We don't have to agree with Shashi Tharoor, the Minister of State for External Affairs, to argue that the Congress party and India could actually benefit from a genuine debate on the foreign policy of Jawaharlal Nehru.
It is never easy to salvage the historical legacy of towering figures like Nehru from the relentless contemporary temptations at simplification, politicization and instrumentalization.
What we need, then, is a determined effort by the Congress leadership to promote professional historical studies of not just Nehru and his foreign policy but the evolution of the party's own worldview over the last 125 years.
We don't have full text of either Tharoor's remarks or the speech by Lord Bhikhu Parekh on 'India's place in the world' at the Association of Indian Diplomats on Saturday. The few quotes that have appeared in the print media reveal how easy it is for even smart people like Tharoor and Parekh to be misled away by common fallacies about independent India's early engagement with the world and the many persistent myths about 'Nehruvian foreign policy'.
Tharoor's comment for example that modern India's foreign policy was a 'moralistic running commentary' is one of those. If you look at the assessments of Nehru's foreign policy by our neighbours, including China and Pakistan, you get a very different picture--of India's first prime minister pursuing the inherited Raj policy of 'regional hegemony'.
After all, the first three treaties signed by Nehru during 1949-5 -- with Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal -- were all re-heated versions of paternalistic British Indian treaties from the early 19th century.
Communist China saw 'nothing moralistic' about Nehru's positions on the bilateral border dispute and Tibet. We don't want to mention at all the Indian wink and nod to the CIA's covert operations in Tibet and the Khampa rebellion. Nor did the West think Nehru was 'moralistic' when he used force to liberate Goa from Portuguese colonial rule.
Parekh's reported remarks that Nehru ignored the internal conflicts in Asia and tended to speak as if Asia was a single entity, again points to the triumph of the myth over the fact.
The publicly available records of independent India's first diplomatic initiative -- the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in March 1947 -- show how divided the Asian delegates were on all the major political and economic issues. After he was outsmarted by China's Zhou Enlai at the Bandung conference in 1955, Nehru had little time for the notion of promoting Asian unity.
It is about time we liberated Nehru's foreign policy legacy from the fawning 'Nehruvians' and the scowling 'anti-Nehruvians'. The only way of debunking the errors on both sides is to let some facts come in the way and allowing the historians to take over. As the junior minister in the foreign office, Tharoor, could certainly help by pressing his government to declassify India's foreign policy records of the first decades. Sixty years after founding of the republic and forty six years since the death of our first prime minister, we can surely afford to take a more objective view of our early decades.
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