Does Nehru remain India’s greatest prime minister? Jaipur Literature Festival debates

Kolkata: The 15th edition of Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) ended with not just a big literary splash, but quite an engrossing point-counterpoint on whether ‘Nehru remains the greatest prime minister of India’. Yes, that was the motion for the ‘Closing Debate’ on the lawns of Clarks Amer hotel in the ‘Pink City’ on Monday.

While this annual event returned in a hybrid format this year from March 5, after a hiatus of two years in view of the pandemic, the last five days of the 2022 edition of the festival — from March 10-14 — were held on-ground. And like every other year, the closing debate was the icing on the cake. There was not even one vacant seat on the Clarks Amer lawns as the audience braved a 38 degrees Celsius late noon heat to listen to what the speakers had to say about a topic that continues to trigger such extremes of opinions, and emotions as well, even seven-and-a-half decades since India’s Independence.

For-and-against

While author Tripurdaman Singh; National Spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Shazia Ilmi; and eminent lawyer Pinky Anand spoke against the motion, writer Purushottam Agarwal; lawyer and academic Avi Singh and former chairperson of the National Commission, Wajahat Habibullah; spoke in favour, with columnist and author Vir Sanghvi playing the moderator.

The Jaipur Literature Festival has been known for its ability to bring people with diverse shades of opinion and socio-political and cultural leanings on one stage, thereby offering a unique opportunity to both, the participants at the festival as well as those in the audience, to express and savour a free flow of ideas without a bias or prejudice to any one thought or idea as an overriding principle. In that sense, the 2022 edition of the event, and particularly the closing debate, was no exception.

A verbal and intellectual tussle

Though Monday’s session expectedly took off as a your-word-against-mine on the motion, what was immensely interesting was the way the claims and counter-claims on the issue at hand meandered into a verbal and intellectual tussle that was much wider in scope and tenor: Whether India’s ‘romanticism’ with all things Nehruvian is a misplaced obsession.

In that sense, the biggest takeaway from Monday’s JLF ‘Closing Debate’ was not whether the motion was shot down or whether it carried through, but the measured war-of-words between two of the panellists – Shazia Ilmi and Wajahat Habibullah – who ended up having a debate of their own on whether India’s first prime minister was at fault in not pushing through with a Civil Code for Muslims in the country and whether his ‘inability’ to push through with such an agenda actually resulted in the minority community in India being treated as a mere vote bank, with the need for social reforms within the community pushed to the back burner for the best part of the last 75 years.

‘Greatest Indian PM’

For the record, the debate ended with the motion being supported by an overwhelming majority of audience members.

And, if for curiosity’s sake, you are tempted to ask whether any other name cropped up as contender for the ‘Greatest Indian PM’ tag, well, there were two who came close: Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh.

Good choices? Now don’t get me started on that. We’ll get back to it maybe between January 19 and 23, 2023, when the next edition of JLF is slated to hit the ground running!