Jawaharlal Nehru

• 1. Introduction

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  Jawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as prime minister at the stroke of midnight on the 15th of August 1947, and he raised the Indian flag at the Red Fort in Delhi. His speech that night carried a phrase that would outlive him: a tryst with destiny. He told a sleeping world that India was awakening to life and freedom. The man making that pledge had spent over nine years of his life in prison across eight separate detentions. He was a Cambridge-trained barrister who disliked the practice of law. He was a nationalist who, in a world war, wanted to fight on Britain's side. How did a privileged son of a wealthy lawyer become the figure who steered a new nation between the two blocs of the Cold War for 16 years? What did he build, and what did he leave unresolved when he died in office in 1964? The answers run from a mansion in Allahabad to the Security Council floor in New York.

• 2. A Sheltered Upbringing

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  Anand Bhavan, the family mansion in Allahabad, was the world Nehru described as "sheltered and uneventful". He was born on the 14th of November 1889 to Swarup Rani Thussu and Motilal Nehru, both Kashmiri Pandits. His father was a self-made barrister of great wealth, with a monthly income exceeding Rs. 10,000, and twice served as president of the Indian National Congress. Private governesses and tutors educated young Jawaharlal at home rather than at a school.

  Ferdinand T. Brooks, an Irishman drawn to theosophy, was one of those tutors, and Nehru later wrote that for nearly three years Brooks "influenced me greatly". Annie Besant, a leader in both the Irish and Indian Home Rule movements, initiated Nehru into the Theosophical Society when he was thirteen. The interest faded soon after Brooks left, but it pushed him toward the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. The scholar B. R. Nanda called those scriptures Nehru's first introduction to the religious and cultural heritage of India.

  Nehru was the firstborn, followed by two sisters. The elder, Vijaya Lakshmi, became the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly. The younger, Krishna Hutheesing, became a writer who authored several books about her brother.

• 3. England And The Bar

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  At Harrow, the leading English school he entered in 1905, classmates nicknamed him "Joe". He received G. M. Trevelyan's books on Garibaldi as prizes for academic merit, and the Italian revolutionary fired his imagination. He wrote that in his mind "India and Italy got strangely mixed together". Earlier, the Russo-Japanese War had stirred him, leaving him musing on Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.

  Trinity College, Cambridge, took him in October 1907, and he graduated in natural science in 1910. He read politics, economics, history and literature, absorbing Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell. He then studied law at the Inner Temple in London and was called to the Bar in 1912. There he also read Fabian Society scholars including Beatrice Webb.

  Nehru returned to India in August 1912 and enrolled at the Allahabad High Court. He was expected to inherit his father's lucrative practice, yet he relished neither the law nor the company of lawyers. More than twenty-five years later, in 1945-46, he put on a barrister's gown once more, serving on the INA Defence Committee during the INA Trials.

• 4. Forging A Radical

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  Nehru met Gandhi for the first time in 1916, at the Lucknow session of the Congress. His father had earlier dissuaded him from being drawn into Gandhi's satyagraha politics. In that same year he married Kamala Kaul, who came from a Kashmiri Pandit family in Delhi. Their only daughter, Indira, was born in 1917. A son born in 1924 lived for only a few days.

  The Jallianwala Bagh killings in 1919 turned Motilal Nehru away from constitutional reform, and father and son both embraced Gandhi's methods. During the non-cooperation movement, Nehru directed political activities in the United Provinces as provincial Congress secretary. He was first imprisoned on the 6th of December 1921. By 1923 he had been elected general secretary of the Congress, president of the United Provinces Congress, and mayor of Allahabad, all in one year.

  A journey to Europe in 1926 to treat Kamala's tuberculosis reshaped his thinking. In Brussels he attended the Congress of oppressed nationalities and was elected to the Executive Council of the League against Imperialism. A visit to the Soviet Union sparked his interest in Marxism, though he never fully agreed with Karl Marx, repelled by some of the tactics he saw.

• 5. Purna Swaraj

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  "It is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom," Nehru wrote in the Indian Declaration of Independence. He drafted it after assuming the Congress presidency at the Lahore session on the 29th of December 1929, where he carried a resolution for complete independence. The British had rejected demands for Dominion status that year.

