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).
Education and social reform Nehru with schoolchildren at the Durgapur Steel Plant. Durgapur along with Rourkela and Bhilai were the three integrated steel plants set up under India's Second Five-Year Plan in the late 1950s. Jawaharlal Nehru was a passionate advocate of education for India's children and youth, believing it essential for India's future progress. His government oversaw the establishment of many institutions of higher learning, including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management and the National Institutes of Technology. Nehru also outlined a commitment in his five-year plans to guarantee free and compulsory primary education to all of India's children. For this purpose, Nehru oversaw the creation of mass village enrolment programmes and the construction of thousands of schools. Nehru also launched initiatives such as the provision of free milk and meals to children in order to fight malnutrition. Adult education centres, vocational and technical schools were also organised for adults, especially in the rural areas. Under Nehru, the Indian Parliament enacted many changes to Hindu law to criminalise caste discrimination and increase the legal rights and social freedoms of women.[57][58][59][60] A system of reservations in government services and educational institutions was created to eradicate the social inequalities and disadvantages faced by peoples of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Nehru also championed secularism and religious harmony, increasing the representation of minorities in government. Nehru specifically wrote Article 44 of the Indian constitution under the Directive Principles of State Policy which states : 'The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.' The article has formed the basis of secularism in India.However, Nehru has been criticised for the inconsistent application of the law. Most notably, Nehru allowed Muslims to keep their personal law in matters relating to marriage and inheritance. Also in the small state of Goa, a civil code based on the old Portuguese Family Laws was allowed to continue, and Muslim Personal law was prohibited by Nehru. This was the result of the annexation of Goa in 1961 by India, when Nehru promised the people that their laws would be left intact. This has led to accusations of selective secularism. While Nehru exempted Muslim law from legislation and they remained un-reformed, he did pass the Special Marriage Act in 1954. The idea behind this act was to give everyone in India the ability to marry outside the personal law under a civil marriage. As usual the law applied to all of India, except Jammu and Kashmir (again leading to accusations of selective secularism). In many respects, the act was almost identical to the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, which gives some idea as to how secularised the law regarding Hindus had become. The Special Marriage Act allowed Muslims to marry under it and thereby retain the protections, generally beneficial to Muslim women, that could not be found in the personal law. Under the act polygamy was illegal, and inheritance and succession would be governed by the Indian Succession Act, rather than the respective Muslim Personal Law. Divorce also would be governed by the secular law, and maintenance of a divorced wife would be along the lines set down in the civil law. Nehru led the faction of the Congress party which promoted Hindi as the ligua-franca of the Indian nation. After an exhaustive and divisive debate with the non-Hindi speakers, Hindi was adopted as the official language of India in 1950 with English continuing as an associate official language for a period of fifteen years, after which Hindi would become the sole official language. Efforts by the Indian Government to make Hindi the sole official language after 1965 were not acceptable to many non-Hindi Indian states, who wanted the continued use of English. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a descendant of Dravidar Kazhagam, led the opposition to Hindi. To allay their fears, Nehru enacted the Official Languages Act in 1963 to ensure the continuing use of English beyond 1965. The text of the Act did not satisfy the DMK and increased their scepticism that his assurances might not be honoured by future administrations. The issue was resolved during the premiership of Lal Bahadur Shastri, who under great pressure from Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, was made to give assurances that English would continue to be used as the official language as long the non-Hindi speaking states wanted. The Official Languages Act was eventually amended in 1967 by the Congress Government headed by Indira Gandhi to guarantee the indefinite use of Hindi and English as official languages. This effectively ensured the current "virtual indefinite policy of bilingualism" of the Indian Republic. National security and foreign policy Nehru with Otto Grotewohl, the Prime Minister of East Germany See also: Role of India in Non-Aligned Movement Nehru led newly independent India from 1947 to 1964, during its first years of freedom from British rule. Both the United States and the Soviet Union competed to make India an ally throughout the Cold War. Nehru also maintained good relations with the British Empire. Under the London Declaration, India agreed that, when it became a republic in January 1950, it would join the Commonwealth of Nations and accept the British monarch as a "symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth". The other nations of the Commonwealth recognised India's continuing membership of the association. The reaction back home was favourable; only the far-left and the far-right criticised Nehru's decision. On the international scene, Nehru was a champion of pacifism and a strong supporter of the United Nations. He pioneered the policy of non-alignment and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement of nations professing neutrality between the rival blocs of nations led by the US and the USSR. Recognising the People's Republic of China soon after its founding (while most of the Western bloc continued relations with the Republic of China), Nehru argued for its inclusion in the United Nations and refused to brand the Chinese as the aggressors in their conflict with Korea.