what are the reasons? You’ve explained them so cogently, so thank you very much for it, Professor.Aditya Mukherjee: But end with one more thing. You know, please… when one despairs – and I got a hint of that – when we talk to young people, they say, “But what can we do? Look at the media – it is controlled; the police are controlled; the judiciary is compromised. How can we do anything? We are doomed, kind of thing. This is going to go on, they’re going to go on winning the elections because the Election Commission is compromised, etc., etc.” So we tell them, as students of history, that if you look back a hundred years, when the British were ruling in India, all of these things were much worse. You know? The fear of the police, the fear of the judiciary, and the control over the press were no less than what they are today. And yet, the genius of the Indian people – they found a way of resistance. So I’m quite sure that even today, our people will find some way of resisting this onslaught on our civilisation.Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah. On that wonderful note, I thank you once again, Professor Aditya Mukherjee, for joining me and joining our listeners to explain this whole thing. That is Professor Aditya Mukherjee, ex-Professor of Contemporary History in JNU, but no less a celebrated author, especially on Nehru – a book which is absolutely a must-read, by the way. Professor, I may… just a thought has been occurring to me for a while: I think you should now consider a book on “Why this obsession with Nehru?” because I think we need a book for the future. So… and he explained very, very cogently why this dispensation, why this Prime Minister and his party and the RSS in general, are so anti-Nehru and anti-Gandhi. We’ll be back once again next time with another guest. Till then, from my team and me, goodbye.