Nehru

Name: Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Date: November 14, 1889 Death Date: May 27, 1964 Place of Birth: Allahabad, India Place of Death: Dehli, India Nationality: Indian Gender: Male Occupations: prime minister

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) was a great Indian nationalist leader who worked for independence and social reform. He became first prime minister of independent India, a position he retained until his death. He initiated India's nonalignment policy in foreign affairs. Jawaharlal Nehru was born on Nov. 14, 1889, in Allahabad into a proud, learned Kashmiri Brahmin family. His father, Motilal Nehru, was a wealthy barrister and influential politician. Jawaharlal was an only child until the age of 11, after which two sisters were born. The atmosphere in the Nehru home was more English than Indian; English was spoken. It was also a luxurious home, with an impressive stable and two swimming pools. Jawaharlal was educated at home by tutors, most of them English or Scottish. Under the influence of a tutor Nehru joined the Theosophical Society at 13. At the age of 15 Nehru left for England, where he studied at Harrow and Cambridge and then for the bar in London. He was called to the bar in 1912. His English experience reinforced his elegant and cosmopolitan tastes. As Nehru said of himself at Cambridge, "In my likes and dislikes I was perhaps more an Englishman than an Indian." In London he was attracted by Fabian ideas; nationalism and socialism from this time on provided his intellectual motive force. Early Political Moves Back in India, Nehru began to practice law with his father. It was not until 1917 that Nehru was stirred by a political issue, the imprisonment of Annie Besant, an Irish theosophist devoted to Indian freedom. As a result, Nehru became active in the Home Rule League. His involvement in the nationalist movement gradually replaced his legal practice. In 1916 Nehru was married to Kamala Kaul, of an orthodox Kashmiri Brahmin family. They had one daughter (later Indira Gandhi, third prime minister of independent India). Apart from his father and Besant, the greatest influence on Nehru politically was Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi had been educated much like Nehru but, unlike him, remained basically untouched, essentially Indian. A second issue which fired Nehru's nationalism and led him to join Gandhi was the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which some 400 Indians were shot on orders of a British officer. The year 1920 marked Nehru's first contact with the Indian kisan, the peasant majority. Nehru was "filled with shame and sorrow ... at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India." This experience aroused a sympathy for the underdog which characterized many of Nehru's later political moves. The plight of the peasant was a

challenge to his socialist convictions, and he attempted to persuade the peasants to organize. From this time on Nehru's concerns were Indian. He began to read the Bhagavad Gita and practiced vegetarianism briefly. Most of his life he practiced yoga daily. In 1921 Nehru followed Gandhi in sympathy with the Khilafat cause of the Moslems. Nehru was drawn into the first civil disobedience campaign as general secretary of the United Provinces Congress Committee. Nehru remarked, "I took to the crowd, and the crowd took to me, and yet I never lost myself in it." Nehru here articulated two of his most distinctive traits throughout his career: his involvement with the people and his aloof and lonely detachment. The year 1921 also witnessed the first of Nehru's many imprisonments. In prison his political philosophy matured, and he said that he learned patience and adaptability. Imprisonment was also a criterion of political success. International Influences In 1926-1927 Nehru took his wife to Europe for her health. This experience became a turning point for Nehru. It was an intellectual sojourn, highlighted by an antiimperialist conference in Brussels. Here Nehru first encountered Communists, Socialists, and radical nationalists from Asia and Africa. The goals of independence and social reform became firmly linked in Nehru's mind. Nehru spoke eloquently against imperialism and became convinced of the need for a socialist structure of society. He was impressed with the Soviet example during a visit to Moscow. Back in India Nehru was immediately engrossed in party conferences and was elected president of the All-India Trades Union Congress. In speeches he linked the goals of independence and socialism. In 1928 he joined the radical opposition to proposals for dominion status by his father and Gandhi. In 1930 Gandhi threw his weight to Nehru as Congress president, attempting to divert radicalism from communism to the Congress. In 1930 Nehru was arrested and imprisoned for violation of the Salt Law, which Gandhi also protested in his famous "salt march." Nehru's wife was also arrested. From the end of 1931 to September 1935 Nehru was free only 6 months. During the 1937 elections the Moslem League offered to cooperate with the All-India Congress Committee in forming a coalition government in the United Provinces. Nehru refused, and the struggle between the Congress and the Moslem League was under way. Nehru also established the precedent for economic planning in a suggestion that the Congress form a national planning committee. In 1938 Nehru paid a brief visit to Europe. On his return he was sent briefly as envoy to China until war intervened and made it necessary for him to return. War in Europe drew India in, together with England. For Indian leaders the question was how an honorable settlement could be reached with England and still allow India to participate on the Allied side. Negotiations toward this end culminated in the Cripps mission and offer of dominion status in March 1942. Nehru refused to accept dominion