[62] He sought to establish warm and friendly relations with China in 1950, and hoped to act as an intermediary to bridge the gulf and tensions between the communist states and the Western bloc. Nehru had promised in 1948 to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir under the auspices of the UN. Kashmir was a disputed territory between India and Pakistan, the two having gone to war with each other over the state in 1948. However, as Pakistan failed to pull back troops in accordance with the UN resolution and as Nehru grew increasingly wary of the UN, he declined to hold a plebiscite in 1953. His policies on Kashmir and the integeration of the state into India was frequently defended in front of the United Nations by his aide, Krishna Menon, a brilliant diplomat who earned a reputation in India for his passionate speeches. Nehru, while a pacifist, was not blind to the political and geo-strategic reality of India in 1947. While laying the foundation stone of the National Defence Academy (India) in 1949, he stated: "We, who for generations had talked about and attempted in everything a peaceful way and practiced non-violence, should now be, in a sense, glorifying our army, navy and air force. It means a lot. Though it is odd, yet it simply reflects the oddness of life. Though life is logical, we have to face all contingencies, and unless we are prepared to face them, we will go under. There was no greater prince of peace and apostle of non-violence than Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, whom we have lost, but yet, he said it was better to take the sword than to surrender, fail or run away. We cannot live carefree assuming that we are safe. Human nature is such. We cannot take the risks and risk our hard-won freedom. We have to be prepared with all modern defence methods and a well-equipped army, navy and air force."[63][64] Nehru envisioned the developing of nuclear weapons and established the Atomic Energy Commission of India (AEC) in 1948.[65] Nehru also called Dr. Homi J. Bhabha, a nuclear physicist, who was entrusted with complete authority over all nuclear related affairs and programs and answered only to Nehru himself Indian nuclear policy was set by unwritten personal understanding between Nehru and Bhabha Nehru famously said to Bhabha, "Professor Bhabha take care of Physics, leave international relation to me".From the outset in 1948, Nehru had high ambition to develop this program to stand against the industrialized states and the basis of this program was to establish an Indian nuclear weapons capability as part of India's regional superiority to other South-Asian states,
From 1959, in a process that accelerated in 1961, Nehru adopted the "Forward Policy" of setting up military outposts in disputed areas of the Sino-Indian border, including in 43 outposts in territory not previously controlled by India. China attacked some of these outposts, and thus the Sino-Indian War began, which India lost, and China withdrew to pre-war lines in eastern zone at Tawang but retained Aksai Chin which was within British India and was handed over to India after independence. Later, Pakistan handed over some portion of Kashmir near Siachen controlled by Pakistan since 1948 to China. The war exposed the unpreparedness of India's military which could send only 14 thousand troops to the war zone in opposition to many times larger Chinese army, and Nehru was widely criticised for his government's insufficient attention to defence. In response, Nehru sacked the defence minister Krishna Menon and sought US military aid. Nehru's improved relations with USA under John F. Kennedy proved useful during the war, as in 1962, President of Pakistan (then closely aligned with the Americans) Ayub Khan was made to guarantee his neutrality in regards to India, who was threatened by "communist aggression from Red China."[72] The Indian relationship with the Soviet Union, criticised by right-wing groups supporting free-market policies was also seemingly validated. Nehru would continue to maintain his commitment to the non-aligned movement despite calls from some to settle down on one permanent ally. The aftermath of the war saw sweeping changes in the Indian military to prepare it for similar conflicts in the future, and placed pressure on Nehru, who was seen as responsible for failing to anticipate the Chinese attack on India. Under American advice (by American envoy John Kenneth Galbraith who made and ran American policy on the war as all other top policy makers in USA were absorbed in coincident Cuban Missile Crisis) Nehru refrained, not according to the best choices available, from using the Indian air force to beat back the Chinese advances. The CIA later revealed that at that time the Chinese had neither the fuel nor runways long enough for using their air force effectively in Tibet. Indians in general became highly sceptical of China and its military. Many Indians view the war as a betrayal of India's attempts at establishing a long-standing peace with China and started to question Nehru's usage of the term "Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai" (meaning "Indians and Chinese are brothers"). The war also put an end to Nehru's earlier hopes that India and China would form a strong Asian Axis to counteract the increasing influence of the Cold War bloc superpowers.
No comments:
Post a Comment