From Zohran Mamdani, Nehru and the forgotten thread of freedom
For the Mamdanis, getting out of Uganda was grasping the thread of freedom.
Mamdani’s invocation of Nehru recalled a formative episode in Nehru’s own life -- his first engagement with city government at the age of 34, when he was elected chairman of the Allahabad Municipal Board.
His daddy was leader of the opposition in the Central Legislative Assembly.
Poignant moments in politics are rare; they are easily eclipsed by the brutalities of power.
Mamdani is partying in Puerto Rico. He and his team deserve to have a good time.
Yet Mamdani’s invocation of Nehru recalled a formative episode in Nehru’s own life — his first engagement with city government.Nehru was a reluctant chairman and soon resigned. The Board asked the Government to reject his resignation. The truth is, under Dyarchy, the municipality had little power. Nehru's intellect and vast knowledge of foreign affairs militated against using his talents for the purpose of inquiring into sewers or issuing regulations for prostitutes.
In Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech, two prominent references, to Eugene V Debs and Jawaharlal Nehru, might at first seem like discrete, unconnected invocations.
Both were jailed for sedition. But the Nehrus had been loyalists till about 1917 when it became obvious that the age of multi-ethnic Empires had ended.
One was a firebrand mobiliser; the other rose to the heights of nation-building and statesmanship. Debs helped create a potent tradition of socialism in the United States;
He was a Trade Unionist who became a Socialist after reading Karl Kautsky in prison.
he stands as one of the towering figures of decolonisation.
He was against America taking over the Philippines, Puerto Rico etc.
Yet these references are neither random nor rhetorical flourishes. Conceptually and historically, they are closely intertwined.
Mamdani is an immigrant. He can't become POTUS because he wasn't born in the US. Perhaps, as Mayor he will protect undocumented migrants.
The surprising thread connecting Debs and Nehru is Roger Baldwin
a Pacifist sentenced to one year in jail for refusing to serve in the Army during the Great War. By contrast, Mahatma Gandhi was recruiting soldiers for the King Emperor. Baldwin later became a staunch anti-communist. His association with Nehru was most intense circa 1927.
, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Baldwin and Nehru were close friends. Baldwin shaped many of Nehru’s views on America and advised him on the Congress party’s American strategy. The two worked together in the League Against Imperialism until Baldwin broke with it over concerns about communist influence — a position Nehru himself shared. Baldwin had worked with and was deeply aligned with Debs’s anti-imperialism and his defence of conscientious objection.
In other words, there was little similarity between Baldwin and Nehru. The latter was not a pacifist nor a crusading attorney nor a great believer in Civil Liberties. That is why the first amendment to the Indian constitution goes in the opposite direction to the American first amendment.
Debs saw racism and the exclusion of immigrants not as aberrations but as tools of bourgeois self-interest. For him, it was the working class — not the privileged elite — that heralded a genuinely open and cosmopolitan society. In contemporary parlance, one might say that the cosmopolitanism of the city is the cosmopolitanism of labour, not of capital.
At an earlier period, there seemed a good chance that America would move in a Socialist direction. Henry George's ideas were wildly popular. But it was Henry Ford who raised his workers' wages so that they too could buy the cars they built. America would choose affluence sponsored by big Corporations rather than Socialism's shared suffering.
Nehru himself was interested in whether the ACLU could take up the cause of political prisoners in India. The ideological thread connecting these figures belonged to a historical moment we have largely forgotten — when civil liberties, anti-racism, socialism, open societies, and decolonisation were all considered part of a single emancipatory movement.
There was no such movement. The Great War had shown that when the chips were down, workers were Nationalists, not Internationalists. The British Labour party, which supported Indian independence in 1919, became more cautious once in office.
Freedom and justice were indivisible.
Because they were meaningless.
Baldwin warned Nehru that the fight for Indian independence would have to be waged on two fronts: Against “the hidden enemy of Wall Street, backed by the American government, and against Britain”.