status, as did the rest of Congress leadership. There followed the Congress "Quit India" resolution and the imprisonment of Nehru, Gandhi, and other Congress leaders until June 1945. There were nationwide protests, a mass demand for independence. Prime Minister In 1945, as Congress president, Nehru was pressed into negotiations with the Moslem League and the viceroy. Congress-Moslem League negotiations were marked by communal killings in Calcutta, followed by sympathetic outbreaks throughout India. Final decisions were reached in conversations between the last British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and Nehru, Gandhi, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. According to the Mountbatten Plan, two separate dominions were created. Nehru became prime minister and minister of external affairs of independent India in 1947. Following Gandhi's assassination in January 1948, Nehru felt very much alone facing economic problems and the possibility of the Balkanization of India. In 1949 he made his first visit to the United States in search of a solution to India's pressing food shortage. Free India's first elections in 1951-1952 resulted in an overwhelming Congress victory. Economic planning and welfare were the first claims on Nehru's attention. He inaugurated a diluted version of socialist planning: concentration of public investment in areas of the economy that were free from private interests. The Planning Commission was created in 1950 and launched the First Five-Year Plan in 1951, stressing an increase in agricultural output. Nehru also took pride in the Community Development Program, established to raise the standard of living in the villages. He saw the Third Five-Year Plan operative before his death on May 27, 1964, in New Delhi. Nehru was the architect of nonalignment in foreign policy. Economic weakness and the Indian tradition were powerful factors in formulating the policy. The other influence on Nehru's foreign policy was his controversial minister of defense, Krishna Menon. Nehru sought closer relations with nonaligned Asian states, with India in the role of leader. Nehru's nonalignment policy was criticized by many Westerners and some Indians as giving preference to totalitarian countries rather than to democracies. Some critics believed that nonalignment left India no effective means to deal with China, national defense, the Great Powers, or the underdeveloped community. On the other hand, nonalignment had many Indian defenders, even in the face of the Chinese invasion of Indian border territory in 1962. Some held that nonalignment was a strategy for deterrence and peace, a force for protecting Indian independence and preservation of the international community on ethical grounds. Nevertheless, nonalignment as implemented by Nehru did not prevent the government from resorting to force in Hyderabad, Kashmir, and Goa. Nehru the man and politician made such a powerful imprint on India that his death on May 27, 1964, left India with no political heir to his leadership. Indians repeated Nehru's

