Kaul: Meet Shri Kaul, India’s First Prime Minister

By the time we achieve Akhand Bharat in the not-too-distant future, everyone will know that the first Prime Minister of India (or divided Bharat) was Shri Jawaharlal Kaul, son of Motilal Kaul. Not Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, as people knew him before April 14, 2022.On April 14, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya, or the museum of PMs, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru became Shri Jawaharlal Nehru in the gallery of PMs’ photos in that museum. But even with the honorific gone, he still remained a Nehru, when clearly his ancestors were the Kauls of Kashmir. Shouldn’t that be fixed too?Early in the 18th Century, an ancestor of Nehru — or Shri Kaul, to be precise — came down to the plains from Kashmir to seek fame and fortune. As Nehru writes in his autobiography: “Those were the days of the decline of the Moghal (sic) Empire after the death of Aurangzeb, and Farrukhsiar was the emperor. Raj Kaul was the name of that ancestor of ours and he had gained eminence as a Sanskrit and Persian scholar in Kashmir. He attracted the notice of Farrukhsiar during the latter’s visit to Kashmir, and probably at the Emperor’s instance, the family migrated to Delhi, the imperial capital, about the year 1716.” medium90873125So, there you are. A Kaul from Kashmir reaches Delhi. But the family then becomes Nehru. How?Raj Kaul got a jagir and a house. This house was by a canal — or nahar. And thus originated ‘Nehru’, or a person living in the house by the nahar. So, Kaul got dropped and in its place popped up Nehru.You noticed, didn’t you, that ‘Nehru’, by a linguistic twist of fate, has its roots in the language of our invaders? And we gullible Indians of Make-in-India fame had for so long been in awe of this foreign-origin surname!You can of course argue — if you happen to be the anti-national sort — that this shift from Kaul to Nehru happened over 300 years ago, and for generations they have been Nehrus, so why bother to change? But then you would be missing a crucial point. India’s glory lies in its golden past, when we were ahead of the rest of the world. I mean, if we weren’t really brilliant, would young Alexander have bothered to fetch up at our borders some 2,300 years ago, travelling all the way from Macedonia? And didn’t he have to kind of pack up and leave after his soldiers refused to fight the battle they surely would have lost?Having got that straight — I mean the historical necessity to replace Nehru with Kaul — one should consider the man’s many blunders that made the honorific Pandit stick out like a sore thumb, however learned he may have been.Seventy-five years ago, when he became prime minister, he could have done what we managed to do only after 2014 — that is, become good pals with the Americans. Instead, what did he do? He thought the future lay in socialism, the Soviet model, all those lousy Five-Year Plans and the Planning Commission. Instead of unleashing the animal spirits — of which we see a fair bit now, though not perhaps in the sense Keynes meant it — we ended up with babudom and red tape.In those days of chunky typewriters, why didn’t he have the vision to imagine the magical world computers would usher in? Why did he bet on heavy engineering when the future surely lay in IT? Had he thought clearly, Kullu Valley, not Silicon Valley, would have been the IT capital of the world. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, would all have been made-in-India tech giants, with perhaps different names.Not only did Shri Kaul miss the fast biz bus, saddling us with public sector undertakings that later governments had no choice but to sell off, he also laboured under the impression that China was a friend. Mao, a friend? That’s the kind of joke stand-up comics crack when they want their audience to ROFL. medium90873574But the Pandit Nehru Fanboy Club is a rather persevering lot. And they are good at rhetoric. The silver spoon they were born with smoothened their tongues, and then they became members of debating societies at elite colleges, which obviously smoothed their passage into the notorious Khan Market gang (sometimes confused with the tukde-tukde gang). So, when the hard-working common man who could never have dreamt of going to Harvard makes these points about Shri Kaul’s obvious failures, he is up against some tough challenge from the gang or club members. medium90873089“I say, old boy, you need a fact-check,” I can hear them say. “Everybody makes mistakes, don’t they? Besides, he acted in good faith. He was a product of his time. Why don’t you brush up on your history a little bit? So many people were drawn to the Soviet Union at that time. Capitalism wasn’t all kosher either, was it? What about the Great Depression? What about inequality? For a while people did believe that socialism was the answer, and Pandit Nehru was one of them.“Besides, what about the institutions he built? What about the IITs, the IIMs? What about making sure we remained a democracy?”Privileged fanboys will always be fanboys. But just you wait. Give it some more time. Let’s make him Shri Kaul, and there will be no fanboys left. Better still, a Nehru-mukt Bharat, will also be a Congress-mukt one. What a relief! medium90872794A new low for Indian jail? Wodehouse book is a security riskNow I know why I was missing a strong Indian leader all my lifeWhy Captain Haddock is mad at Indian software giant medium90872797Illustration: Sajeev Kumarapuram