Jawaharlal Nehru

Born in 1889 in Allahabad to Motilal Nehru’s prominent household, Jawaharlal studied at Harrow and Cambridge, absorbed European intellectual currents, and returned to a country where law in chambers could not compete with law in streets. Meeting Gandhi in the 1910s reoriented him: mass politics, khadi, and prison seasons shaped a leader who could organize campaigns and write speeches that married emotion to argument. Through Non‑Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, and Quit India, he built trust with workers and students while learning to manage factions inside the Congress. As Prime Minister from 1947 until 1964, Nehru faced tasks few leaders have survived: Partition’s carnage and refugee resettlement; integration of princely states; drafting and operationalizing a secular, democratic constitution; building an economy from scarcity; and declaring foreign policy autonomy in a Cold War. He delegated to Patel the ironwork of integration, to Ambedkar the drafting genius of the Constitution; he himself became the public face of a Republic that promised freedom and planning together. Elections were held regularly; opposition was allowed to speak; the press quarrelled with him and was not shut; the Supreme Court struck balances he sometimes disliked but respected. Economically, Nehru backed a mixed economy: public sector at the “commanding heights,” five‑year plans, community development, and investments in power, steel, and irrigation. He promoted scientific research through CSIR, atomic energy under Homi Bhabha, and elite technical education via the IITs. Critics fault the license‑permit regime and slow growth that hardened later; defenders credit him with building the base without which later liberalizations would have lacked institutions and skills. Either way, a network of universities, laboratories, and academies dates to his decisions. In foreign affairs, non‑alignment was not neutrality but an attempt to keep policy independent of blocs while supporting decolonization and peace. Nehru was an early voice against nuclear proliferation and an advocate for the United Nations. Panchsheel principles guided relations with China until the 1962 war shattered trust. The military and intelligence failures of that war exposed weaknesses in preparation and judgment; Nehru took responsibility and absorbed the blow politically and personally. It remains a defining critique of his tenure. Social questions tested the Republic’s promises. Nehru spoke for secularism not as indifference to religion but as equal respect and non‑establishment. He pushed for the Hindu Code Bills to reform personal law—property and inheritance for women—against fierce opposition; partial success arrived under his watch. Language policy—recognizing linguistic states—required delicate balancing. His response to dissent was not uniformly liberal; preventive detention laws and moments of impatience blemish the record. Yet in comparative perspective, the early decades set a democratic routine rare among post‑colonial states. As a writer, Nehru educated political imagination. “Letters from a Father to His Daughter,” written to young Indira, modeled a scientific, historical temper. “Glimpses of World History” surveyed civilizations as conversation rather than clash; “The Discovery of India,” composed in prison, wove a narrative of unity in diversity that could inspire without erasing difference. His prose made the case that a modern India needed not only factories but a civic culture of curiosity. Nehru died in office in 1964. His reputation continues to rise and fall with contemporary politics, but the artifacts of his choices remain concrete: elections, courts, universities, laboratories, dams, and debates. Judging him requires patience with complexity: he was a builder who miscalculated; a democrat who sometimes over‑trusted the state; a secularist who wanted faith to civilize itself into ethics, a modernist who loved poetry. For citizens and students, the lesson is not hagiography but conversation—argue with him by building better institutions, not by abandoning the ones he left.