FOR well over six decades Nov 14, the birthday of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, has been celebrated as Children’s Day in schools across the country, a day marked by a mixture of ritual formality and fun. In a distant past if the earnest student was given a medal for writing poems and essays on ‘Chacha Nehru’, the rest got to spend the day without the usual tedium of lessons.

This year marks the 125th birth anniversary of Nehru but the day had no children in the frame. Schools were possibly fatigued by the marathon exercise launched by the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Teacher’s Day (Sept 5) to draw millions of schoolchildren into his net. But there has been worse: a complete absence of official celebrations of this Nehru milestone. Instead, with the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) firmly ensconced in Delhi, it was open season on the man who laid the foundations for the Indian republic, a man whose vision shaped the trajectory of the country for not just the 17 years he was at the helm but for decades thereafter.

The long propaganda campaign against Nehru by the BJP and its multifarious outfits that make up the saffron brigade has been a constant over the years. Now, it has taken on a triumphal viciousness, characterised mostly by a lack of concern for veracity. The foremost objective of the right-wing cohorts is to demolish Nehru the nation-builder. No effort is spared to show that all the ills of the country are the fault of the man who put India on the world map during the halcyon days of his stewardship. The big problems for which he is blamed have at the top Kashmir, the slow rate of growth and the planned economy, the China defeat. The right also blames him for trying to turn India into a secular and liberal society, for pandering to the minorities.

For a vast number of Indians — sadly, from the older generations — it is the scientific temper that defines Nehru.

Nehru’s legacy may be in tatters but that it endures in some measure may explain why the BJP (and its right-wing allies) is still so furious with Nehru and is trying so desperately to dismantle it. The biggest casualty of this campaign of calumny is the scientific temper that Nehru so famously and almost obsessively tried to inculcate in a nation steeped in obscurantism, a path that set him quite often in conflict with the nation’s founder, Mahatma Gandhi. And it is here that India is facing its greatest tragedy. Rationalism is taking a backseat as the new regime pursues its putsch to rewrite history and chalk out a macho profile for a resurgent Hindu nation.

Schoolbooks are being rewritten, the university syllabus is being revised and in countless ways, the nation that Nehru built is being dismantled. One small example: for the first time in its history, a prime minister of the secular republic of India gifts 2,500kg sandalwood (cost: Rs19.1 million) to the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu. That was on Modi’s first official visit to Nepal in August.

For a vast number of Indians — sadly, from the older generations — it is the scientific temper that defines Nehru and with it the strong fabric that fashioned India into a secular nation. It is pertinent here to quote him at some length from his 1946 work Discovery of India.

“It is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on preconceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind — all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems. ... The scientific approach and temper are, or should be, a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting and associating with our fellowmen...”

Often, Nehru’s passion for the scientific temper is confused or conflated with his championing of science and technology in India. That itself is an enduring legacy: the vast network of scientific research institutions and the technical institutions of higher education such as the IITs, all of which helped India to become a powerful force in the knowledge economy. Till his death in 1964, Nehru was chairman of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research which set up dozens of topnotch research laboratories during his time. Perhaps, all this was to be expected of Nehru who did Natural Science Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge.

But it’s his larger thinking on scientific enquiry that is so acutely missing in the current regime which harks back to a golden past to conjure up mythical technologies we are supposed to have mastered several millenniums ago. Modi claims publicly, based on Indian myths and legends, that ancient Indians possessed the know-how for plastic surgery (Ganesha, one of the gods, has an elephant head fixed on him) and modern genetics because one of the characters in the Mahabharata begat 100 sons outside her womb!

Even Nehru, surprisingly, did hark back to ancient Indian scientific traditions but with a sharp difference. He cited inspiration from the Upanishads and the Buddha’s teachings to emphasise the reverse of what the current regime propagates. In a 1958 address to students of Guwahati University, Nehru said: “... the spirit of the Upanishads and the teachings of the Buddha, basically, were the method of science: search, inquiry and applying your mind to it, and maybe something more than the mind but it was search by experience, by reasoning. Almost everything you see roundabout you is a product of science and technology. But I am particularly referring to the temper of science, the mental approach, that is, not an approach of a bigot, not the approach of a closed mind, but of an open mind, of inquiry, realising a special way of thinking as it used to be in India.”

The writer is a journalist.

ljishnu@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, December 1st, 2014