Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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During the communal riots in Delhi, a Moslem restaurateur saw a fellow Moslem slaughtered in front of the shop. He went to the phone and got Nehru directly. "Wait ten minutes!" cried the Prime Minister. "I'll be right down." In ten minutes, Nehru was on the scene with truckfuls of police. From the middle of the street, bent over a map of the district, he directed the cleanup of looters...
During the Asian Relations Conference of 1947, when the audience became noisy and unruly, Nehru descended from the speaker's stand, shoved down people in the front rows until the crowd calmed down. Then he got back on the platform and listened to Gandhi make a speech on nonviolence...
...Vital Force? Nehru has called for a Congress revitalization, but the reaction has been sluggish. Able Sardar Valkbhbhai Patel, Deputy Prime Minister and Nehru's strong right hand in administration and politics, is too ill and old (74) to beat a new party drum. Some disillusioned Congress followers have turned to the Socialist Party, which has just begun an organizational drive in the villages. Many more, especially from the inflation-harried middle class of clerical workers and small merchants, are turning to the extremists...
...Communists, numerically weak and partially outlawed, are now promoting underground terror and sabotage, agitating even in the jails where Nehru and his Congress comrades once languished. On the far right loom the Hindu chauvinists, the Hindu Mahasabha. Beside them, noisier, more militant and dangerous, are the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-literally, Organization for Service of the Nation). They spawned Gandhi's assassin; they could still undo the communal peace so painfully...
Despite such political and ideological unrest, Nehru insists: "People do not believe in 'isms.' They believe in their own individual life . . . India is fundamentally stable because its peasants are better off than before. Industrial workers are, in some cases, a little better off and in some cases a little worse off. But, in any case, not discontented. But the middle class is much worse off and that is the danger to our stability...