INTRODUCTION
If a person had the luxury of choosing the moment in historical time in
which to be remembered, Jawaharlal Nehru ought to have chosen the
year 1955. The newly-independent Indian state, of which he was now
prime minister, was a greatly-admired model for colonial nations
struggling for independence, and Nehru himself was an appealing national
leader: urbane, sophisticated and intellectual, committed to social justice,
democratic, not sectarian. India had begun to recover from the traumas
of a partition conducted on the basis of religious community, which had
led to the formation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Under Nehru’s
leadership, India had successfully resisted internal pressures to define itself
as ‘Hindu’, which would have meant consigning its substantial minority
of Muslims to the implicit status of foreigners, and leaving other minori-
ties in an ambiguous position. Under his leadership, India’s hopes of rapid
economic development and an eventual emergence from poverty were
generally considered to be bright; the rest of the world was beginning to
look to India as a model for planned development in the non-communist
underdeveloped world. Nehru’s form of socialism seemed to avoid the
authoritarian tendencies of the Soviet model; his credentials as a democrat
who was not a puppet of the Western bloc were greatly enhanced by his
being among the leaders of an emerging group of non-aligned states and
by his opposition to the Korean War.
But of course Nehru could not choose his moment of remembrance;
and this rather positive picture has been somewhat modified over the years.