Why Modi’s 'Age Of Bharat' Is Trumping Nehru’s 'Idea Of India'

Nalin Mehta writes on how Modi’s power play is an inverted mirror image of Nehru’s politics seventy years earlier.

With Narendra Modi surpassing Jawaharlal Nehru as India’s longest democratically elected and continuously serving Prime Minister – 4,398 days of Nehru between 1952-1964 vs 4,399 days of NaMo and counting – the obvious question is who has had the greater impact on the nation and how do their legacies compare?

Irrespective of which side of the political fence, you may be on — and with each side painting their own as a hero and the other as a villain — a deeper comparison, beyond coloured ideological lenses and immediate politics, is apt.

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Modi may be the mirror opposite of most things Nehru stood for, but in terms of impact, the tectonic shifts he has heralded in the wellsprings of the nation are Nehruvian in scale. Beyond the numbers, so deep ranging is the wider societal impact of Moditva that, among the 14 prime ministers India has had since 1947, he can only be compared with Nehru. His lasting social, political and civilisational imprint may be even more consequential and long-lasting.

At an individual level, both prime ministers couldn’t be more different. Nehru was born into privilege, came of age at Harrow and Cambridge, was forged in the fires of the freedom struggle with about nine years in British jails, and was anointed by the Mahatma as his ultimate heir at the cusp of India’s independence. Modi, the first Indian premier to be born in independent India, was famously born at the lower economic end of what Marx called the ‘proletariat’, shaped by the ‘weltanschauung’ of a party that for the first five decades of his life was not seen as pan-Indian by most Indian voters- even though it espoused a nationalist ideology – and fought his way to power, first in Gujarat and then in Lutyen’s Delhi, against the grain of elite opinion.

They are ideological opposites. Yet, there are counterintuitive similarities between both Modi and Nehru.

First, just as Nehru heralded what later became known as the ‘idea of India,’ to use Sunil Khilnani’s evocative term, Modi embodies what may be called the new ‘Age of Bharat’. If the Nehruvian order predicated an imagination of India as a modernist, reforming society that came to be accepted by both the elites and........

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