Word: nehru
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...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...
...stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." So declared Jawaharlal Nehru in his speech on the eve of his nation's independence from Britain. In New Delhi the next day, the celebrating crowd was so huge that Nehru, the new Prime Minister, had to fight his way to the grandstand, at one point knocking off the turban of a man who had gotten in his way. He was worried for the safety of his friends, the last British viceroy Lord Mountbatten, who was a cousin of England's monarch, and his wife...
...moot by the time the screaming started over the new borders. No preparations were therefore made to control the inevitable havoc. The result was a bloody birthday gift to newborn India and Pakistan as millions of people were uprooted amid massacres and murder. "I am sick with horror," Nehru would write his friend Mountbatten after visiting one affected area. More horror was to come: refugee camps everywhere and, eventually, war with Pakistan over Kashmir, an enmity, potent as nuclear bombs, that lasts to this day. Five months after independence, the idealism of the struggle for freedom was shattered when...
Galbraith says that one of the most valuable experiences of his life was the time he spent during the presidency of John F. Kennedy ’40 as ambassador to India. He tells the story of how he was welcomed to India by then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. “He greeted me, when I presented my credentials, as no ambassador in history,” Galbraith says. “He said, ‘I welcome you as ambassador, but I hope that this will not prevent you from being my economic adviser...