Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru, the son of Motilal Nehru was born in Allahabad on Nov 14, 1889. He was the first Prime Minister of Independent India. He grew up in an influential political family, his father being a lawyer and prominent in the Nationalist Movement.

His Childhood was privilege; he was tutored at home and then studied in England at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was admitted to English Bar and returned to India very westernized. He married Kamala Kaul in year 1916. And in 1917 their only child Indira was born.

Nehru met Mahatma Gandhi in 1916 at an INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS party meeting. From then on, their lives were entwined, though they differed on several points, Largely because of Nehru’s international outlook clashed with Gandhi’s simple Indian outlooks and views. The turning point in his life came in 1919 when he overheard General Dyer gloating over the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. From this point he vowed to fight the British. Regardless of the criticism, he was one of the most influential leaders in freedom struggle. He was the pioneering articulators of Asian resurgence and an unusually idealistic advocate of consciences in International politics.

The younger Nehru became a leader of more radical wing of the congress party and in 1929 he was elected as the party president. British repeatedly arrested him for civil disobedience strikes and other political actions; he spent half of his next 18 years in jail.

During his life time, he went through the variety of individual and collective reactions- to be adored as a revolutionary and vibrant personification of the forward looking spirit of India, to be described as a pampered young man who unintentionally acquired the national leadership due to influence of his father and the nepotism of Mahatma Gandhi.

He is admired as the leader of freedom movement, as the father of institutional democracy and as an architect of Indian policy in all manifestations, and as the longest serving Prime Minister of India (1946-1964).

After World War II he participated in the negotiations that eventually created the separate states of India and Pakistan, a partition of Indian subcontinent between Hindus and Muslims that Gandhi refused to accept. When independence came on Aug. 15, 1947, Nehru became Prime Minister of India, leading his country through the difficult transition period. Nehru had to cope with the influx of Hindu refugees from Pakistan, the problem of integrating the princely states into the new federal structure, and war with Pakistan (1948) over Kashmir and with China (1962).

In International affairs he pursue a policy of strict nonalignment, a difficult course in the cold-war years; his neutralism broke down, however, when he asked for western aid during the Sino-Indian conflict. A firm upholder of democratic socialism at home, Nehru remained immensely popular in India. In January 1964, after 17 years in office, he suffered a stroke. He died four months later. Nehru was the author of many books, including an autobiography, Toward Freedom (1941).