There is a sudden upsurge in Nehru mania among Indian leftists, and it is quite understandable. The English left feels left out of the day to day general discourse and feels infiltrated by the pesky, bad-English, cow-herder, Hindutva trolls in the like of some English news channels. It needs some reinvigoration of sorts before the election which the founder of modern Indian national congress could provide or at least they think he can.
Anyways, there is no denying that Nehru made some serious and successful efforts especially in regards of higher education and social legislation but making Nehru the pole on which Indian mathematics, science, logic, literature, and drama of the past 5000 years revolves is absurd. Nehru’s contributions should also be viewed under the light of an unchallenged unparalleled 17-year firm rule over the modern Indian state.
Unscientific? Who?
It is also unworthy to see all of India’s scientific achievements in Nehru’s light. Nehru wasn’t there nor contributed anything when partial fractions were understood in the Rigvedic age. Nor did he create the flourishing schools of logic and grammar with India only the second civilization to have done so in such ancient time.
Nehru didn’t help Aryabhatta in almost accurately calculating earth’s circumference. Nehru was not the prime minister when Indians invented the number system. He was not there when Indian mathematicians were calculating trigonometric values and so much more.
Even in the modern age, Nehru was no factor in the rise of Ramanujam, CV Raman or SN Bose and many others like them. If there are so many achievements of people who knew nothing of Nehru’s India how can, then the country be unscientific without him?
Indians moreover have most of the times accepted logical arguments be that of the Buddha against the materialism and the cruelty of many practices of the Vedic religion or that of allowing modern norms contrary with the traditional way of things.
Nehru and the Rest
Compare Nehru to his contemporaries like Patel and Ambedkar who were much farther sighted in foreign policy and economy, the biggest failures of Nehru, and the shiny object doesn’t look shiny anymore. India still suffers from Nehru’s disastrous foreign policy and socialist economic ideas which the left abhors highlighting. Had Nehru not been the first prime minister and a pragmatist like Ambedkar would have seated in the top chair, things would have been better if not the same.
India may not have suffered from abject poverty and little growth which the English left gleefully describes as “Hindu rate of growth.” India would not have constant problems in the state of J&K. India would not have seen the humiliating defeat of 1962 and would not have allowed China to pin it down as it has currently.
Some nuts don’t change history
This, however, does not change the fact that the current ruling establishment does have many who believe in fantasy like jet planes in Vedic age. Some people believe that mythologies are real, but such people are everywhere.
Does Mike Pence being an evolution denier change that Americans have more innovations to their name than any other country? Or will V.P Pence at the helm change American scientific thought altogether? Nobody believes this to be the case for the US but why then for India? Someone’s personal yet absurd belief cannot be argued as the representation of a nation’s scientific ideas.
India has for ages striven for knowledge and would have continued to do so with or without Nehru. The only thing now remains who needs Nehru more? Scientific thought or leftist ideologues?
