Word: nehru
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Congress Party and its leader, Sonia Gandhi, scored a stunning upset, shutting the mouths of skeptics. But I would not call this a dynastic victory. If you brush back the cobwebs of history, you will see that Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were each elected in his or her own right. They did not achieve office through natural succession. And now Sonia Gandhi has declined the position of Prime Minister, one that those in the opposition would give anything for. Sam Mathews New Delhi...
There's an undeniably romantic allure to the notion that India's election result marks the ordained resurrection of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty. Its improbable return to power, atop a messy and probably fragile coalition of the Congress Party was led by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of slain former Prime Minister Rajiv, who was son of the legendary prime minister Indira Gandhi (also assassinated), herself daughter of the country's legendary first prime minister, Jawarahalal Nehru, the father of modern India. As if to highlight the dynastic allure of her party, Sonia had her son Rahul...
...themselves on having one of the world's most open democracies, but an unwritten agreement honored by its media ensures that exposing the love lives of the country's leaders remains taboo. So when the purported sexual peccadilloes of the nation's first?and most important?Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, inspire a new novel, you'd expect Indians to be astonished and appalled. Unless, of course, its author is Khushwant Singh. One of India's oldest and most respected writers, Singh also ranks among its smuttiest, and his compatriots are long used to being astonished and appalled by what...
...Singh is enjoying yet another spell under the spotlight, thanks to his new novel Burial at Sea, a fantasia on an alleged sexual escapade by Nehru. The central character, Jai Bhagwan, "is a takeoff of Nehru," says Singh. Bhagwan, like Nehru, is a Brahman from Kashmir, British-educated, brilliant, agnostic, a follower of Mohandas Gandhi, and with big dreams of modernizing his impoverished country. There's one difference: instead of going into politics, Bhagwan decides to transform India by becoming an industrialist to give his country the economy it deserves. The crux of the novel comes when the middle-aged...
...Bhagwan's Tantric tryst is a thinly veiled allusion to one of the more bizarre nooks of modern Indian history. Years after Nehru's death, one of his close aides made the sensational claim that he had had a secret affair with a Hindu godwoman. Singh says he met the godwoman late in her life, and was convinced?whatever the veracity of her story?that she at least possessed the physical charms necessary to bowl over a Prime Minister. "What she must have been in her 20s, I can only imagine," says Singh, with a hint of longing...