What Nehru Gave To India?  

It was a sudden and interesting confrontation with some of my most treasured experiences in life. Sitting in The DayAfter office in New Delhi, under a power breakdown, I was discussing with my editorial team the vision of our immediate future issue. The fact that the office was plunged in dark and it was very sweaty did not deter us from carrying on a lively discussion on what should or should not be in the issue, which is now before you. Then came the surprise! The telephone started ringing and I think Saswat took the call. He told me that it was phone for me. I was surprised. Who could it be? Except for my wife, none knew that I might land up at The DayAfter office on an unannounced visit. Sunil Dang knew about my coming but he was sitting in Mumbai, participating in an important meeting of the Indian Newspaper Society. Who could it be? Saswat told me it was a lady, Geeta Mohan, from Doordarshan News. That intrigued me further. How did the Doordarshan get to know about my whereabouts at that particular moment?

I went and talked to the lady. She told me that they were recording a programme in connection with the death anniversary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and they would want to record my reminiscences too. Now who had told them about me and my link with Pandit Nehru? In any case, I was among dozens of young persons who had accidentally the privilege of having worked for Pandit Nehru in the 1950s. Was I important enough to record my reminiscences about a great man whom we literally worshipped as the maker of modern India? Maybe many of them were no more and few of us who were still alive as old men and women, often lost in nostalgia, could yield some bit of what we were privileged to see, feel and know about the man who gave India so much to turn it into a modern, vibrant and stable democracy, the largest in the world in terms of population, problems and challenges it was destined to face.

Doordarshan News was given the direction on how to reach us by Dr. Anis Ahmad, our Executive Editor, and a young DD trainee Pawan Kumar ferried me to the DD building. At the studios, a very pleasant looking young interviewer, Geeta Mohan, greeted me and then put me through the grill. She asked me a shower of questions to get out of me as much as I knew about what Pandit Nehru had given to this country. When the programme was telecast on May 27, the very next day, I found myself in the company of three others of the Nehru era, all my friends. They were Dr. Karan Singh, Kuldip Nayar and Saeed Naqvi. Geeta tried to take out from all of us according to our knowledge and perception. It turned out to be a well made programme. Of course, the best performance was that of Geeta and her crew who did so well in such a short time. They must have sat editing till late night to put this intelligent remembrance piece by piece on DD News. Few other channels took notice of Nehru, the same way as DD News did. Or something might have escaped my notice.

During the TV interview I told whatever I knew and could share during the short span of time available. I also found out who had put them on to The DayAfter to trace me.  But that I would keep as a personal secret.

In all honesty, I will not repeat anything I said in the TV interview except for the fact that democracy was Nehru’s greatest gift to India as the country is still an oasis of stable and vibrant democracy in a world beset by turbulence and despotic military and oligarchic regimes. Most of the policies which made modern India “modern and democratic” were initiated by him. But there was much more I would like to record as The DayAfter’s rememberance of Pandit Nehru.

Since I had worked directly under Jawaharlal Nehru as an honorary worker in the Congress Party-in-Parliament, I would like to recall some of my experiences there, which had greatly moulded and shaped my life and views. Pandit Nehru was the Leader of the party during the very first parliament and the famous journalist B. Shiva Rao, the Vice President. Dr. Harekrishana Mehtab, the jovial leader from Orissa was the Secretary-General of the party. Dr. Ram Subhag Singh from Bihar was one of the general secretaries. We also had another famous Andhra personality on the staff of the party office secretary in the person of Dr. W. S. Murthy. He was the Director of the Bureau of Parliamentary Research of the Congress Party-in-Parliament. The other members of the secretariat, including me, were all very young and full of beans. We had different responsibility and many of us were also members of the Bureau of Parliamentary Research. It was the Nehru inspiration that made us, all youngsters, perform little miracles, just to get back a smile of appreciation from the leader. Older of the young men were F.C. Pahwa, Shiva K. Talwar and Saxena. Kalra, Lalita Bhagat, Arjun Rao, later Bhup Jit Rao and Jaipaul Chadha, were all younger folks. We all used to get fixed honorariums as compensation but the greater compensation was the feeling of being participants in the emergence and building of an independent, new and democratic India right under the shadow and eye of the great Pandit Nehru.

Pandit ji was very keen on strengthening and promoting Hindi as a national language in the country which had very high illiteracy rate. Many of the Congress MPs from different parts of the country did not know English. They were grass-root men and women who knew their local and tribal languages very well but the modern parliamentary system was quite new to them. So, it was decided to set up a Hindi Department in the Congress Party-in-Parliament. I was made in charge of it. The other person to assistant me was the ever-smiling and pleasant friend of mine from Andhra Pradesh, Y. Arjun Rao. Even in 1950, he could fluently and accurately type on a Hindi type-writer. It was a rare qualification those days.

Dr. Ram Subhag Singh passed on two very important assignments from the leader, Pandit Nehru himself, to the “Hindi Department”. One was to prepare a weekly journal in Hindi to educate and inform the MPs about the background of legislation, issues and other business before the Parliament, both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and about the procedures and rules to be observed, including the tabling of starred and unstarred questions. We got a big pat on the back when the two-member editorial team, that is I and Arjun, brought out the first issue of the Hindi journal for Members of the Congress Party-in-Parliament and titled it SANSAD SAMACHAR. That name was coined by me. How I wish I had copyrighted it because it was later used by radio and TV channels in a big way. But I do not grudge them the use of the right words for right reporting.

My second brief was to bring out the annual report of the Congress Party in Parliament, to be placed before the next annual meeting of the Executive Committee. An elaborate committee of expert advisors was set up to help us turn the English report into a Hindi version. Among the members of the committee of eminents were people like Seth Govind Narain, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar and Dr. Raghuvira. For some months the committee met regularly but could clear only about 20 paragraphs of authentic Hindi version of a report which spread over quite a few pages in English. Then The Day-After was drawing close. Dr. Ram Subhag Singh was worried. He asked me that the report had to be got ready somehow, turning the English report into Hindi, para by  para, page by page, and kept on sending it to a printer for composing and page-making simultaneously. Dr. Ram Subhag Singh was asking me everyday about the progress. Finally, I could present him the printed and properly bound copies of the Hindi report, all my own work in consultation with my friend Y. Arjun Rao. When the report was placed before Pandit Nehru and other members of the Executive of the Congress Party-in-Parliament, everyone was immensely pleased; we got a pat on the back and accidentally became the pioneers of introducing Hindi into the official language status of the ruling party of India during the first Parliament itself. I became overnight an amateur Hindi expert and Harekrishana Mehtab, Krishna Menon and of course Pandit ji would often call me seek my opinion on what particular English word would mean in “understandable Hindi”?

The economic planning was another passion with Pandit Nehru. When the First Five Year Plan was released, he was quite excited. It was a bulky document. He got several copies for use in the party office. Whenever an MP or a Minister came to see him at his office in parliament House, and South Block or at his residence in the Teen Murti House, he would ask, “Apna Panchsala Plan parha?” (Did you read Five Year Plan?) Many had to cut a sorry figure. Then, under the guidance of V. Vithal Babu our Bureau of Research prepared a volume “Five Year Plan in Pictures”. It was a well researched, a slim volume explaining with pictographs the salient features of the First Five Year Plan. We got a great pat on the back from Pandit ji.