Baldwin, at that period, was a Leftist. He had visited Bolshevik Russia and was initially impressed by what he saw. Later he purged the ACLU of Commies.
The former, he said, would always seek to preserve India as a source of revenue for the British Empire.
Baldwin was a fool. England gained by making colonies self-garrisoning and self-administering. What mattered was that they stay in the sterling zone. Nehru was happy with this arrangement. His closest friend was Mountbatten.
Civil liberties, in this view, were a cause of the Left — distinguishing it from communism and far removed from today’s libertarian appropriation.
Pacifism, Feminism, Socialism, Vegetarianism and anti-vivisection were once comfortable bed-fellows. But they were as boring as shit.
What is so resonant about this connection is the reminder that civil liberties once meant defending even the rights of those accused of conscientious objection and treason.
But doing so in a wholly ineffectual manner.
In an age when the definition of treason has expanded to the point that the very idea of a “political prisoner” has lost meaning, this history bears remembering.
No. It is pointless to do so.
History comes full circle in curious ways. It is fitting that Amrit Singh, the daughter of the last Nehruvian, Manmohan Singh, should emerge as one of the leading lights of the ACLU.
She gives the US military a hard time over Guantanamo. But no prisoners held there got released.
Mamdani, in connecting Debs and Nehru, is not deploying a freshly minted Gen Z progressive vocabulary; he is retrieving an older, forgotten idiom of 20th-century politics.
Debs and Nehru weren't immigrants. Mamdani is an immigrant. He can't become POTUS. Boo hoo!
Poignant moments in politics are rare; they are easily eclipsed by the brutalities of power.
Mamdani got 33 percent of the Jewish vote. He must be doing something right. Rent control is now back on the agenda. So is universal child care and public transport. Wisely, Zohran stopped talking about Public supermarkets or building lots of new houses. What he is promising builds on De Blasio and it appears he is taking on board some of De Blasio's team. This may signal that he is moving to the centre. But, with Trump now talking about 'affordability' and seeking to project his party as the friend of the working family, Dems may see an advantage in moving to the left and thus outflanking Trump who promises protection from low-wage competition rather than more direct help.
Yet Mamdani’s invocation of Nehru recalled a formative episode in Nehru’s own life — his first engagement with city government at the age of 34, when he was elected chairman of the Allahabad Municipal Board. This is the same age at which Mamdani becomes mayor.
But Nehru & his father had been jailed at the time of the Prince of Wales's visit. The result was a 100 percent boycott in Allahabad. This was the moment when the 'cow belt' became the epicentre of the Freedom Struggle. Nehru was following his father's line in politics but his heart was with the Mahatma- i.e. he was 'no changer' (i.e. against Council entry). This was an open secret and was one reason why he prevailed though his father failed.
At first, Nehru saw the role as a distraction from national politics,
not to mention travelling abroad.
and he shared the perennial frustration of city leaders: How little actual power they possess. But he soon convinced himself that it was within the board’s reach to make “life more bearable, a little less painful to the inhabitants of Allahabad”.
In his autobiography, he called it 'Prayag'.
As Mohammed Aqil’s research shows, Nehru’s municipal priorities were, unsurprisingly, centered on the marginalised — the property rights of prostitutes, ekkawalas, and the urban poor.
He nationalized the Prostitution industry. By recruiting ekkawala horses, productivity in that sector went up 23 percent. The urban poor started thinking about making a career move into rural poverty.
It was the city that made Nehru’s sense of India’s problems more concrete.
India's biggest problem was that it was full of Indians. Also it is as hot as fuck. More research should be done in Europe to discover ways of diminishing this problem.
Transport policy became a site of tension between providing free rides
Nehru was against officials demanding free rides
and increasing the wages of ekkawalas. Ironically, given India’s later fiscal history, Nehru vehemently opposed octroi as a regressive tax. He preferred to tax the rich, using the employment of multiple servants as a proxy for wealth.
