The Legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the greatest Leader India has seen so far, was the first Prime Minister of India. He was at the forefront of Indian politics and Independence movement along with Mahatma Gandhi. The people of India loved him a lot, and he remained as the Prime Minister for a long duration of 17 years! He is considered to be the architect of the modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14^th November 1889 as the son of Motilal Nehru and Swaroop Rani. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Inner Temple, where he trained to be a barrister. He became a rising figure in Indian politics by the year 1910. The Non-Cooperation Movement was a significant phase of the Indian independence movement from British rule. Mahatma Gandhi led it after the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. It led to thousands of common citizens to participate in Indian Independence movement. Nehru was an active leader of this movement, and he got arrested for the first time for activities against the British rule.

In 1929, Nehru became the president of the Indian National Congress. It was his first leadership role in politics. On 8^th August 1942, the members of Congress passed the Quit India resolution demanding complete political freedom from Britain in exchange for support in the World War II. The following day, the British government arrested all Congress leaders, including Nehru and Gandhi. He spent a total of nine years of his life in jail. Pandit Nehru wrote ‘The Discovery of India’ in 1942–46 at Ahmednagar fort in Maharashtra, where he was in imprisonment. The book is considered one of the finest modern works on Indian history. He wrote several other books later.

Once elected, Nehru headed an interim government, weakened by outbreaks of communal violence and political disorder. After failed attempt to form coalitions, Nehru reluctantly supported the partition of India. He took office as the Prime Minister of India on 15 August 1947. He was a visionary leader and started to lead India to accomplish his vision of India. The Constitution of India was enacted in 1950, after which he started working on an ambitious program of economic, social and political reforms. He led India's transition from a colony to a republic, while nurturing a multi-party democracy. He took a keen interest in developing Indian foreign policy.

Under Nehru's leadership, the Congress emerged as the largest party all over India and won consecutive elections 1951, 1957, and 1962. He remained popular with the people of India in spite of some political troubles and the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Throughout his 17-year leadership, he advocated democratic socialism and secularism. In 1951, he published the first five-year development plan and encouraged India’s Industrialization movement & improvement in the agricultural production.

Nehru had the vision of investing in Space Science & Nuclear technology and also had the skills to convince his colleagues about it. He brought exceptionally great intellects like Dr. Bhabha & Dr. Sarabhai to lead these programs & also managed to get help from other countries like the US, Canada, France and Germany in the early stages of these programs. He instituted various social reforms such as free public education and meals for Indian children. He approved the legal rights for women including the ability to inherit property and divorce their husbands. He appealed the conventionally opposed categories of low caste and high caste, Hindu and Muslim and North Indian and South Indian.

The Indian democracy is in the steady state today because of the foundations laid by Nehru. If India has become a large economy in the World, it is because of the multi-purpose projects, the public sector undertakings and institutions established by Nehru as well as the systematic planning process initiated by him.

India will always remember Jawaharlal Nehru as a great leader of Congress, the single largest political party in India that time & the first Prime Minister of India. During his leadership, India became independent, the Constitution of India was signed, and India made considerable progress as an Independent Nation. He developed a great relationship with multiple nations and led India on a progressive path. He was the greatest political leader India had seen so far.

Vinoba Bhave -Social Entrepreneur or Sacred Fool ?

A couple of days ago on the 11th of September was the 112th birth anniversary of a man who has now become so obscure that even the usual speech and garland the statue routine that we are so used to was dispensed with. In fact, it has been that way for many years now. Recently he appeared in the news because the well known author V.S.Naipaul has lambasted him in his book " A Writer's People" soundly calling him a “fool parody of Gandhi”. Yet in his time, he made it to the cover of TIME magazine, won the Ramon Magasaysay award for community leadership in its inaugural year(this year P.Sainath received it) and has been called one a great social entrepreneur by the Asoka Foundation along side the likes of Florence Nightingale. And to top it all, he was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna.

