Person · nationalist & prime minister · India

Jawaharlal Nehru

Date

1889–1964

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

25.448, 81.840

Worth knowing

He and Patel disagreed on almost everything — states reorganisation, the economy, the treatment of the RSS — and governed together anyway for three years until Patel's death, which is the least remarked-on fact about the first Indian cabinet.

About the place

Placed at Allahabad, where he was born at Anand Bhavan, the family house his father gave to the Congress in 1930. He died in Delhi.

Connections (6)

• Alternative toSubhas Chandra Bose

  Bose was elected Congress president in 1938 and re-elected in 1939 against Gandhi's candidate, then forced out within months when the working committee resigned under him. Nehru, who agreed with him about socialism and disagreed about method and about Gandhi, did not back him. Six years later Nehru put on a barrister's gown to defend Bose's officers at the Red Fort — which is the whole relationship in two episodes.

• Court associationVallabhbhai Patel

  Patel and Nehru disagreed on almost everything — planning, the treatment of the RSS after Gandhi's murder, the handling of Kashmir, the temperament of the administration — and both offered to resign over it more than once. Gandhi chose Nehru for prime minister in 1946 although the provincial committees had overwhelmingly nominated Patel. They then governed together for three years until Patel's death, which is the least remarked-on fact about the first Indian cabinet.

• Imperial administration ofConstitution Hall (Parliament House)

  Nehru made the tryst with destiny speech in this chamber at midnight on 14 August 1947, and then governed from the building for seventeen years — the longest continuous prime ministership India has had, and the one in which the parliamentary system, the planning apparatus, the states reorganisation and non-alignment were all set. He also lost the 1962 war from here, and died two years later still in office.

• Power passed toSikkim

  Sikkim became an Indian protectorate in 1950 with an Indian political officer in Gangtok controlling defence and external affairs, which is the arrangement Nehru's government made for a Himalayan state on the Tibet frontier — a frontier that mattered a great deal more after 1950 and again after 1962. The protectorate lasted twenty-five years and ended in 1975 with a referendum, an agitation and a constitutional amendment.

• Patronage networkAnnie Besant

  Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) encountered Annie Besant's Home Rule movement during his early political life after returning from Cambridge in 1912. Besant's 1917 arrest by the Madras government under the Defence of India Act (she was interned at Ootacamund for three months) produced the Home Rule campaign's turning point and brought Nehru's generation into mass nationalist politics. Although Nehru's political trajectory later developed differently from Besant's (he joined Gandhi's non-cooperation movement in 1920 while Besant parted with Gandhi over the 1920 Nagpur Congress resolution), Besant's Home Rule campaign contributed to the political environment in which Nehru's generation became involved in Indian nationalism. Nehru acknowledged this influence in his autobiography (1936).

• Mentor ofMohandās Karamchand Gandhi

  Nehru was thirty-one when he first met Gandhi in 1916 at the Lucknow Congress and sixty when Gandhi was killed in 1948. In between Gandhi named him his political heir in 1942 and the two moved in and out of agreement over the next thirty years — on socialism, on industrialisation, on the Hindi-Urdu question, on Partition — without the relationship breaking. The 1942 Quit India Resolution was drafted together in Bombay.

On these journeys

• Decolonisation, partition and integration

Sources

Wikipedia, “Jawaharlal Nehru”. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography and The Discovery of India; Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru.

• Wikipedia — Jawaharlal Nehru