own words of the time of Gandhi's assassination: "The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere." Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India was born at Allahabad on 14 November 1889. He was the only son of Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani. From the age of 15 to 23 Jawaharlal studied in England at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple returning to India in 1912. Jawaharlal Nehru remained the Prime Minister of India for 17 long years and can rightly be called the architect of modern India. He set India on the path of democracy and nurtured its institution - Parliament, multi-party system, independent judiciary and free press. He encouraged Panjayati Raj institutions. With the foresight of a statesman he created institutions like Planning Commission, National Science Laboratories and laid the foundation of a vast public sector for developing infrastructure for industrial growth. Besides, developing the public sector, Nehru also wanted to encourage the private sector to establish a social order based on social justice he emphasised the need of planned development. Nehru gave a clear direction to India’s role in the comity of nations with the policy of non alignment and the principle of Panchsheel, the five principles of peaceful coexistence at a time when the rivalries of cold-war were driving the humanity to its doom. His vision was that of extensive application of science and technology and industrialisation for better living and liberation from the clutches of poverty, superstition and ignorance. Education to him was very important for internal freedom and fearlessness. It was Nehru who insisted if the world was to exist at all; it must exist as one. He was generous and gracious. Emotional sensitivity and intellectual passion infused his writings, giving them unusual appeal and topicality even today. He was awarded Bharat Ratna in 1955. He never forgot India's great cultural heritage and liked to combine tradition with modernity. Jawaharlal was a prolific writer in English and wrote a number of books like ‘The Discovery of India’, ‘Glimpses of World History’, his autobiography, ‘towards Freedom' (1936) ran nine editions in the first year alone. Emotional sensitivity and intellectual passion infused his writings, giving them unusual appeal & topicality even today. He was awarded Bharat Ratna in 1955. Pandit Nehru loved children and they call him affectionately as Chacha Nehru. Hie birthday is observed as Children's Day. He believed that children are the future of the nation. Nehru passed away in 1964.

Jawaharlal Nehru AKA 'Pandit' (pundit or teacher).

Country: India. Cause: Liberation of India from British colonial rule. Background: British occupation of India begins at the start of the 17th Century, with the 'Raj' reaching its zenith at the end of the 19th Century. Indian opposition to colonial rule gains focus in the early 20th Century as the nation unites to expel the British. More background. Mini biography: Born of 14 November 1889 at Allahabad in northern India, into a wealthy Kashmiri Brahman family. His father is a member of the self-rule movement and a leader of the Indian National Congress Party. 1905 - Nehru studies at Harrow school in England, staying there for two years before entering Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he spends three years earning an honours degree in natural science. He qualifies as a barrister after two years at the Inner Temple, London. 1912 - Nehru returns to India and practices law in the Allahabad High Court. 1916 - He marries Kamala Kaul. Their only child, Indira Priyadarshini (Indira Gandhi), is also destined to serve as prime minister of India. Nehru meets Mahatma Gandhi for the first time at the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress Party in Lucknow. 1917 - The British Parliament announces that Indians will be allowed greater participation in the colonial administration and that self-governing institutions will be gradually developed. 1919 - The promise of self-governing institutions is realised with the passing of the Government of India Act by the British Parliament. The Act introduces a dual administration in which both elected Indian legislators and appointed British officials share power, although the British retain control of critical portfolios like finance, taxation and law and order. However, the goodwill created by the move is undermined in March by the passing of the Rowlatt Acts. These acts empower the Indian authorities to suppress sedition by censoring the press, detaining political activists without trial, and arresting suspects without a warrant. Nehru now becomes closely involved in the Congress Party. Gandhi begins a campaign of resistance or 'Satyagraha' (the devotion to truth, or truth force) against the Rowlatt Acts and British rule. The Satyagraha movement spreads through India, gaining millions of followers. The movement is temporarily halted on 13 April when British troops fire at point-blank range into a crowd of 10,000 unarmed and unsuspecting Indians gathered at Amritsar in

