In a news report that highlights how little the Western world knows about Indian realities, Washington Post referred to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as India’s ‘Founding Dynasty’. The report, which highlights the vacuum in the leadership of India’s main opposition party, stated that with Rahul Gandhi’s resignation, the dynasty was nearing an end.
The headline only shows that Western Media buys into whatever delusions Indian liberals are selling due to ideological affinity. Far from being India’s ‘Founding Dynasty’, the Nehru-Gandhi Parivar’s contribution to Indian independence itself is extremely debatable. There were a plethora of great leaders who contributed to Indian independence and a lot of them did not even belong to the Congress party.
Forget being the founding dynasty of India, the Nehru-Gandhi family is not even the founding dynasty of the Congress party. The party was led by some of the greatest leaders India had seen before the independence of India, long before Jawaharlal Nehru became the defacto supremo of the party.
Thus, Jawaharlal Nehru was merely a leader of the Congress party at the time when the party was littered with stalwarts who fought for Indian independence. Moreover, the family is not biologically related to the designated father of the nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, like many people believe. The original Gandhi did favour Nehru for the Prime Ministerial post and overruled the democratic will of the Congress party but he certainly wasn’t a part of the dynasty.
Nehru wasn’t even the most popular leader within the Congress at the time, let alone India. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel far exceeded Nehru when it came to the preference for the post of Prime Minister among senior Congress leaders. Then, there were leaders such as Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose who were sidelined by the Congress who contributed immensely to Indian independence. Therefore, to ignore the contributions of such stalwarts and label the Nehru Parivar as India’s Founding Party is sheer ignorance.
Unsurprisingly, the Washington Post is furthering the exact narrative that the Parivar and liberals in India have normalized in India over the years. Over the years, intellectuals have attributed every good thing about our country to one particular Parivar and the entire blame for all of its follies has been laid at the feet of Hindu culture. Western media, and its intellectuals, overly reliant on their Indian counterparts as they are have not bothered at all to critically evaluate such claims.
The desire to have a ‘Founding Dynasty’ for India is rooted in the Eurocentrism of the West. American intellectuals wish to see founders of nation-states in the political leaders of the time because of the fact that the USA has its own Founding Fathers. But India is completely different. As has been argued by many scholars earlier, India is more of a Civilizational state than a Nation state. Therefore, the equivalent of our country’s founding fathers lie in ancient history, not in the modern era.
However, it is easy to understand why Indian liberals would want to consider the Nehru Parivar as India’s ‘Founding Dynasty’. According to the liberal conception of the Indian state, India made a fresh beginning on the 15th of August, 1947 from a blank slate. They completely deny India’s ancient history and reject the fact that India is a natural consequence of thousands of years of Hindu Civilization.
Objectively, India is the manifestation of the Hindu conception of a nation state. As such, India is the custodian of the Hindu Civilization, the primary objective of which is to ensure the continued existence of Dharma. Hence, it is practically impossible for India to have a founding dynasty that originated in the 20th century.
Calling the Nehru Parivar India’s founding dynasty only reveals the utter lack of respect liberals have for the great and ancient history of our civilization. That it is an idea that has been accepted as Vedic Truth in the West only reflects the manner in which Indian liberals have undermined our history.
