LALAJI

Nehru, Jawaharlal (1889-1964), Indian nationalist leader and statesman, who was the first prime minister (1947-1964) of independent India.

Nehru was born on November 14, 1889. His father was a wealthy Brahmin lawyer and politician from Kashmir who had settled in Allahabad in modern Uttar Pradesh. Nehru went to England at the age of 16 and was educated at Harrow School and the University of Cambridge. He returned to India in 1912 with a degree in natural sciences, and qualified to practise law as a barrister.

In 1919 Nehru joined the Indian National Congress, the principal nationalist organization of India, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi. Between 1921 and 1945 he was imprisoned nine times by the British administration for his activities for Indian independence. The Indian nationalist movement brought him into contact with the whole social spectrum of India, particularly peasants, and he came to the conclusion that the political struggle in India must also aim at social equity and an end to mass poverty.

By the late 1920s Nehru had emerged as the leader of the younger, more militant section of the Indian National Congress; he founded, with Subhas Chandra Bose, the India Independence League within the Congress. It was at the insistence of the younger leadership that the Congress adopted complete independence, rather than dominion status within the British Empire, as its goal. To attain that object, the Civil Disobedience movement was launched in 1930 under Gandhi’s leadership, with Nehru as the President of the Congress. At his insistence, the Congress adopted a programme of “no rent” campaigns for the assertion of peasants’ rights against landlords and moneylenders. In the 1930s he adopted a socialistic ideology, which informed the new agenda of the party. In 1937 Nehru founded, again with Bose, the Congress Planning Committee, which anticipated the economic programmes of his government after independence.

At the outbreak of World War II, the British colonial government declared India to be a belligerent nation without any consultation. Despite his anxiety to help the anti-fascist alliance, Nehru agreed with the Congress policy of non-cooperation with the war effort. When the Cripps Mission seeking Indian cooperation on the promise of a post-war political settlement failed, the Congress, under the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru, decided to launch another movement of civil disobedience. Nehru was again arrested along with the entire leadership of the Congress.

Though the Congress leaders were imprisoned, negotiations were opened for transfer of power after the war, and a British Cabinet mission proposed a formula that conceded a large measure of autonomy for the Muslim-majority provinces in the east and the north-west of India, as demanded by the Muslim League and its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. An interim government led by the Congress and the League, with Nehru at its head, was formed. Eventually the Cabinet mission’s proposal was rejected by the League because Jinnah interpreted a statement by Nehru as evidence that the Congress would renege on the agreement once the British had left. Following extensive riots between Hindus and Muslims in 1946, Nehru and the Congress accepted the partition of India, and the two separate states of India and Pakistan came into existence. India remained within the British Commonwealth of Nations, mainly at Nehru’s insistence.

In August 1947, following the final withdrawal of the British and the establishment of India as a self-governing dominion within the Commonwealth of Nations, Nehru was elected Prime Minister. The Indian Constituent Assembly gave India a federal constitution, but effectively power was concentrated at the centre and lay largely in the hands of Nehru. It was he who virtually determined the shape of India’s domestic and foreign policy.

At home, Nehru launched a policy of planned economic development with heavy emphasis on large-scale industries and multi-purpose projects. The economy was to be a mixed economy with a large share of investment in the state sector, based on protective policies of import substitution as well as restrictions on foreign investment. It was also to accommodate the Gandhian preference for small-scale handicraft industries with state subvention. Nehru secured substantial aid both from the West and the Soviet Union in his efforts at industrialization.

Abroad, Nehru initiated the policy of non-alignment and resistance to what he considered residues of Western colonialism. He visited China in the hope of developing a special relationship and enunciated his Five Principles of Coexistence. He emerged as one of the leaders of the non-aligned nations. However, the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir leading to the outbreak of the Indo-Pakistan Wars with implicit Western support for Pakistan, as well as other events, induced policies that were often seen to be anti-Western. Nehru’s position on the world scene was rudely shaken when a dispute over the Sino-Indian border led to the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and a humiliating defeat for the Indian army. Nehru was forced to seek American assistance, and his position at home was also badly damaged. He died on May 27, 1964, in many ways a broken man. Yet his charisma survives in Indian eyes, and he is remembered as one of the world’s great statesmen of the 20th century.

Nehru was a prolific writer. His Discovery of India, written while in prison in 1944, and his autobiography are among his best-known works. His letters to his daughter Indira Gandhi, published as Glimpses of World History (1936), project a vision of cultural synthesis on a global scale, with the distinctive features of each culture fully preserved. His opposition to Western imperialism notwithstanding, Nehru was deeply attached to English culture and opposed to all forms of cultural chauvinism. An agnostic, he believed in secularism and rationality, with emphasis on a scientific approach as the preferred path to India’s progress. Yet he was profoundly respectful towards India’s rich religious and cultural inheritance.