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And this conceit was dangerous too and had often led to conflict and war. The pacifist father warns Indira about the horror of War. Talking about the First World War that killed and maimed millions, he wonders if it was a very civilised or sensible thing for people to kill each other like this.”If two men fight in the street”, he says, “the policeman separates them and everybody thinks how silly they are. But how much sillier and more foolish it is for countries to fight each other and kill thousands and millions? “(Page, 50)Nehru wants Indira to be free of all superstition. A rational explanation of the origin of the idea of God is offered to her. The idea of God, and of religion, he says, came out of the early man”s ignorance and fear of natural things.”Nature”, he tells her, “must have seemed to him an enemy sending hail and snow and earthquakes… he thought that some God was trying to hit him…. How could he please him? So he would take some meat or kill an animal to please the god… He would go so far as to sacrifice a man or a woman, or even his children to appease the Gods. (Page, 54, 55, 62) This seems horrible, he says, but a man who was afraid would do anything.In an interesting reference, Nehru tells Indira how some clever men, given the right to collect revenue, usurped people’s power and declared themselves kings. They also squandered the money collected from people on themselves. “In India,” he says, “we have still many rajas and maharajas and nawabs. You see them going about with fine clothes in expensive motor cars and spending a lot of money on themselves. Where do they get all this money from? They get it in taxes from the people”. (Pages, 72, 73)He also tells Indira how some people got to get more money than many who remained poor. “The rich people today,” he says, “are those who have plenty of surplus wealth, the poor have none at all. Later you will see how this surplus comes. It is not so much because one person works more than another, but nowadays a person who does not work at all gets the surplus, while the hard worker often gets no part of it!”This seems a very silly arrangement. Many people think that it is because of this stupid arrangement that there are so many poor people in the world.” (Page, 62).The presence of hereditary privileges and the unequal division of wealth must have looked outrageous to the precocious child that Indira was. Later as Prime Minister, she would abolish the privy purses of the princes and strip them of their privileges. She would also see that some part of the surplus wealth of the society came to the poor too.To attain that goal she would, among other things, nationalise fourteen commercial banks so the poor could also have access to money. “Low-paid government and other employees, taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers…(the) unemployed and others who had never seen the interior of a bank … danced in the streets and held rallies outside Indira’s bungalow,” noted veteran journalist Inder Malhotra. The daughter had turned the dreams of a father into reality!With so much knowledge contained in fewer than two hundred pages, I wonder why the book was never prescribed for school syllabus, even by Congress governments, often accused of promoting Nehru’s name?
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Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to Indira Gandhi from prison continue to teach and inspire the young & the old
