Mahatma, Nehru and Beyond

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Nehru was among the leaders through most of his public life, which began in 1919 when he joined Mahatma Gandhi's first and most impressive challenge to the British Empire, the satyagraha movement. He grew gradually into a hero when, as free India's first prime minister through the dream decade of the 1950s, he transformed a country into a democratic and modern nation, winning the love of his people and admiration of the world. Pakistan, interestingly, offered a template of what could go wrong as its politicians destroyed one another and finally surrendered to their armed forces in the grey gloom of constitutional anarchy. Nehru, in contrast, had piloted, along with Dr B.R. Ambedkar, a model Constitution, led his party to triumph in two exemplary general elections and then announced that power was not his only ambition in life. On April 29, 1958, the Congress Parliamentary Party met in an environment of unprecedented crisis. Nehru wanted permission from his party to resign. He had already told president Rajendra Prasad his reasons. Fatigue. Forty years of public service had been exhilarating, he told his fellow MPs, but he now wanted a respite from thus daily burden" to do "some quiet thinking" and return to myself as an individual citizen of India and not as prime minister".

Tanveer Hasan is a renowned author from India. Apart from this book, Hasan has written a number of other books. Hasan was born in Himachal Pradesh and he completed his schooling from Forman Christian College. He completed his degree from Gurukul Kangri University and went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Delhi.

Nehru was among the leaders through most of his public life, which began in 1919 when he joined Mahatma Gandhi's first and most impressive challenge to the British Empire, the satyagraha movement. He grew gradually into a hero when, as free India's first prime minister through the dream decade of the 1950s, he transformed a country into a democratic and modern nation, winning the love of his people and admiration of the works datistan interestingly, offered a template of what could go wrong as its politicians destroyed one another and finally surrendered to their armed forces in the grey gloom of constitutional anarchy. Nehru, in contrast, had piloted, along with Dr B.R. Ambedkar, a model Constitution, led his party to triumph in two exemplary general elections and then announced that power was not his only ambition in life.

On April 29, 1958, the Congress Parliamentary Party met in an environment of unprecedented crisis. Nehru wanted permission from his party to resign. He had already told president Rajendra Prasad his reasons, Fatigue. Forty years of public service had been exhilarating, he told his fellow MPs, but he now wanted a respite from "this daily burden" to do "some quiet thinking" and return to "myself as an individual citizen of India and not as prime minister".

This colossus was human. And human enough to be persuaded to change his mind. As one Congress MP archly remarked, Jawaharlal wanted time to think about how to save the world from the hydrogen bomb, but had no compunctions about dropping a hydrogen bomb on the Congress. When the Congress rejected his offer to resign, letters of congratulation and relief came from both Dwight Eisenhower in Washington and Nikita Krushchev in Moscow. Nonalignment was working somewhere!

Thirteen years of Nehru's transition from youth to middle age were spent in British jails, many of them ratinfested and all of them depressing. His anger was restricted to British rule, never to the British; his friendship with the last viceroy and his wife, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, which flowered in the Fifties, is the stuff of history and gossip. When India became free of viceroys, he placed a gold statuette of Gandhi and a model of the hand of Lincoln on his desk, and set to work. On January 30, 1948, the light went out of his, and India's, life when the Mahatma was assassinated. By 1950, the pillar of his administration, Sardar Patel, was gone as well. Maulana Azad (Nehru translated the Maulana's stirring presidential address at the Ramgarh Congress session in 1940) seemed to have lost heart after he lost the war within his own community to preserve the unity of India. Nehru was alone. Nehru may have been only the first among equals when he became prime minister, but after 1952 there was no equal in his Cabinet.

**Contents and Sample Pages**