In the year of the fiftieth death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, this timely book has ventured to review Nehru’s contribution in shaping trajectories of political developments in pre and post-independent India. In the process, it covers a wide canvas of ideas, ideologies, personalities and events that were most significant in Nehru’s political career as a freedom fighter (1920-1947) and the first Prime Minister of India (1947-1964).
In his relentlessly persuasive narrative, the author not merely argues that Nehru was the tallest leader of independent India but he places Nehru next only to his master, Mahatma Gandhi. On the one hand, the author gives credit to Nehru for recasting Gandhian ideas within the framework of modernity, while on the other hand, he is conscious of the fact that Nehru parted company with Gandhi as a modernizer and built foundations of heavy industry, constructed large dams and chose to run Indian National Congress (INC) as an umbrella party, even though Gandhi would have liked it to be dissolved after independence. The author asserts that even though Nehru’s emancipatory project of development did take cognizance of Marxist ideas, he was uncomfortable with dogmatic and doctrinaire views of Indian communists who looked for inspiration from outside to formulate their plan of action in India. Consequently, he chose to oppose them in domestic politics. After observing all the protocols of scholarship and going through the relevant primary sources in minute details, the author has refrained from squeezing Nehru’s policies into any straitjacket schematic framework by either dubbing them as idealistic or realistic. Instead, he has explored complexities that shaped such policies in order to come to terms with the making of modern India.
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