Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, in Allahabad, the city now called Prayagraj, in the United Provinces of British India ^[1]. His father, Motilal Nehru, was one of the most successful lawyers in northern India, a Kashmiri Brahmin whose wealth allowed the family to live in a large residence known as Anand Bhavan. His mother, Swarup Rani, came from a Kashmiri family settled in Lahore. Jawaharlal was the eldest child, followed by two sisters, Vijaya Lakshmi and Krishna, both of whom later took part in public life ^[2].

His education was that of an English gentleman. Private tutors, among them the Irish theosophist Ferdinand Brooks, taught him at home until the age of fifteen, when he sailed for England to enter Harrow School in 1905. Two years later he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences and took his degree in 1910 ^[1]. He then studied law at the Inner Temple in London and was called to the bar in 1912. Anyone asking who was Jawaharlal Nehru before politics finds a somewhat aimless young barrister: he returned to Allahabad that year and joined his father's practice, but the law bored him, and he later admitted that his early court work left little mark on him ^[3].

In 1916 he married Kamala Kaul, a young woman from a Kashmiri family of Delhi. Their only child, Indira, was born the following year. That same period brought his first sustained contact with the Indian National Congress, which the Nehru family already supported, and with the lawyer from Gujarat who would transform his life: Mohandas Gandhi ^[2].

The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919, when troops under General Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd, pushed both Nehrus into open opposition to British rule ^[1]. Jawaharlal committed himself to Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920 to 1922, gave up Western dress for homespun khadi, and toured the villages of the United Provinces. The rural poverty he saw there shocked him and gave his nationalism a social and economic edge that never left him ^[3].

Prison became a regular feature of his life. Between 1921 and 1945 the British jailed him nine times, and the terms added up to almost nine years behind bars ^[2]. He used the enforced idleness to write. Glimpses of World History (1934) grew out of letters to his daughter Indira; An Autobiography (1936) made his name among readers in Britain; and The Discovery of India (1946), composed in Ahmadnagar Fort during his longest imprisonment, set out his sense of the country's past and future ^[4].

Within the Congress he rose quickly. He served as general secretary in the 1920s, and travel in Europe in 1926 and 1927, including a visit to the Soviet Union, drew him toward socialist ideas ^[3]. In December 1929 he presided over the historic Lahore session of the Congress, which declared complete independence, purna swaraj, as the movement's goal, and January 26, 1930 was observed as the first Independence Day ^[1]. Gandhi's decision to back the younger Nehru for the presidency that year marked him publicly as a future leader of free India. He led the party again in 1936, 1937, and 1946, and in September 1946 he became head of the interim government that steered the final negotiations with Britain ^[2].

At midnight on August 15, 1947, Nehru addressed the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi with a speech remembered for its opening theme of a tryst with destiny, and became the first Prime Minister of independent India ^[1]. The moment was shadowed by partition. The division of British India into India and Pakistan set off mass migrations and communal killings on a scale that horrified him, and the first war with Pakistan over Kashmir began within months. In January 1948 Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist, leaving Nehru, in his own words at the time, facing a darkness in public life ^[2].

Despite this violent start, the years that followed produced a working constitutional democracy. The Constitution of India came into force on January 26, 1950, establishing a sovereign republic with universal adult suffrage, and the first general election in 1951 and 1952 was then the largest exercise of the franchise ever attempted anywhere ^[5]. Nehru led the Congress to decisive victories in 1952, 1957, and 1962, and unlike many leaders of newly independent states he never restricted opposition parties, a free press, or an independent judiciary during his tenure ^[3].

His government pursued planned economic development. The Planning Commission, created in 1950 with Nehru as chairman, drew up Five-Year Plans on a broadly socialist model, giving the state control of heavy industry while leaving agriculture and small business in private hands ^[5]. Large dams such as Bhakra Nangal, steel plants built with foreign collaboration, and new institutions including the Indian Institutes of Technology, founded from 1951 onward, reflected his conviction that science and industry would lift the country out of poverty. He liked to call the big projects the temples of modern India ^[4].

Any honest account of Jawaharlal Nehru achievements must begin with the consolidation of Indian democracy. He built the habits of parliamentary government: he attended the Lok Sabha regularly, answered hostile questions, and accepted judicial and electoral defeats. Historians such as Ramachandra Guha have argued that India's survival as a democracy, against most predictions made in 1947, owes much to the precedents set in the Nehru years ^[5].

