5 min readMay 27, 2026 06:30 AM IST First published on: May 27, 2026 at 06:30 AM ISTFar from receding into the fog of history, Jawaharlal Nehru retains a quick recall factor not many public figures can rival even today. Nehru’s ability to animate politics with such intensity more than six decades since his death is an indicator of his central location in the ongoing struggle over the meaning of India itself.By continuously pushing the notion of his “mistakes”, the attempt is to dispute Nehru’s position as a historical statesman and turn him into a convenient repository of blame. While many debaters on all sides of the ideological divide engage in polemics around Nehru, the task for those seeking to develop an understanding of history is neither to sanctify him nor to shield him from criticism, but to place him, his ideas, and his actions within the constraints and dilemmas of his time.AdvertisementNehru governed a nation newly emerging from the debilitating violence of colonial rule and the immediate trauma of Partition. Not only was the young India economically weak and socially fractured, its administrators and institutions also had no experience as autonomous functionaries.While many post-colonial states quickly descended into coups and one-party systems, Nehru played a central role in legitimising parliamentary politics through respectful engagement with the Opposition, even when he could have taken authoritarian shortcuts. He was clear-eyed that democracy involved educating the citizenry and a robust culture of institutionalised accountability.While Nehruvian secularism is often misunderstood in contemporary debate, it is important to point out that it was neither hostile to the institution of religion nor to any particular faith. It was not an attempt to erase faith from public life; rather, he sought to strengthen a framework that could prevent the state from privileging one religious identity over another. The challenge of welding together a country into a functioning republic was unprecedented, and his writings show that as the first PM, he understood the full import of this challenge.AdvertisementThis composite vision of India is also reflected in Nehruvian economic ideals. The conditions in which Nehru decided the direction of India’s economic development are not disputed. In the early 1950s, Indian private capital was neither willing nor equipped to build steel plants, heavy machinery or large-scale irrigation. Nehru built a public sector geared for national development in place of an imperial machinery whose objective so far had been to suck India dry. Private enterprises, even today, demand vast freedom and little regulation. At the same time. They expect heavy state investment and support that make such “freedom” possible. The regulations may be criticised as excessive, but they should not eclipse what state-led development achieved when private enterprise was hesitant and foreign capital anathema.Nehru knew that transforming India’s masses into a citizenry of a functional democracy required cultural infrastructure. The Sahitya Akademi, Lalit Kala Akademi, Sangeet Natak Akademi, National School of Drama, Film and Television Institute of India, Films Division, and so on emerged from this conviction. These institutions might appear paternalistic and flawed by today’s standards, yet they nurtured generations of writers, artists, filmmakers, and performers.you may likeEven Nehru’s foreign policy deserves more nuance than current polemics allow. Non-alignment is often caricatured as naive moralism. But in the rigid bipolarity of the Cold War, it was a pragmatic policy and an assertion of sovereignty, and carved out strategic space between rival blocs not only for India but also for other newly decolonised nations.How does one evaluate the legacy of a pacifist statesman in times of war and internal strife? Anti-militarist scholars interpret the conflict with China through the ambiguities of colonial border-making and competing regional hegemonic aspirations. They regard the policy before 1962 as naive, some going so far as to say that Nehru’s moral internationalism coexisted awkwardly with emerging Indian strategic ambitions. This is true with respect to Kashmir and the wars with Pakistan, too. Nehruvian internationalism could not escape the logic of the military consolidation of the Indian state.We do not need to waste any more time obsessing over whether Nehru was right about every policy. The Nehru of our inheritance would not require us to unthinkingly repeat his choices but to recover the outlook he embodied. His faith in procedure and institutions, willingness to explain and persuade when he could have easily commanded, made India a durable democracy.The writer is MP (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal