On the 130th birth anniversary of the country's first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, leaders from across the political spectrum paid homage to him. Pandit Nehru, in recent years, has undergone a tremendous amount of criticism. The country’s first prime minister has been an easy fall guy to pin all of the country’s ills on.
The legacy of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru has been systematically dismantled over the years – through articles, memes and WhatsApp forwards. In today's times he has been crictised on social media and WhatsApp forwards blaming him for every modern India's failures, from casteism to Kashmir, but the truth is without a visionary like him, a nation like India would've fragmented. The bizarre part is that the defamation started after his death.
It is very difficult to separate one or the other of the towering individuals who fought for India’s freedom. But there are specific issues in which the personality of the leader played a distinct role. And so it is with Nehru. Nehru owes much of his reputation to his post-1946 career. He made at least three decisive interventions that have made India the republic it has become.
First, he ensured that his vision of India was inscribed in the Constitution. He drafted and moved in the Constituent Assembly a resolution that set out its objectives, which included the declaration of India as an independent republic in which all power was derived from the people. Everyone was to be guaranteed “social, economic and political justice, equality of status and opportunity, and freedom of thought, religion and association.” There were to be safeguards for minorities, backward and tribal areas. All of this was not a given. The 1937 provincial elections were limited by property ownership and had given the vote to only about 30 million Indians. There were, by contrast, 173 million eligible voters in the 1951 elections in independent India.
Nehru also worked in a context when India as an independent nation emerged as a political compact where units like princely states and other communities were open to alternative political futures.
Second, Nehru’s impact on world politics is widely acknowledged. He emerged as an authoritative voice and critic of racism, imperialism and an advocate of Asian unity, Afro-Asian solidarity and world peace. He presciently crafted the policy of Non-Alignment to steer clear of power blocs in order to benefit from contacts with both sides as Guha points out, and it also enabled India to emerge as a mediator between nations and as a leader of developing countries.
Third, Nehru was also focused on domestic social change and saw state planning as a driver of growth and an agent for addressing inequality. This socialist mode of governance with a measure of mixed economy has been discredited in recent years as it stymied innovation and growth but such policies did not lack support – Indian industrialists, for example, also wanted protection from competition. Leaders, in any case, should be judged by the standards of their time.