  At midnight on New Year's Eve 1929, Nehru hoisted the tricolour flag upon the banks of the Ravi in Lahore. A pledge of independence was read out, including a readiness to withhold taxes, and the crowd raised their hands in approval. In support, 172 Indian members of central and provincial legislatures resigned. The Congress asked Indians to observe the 26th of January as Independence Day.

  The salt tax gave the movement its next symbol. Nehru and most Congress leaders were ambivalent about Gandhi's plan, but Nehru remarked of the response, "It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released". He was arrested on the 14th of April 1930 after ceremoniously manufacturing contraband salt, and sentenced to six months. He considered the salt satyagraha the high-water mark of his association with Gandhi, valuing how it gave village masses self-respect and self-reliance.

• 6. The Road To Partition

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  "The same old game is played again," Nehru wrote bitterly to Gandhi when Viceroy Linlithgow declared India a belligerent in World War II without consulting Indian representatives. On the 23rd of October 1939, the Congress condemned the Viceroy and ordered its provincial ministries to resign. Nehru had urged Jinnah and the Muslim League to join the protest, but Jinnah declined.

  In March 1940 Jinnah passed the Pakistan Resolution, declaring that Muslims were a nation who must have their own State. The 1942 Cripps mission, led by Sir Stafford Cripps, failed when Gandhi would accept nothing less than independence. After the Quit India resolution of the 8th of August 1942, the entire Congress working committee was arrested. Nehru and others were held at the Ahmednagar Fort until the 15th of June 1945.

  While the Congress leaders sat in jail, the Muslim League grew in power, capturing the governments of Bengal and the North-West Frontier Province in 1943. In the 1946 provincial elections, Congress won, but the League took all the seats reserved for Muslims. The British read this as a mandate for Pakistan. Nehru became interim prime minister in September 1946, with the League joining hesitantly in October.

• 7. Building A Republic

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  On the 30th of January 1948, Gandhi was shot in the garden of Birla House by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist linked to the Hindu Mahasabha. Nehru told the nation by radio, "the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere". The historian Yasmin Khan argued that the funeral helped consolidate the new state under Nehru and Patel, who suppressed groups including the RSS in some 200,000 arrests.

  Between 1947 and about 1950, the princely states were integrated into the Indian Union, work led by Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon. On the 26th of January 1950 a new Constitution made India a sovereign democratic republic, growing from the Objectives Resolution Nehru had moved in December 1946. The first elections under it, held in 1951-52, gave the Congress a large majority. Crowds waited overnight to see him, and in his name stocks of soda and lemonade sold out.

  Nehru held the External Affairs portfolio throughout his tenure and pioneered non-alignment. He co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement and organised the Bandung Conference of April 1955, which brought together 29 newly independent nations. In 1954 he signed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence with China, known in India as the Panchsheel.

• 8. Vision And Reckoning

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  The scholar Bhikhu Parekh called Nehru the founder of the modern Indian state, crediting him with a national philosophy of modernisation. Its goals included national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, socialism and non-alignment. Steel mill complexes rose at Bokaro and Rourkela with Soviet and West German help, and industry grew 7.0% annually between 1950 and 1965, making India the world's seventh-largest industrial country.

  Nehru championed education, overseeing the founding of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management. His government passed four Hindu code bills in 1955-56, expanding the legal rights of women. He wrote Article 44 of the constitution, calling for a uniform civil code, yet he allowed Muslims to keep their personal law, which drew accusations of selective secularism.

  The Forward Policy on the Sino-Indian border led to defeat in 1962, exposing a military that could send only 14,000 troops against the larger Chinese army. Nehru, widely criticised, saw the war as a betrayal of trust, and some writers tie his decline to it. His health failing, he died of a heart attack on the 27th of May 1964, with his death announced in the Lok Sabha at 14:00. On the 28th, 1.5 million mourners watched his cremation at the Shantivan on the banks of the Yamuna. His birthday is now celebrated as Children's Day in India.