Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first Prime Minister and Mahatma Gandhi’s close ally) is often celebrated as a modern architect of India, a progressive visionary who laid the foundation of a secular and democratic state. But behind this myth lies the reality of a man who served not the people, but the interests of the Indian capitalist class.
His policies protected the rich, crushed the communists, and betrayed the revolutionary energy of the masses. This article is not meant for those who place all their hopes in reformism, bourgeois parliaments, or Fabian dreams of “socialism from above.” It is addressed to fellow workers and revolutionaries who refuse to compromise with the ruling class in any form.
The Indian National Congress, of which Nehru and Gandhi became the leading figureheads, was never a genuine anti-imperialist party. It was born out of the need of British colonialism to channel and control the rising anger of the Indian masses. From the beginning, Congress leaders represented landlords, businessmen, and upper-caste elites. Nehru, despite his ‘socialist’ rhetoric, fit neatly into this role. He was the perfect face of class collaboration—calming the masses with words, while handing power to the capitalist class.
During the Independence movement against British imperialism, Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar and others represented the interests of the Indian bourgeoisie, while leaders like Bhagat Singh represented the genuine interests of the Indian masses. They arrived at the conclusion that only a socialist revolution across India could lead to true independence. Such a revolution would not only end imperialist rule but also the class-based system of exploitation, which the leaders of the Congress wanted to take over from the British.
But due to the crimes of Stalinism and betrayals by the leadership of CPI, this revolutionary movement was not successful and the Indian bourgeoisie was able to take control after the collapse of the British Raj. This counterrevolution led by Nehru and Gandhi, at the behest of the Indian bourgeoisie under the dictates of imperialist powers, divided the whole Indian subcontinent on religious lines.
The frenzy imposed from above and whipped up by the leadership of Congress and Muslim League, another stooge of the British, and supported by the CPI, drowned in blood the revolutionary movement that had erupted across undivided India after the Second World War. Nehru and Gandh played a leading role in orchestrating this. After this orgy of bloodshed and huge migration, the seeds of future wars and religious bigotry were sown, which continue to underpin the Indian capitalist system even today. In other words Modi is reaping the harvest sown by his predecessors.
The Indian state after the partition is a continuation of the bourgeois state built by the British, with all the institutions from judiciary to executive having a colonial legacy built into their foundations.
Nehru’s Five-Year Plans are often described as ‘socialist,’ but they were nothing of the sort. These plans allowed Indian big business, under the cover of state planning, to expand its grip over the economy. While the industrialists flourished, workers faced low wages, peasants were left in debt and despair, and foreign capital retained its control in key sectors. What Nehru built was not socialism, but a managed capitalism that favored Indian monopolists like the Tatas and Birlas. His planning mechanisms served the rich, not the working masses.
When workers struck for better wages and conditions, Nehru sent in the police. When peasants rose up in Telangana demanding land, he sent the army to crush them. When communists became a mass force, threatening the rule of the landlords and capitalists, Nehru banned them—not because they were ‘anti-national,’ but because they were anti-capitalist.
He feared the communists not for their slogans (which were bastardised by the revisionist Stalinist theory of stages), but for their potential to provoke a movement that would threaten existing property relations. The suppression of various major strikes is just one example among many where Nehru’s government sided with capitalist profits over workers’ rights. The ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ that Nehru coined and helped to found was simply an opportunistic manoeuvre to balance between the imperialist west and the USSR, seeking the best possible advantage for Indian capitalism by playing the two superpowers off against one another.
India’s Constitution, hailed as a great democratic document, was also written under Nehru’s watch. But what does this Constitution really protect? It protects private property, not the needs of workers. It allows the state to ban strikes, jail trade unionists, and protect the wealth of a few while millions remain in poverty. Revolutionaries don’t see the Constitution as sacred—it is a shield for the bourgeoisie. We must fight to replace it with a workers’ constitution, born out of revolution and built on the foundation of working-class power.
Some claim that criticising Nehru only helps Modi, the Hindu nationalist BJP and its fascist paramilitary force, the RSS. But this is a trap. Nehru and Modi represent two faces of the same capitalist system. One ruled in the name of secularism, the other does so under the cloak of religious nationalism. Both defend private property. Both fear a revolutionary working class. In the end, Nehru weakened the workers’ movement, centralised the capitalist state, and left the door open for communalist reaction to grow in strength.
Furthermore, invoking Nehru’s legacy as the answer to ‘fascism’ misrepresents the nature of Modi’s BJP regime. The fact that mass communist parties (at least in name) and trade unions continue to function in India today demonstrates the country is not governed by fascism. Such a regime exists to physically liquidate the organisations of the working class. Nonetheless, under Indian ‘democracy’, Hindutva developed into a mass force, with communalist and even fascist elements terrorising Muslims, Dalits, women and other oppressed peoples.
When Congress leaders, along with bureaucrats at the head of the unions and workers’ parties, claim that Modi’s regime is fascist, they seek to prettify the legacy of Congress and the Gandhi-Nehru family. They harken back to ‘better days’ and call for class collaboration in defence of Indian ‘democracy’. But it is precisely the absence of any serious working-class alternative that has allowed Modi to adopt such a dominant position since his election in 2014, based on the fury and despair of decades of poverty, instability and humiliation at the hands of successive Congress governments.
Liberal capitalists cannot mount an effective fight against Modi, nor combat the real threat of fascist gangs for that matter, because they are part of the system that produces these reactionary forces. The only way forward is building an independent, democratic, and internationalist working-class movement. Not tailing behind dead bourgeois leaders like Nehru, but advancing a revolutionary socialist programme.
We communists will fight for every advance that can be won for working people. But lasting change will not come from elections or legal reforms. It will come from factory committees, mass strikes, workers’ councils and, finally, revolution.
We reject Modi and the RSS, but also Congress and Nehru. One side might wave a saffron flag, the other the tricolor—but all defend the rule of capital. Our banner is red. Our task is not to choose between two capitalist chains, but to break them entirely. Let us build the revolutionary working class movement this country truly needs to lead them at the decisive moment, and complete the tasks of the Indian revolution that Gandhi, Nehru and their bourgeois gang betrayed 80 years ago!