the Punjab to celebrate a Hindu festival. A total of 1,650 rounds are fired, killing 379 and wounding 1,137. The incident galvanises Nehru, who becomes a staunch nationalist. 1920 - Gandhi proclaims an organised campaign of noncooperation and advocates 'Ahimsa' (nonviolence) and 'Swaraj' (self-rule), particularly in the economic sphere. Nehru joins the campaign. During the year, Gandhi refashions the Congress Party from an elite organisation into an effective political instrument with widespread grassroots support. Nehru supports the reforms. 1921 - Nehru is arrested by the British and imprisoned for the first time. Over the next 24 years he will spend more than nine years in jail, with the longest of his nine detentions lasting for three years. Nehru will occupy much of his time in prison writing. His major works will include 'Glimpses of World History' (1934), his 'Autobiography' (1936, and 'The Discovery of India' (1946). Meanwhile, the Congress Party gives Gandhi complete executive authority. However, after a series of violent confrontations between Indian demonstrators and the British authorities, Gandhi ends the campaign of civil disobedience. 1923 - Nehru becomes general secretary of the Congress for a period of two years, attaining the position again in 1927 for another two years. 1926 - He tours Europe and the Soviet Union, where he develops an interest in Marxism. 1927 - The British set up a commission to recommend further constitutional steps towards greater self-rule but fail to appoint an Indian to the panel. In response, the Congress boycotts the commission throughout India and drafts its own constitution demanding full independence by 1930. 1929 - Under Gandhi's patronage, Nehru is elected president of the Congress at the party's Lahore session. Nehru is to serve as party president six times. 1930 - Nehru is arrested during a new campaign of civil disobedience orchestrated by Gandhi. The campaign calls upon the Indian population to refuse to pay taxes, particularly the tax on salt, and centres on a 400 km march to the sea between 12 March and 6 April. Thousands follow Gandhi as he walks south from his commune at Ahmedabad (the capital of Gujarat) to Dandi (near Surat on the Gulf of Cambay). When they arrive they illegally make salt by evaporating seawater. In May, Gandhi is arrested and held in custody for the rest of the year. About 30,000 other members of the independence movement are also held in jail.

1931 - Gandhi accepts a truce with the British, calls off civil disobedience, and travels to London to attend a 'Round Table Conference' on the future of India. On his return to India he finds that the situation has deteriorated. 1932 - Hopes that calm will prevail following the negotiations between the Indians and the British are dashed when Gandhi and Nehru are arrested. Nehru is sentenced to two years imprisonment. 1934 - When Gandhi formally resigns from politics, Nehru becomes leader of the Congress Party. 1935 - Limited self-rule is achieved when the British Parliament passes the Government of India Act (1935). The Act gives Indian provinces a system of democratic, autonomous government. However it is only implemented after Gandhi gives his approval. 1937 - In February, after elections under the Government of India Act bring the Congress to power in seven of 11 provinces, Nehru is faced with a dilemma. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the defeated Muslim League, asks for the formation of coalition Congress-Muslim League governments in some of the provinces. His request is denied. The subsequent clash between the Congress and the Muslim League hardens into a conflict between Hindus and Muslims that will ultimately lead to the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. 1939 - When the Second World War breaks out in September Britain unilaterally declares India's participation on the side of the Allies. Nehru argues that India's place is alongside the democracies but insists that India can only fight as a free country. The Congress withdraws from government and decides it will not support the British war effort unless India is granted complete and immediate independence. The Muslim League, however, supports the British during the war. 1940 - Nehru is arrested and sentenced to four years imprisonment but is released after little more than a year, along with other Congress prisoners, three days before the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. Meanwhile, the Muslim League adopts the 'Pakistan Resolution' calling for areas with a Muslim majority in India's northwest and northeast to be partitioned from the Hindu core. 1942 - With Japanese forces reaching the eastern borders of India, the British attempt to negotiate with the Indians. However Gandhi and Nehru will accept nothing less than independence and call on the British to leave the subcontinent. When the Congress Party passes its 'Quit India' resolution in Bombay on 8 August the entire Congress Working Committee, including Gandhi and Nehru, is arrested and imprisoned. Nehru is not released from this, his ninth, last and longest period of detention, until 15 June 1945.

