Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

Though not formally a Marxist, Jawaharlal had revealed a susceptibility to Marxian analyses of historical forces in his early writings. In an unfinished review of Bertrand Russell’s 1918 book Roads to Freedom Nehru had already articulated the basics of his political philosophy. ‘Present-day democracy,’ he wrote (in 1919), ‘manipulated by the unholy alliance of capital, property, militarism and an overgrown bureaucracy, and assisted by a capitalist press, has proved a delusion and a snare.’ But ‘Orthodox Socialism does not give us much hope . . . [A]n all-powerful state is no lover of individual liberty . . . . Life under Socialism would be a joyless and soulless thing, regulated to the minutest detail by rules and orders. . . .’ At the Lucknow Congress in 1936 Nehru had gone further, declaring: I am convinced that the only key to the solution of the world’s problems and of India’s problems lies in socialism . . . . I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation and the subjection of the Indian people except through socialism. That involves vast and revolutionary changes in our political and social structure, . . . a new civilization radically different from the present capitalist order. Some glimpse we can have of this new civilization in the territories of the USSR . . . . If the future is full of hope it is largely because of Soviet Russia.