Word: nehru
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...employees and investors. Individual Hindus have employed strong-arm tactics against Christian missionaries and burned down churches. And school history textbooks have been rewritten to depict India's medieval history as a long saga of unending Muslim barbarism. As Neeladri Bhattacharya, professor of modern Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, noted in an article published last year, so inaccurate are the new textbooks that they represent nothing less than "declarations of war against academic history itself ... When history is fabricated to constitute a politics of hatred and violence, then we need to sit up and protest...
...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...
...good part of Nehru's India, Tharoor notes, is gone already. Socialism is being slowly dismantled. The result has been a rapid acceleration in growth and prosperity-ammunition for those who would like to dismiss Nehru's legacy altogether. But religious fundamentalists have also launched an attack on two other Nehruvian institutions-religious tolerance and pluralist democracy-that have repeatedly demonstrated their value in holding India together. As Tharoor writes, "India's challenge today is both to depart from [Nehru's] legacy and to build...