Jawaharlal Nehru: The man and the my th

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It was bad enough that unemployment offices in many states including Nevada failed miserably during the pandemic while facing an avalanche of claims But the fact that they stiffed many struggling Americans while doling out billions to fraudsters makes the fiasco worse

On thursday, a federal report put a price tag on the rip-offs the inspector general for the Labor Department now estimates that $45 6 billion was stolen over two years by criminals using false identities to file for unemployment claims that’s triple the estimate of a year ago the damage may be even more severe the Washington Post reported that investigators said they lacked complete data and focused on only “high-risk” areas

“the two factors raised the prospect that they could uncover billions of dollars in additional theft in the months to come,” the Post reported this week In addition the inspector general told Congress in March that overpayments of jobless benefits in addition to fraud could total more than $160 billion the types of scams varied widely the Post found that fraudsters filed multiple claims in numerous states simultaneously and sometimes used Social Security numbers of the deceased In California, criminals posed as prison inmates including some on death row to pocket checks to make matters worse, state agencies weren’t eager to provide information on this calamity Reuters reported that the inspector general s office said it had “difficulty getting unemployment insurance data from state workforce agencies until subpoenas were issued In some cases, the data sent was incomplete or unusable ” Chalk that up to bureaucratic hubris and the insular nature of government agencies Accountability is an afterthought when there are no repercussions for incompetence State agencies understandably buckled under the weight of an unprecedented situation and many have been rewarded with increased budgets and equipment upgrades Yet the problems persist Nevada continues to have a backlog of jobless cases, some dating back a year the inspector general found a similar inertia at the federal level the report concluded that the Labor Department has failed to implement previous recommendations to “collaborate with state agencies to establish effective controls to mitigate fraud and to work with Congress to require state agencies to cross-match high-risk areas ” Reuters reported State law enforcement agencies and the Justice Department have brought a number of cases to court involving defendants accused of fraudulently obtaining unemployment and other pandemic benefits Last week the DOJ announced it had reached the “milestone” of charging 1,000 people with bilking the jobless system during the pandemic When they add a few zeros to that number, perhaps they’ll have something to crow about

Th e fears were genuine Many influential, moneyed, individuals and big companies preferred to give big chunks of money to the ruling party the Opposition cried foul as it lacked the resources to fight elections in what was turning out to be a one-sided electoral fight If your history lessons are weak, you can easily mistake the time and imagery to be, say, the year 2018 and the overwhelming political dominance of India s political space by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi that would be a mistake An eerily similar situation prevailed on the eve of the second General election in 1957 the Congress party, the then dominant force in India’s politics was on the verge of gathering a war chest of 5 crore, a gigantic sum at that time the nascent Opposition worried about its ability to muster enough cash to even stay in the reckoning But in these days of alleged democratic backsliding these facts are forgotten, almost conveniently

In Nehru’s India: A history in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press; 304 pages; $39 95), taylor C Sherman sketches a very different history In parsing the myth of a successful democracy during Jawaharlal Nehru’s time she says, Although large-scale corruption tied to permit-andlicence raj is often dated to the late 1960s or early 1970s it can be traced at least to the second general election ” She highlights the now forgotten Serajuddin affair in which a company trading in manganese and chromite was given mining licences and favours this was in return for a donation of 10,000 to Keshav Dev Malaviya, the then minister for mines and fuel the problems that corroded India’s electoral practices such as the inability of the election Commission to ensure expenditures by candidates within prescribed limits corporate contributions to political parties and more can be dated to this period the answer has much to do with the myth created assiduously over time, that in Nehru’s time democracy in India was pristine and was suffused with idealism the other part of the myth is that Nehru’s successors distorted democracy until the Modi era when it was finally twisted out of shape to be something less than democracy Sherman, a professor of history at the London School of economics is clear on this point She writes It is when they remain unexamined, or when they are marshalled to form part of an argument about something else, especially about the present that the myths are produced and amplified most powerfully ”

Why should any of this matter now, 65 years later?