Also during 1942 Gandhi officially designates Nehru as his political heir. 1944 - The British Government agrees to independence for India on condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the Muslim League and the Congress Party, resolve their differences. 1946 - Nehru, with Gandhi's blessing, is invited by the British to form an interim government to organise the transition to independence. Fearing it will be excluded from power, the Muslim League declares 16 August 'Direct Action Day'. When communal rioting breaks out in the north, partition comes to be seen as a valid alternative to the possibility of civil war. Nehru attempts to prevent partition but is unsuccessful. 1947 - On 3 June British Prime Minister Clement Attlee introduces a bill to the House of Commons calling for the independence and partition of the British Indian Empire into the separate nations of India and Pakistan. On 14 July the House of Commons passes the India Independence Act. Under the Act Pakistan is further divided into east and west wings on either side of India. On 14 August Pakistan is declared to be independent. India formally attains its sovereignty at midnight on the same day. Amid the celebrations Nehru delivers a famous speech on India's "tryst with destiny", but the initial jubilation is soon tempered by violence. Sectarian riots erupt as Muslims in India flee to Pakistan while Hindus in Pakistan flee the opposite way. As many as two million die in north India, at least 12 million become refugees, and a limited war over the incorporation of Kashmir into India breaks out between the two nation states. Nehru becomes the first prime minister of independent India and introduces a mix of socialist planning and free enterprise measures to repair and build the country's ravaged economy. He also takes the external affairs portfolio, serving as foreign minister throughout his tenure as prime minister. 1950 - India becomes a republic with Nehru as its prime minister. He is deeply involved in the development and implementation of the country's five-year plans that over the course of the 1950s and 1960s see India become one of the most industrialised nations in the world. Industrial complexes are established around the country, while innovations are encouraged by an expansion of scientific research. In the decade between 1951 and 1961, the national income of India rises 42%. Nehru also pursues reforms to improve the social condition of women and the poor. The minimum marriageable age is increased from 12 to 15, women are given the right to divorce their husbands and inherit property, and the dowry system is made illegal.

Absentee landlords are stripped of their land, which is then transferred to tenant farmers who can document their right to occupancy. In foreign affairs, Nehru advocates policies of nationalism, anticolonialism, internationalism, and nonalignment or "positive neutrality". He founds the nonaligned movement with Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito and Egypt's Gamal Abdel-Nasser and becomes one of the key spokesmen of the nonaligned nations of Asia and Africa. Nehru argues for the admission of China to the United Nations (UN) and calls for détente between the United States and the Soviet Union. Acting as a mediator, he also helps to end the Korean War of 1950-53. 1956 - India under Nehru is the only nonaligned country in the UN to vote with the Soviet Union on the invasion of Hungary, calling into question the country's nonaligned status. 1961 - Indian troops occupy the Portuguese enclave at Goa on the west coast of the country in December, removing the last remaining colonial administration on the subcontinent and ending six years of unsuccessful negotiations. 1962 - A long-standing border dispute with China breaks out into war, despite Nehru's efforts to improve relations between the two countries. When the Chinese threaten to overrun the Brahmaputra River valley on India's northern border, Nehru calls for aid from the West. China withdraws but Nehru's nonalignment policy is further discredited. 1963 - He suffers a slight stroke, followed by a more debilitating attack in January 1964. 1964 - Nehru dies in office on 27 May in New Delhi from a third and fatal stroke. Comment: The secular and practical balance to Gandhi's spiritual idealism, Nehru was no less passionate in his pursuit of independence for India. Though often overshadowed by the Mahatma, he was no less admired. He had the cultural and intellectual credibility necessary to first attract the younger intelligentsia to Gandhi's campaigns and then rally them after independence had been gained. Nehru's tenure as prime minister has however come under critical analysis. Always a democratic socialist, his five-year plans helped to establish the economic independence that Gandhi had advocated. Nehru's domestic policies were centred on democracy, socialism, unity, and secularism. Today India is one of the strongest democracies in the world and is beginning to take off as an economic power. Nehru's only child, Indira Gandhi, served as India's prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 to 1984. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was prime minister from 1984 to 1989. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) The Encyclopedia of Asian History the Asia Society 1988.

