Word: nehru
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With his patrician good looks and air of thoughtful intensity, his blend of Western rationalism and passionate nationalism, Nehru was an ideal-and idealistic-leader of the new India. He was cosmopolitan, commanding, charismatic. His interest in civil rights had been quickened by his friend and mentor Gandhi, his intellectual theories refined at Harrow and Cambridge. As Prime Minister, he ambitiously embarked upon a path of democratic socialism, hoping to bring industry, literacy and, above all, modernity to an India that was in many areas poverty stricken and backward. Abroad, as his own Foreign Minister, he pursued a policy...
Through three successive elections Nehru coasted to one handy victory after another. By 1958, however, the revered Panditji, then 69 and riding the crest of his popularity, wanted to step down. The cries of outrage were so overwhelming that he agreed to continue. Although the widowed Prime Minister retained his shy daughter Indira as one of his most trusted companions and made her president of the Congress Party, he continued to regard a monarchical succession as "undemocratic and undesirable...
...when Nehru's successor Lai Shastri died in 1966, after only 19 months in power, Indira was chosen as Prime Minister. Though self-effacing and inexperienced, she commanded the affectionate support of the country simply by virtue of being the only child of its beloved father figure...
...began talking of Maneka's son by Sanjay, Feroze Veruna, as a future candidate for Prime Minister. The boy is, to be sure, only five years old, but he enjoys what may be the most powerful political qualifications in India: the name of Gandhi and the ancestry of Nehru...
...next year, hardly aware of what was happening, she perched on her grandfather's knee as he and her father were sentenced to prison for opposing British rule in India. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was to spend years in prison while his only child grew into a shy, frail adolescent. He wrote her a long series of laboriously educational prison letters, now widely read in Indian schools, that covered the whole history of the world. "They were the only companionship I had with my father," she later recalled...