Nehru's father was battling the increase in the Salt Tax in the Legislature. That was a popular cause which Gandhi would later take up. There were provisions for raising Municipal taxes but they too would be regressive. A nouveau riche family may have few servants. A bankrupt feudal family may have dozens and dozens of family retainers.
Housing was central to his agenda, and he admired the Vienna model of financing housing for all, with higher charges for those who could afford to pay.
All Indians should do research in Vienna.
He was an ardent advocate of free public spaces and believed that cities were the incubators of civic ideals. At least during his Allahabad years, Nehru saw statism as diminishing civic virtue, while socialism — understood as cooperative relations among citizens — strengthened it.
Prostitutes should have cooperative relations with ekkavala horses.
Nehru’s time in prison made him sympathetic to Lewis Lawes, the warden of Sing Sing Prison in New York, who believed that more than 80 per cent of prisoners were not anti-social or inherently bad — that better economic policy, education and employment could empty the prisons.
So that Congress wallahs could fill them up again.
Later, Nehru developed a distinct vision for India’s cosmopolitan cities such as Bombay and Madras. He saw them as polyglot zones whose vitality came from linguistic and cultural diversity. His reluctance about the reorganisation of states stemmed from a fear that linguistic nationalism would erode this cosmopolitan spirit. The unapologetic celebration of polyglotness was a quintessentially Nehruvian hallmark.
Yet the States were linguistically reorganized. It seems that everything Nehru was for, he acted against.
Nehru’s relationship with American leaders and geopolitics was often testy.
He kept asking for food & money. Truman was not sympathetic. An agricultural nation should be able to feed itself.
Yet the India-US relationship has always been entwined at the level of ideas
bullshit.
— through vast movements of intellectual, political and spiritual exchange. It is a history of ideational affinities, not of ethnic showcasing. We often recall Gandhi’s influence on American life,
e.g. Donald Trump wearing dhoti
but we forget Nehru’s intellectual presence, choosing instead to participate in the lazy condescension of posterity.
Nehru's 'Discovery of India' did create a positive impression in the US. The State Dept. thought he wanted to raise money on Wall Street to pay Dow Chemicals to take over from ICI in India. American Corporations would do fdi and technology transfer. India would rise rapidly as an industrial power. Sadly, Nehru wasn't interested in making India richer.
Martin Luther King Jr, who himself acknowledged Nehru as an inspiration, offered perhaps the most eloquent tribute to Nehru’s enduring presence: “In all these struggles of mankind to rise to a true state of civilisation, the towering figure of Nehru sits unseen but felt at all the council tables. He is missed by the world, and because he is so wanted, he is a living force in the tremulous world of today.”
King was supposed to arrive in New Delhi by plane. Sadly, his flight was diverted to Bombay. Driving through Bombay's streets in the middle of the night, King was horrified by the naked poverty of the people sleeping on the foot-paths. Earlier, an African American economist, A. F Brimmer, who was supposed to do a PhD in Delhi under K.N Raj but found his supervisor was constantly travelling abroad, moved to Bombay and did research on Managing Agents. He came to the conclusion that, by and large, they were a good thing and could help lift India out of poverty. Sadly, Nehru's regime helped crooked Marwaris take over and ruin many such enterprises.
Inevitably, these threads of freedom ended in disappointment, but what potential they carried.
None at all. Politics isn't about ideals and fine phrases. It is about solving collective action problems. Nehru was bad at that sort of thing. Will Mamdani be just as big a wind-bag? Perhaps. But, for the moment, he has delivered for the Dems. Trump is now telling his people to end the filibuster and just do a deal already. Voters blame the Republicans for the shut down. Trump may also have to give up his favourite toy- tariffs. Too much uncertainty has been created. He has a year to turn around consumer confidence, otherwise he loses the mid-terms and becomes the lamest of lame ducks. Zohran's election may well signal the end of the age of Trump. The Dems might ditch 'stale, male & pale' dynastic candidates like Cuomo. The future may well belong to AOC.
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