Jawaharlal Nehru was a towering figure of this century, a transcendental personality.
One of the facets of Jawaharlalji's multi-dimensional personality was his attachment to Socialism. In 1936, while delivering his Presidential Address at the Congress Session held in Lucknow on April 12, that year, Panditji had said: "I am convinced that the only key to the solution of the world's problems and India's problems lies in socialism, and when I use this word, I do so not in a vague humanitarian way but in the scientific, economic sense. Socialism is, however, something even more than an economic doctrine; it is a philosophy of life and as such also it appeals to me".
Jawaharlalji's ideas about socialism were influenced by many streams of thought. His concept of socialism was moulded to suit conditions prevailing in India. The principle of secular democratic socialism became an integral part of his thinking.
I am happy that through her study of "Socialist Orientation of Jawaharlal Nehru", Smt. Neelam Mishra has sought to trace various forces which influenced formation of Nehruvian socialism. I hope readers would find her exposition rewarding.
There is no dearth of reading material on Nehru. In fact, a considerable volume of literature has grown up around him - Nehruana, as it may be called. Still, studies continue to pour on the grand personality of Jawaharlal Nehru and will go on, because he had a breadth of vision of the world which is of vital importance even today. His idealism, unorthodoxy, socialism, secularism, humanism, internationalism, scientific spirit and the sense of history spilled over the frontiers of India and time itself to cover tomorrow's world no less than today's.
The worth of Jawaharlal Nehru cannot be gauged by any mundane standards. We are creatures of one generation; he belongs to history, we walk the beaten track of custom and traditions; he blazed new trails, striding forward like the law of historical development itself. The study of Nehru is also a study of history, for the forces that influenced his mind were also influencing other parts of the world. Nehru truly symbolises the mind of Asia and Africa which is renascent, on the voyage of discovery and towards the goal of fulfilment. Moreover, an analysis of personalities like Nehru would provide us some values with which we could identify, especially when the very edifice of society and systems is in a state of convulsion. India is being ripped apart by the destructive forces of communalism, casteism, regionalism, abuse of money power and the most dangerous of all, terrorism. It is during these traumatic times when Jawaharlal Nehru's wisdom, thought, endeavour and statesmanship should work as a sanitizing force. The year of his centenary presents us a good opportunity to re-examine his ideas, views and experiments towards finding out an amicable solution for various ills affecting our body-politic.
A study of Socialist Orientation of Jawaharlal Nehru is the focal point of the present study. The objective has been to identify and locate the forces which helped shape it, to delineate the zig-zags in its evolution under the cross-currents of national and international developments in the absence of a clear-cut class analysis of the situation, and finally to make a critical evaluation of his contribution to socialist thinking and movement in India.
Socialism has to be defined more by what it is not, than by what it is. On the one side, stands liberal capitalism, with its distrust of the state and its emphasis on competition and the liberation of the individual from any, if not all, social principles of obligations. On the other, stands communism, with its totalitarian identification of liberty with the realization by the individual of a collective social purpose. Socialists have sought the via media.
Socialism, then is best defined as a self-conscious middle way. Its original doctrine was opposition to capitalism, its later doctrine opposition to communism. For many years communism and socialism were synonymous; after Marx they were regarded by some, as separate successive historical stages, but the socialist movement was not yet split clearly from communism. The split came when Bernstein and other thinkers differed from the majority of Marxists on the nature of revolution and the direction of the bourgeois state. For Bernstein, as for Fabians, the state was a mechanism for social improvement and for the gradual achievement of socialism; for the Bolsheviks it was an instrument of the bourgeois, with no possibility of any other use. After the Bolshevik seized power in Russia the division between socialists and communists attained an objective basis. Political and economic actions by the Soviet Government showed clearly that the Bolsheviks were not liberals, were no gradualists, and that they were apostles of violent revolution throughout the world. On the other hand, Socialists were parliamentarians.
It is difficult to relate socialist practice directly to socialist philosophy, or to relate it either to political or economic reality, since socialist practice has for the greater part been directed by short-term parliamentary considerations, and socialist philosophy has been like the shadows of Plato's cane, reflected and refracted from capitalist societies to communism and back to socialism, and then hastily related to what the socialist parties were doing.
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