Social reform was a second front. Over strong conservative resistance, his government carried the Hindu Marriage Act (1955) and the Hindu Succession Act (1956), which permitted divorce, barred polygamy among Hindus, and gave daughters inheritance rights ^[2]. He insisted on a secular state in which citizenship did not depend on religion, a principle written into the constitution and defended in his speeches throughout the 1950s ^[3].

In foreign policy Nehru made newly independent India unusually visible. He refused to join either Cold War bloc and instead promoted non-alignment, becoming, with Nasser of Egypt, Tito of Yugoslavia, and Sukarno of Indonesia, a founding figure of what became the Non-Aligned Movement, launched formally at Belgrade in 1961 ^[6]. He championed decolonization at the United Nations, sent Indian troops to UN peacekeeping operations, and in 1954 signed an agreement with China that stated five principles of peaceful coexistence, the Panchsheel ^[1]. The policy brought prestige, though its limits were exposed later in his career.

Nehru's family life carried heavy costs from his politics. Kamala Nehru, who took part in the civil disobedience campaigns herself, suffered from tuberculosis for years and died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1936 while her husband was en route from prison to her bedside ^[2]. He never remarried. His father Motilal, twice president of the Congress, had died in 1931, and the family home Anand Bhavan had by then been given over to the movement as Swaraj Bhavan.

His daughter Indira became his closest companion in the prime ministerial years, serving as hostess at his official residence, Teen Murti House, and rising through the Congress organization; she was elected party president in 1959 and became Prime Minister herself in 1966, two years after his death ^[3]. Among the better known Jawaharlal Nehru facts is his fondness for children, who called him Chacha Nehru, meaning Uncle Nehru, and his birthday, November 14, is observed in India as Children's Day ^[7].

In person he mixed charm with a famous temper. He wrote fluent, sometimes lyrical English, read widely in history and science, and habitually wore a knee-length coat and a white cap that both became associated with his name. He described his own outlook as that of an agnostic shaped equally by India and by the West, a tension he examined openly in his autobiography ^[4].

The last phase of his rule brought setbacks. The takeover of Goa from Portugal by Indian forces in December 1961 drew criticism abroad even as it was celebrated at home ^[1]. Far more damaging was the border war with China in October and November 1962. Chinese forces advanced across the disputed Himalayan frontier in Ladakh and the North East Frontier Agency, and the Indian army, poorly equipped for mountain warfare, was defeated before Beijing declared a unilateral ceasefire ^[6]. The war discredited the friendship with China that Nehru had cultivated, forced the resignation of his defence minister V. K. Krishna Menon, and visibly aged the Prime Minister.

His health declined from 1963. He suffered a stroke in January 1964 while attending the Congress session at Bhubaneswar, and though he returned to work, colleagues began quietly discussing the succession ^[3]. On May 27, 1964, he died in New Delhi of a heart attack following a ruptured aorta, at the age of seventy four. His funeral along the Yamuna drew an enormous crowd, and he was cremated at a site now called Shantivan ^[2].

In his will he asked that a handful of his ashes be thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad, not for religious reasons, he wrote, but as a link to India's long past, and that the rest be scattered from the air over the fields where Indian farmers worked ^[4].

Nehru governed India for just under seventeen years, the longest tenure of any Indian Prime Minister, and the institutions he shaped outlived him: regular elections, a professional civil service and army under civilian control, public universities and research laboratories, and a foreign policy tradition of strategic autonomy ^[5]. Three of his descendants, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Rahul Gandhi, have led the Congress party, making the Nehru-Gandhi family a durable force in Indian politics ^[3].

His record divides opinion. Admirers credit him with anchoring democracy and secularism in a poor, diverse, newly partitioned country. Critics fault the slow growth of the state-directed economy, the unresolved Kashmir dispute, and the misjudgments that preceded the 1962 defeat, and some argue that his economic model delayed India's later boom ^[5]. Both camps still argue with him, which is itself a measure of his weight.

Readers approaching a Jawaharlal Nehru biography today can start with his own books, still in print after eight decades, or with the major studies by Sarvepalli Gopal and later scholars ^[8]. Teen Murti House in New Delhi became the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library after his death, preserving his papers, and his portrait, the rose in the buttonhole, remains one of the most recognizable images of twentieth century Asia ^[7].