Was Vinoba a fool or an eccentric entrepreneur? By the time, I came to know about him, he was past his prime and was derisively known as the “Sarkari Sadhu” the state approved holy man who could be brought forward to bless unpopular and controversial decisions. I remember two. When Mrs. Gandhi imposed the emergency in 1975, and was vehemently opposed by JP, Acharya Kripalani and a few other surviving Gandhians, she promptly paraded Acharya Vinoba Bhave who declared that the period of emergency was actually Anushashan Parva, a time of discipline. But because by that time, Vinoba Bhave was more or less considered senile, his pronouncement carried little clout.

On many other occasions, Hindu sants would go on an agitation demanding a ban on cow slaughter. This was some thing that Vinoba Bhave too was passionate about. But while the other sants were generally hostile to the government Vinobaji after a couple of days of token fast would be assuaged with some vague assurances and a glass of lime juice and often because Vinoba Bhave had a much higher stature than the typical Sadhu, the back of the agitation would be broken.
But there was a lot more to Acharya Vinoba Bhave than the eccentricities of his old age. He was the original Padyatri”, a man who was deeply learned in Eastern philosophy and skilled in mathematics. His utter simplicity of manner and dress belied the fact that he was at home in 18 Indian and foreign languages, including Persian, Arabic, French and English

Bhoodan is Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s lasting contribution, though in retrospective analysis, it was a movement that failed. But it is the sheer effort of the man that and the nobility of his motives that attracts attention. Writing as far back as in 1953, when TIME put him on its cover the magazine says that his popularity ranked next to Pandit Nehru in the post Gandhi era.

Vinoba Bhave and his followers vowed to collect 50 million acres of land from India's landlords by the simple process of "looting with love." The largest single gift was 100,000 acres from a maharajah. The smallest was one fortieth of an acre donated by a Telengana peasant who owned only one acre himself. By the time the Bhoodan movement petered out, Vinoba had walked 13 years, over 36,000 miles, accepting over 4.4 million acres of land.

Vinoba was a communicator, a simplifier, a translator of Gandhian thought. Though he had not one bit of Gandhi's humor or charisma, he could convince anyone. Bandits laid down their weapons at his feet and repented. As he himself said of himself and perhaps most of us – “Though we are small men we can stand on the shoulders of giants and perhaps see a little farther……” In today’s times, when so much of the unrest in our country is about land rights and unequal land distribution and the agitation is being fuelled by Naxalites and proponents, it is a pity that Bhoodan has not been given another chance.

Nehru's Legacy- Is is now passe ?

Later this month , Jawaharlal Nehru's 47th death anniversary will be observed with the usual solemnity at Shanti Vana in Delhi. Most people in India have some measure of respect for the nation's first Prime Minister- Jawaharlal Nehru. Some or even many of his policies and ideological orientation seem flawed by today's understanding but very few will deny him his place as one of the founders of modern India and by any yardstick a statesman and the one who cemented our still surviving democracy.

Looking at the political churn that all our immediate neighbors seem to be going through , it seems but natural to be grateful for the fact that he lived for 17 years after independence and was the stabilizing influence in a feudal society that was hardly conversant with the niceties of Westminster style parliamentary democracy.

During his long innings in parliament , he chose to contest from Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh which hasn't been as lucky as Amethi and Rae Bareli in in the people it has sent to parliament in the post Nehru era. But History has played a cruel joke on Jawaharlal Nehru — a bandana-wearing mafia don who is accused of murder has taken his place. Everything about Atiq Ahmad is quietly sinister, down to the curl of his mustache. But his fawning followers compare him with the first Prime Minister of India.

Uttar Pradesh has come a long way in its journey in democracy. The Congress Party of Panditji is a distant number four or so in the stakes for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections which are on now. What is sad or baleful about th the whole matter is not the decline of the Congress Party but the brand of “peoples' representatives” that have now taken the place of the late Prime Minister.

The bigger joke on Nehru is not who represents Phulpur in parliament but what kind of person does and the state of the polity in Uttar Pradesh mired as it is between Bahu balis like Atiq or obscurantists like Yogi Adityanath , who don religious garb and practice a kind of politics that was abhorrent to the progressive , forward thinking and secular minded Nehru. Besides, today it finds itself caught in a vicious web of caste politics.

