Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Problems of Power. It was in most respects an appalling heritage. When independence finally came, and Nehru took the reins of power, it scarcely seemed as if he had even the raw material for a nation. The people with whom he had to work were among the world's poorest and most backward. Even today 325 million Indians (85% of the population) are illiterate, and their per capita income is only $57 a year (v. $49 in China, $143 in Japan). Some 68 million-the equivalent of the total U.S. labor force-are unemployed. In summer...
...always close to the boiling point. The nation's 50 million untouchables suffer from caste discrimination, resting, in the words of an Indian government official, on "prejudices deeper than the one against Negroes in the U.S." The 26 million ebony-colored Tamils claim that fair-skinned northerners (like Nehru) persecute them because of their color...
...itself would tear the nation apart. Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems battled all over India in an orgy of violence which claimed up to half a million lives. Somehow, through the public shock of Gandhi's assassination and by the determined use of power, the slaughter was finally checked. Nehru could at last turn his attention to other problems. He and his government forced through laws forbidding social and religious discrimination against untouchables. They incorporated into free India 552 princely states which the British had allowed to fester in medi eval autonomy. They held free elections-the world...
...solution to the nation's economic problems, Nehru advanced what he vaguely called "a socialist pattern of society...
...Possible Caesar. An article in an Indian magazine, the Modern Review, written in 1936, described Nehru in this fashion: "Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in a democracy. He calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately slave to the heart . . . Jawahar has all the makings of a dictator in him-vast popularity, a strong will, ability, hardness, an intolerance for others and a certain contempt for the weak and inefficient... Is it not possible...