What Modi, Shah & Kejriwal need to learn from Nehru’s handling of Delhi riots

The recent communal riots in Delhi are another grim reminder of how hatred can cause grievous harm and loss of innocent lives. But this is not the first instance of the Capital facing violent communal clashes involving Hindus and Muslims.

Back in 1947, in the aftermath of Partition, Delhi faced similar rioting with all communities -- Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs -- involved in wholescale violence. Mahatma Gandhi went on a fast in 1948 against the Hindu-Sikh majority of India and the Muslim majority of Pakistan, who were both attacking the minorities in their respective countries.

How did the political leadership of the day, namely the prime minister, respond to the situation? Turns out the conduct of Jawaharlal Nehru in the midst of an unfolding communal storm has many lessons for today’s political chieftains, whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his closest lieutenant, Home Minister Amit Shah, or Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. The leaders of today, by comparison, appear as if they have cut and run from an ongoing disaster. Neither the PM or the HM or even the Delhi CM were to be seen anywhere near the scenes of violence even days after the rioting had stopped. The first government representative to tour the riot-hit areas of north-east Delhi was National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.

After the death of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, India underwent a series of communal clashes, especially in New Delhi. Congress leader and writer Shashi Tharoor in his Nehru: The Invention of India quotes the American journalist Norman Cousins as noting in an essay that there were two eyewitnesses to an incident which took place at night in August the same year, when Nehru himself jumped in the middle of an ongoing attack to stop it.

He spied a Moslem who had just been seized by Hindus. He interposed himself between the man and his attackers. Suddenly a cry went up, “Jawaharlal is here! Don’t hurt Jawaharlal!

The news that ‘Jawaharlal’ himself had entered the scene soon spread through the crowd.

It had a magical effect. People stood still and dropped their arms to their sides. Looted merchandise was dropped. The mob psychologically disintegrated. By the time the police arrived people were dispersing. The riot was over.

In The Many Faces of Jawaharlal, by Aakar Patel, there is a reference to another incident during the same period, where Nehru rushed to save a Muslim tailor by grabbing the lathi the police used to beat up the man. Patel notes:

Nehru was already prime minister when he was passing by a mob that was attacking a Muslim tailor at Chandni Chowk. He ordered the car to stop and jumped in to save the man, swinging a lathi that he took from the police. He had no care for his personal safety and of course, this was in the time when prime ministers did not have the sort of security that they do today. But he thought of nothing other than the victim and the mob, terrified at the enraged leader in their midst, fled.

Nehru also made sure that he reached out to the chief ministers of the states time and again, most notably through letters. He wrote about the need to save the country from communal politics at the time of the East Pakistan riots and its retaliation in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and Dhaka, in late 1947, reiterating “.. the paramount importance of preserving the public services from the virus of communal politics.”

Underlining the urgent need to control the situation before matters got out of hand, he wrote:

We would be faced with a situation of the utmost gravity, viz. of having a government in the office which could not get its decrees executed by its own servants; the sort of thing that is happening quite frequently in South American Republics.

At that point in South America, in Colombia particularly, the Conservative government had begun increasing their reprisals against Liberal protesters and small rebel groups. This retaliation was considered to be the genesis of ‘La Violencia’, a civil war that went on from 1948 to 1958.

Nehru’s actions come back to us today when we are faced with the almost total abdication of personal involvement by top political leaders to defuse situations of violence. It is time to ask, even if there seems little chance of it actually happening, whether our current leaders will learn from history, or will the country be condemned to repeat the mistakes.