Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was a leader of India's independence movement and the country's first prime minister, holding office from independence in August 1947 until his death in 1964. Gandhi's chosen political heir, he spent nearly nine years in British prisons, and as prime minister he built the institutions of a secular parliamentary democracy, launched state-led economic planning, and became a leading voice of the newly independent nations through the policy of non-alignment. His failures, above all the war with China in 1962 and the unresolved conflict over Kashmir, are part of the same record.

Nehru was born on 14 November 1889 in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, in northern India, into a wealthy family of Kashmiri Brahmins. His father, Motilal Nehru, was one of the most successful lawyers in the country and later twice president of the Indian National Congress. Jawaharlal was taught at home by English tutors and in 1905 was sent to England, to Harrow School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in natural sciences. He trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple in London and returned to India in 1912.

He practised law without much enthusiasm, but politics drew him in. In 1916 he married Kamala Kaul, and their only child, Indira, was born in 1917. The same year, 1916, he first met Mahatma Gandhi, whose combination of moral force and mass politics transformed him. After the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which British-commanded troops killed hundreds of unarmed people, he committed himself fully to the national movement in British India.

Nehru joined Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920 to 1922, worked among peasants in the United Provinces, and was jailed for the first time in 1921. It was the first of nine imprisonments, which together kept him behind bars for almost nine years. A visit to Europe in 1926 and 1927, including the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels and the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in Moscow, made him a socialist and an internationalist, and he became the leader of the Congress's younger left wing.

In December 1929, at the age of forty, he presided over the Congress session at Lahore, which declared that its goal was purna swaraj, complete independence, rather than self-government within the British Empire. He took part in Gandhi's Salt March campaign of civil disobedience in 1930 and was jailed again. Prison gave him time to write: Glimpses of World History (1934), letters on history addressed to Indira, and his Autobiography (1936). Kamala died of tuberculosis in Switzerland in 1936. He was elected Congress president again for 1936 and 1937.

When Britain declared India at war in 1939 without consulting Indian leaders, the Congress ministries in the provinces resigned. Nehru loathed Fascism, but he refused to support the war effort without a promise of independence. In August 1942 the Congress launched the Quit India movement, and he and the rest of its leadership were arrested; he spent almost three years in Ahmednagar Fort, where he wrote The Discovery of India.

After the Second World War a weakened Britain moved towards withdrawal. Negotiations between the Congress and Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League, which demanded a separate Muslim state, broke down amid mounting communal violence. In September 1946 Nehru became head of an interim government. In 1947 he and other Congress leaders accepted the plan of the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, to divide the country, and at midnight on 14 to 15 August 1947 India became independent. Nehru marked the moment in Delhi with his "tryst with destiny" speech.

The Partition of India was accompanied by massacres and one of the largest migrations in history, with perhaps a million or more people killed and some fifteen million displaced between India and Pakistan. Within months the two states were at war over Kashmir, whose Hindu maharaja acceded to India after an invasion by tribal forces from Pakistan. Nehru referred the dispute to the United Nations, and a ceasefire in January 1949 left the region divided. In January 1948 Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist, and Nehru announced to the nation that "the light has gone out of our lives". In the following years he and his deputy, Vallabhbhai Patel, oversaw the integration of more than 500 princely states, by negotiation and in some cases by force.

The constitution adopted in January 1950 made India a secular, democratic republic with universal adult suffrage. Nehru led the Congress to large victories in the general elections of 1951 to 1952, 1957 and 1962, the first of them the largest democratic election the world had yet seen. He insisted on a secular state at a time when partition had inflamed religious hatred, and the Hindu Code Bills of the mid-1950s gave Hindu women rights of divorce and inheritance. Under pressure from popular movements, he accepted the reorganisation of states along linguistic lines in 1956.

His economic policy aimed at a "socialistic pattern of society" through a mixed economy. The Planning Commission drew up Five-Year Plans that gave priority to heavy industry, dams, steel plants and power, and to public sector companies. He founded scientific and technical institutions, including the first Indian Institutes of Technology and the atomic energy programme, and called the new dams the temples of modern India. Industrial output grew, but agriculture lagged, land reform was patchy, and poverty and illiteracy remained widespread. His critics later blamed the system of state licences, the "licence raj", for slow growth.

Nehru acted as his own foreign minister. Refusing to join either bloc in the Cold War, he became, with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, which held its first summit in Belgrade in 1961. He attended the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states in 1955 and championed decolonisation at the United Nations.

He sought friendship with the People's Republic of China, and in 1954 the two countries agreed the Panchsheel, five principles of peaceful coexistence. But relations soured over Tibet, where India gave refuge to the Dalai Lama in 1959, and over disputed borders in the Himalayas. In October and November 1962 Chinese forces overwhelmed the Indian army in a short border war. The defeat was a humiliation for Nehru, whose policy had assumed China would not attack, and it forced him to seek arms from the United States and Britain. In December 1961, by contrast, he had sent troops to end Portuguese rule in Goa.

Nehru's health declined after 1962, and he died of a heart attack in New Delhi on 27 May 1964. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister in 1966, and the Nehru-Gandhi family dominated the Congress for decades afterwards. His birthday is celebrated in India as Children's Day.

Nehru's reputation has risen and fallen with Indian politics. Admirers credit him with keeping India democratic, secular and united when many new states fell to dictatorship, and with laying the foundations of its science, industry and higher education. Critics fault his economic controls, his handling of Kashmir and China, and the dynastic politics that followed him, and Hindu nationalists reject his secularism. For the wider story, see the History of India.