The Real Threat to India’s Unity

The Real Threat to India’s Unity

1989 5 May 8 The Real Threat to India’s Unity (346) It is now a matter of history that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru regarded the perennial threat of Hindu dominance as a major danger to the unity of India, a unity which could survive only through a commitment to secularism.

A biography * of former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, edited by M.J. Akbar provides an exhaustive study on the subject. In its 27th chapter it is written that Nehru regarded the perennial threat of Hindu dominance as a major danger to the unity of India, a unity which could survive only through a commitment to secularism. He had kept the communal elements in the Congress under strong check. As his own influence increased, theirs declined, and in the 1950’s the communalists of the 1940s were slowly weeded out or put into limbo. In the 1960s Nehru began to worry about what might happen after his death. A little before the Bhubaneshwar session of the Congress, remembers Gundevia, Nehru had joined one of the Friday morning meetings at the foreign office where all the senior & junior bureaucrats gathered. The topic shifted to the professed neutrality of the Indian Civil services. Gundevia asked Nehru, ‘Well Sir, this being the case, what happens if tomorrow, shall we say, the communists came into power? We have had a Communist Government in Kerala. But what happens to the services if the Communists are elected to power, tomorrow, at the Centre, here in Delhi?

Nehru pondered before answering, ‘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?’ A pause, and then the words came slowly and deliberately. ‘The danger to India, mark you, is not communism. It is Hindu right-wing Communalism.’ Before the meeting closed he repeated these two sentences.

The danger predicted by Nehru has now become an ever-present and overwhelming reality.

*M.J. Akbar, Nehru: The Making of lndia, 1988, p. 580.