It's Children's Day, not politicians' day
From Nehru to Modi, successive governments have taken advantage of the fact that Indians love to idolise their politicians.
"It is well known that Jawaharlal Nehru admired 2 things, one of which was the rose and the other were children. To give him tribute, India celebrates this festival on 14 November, the day of his birthday." (Wikipedia entry on Children's Day)
Like all Indian children, I grew up being told this story. Nehru loved children hence we commemorate his birthday as “Children’s Day”. I, of course, have no way to verify Nehru’s actual views on children. Did he, for example, love them enough to calmly accept a child kicking the back of his seat on a long flight? However, the actual reason for Nehru’s birthday being celebrated as Children’s Day is a bit more prosaic.
In 1947, the United Nations set up an organisation known as The United Nations Appeal for Children (UNAC). The UNAC was a fund-raising body and in India it worked closely with the government. By 1950, the Indian arm of the UNAC has spun off into an independent non-governmental organisation which ultimately came to be known as the Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW), which is still functional. TheICCW was closely associated with the powers-that-be: Indira Gandhi, for example, has been one of its presidents.
In 1951 when the ICCW wanted to organise a fund raising drive for child welfare, it designated Nehru’s birthday as the date for the event. This became an annual affair and by 1952, newspapers had taken to calling the day “Children’s Day”. Soon enough, the event became a fully sarkari affair. In 1954, the Times of India reported that a children’s rally in Dadar, Mumbai was addressed by the Assembly speaker as children raised slogans like “Nehru chacha ki jai” and “We are future Nehrus”. In 1956, Nehru was felicitated on his birthday at the National Stadium by no less than one lakh children. “The most highly appreciated item of the programme,” The Times of India reports, “was the PT display”. A year later, in 1957, Nehru’s government released postal stamps of Children’s Day, making sure that the nation knew just how much its prime minister loved children.
Therefore, while we all might have fond memories of Children’s Day, it was originally nothing but propaganda on part of the Indian government, to portray Nehru as a paternalistic figure, “looking” after the nation as one would take care of children.
This is not exactly unprecedented: politicians often paint themselves in similar colours, one example of many being Abraham Lincoln. During the American Civil War, poems and songs were being sung where the President was literally nicknamed “Father Abraham”. Of course, Indians are particularly notorious offenders when it comes to putting their leaders on a pedestal. As BR Ambedkar informs us, “in India, bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world”.
This hero worship of Nehru ended up destroying all political opposition against him which is always an unfortunate thing in a democracy. The 1962 China War, for example, could have been prevented if a strong Opposition had stood up to some of Nehru’s disastrous ideas.
Far from learning our lessons though, Indians just careen from one propped-up father figure to another. Nehru was followed by his daughter Indira Gandhi who took hero worship to new heights (or, more aptly, depths). And of course, even today, the hero worship of Narendra Modi gushes out in huge torrents. Recently, the president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations described Modi as an “incarnation of God” and one who even “supercedes Mahatma Gandhi”. And even if the media might obliquely criticise the government or some of its ministers, direct condemnation of Modi is rare, a stark change from the way the press treated the previous prime minster.
In fact, coming full circle, Modi seems to have taken a few tactical tips from Nehru himself. His outreach to students on Teacher’s Day was clearly an attempt to build up the image of a benign father figure to the nation, even if he has some way to go to achieve Nehru’s “Children’s Day” success.