Nehru, Jawaharlal (1889-1964), nationalist leader and the first prime minister of India (1947-1964), was born at Allahabad on 14 November 1889. The only son of Motilal Nehru, he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and called to the bar in London. The seven years he spent in England were a formative period in which he acquired a rational and skeptical outlook and sampled Fabian socialism and Irish nationalism, which added to his own patriotic dedication. He returned to India in 1912. Legal work and a comfortable life failed to satisfy his restless spirit: it was not law but politics that called him. He joined the Home Rule movement in 1917, but his real initiation into militant politics came two years later when Mohandas Gandhi launched his campaign against the Rowlatt Bills. There was much about Gandhi that puzzled and baffled young Nehru, but he saw in Gandhi's satyagraha and effective alternative to armchair politics and sporadic terrorism, between which Indian politics was oscillating. At first Nehru's father did not like the idea of his twenty-nine-year-old son plunging into an unconstitutional agitation, but both father and son cast in their lot with Gandhi at the crucial session of the Indian National Congress held in Calcutta in September 1920. A year later they were jailed for six months. This was Jawaharlal's first prison term; in all he was to spend nine years in jail. Despite intellectual and temperamental differences, Jawaharlal became a trusted lieutenant of Gandhi. He served as general secretary of the All India Congress Committee, whose office was located in the family house at Allahabad. While he was in Europe for the treatment of his ailing wife, Kamala in 1926-1927, Nehru attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities Against Imperialism in Brussels and paid a brief visit to Moscow, which gave a radical edge to his politics. In December 1928, at the Calcutta session, he clashed with the Congress old guard on the issue of dominion status for India. A year later, he presided over the Lahore session, which declared complete independence and civil disobedience under Gandhi's leadership. Nehru was elected to the Congress presidency again in 1936, 1937, and 1946, and he came to occupy a position in the nationalist movement second only to that of Gandhi. Passionately opposed to fascism, Nehru was eager for nationalist India to throw its full weight behind the Allied war effort. But he insisted that the British government recognize India's right to freedom. After the abortive Cripps Mission, he reluctantly fell in line with Gandhi's plans for the "Quit India" campaign and was imprisoned in August 1942. Released in 1945, he took a leading part in the negotiations that culminated in the emergence of the dominions of India and Pakistan in August 1947. Nehru was fifty-seven when he assumed office as prime minister of India. Although his entire life had been spent in opposition, he made an effortless transition from a political agitator to a statesman. His government coped successfully with formidable challenges: the disorders and mass exodus of minorities across the new border with Pakistan, the integration of 500-odd princely states into the Indian Union, the framing of a new constitution, and the establishment of the political and administrative infrastructure for a parliamentary democracy.

Nehru's position in the Congress Party and the government was unchallenged throughout his seventeen years of power, except perhaps during the first three years of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's term as the deputy prime minister. Nehru's aim, in his own words, was to convert India's economy into that of a modern state. He set up a Planning Commission, encouraged development of science and technology, and launched three successive fiveyear plans. His policies led to a sizable growth in agricultural and industrial production, but it was somewhat offset by an unprecedented increase in population. Important as Nehru's influence was on domestic policy, it was decisive on foreign affairs. Long years of association with the nationalist movement under Gandhi's leadership had conditioned him against colonialism and militarism. He was also acutely conscious of the hazards of war in the thermonuclear age and refused to align India with either of the power blocs. Initially his independent stance put him out of court with both the United States and the Soviet Union. However, over time both countries increasingly appreciated his motives and aims. He played a constructive, mediatory role in bringing the Korean War to an end and in resolving other international crises, such as those over the Suez Canal and the Congo, offering India's services for conciliation and international policing. He contributed behind the scenes toward the solution of several other explosive issues, such as those of West Berlin, Austria, and Laos. Nehru was unable to achieve a satisfactory equation with India's two major immediate neighbors, Pakistan and China. The Kashmir issue proved a stumbling block in reaching an accord with Pakistan, and the border dispute prevented a resolution with China. The Chinese invasion in 1962, which Nehru failed to anticipate, came as a great blow to him and probably hastened his death. Nehru had the prescience to foresee the possibilities of liberalization in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and of the rift between the Soviet Union and China. He persevered, in the face of much skepticism and criticism, in his pleas for the admission of China to the United Nations, for détente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and for a more equitable economic relationship between the developing and the developed countries. He called for liquidation of colonialism in Asia and Africa and, with Tito and Nasser, was one of the chief architects of the nonaligned movement. Nehru was also a writer of distinction. His writings were a by-product of his intense involvement in the Indian nationalist movement, and his major works, Glimpses of World History (1934), his Autobiography (1936), and The Discovery of India (1946), were actually written in prison.