NEHRU AND MODI: A TALE OF TWO PRIME MINISTERS

JAWAHARLAL Nehru was sworn in as the country’s first democratically elected Prime Minister on May 13, 1952. He remained in office for a period of 4,397 days until his passing on May 27, 1964.

- BERJIS DESAI

For the alert student of constitutional history, on August 15, 1947, Nehru was head only of the interim government responsible to the Constituent Assembly that sat as the provisional Parliament. Today, Narendra Modi transcends Nehru’s term in office by completing 4,398 days as Prime Minister.

Modi and Nehru, our longest-standing PMs, are a picture in contrast—diametrically opposite in upbringing, mindset, belief, temperament, style of functioning, value system and political philosophy.

Nehru was attended to by English governesses and Irish tutors along with a retinue of attendants in a 42-room house of his prosperous barrister father, before studying at Harrow, where British aristocrats schooled their children, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He wrote in his autobiography that he had a garden, a tennis court and a swimming pool and a pet pony to ride. His childhood, he wrote, “was sheltered and uneventful”.

Narendra, whose father ran a tiny tea shop at a railway station, lived with his five siblings in a dingy house without electricity. He received substandard education in the vernacular and did not have access to radio or newspapers. There was no toothbrush, shower, toilet, or even tap water in Modi’s household, which he left at 17 on a personal spiritual journey, never to return.

Jawaharlal, the child, was aghast to watch his father sip imported red claret, which he thought was blood, as he puts it in his autobiography. Narendra, the child, watched his mother clean utensils of others with glass-mixed ash, which often made her fingers bleed.