It is instructive that none of the members of the Nehru industry are mentioned in the book s acknowledgments this is not a coincidence: this group acts as a gatekeeper for what is acceptable and what is unacceptable on Nehru scholarship in India It is also worth noting that new interpretations of the Nehru period have come from scholars who work abroad tripurdaman Singh’s Sixteen Stormy Days: the Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India (2021) is another example

What is interesting about Sherman’s interpretation of the Nehru age is her steering clear of any political interpretations” liberal or conservative this is unlikely to please any of the warring camps in contemporary India, with the possible exception of the Left She notes, By the end of the Nehru era many of those claiming to speak on behalf of Muslims and Dalits were anything but satisfied with India s official secularism Focused as it was on monumental spaces revered personalities and iconic pieces of legislation, this secularism had left India’s least advantaged communities beleaguered and frustrated in their daily lives ” this comes close to leftist interpretations that have now abandoned the myth of the Nehruvian “golden age and reason that Indian communalism is a much older problem dating far earlier than the contested 1980s

At the core of Sherman’s interpretation is the idea of a myth as a gap between what existed in reality and what was projected later this can be true of any facet of social life and to that extent Nehruvian myths are no different

All Nehruvian myths non-alignment, socialism, successful democracy a strong state high modernism and Nehru as “architect of Independent India” have this gap in varying measures In some cases, this gap is small and in others more of projection and very little of reality What makes Nehruvian myths striking is their persistent hold over the imagination of India’s intellectuals (but not its people: they have far more prosaic concerns) It is the differing mechanisms by which these myths were propagated that make her book a riveting study

Nehruvian socialism is an interesting example Sherman says that during his time as prime minister Nehru refused to define the expression “socialism ” the use of that word without a clear definition has created a gap that has been filled with the assumption Indian socialism can be equated with Soviet-style planning how did this lazy interpretation arise? this was done by a combination of politics and history In this case, the Swatantra Party independent India’s first liberal political experiment laid the groundwork for a caricature of Indian socialism as having “totalitarian” ambitions In the author ’s delicious words, “In the absence of a more complex picture, the blazing furnaces of steel plants have been left to stand for India’s official socialism ” the reality was somewhat more complicated Nehruvian socialism was an attempt to solve collective action problems in areas as diverse as irrigation (such as the construction of multi-purpose river valley dams), industry (factories owned and controlled by the government for producing basic goods like iron and steel and pharmaceuticals) and other sectors this is closer to the imagination of Dadabhai Naoroji than the brutal plans of Joseph Stalin

As with so many other myths Indian socialism acquired a life of its own And it was damaging Nehru bequeathed the idea along with a part of the apparatus (such as the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act 1951) to his daughter It was during her time that India’s economy was entangled in a web of controls and quotas that choked growth Parts of that pernicious legacy such as the idea that welfare is synonymous with a statecontrolled economy are yet to be overcome Sherman’s analysis of the myth of a “strong state” is equally interesting She says the truth of India inheriting a strong state from the raj has more to do with the fact of inheritance and not the quality of the bequest this is true Forging a coherent nation-state from a patchwork of independent principalities stretched the capacity of the Indian state to an extreme Where hyderabad could be integrated by mere “police action”, Kashmir had to be carved out as a distinct political sphere Sherman states, here is the pattern: Indian statesmen and stateswomen recognised that India was a union in the making to meet the differential needs of the nation-to-be, asymmetric privileges were granted and basic rights were curtailed on an exceptional basis

While meant to be transitional, these measures became entrenched, as each attracted a constituency that argued for its extension this is on target to give one example, by the end of the 20th century, “asymmetric federalism” originally carved out as an exception due to the weakness of the Nehruvian state gained a hydra-like character as India turned into a fractured and dysfunctional polity

So much so, it has become an article of faith among India’s intellectuals that India’s democracy can survive only by furthering it Never mind the fact that taking this idea to its logical conclusion would have sundered India’s unity the very danger that Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel did everything in their power to avoid Nehru was India s first prime minister and by the fact alone an interesting figure But he is not a deity to be worshipped on an intellectual altar Sherman has done well to restore some credibility to scholarship on him

In Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths by Taylor C Sherman, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, ₹ $39 95