What Sitaram ji Said: Encounters with Jawaharlal Nehru

We have briefly introduced the invaluable contributions of Sitaram Goel, one of the strongest voices in the post-Independence era of India speaking up for and defending Sanatana Dharma, and at the same time, offering sledgehammer-like blows to the combined forces of the residues of imperialism that had so horribly wrecked Bharata for nearly a thousand years. Yet, for the most part, he was in a minority fighting against the new imperialism: Nehruism. The term by itself is rather cruelly tragic. The fact that we had to invent productive suffixes named after a fickle-minded but despotically shrewd political operator who became Prime Minister through backroom manipulation is both the cruelty and the tragedy: “Nehruvian” and “Nehruism.”

But what even Nehru-worshippers obliquely agree is the fact that Nehru was as alien to the native culture and values and traditions of Bharata as were the British. Among his junior contemporaries, it was Sitaram Goel who brought out these facets with unrivalled truthfulness and daring.

Sitaram Goel’s untiring and relentless exposes of Jawaharlal Nehru were based solely on two factors: Nehru’s own words (both spoken and written) and actions. One can broadly classify Sitaram Goel’s exposes of Nehru under these heads:

• Nehru as a freedom fighter
• Nehru as a political leader of the Congress party
• Nehru as Prime Minister

Without further ado, let’s begin. Emphases added.

Defining Features of Nehruism

Today, I view Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as a bloated Brown Sahib, and Nehruism as the combined embodiment of all the imperialist ideologies Islam, Christianity, White Man’s Burden, and Communism that have flooded this country in the wake of foreign invasions. And I do not have the least doubt in my mind that if India is to live, Nehruism must die. Of course, it is already dying under the weight of its sins against the Indian people, their country, their society, their economy, their environment, and their culture. What I plead is that a conscious rejection of Nehruism in all its forms will hasten its demise, and save us from the mischief which it is bound to create further if it is allowed to linger.

Sitaram ji wrote these prophetic words in 1993. Between then and now, we have seen how even vestiges of this same lingering Nehruism sputtered but bounced back and finally suffered its greatest setback in 2014. And we’ve seen the enormous damage that these mere vestiges inflicted upon India between 2004-14. However, the “conscious rejection of Nehruism in all its forms” hasn’t occurred even as we speak.

Pandit Nehru was by no means a unique character. Nor is Nehruism a unique phenomenon for that matter. Such weak minded persons and such subservient thought processes have been seen in all societies that have suffered the misfortune of being conquered and subjected to alien rule for some time…Viewed in this perspective, Pandit Nehru was no more than a self alienated Hindu, and Nehruism is not much more than Hindu baiting born out of and sustained by a deep seated sense of inferiority vis a vis Islam, Christianity, and the modern West.    

Compare Nehru with his great grandson, Rahul Gandhi. In fact, the self-alienation of Nehru that Sitaram ji so correctly diagnoses found its perverse fulfilment in Rajiv Gandhi marrying a white-skinned foreigner, Sonia Maino. Back in Jawaharlal Nehru’s own lifetime, large portions of his household and parts of his extended family were practicing Hindus. The atmosphere of the Nehru home was largely Hindu. And if Rahul Gandhi uses the word “Hindu” only for the purposes of vote-shopping, we see the full, generational consequence of self-alienated Hindus.

It is not an accident that the Nehruvian regime has behaved like the British Raj in most respects. The Nehruvians have looked at India not as a Hindu country but as a multi racial, multi religious and multi cultural cockpit. They have tried their best, like the British, to suppress the mainstream society and culture with the help of minorities, that is, the colonies crystallized by imperialism…The partition of the country was brought about by Islamic imperialism. But the Nehruvians blamed it shamelessly on what they stigmatized as Hindu communalism…The Nehruvian formula is that Hindus should stand accused in every situation, no matter who is the real culprit.

Nothing has really changed even in the last four years despite the Nehruvian-Indira Congress suffering a mortal blow in 2014. The mushrooming and proliferation of fake news factories like The Wire, Scroll, The Print, the unhinged insanity of the Nehruvian establishment populated by the NDTVs, Romila and Karan Thapars of the world continue to follow the same script of accusing Hindus “in every situation, no matter who the culprit.” I would hasten to add that while the Nehruvian political and ideological establishment has lost its enormous, monopolistic clout, the Nehruvian mental and psychological establishment remains largely intact: even among sections of the BJP.

Encounters with Jawaharlal Nehru the Person and Leader

It was my great good fortune that Pandit Nehru never became my hero. Heroes have a way of inhibiting cold reasoning and calm reflection among those who admire them. My reason and reflection have suffered an eclipse, every now and then. But not for long. And not for a moment under the spell of Pandit Nehru.  

This is a fundamental point that we shall return to frequently in this series. I will go so far as to claim that every person who’s rooted in the pulse of Bharata can and will never regard Jawaharlal Nehru as a person of any stature. Indeed, this lusty political operator himself was instinctively aware of the limited reach of his appeal such as it maybe. Which is why he rode on the non-violent pony named Mohandas Gandhi to sit on the coveted seat. If popular mandate is the cornerstone of electoral politics and democracy, Nehru’s appeal wouldn’t have made him even a Chief Minister.

During my school days in my village and, later on, in Delhi, the Freedom Movement for me meant Mahatma Gandhi… The only other leader of whom I became increasingly aware was Pandit Nehru. There was quite a folklore afloat about him. He was reputed to be the only son of a fabulously rich man who lived in a palace at Allahabad, who got his clothes stitched in London and laundered in Paris, who had used high denomination currency notes as fuel for preparing tea when the viceroy paid him a visit, and who had blisters all over his tender skin when he put on khadi clothes for the first time.

So what happened when this tender tyrant-in-formative-years jumped into the freedom struggle is the subject of the next instalment of this series.