Word: nehru
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grandfather never met Mohandas Gandhi, but he did the next best thing. A photograph taken in the 1950s, which hung in a room in his mansion, showed him bashfully stepping forward to place a garland around the neck of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man Gandhi chose to lead India after independence from Britain. If Gandhi is India's founding saint, for those of my grandfather's generation, Nehru, their first Prime Minister, was only a shade removed. They called him the "architect of the nation" and believed he would heal India's divisions and transform their impoverished country into a proud...
...Modern Indians regard Nehru with more ambivalence. As novelist Shashi Tharoor points out in his new biography, Nehru: The Invention of India, the architect of modern India turned his country into a democracy and an industrial giant but also shackled it to a heavily regulated socialist economy. If Nehru managed to fuse a disparate jumble of regions and principalities into a united nation, he also bequeathed India its most serious political problem, the insurgency in Kashmir. Although Tharoor's biography lacks the exhaustiveness and depth of some of its predecessors, its attitude is perfect for the times. Writes Tharoor, "What...
...Some Indians were never happy with Nehru. A Hindu-nationalist leader once accused him of being "English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident." The son of one of colonial India's most famous lawyers, the young Jawaharlal had British tutors and was educated at two of England's most élite establishments, Harrow and Cambridge. Gandhi's example transformed a mediocre Anglophile lawyer into a nationalist hero, but the two men's visions were hardly alike: Gandhi believed India's future lay in self-sufficient villages, but Nehru, influenced by Soviet socialism, wanted to urbanize and industrialize...
...belief, though, was common to both men: a conviction that India would be no home for bigots. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu fanatic who claimed that Gandhi was making too many concessions to Muslims; Nehru offered shelter in his house for Muslims during the riots that followed India's independence. Islam, in Nehru's view, was a fundamental part of India's culture. His great treatise on his nation's history, The Discovery of India, written when he was put in jail by the British, describes the mind-boggling diversity of religions, cultures, kingdoms and empires that...
...Tharoor points out, even during Nehru's own lifetime, his halo began to fade. His concentration on industrialization, rather than reforming the primitive agricultural sector, led to food shortages by the late 1950s. The state-controlled economy bred corruption and stagnation. Kashmir was another growing problem; as Tharoor notes, most Indian commentators blame Nehru for his decision to take the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations, thereby turning it from a domestic matter into an international issue. (Tharoor's day job is as an under secretary-general of the U.N.) Then, in 1962, the Chinese invaded India-a crushing humiliation...