Before writing this blog i thought of stating a disclaimer,but then i thought that what's the use of that.I lives in free india and i have freedom of thought and expression, but now the question arrises that i should be in a well defined braces of limits for expression of thoughts so i just re - evaluated this post and found out that i just did historical analysis of data and didn't added any personal thoughts in that.
My curiosity for this particular issue developed from my first visit to Allahabad (birth place of Chacha Nehru) when I joined a engineering college . At that particular point of time I thought that Nehru must be most respected and looked after Hero’s of Allahabad but when I heard some of the comments like “He was a biggest womanizer’s India can have ? “ from my localized friend’s , I received a shock of my life. People of Allahabad in particularly young generation want to associate themselves with Amitabh Bachan rather than Nehru …. Quite strange na ?? Then a felling that I should research In this particular matter popped out from some were within a bottom of my heart and I started turning the pages of text books of NCERT for both preschool and post school students. We were always explained indepth the instances why Gandhi was the father of the nation in our textbooks, what all did he do for the country but I checked all textbooks from Class I to Class X and couldn’t find one single incident why Nehru was great. About Nehru, its always mentioned that he was the first prime minister, he loved children, wore a red rose, was the strongest devotee of Gandhi, wrote letters to Indira Gandhi and so on and so forth, but never what exactly did he do? He was charismatic to the poor Indian people because he seemed as sophisticated as the Britishers, in spite of being an Indian, was educated abroad and was very different from the poor, illiterate majority. Did he set precedents of how India as a nation would function? No, because he implored Lord Mountbatten to do that before the latter left India. Mountbatten once said that giving India’s throne to Nehru was a unique experience. “Unique in the sense, he was handing over power to someone who didn’t know what to do with it, just like a beggar who wins a pot of gold.” Whatever model of governance was suggested by Mountbatten was accepted without a second thought, the major bone of contention was how chairs, tables, almirahs in govt. offices would be divided between India and Pakistan. Can you believe that? They didn’t ask Mountbatten how they could better India’s economy (as they had no experience in administration before that), could resolve farmer’s problems, give a boost to industrial development etc, rather were concerned that a Muslim shouldn’t become India’s first prime minister, and so they went about suggesting division. Ever wondered why China is so ahead of us as it also became independent in 1949, becoz we were stricken with ills of partition for nearly three decades even after it had taken place. We had no policy for development, we never cared to have one. India was a nation full of illiterates who could never understand what their leaders were up to.
Jinnah at the time, wanted to be the first prime minister of India, he was suffering from tuberculosis and was dying. He had won the support of muslims, and he was the one who said that if he was not given the throne of prime minister of India, he would seek partition. True to his words, he did that because Nehru and other Indian leaders did not agree to accept him as the first prime minister. Nehru was the one along with Jinnah, who brought about partition for his selfish reasons, and once the situation turned worse (India was like a ship, full of ammunition, its decks on fire, in the middle of the ocean) due to bloodshed all around, both of them hapless and helpless, cowered and ran to Mountbatten and begged him to help. They cited reasons like lack of knowledge in handling administrative affairs and highly violent illiterate population which could not understand the import of their words. This was what convinced Mountbatten to help them to control riots and this was what that made him stay till June 1948 inspite of declaring India independent on 15th august, 1947. Partition meant nothing to Indian population, they were not even aware of its consequences before they saw it happening, it was like a moribund state brought to activity by the action of its leaders who had decided that India would be divided. The majority of people didn’t even know what it meant to be independent, forget about what partition would mean. They were solely dependent on what their leaders told them, wrong or right, they didn’t care, rather they couldn’t care.
The partition didn’t end India’s troubles, as we all know - infact it was a genesis of more. The shadow of it still haunts the memories of the living who witnessed it, pulled us back ages in terms of prosperity and development and also worsened our relations with Pakistan and continue doing that till this very day. All for the chair of India’s first prime minister. Obviously humans can be error prone they are not infallible, but the degree of damage done also varies, and in case mistakes turn out to be grave, you have a right to raise a finger at the other person. The greed of two men ( Jinnah and Nehru ) decided how more than a billion people should feel about each other, their suspicions and hatred for each other sowed seeds of such hatred in the hearts of millions of their countrymen. And we live today reading chapters about their greatness and blaming Britishers for partition (Indians about Nehru and Pakistan about Jinnah), maybe that’s why they say – Truth is stranger than fiction.
This one piece cannot bring about change in opinions of those who have taken to their hearts and minds multitudes of lessons learnt in childhood, nor does it aim to do so, it’s just an attempt to question the fact – what if we had not been spoon fed with such illustrious stories? Had we grown up to be less loyal to the nation or had we grown up realising there is so much more to do, so many mistakes to rectify, so much more to learn from the errors of the past
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