Nehru garnered support from all sections of society and irrespective of ideological affinities was respected by most as a statesman and a humanist.. Today the voting pattern is determined by caste equations: the Yadavs back the Samajwadi Party; the Brahmins support the Bharatiya Janata Party; and the Dalits go along with the Bahujan Samaj Party. And it is not that these parties are any more ideologically pure either.

The Samajwadi party has lost its socialist mooring, the BSP is all things to all people as it realizes that the Bahujan vote alone is not sufficient in electoral politics and the BJP is supposedly open if necessary , to prop a SP led government , to keep the Congress out of any share in the power game. Along the way , the egalitarian society that Nehru dreamed off has fragmented as society fragments along caste lines , propped up by his own Congress led government. Nehru is passe and his ideology obsolete – and no where is it more evident than his parliamentary constituency of Phulpur.

Shaheed Bhagat Sngh .... The Terrorist

Later this year the nation will celebrate the birth centenary of Sardar Bhagat Singh and as a curtain raise, the revolutionary hero is getting a great deal more attention that he would otherwise get. It is also a good time to study his ideology. But even though, I started off trying to read up about a man of who I had read about only in history books, I ended up admiring the man. I am learning to admire Bhagat Singh not necessarily for his ideological convictions which I do not agree with but for the sheer amount of content that hi short life of only 23 years produced. Bhagat Singh, born in 1907 was hanged on March 23^rd, 1931 having avenged the lathi charge on his hero ands mentor, Lala Lajpat Rai who died shortly after the lathi charge.

Bollywood has of course done well to capture the influence his life had through Rang De Basanti as well as through at least 5 other biopics on his life. They might or might not have done him justice. But it is amazing as to how what we would think to be a callow youth developed strong convictions, lived by them and died for them. Bhagat singh was an atheist, considered to be one of the earliest Marxist in India and in line with hi thinking, he renamed the Hindustan Republican Party and called it the Hindustan Socialist Revolutionary Party. Bhagat Finally, awaiting his own execution for the murder of Saunders, Bhagat Singh at the young age of 24 studied Marxism thoroughly and wrote a profound pamphlet “Why I am an Atheist. ” which is an ideological statement in itself.

The circumstances of his death and execution are worth recounting. Although, Bhagat Singh had assassinated Saunders, the Assistant Superintendent of Police at Lahore as a means of avenging Lala Lajpat Rai’s death, he was not arrested then. It was later, when he along with his co patriots threw a bomb in Delhi’s Central Legislative Assembly, that he was captured though escape could have been possible as he wanted to embrace martyrdom. Consequent to that, once sentenced to death, he made no further appeals to the higher courts or the Privy Council in the House of Lords.

There is some controversy about the role of Mahatma Gandhi in the attempts that were otherwise made to save him from the gallows. The Gandhi – Irwin talks were going on at the time and it was felt that a word from Gandhi could have made a difference. Other leaders like Motilal Nehru made public appeals , but it seems that Gandhiji kept away , ostensibly because he believed in non violence but according to some historians, because he perceived Bhagat Singh to be a threat like Netaji to his own stranglehold over the Nationalist movement.

As I said in the beginning, I set out to debate it out whether Bhagat Singh was an terrorist or a freedom fighter but like the actors in Aamir Khan’s Rang De Basanti who are happy go lucky folks whose lives are transformed as they read about the characters they play, I find myself challenged. When we all see and read about are Vikas Yadav , Anand Jon , Amardeep Singh Gill, and the many politically active Bahu Balis of Uttar Pradesh is it really possible that a man like Bhagat Singh achieved all that he did and left behind a lasting revolutionary legacy that lasts till this day and all that in a short span of 24 years? Well may be Bhagat singh was a terrorist and may be he wasn’t. But he surely lived a full life in the short span of time he was alive. And that by itself is no mean thing!