Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar has credited former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with bringing India out of “utter stagnation” and said the country would have been growing at 21 per cent or more today had it maintained the “Nehruvian rate of growth”.
Speaking at the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) here on Thursday, the former Union minister said the Nehruvian tradition appeared to have been abandoned in almost every aspect of nation-building.
“Angus Madison (British economist) had estimated our growth rate from 1914-47 as 0.72 per cent per annum… But in Nehru’s first few years, we went up from 0.72 to 3.5 per cent. Now that is seven times.
“It is such an amazing achievement that if we have maintained the Nehruvian rate of growth, we would today be growing at 21 per cent, or even more, perhaps 42 per cent,” Aiyar said during a discussion on his autobiography — “Memoirs of A Maverick: The First Fifty Years (1941–1991)”.
Nehru’s policies brought the country out of “utter stagnation” and put it on the path of growth, he said.
The diplomat-turned-politician underlined the need for India to return to Nehruvian values and said the most important of these, unity in diversity, has been facing a grave threat over the last 10 years.
India today is much more emotionally disintegrated than it was in 2014 and if the trend continues, then “we will either move towards a vicious dictatorship or we’ll move towards disintegration of India”, the 82-year-old Congress leader said.
Aiyar said that during his school days, not a single boy said anything against the Muslim community but “today in the same school it is a handful (of) boys who are talking about secularism while the rest are falling into anti-Muslim mode”.
On the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, he said the people of the country have an opportunity before them to reverse this “aberrant trend” that has entered our polity, society and civilisation since 2014 — the year the BJP came to power at the Centre.
He said, “This election is not the question of whom do you want ruling this country for the next five years but also what kind of India… you want in 50 years from now. Are we to be in 2047, 100 years after we became independent, a totally different country, or… a better version of India that we were in 1947?” Historian William Dalrymple, Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, actor Prakash Raj, American physician-author Abraham Verghese, award-winning author Perumal Murugan and comedian Kanan Gill are among the 400 noted personalities attending the Kerala Literature Festival.
The discussions at the four-day festival, which began on Thursday, will revolve around several themes, including science and technology, literature, art, gender, cinema, culture and environment.
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