ABSTRACT
Jawaharlal Nehru led India for an uninterrupted seventeen years as prime minister, for several years holding the position of the president of the ruling Congress Party. As prime minister, Nehru was full of ideas and innovations in every field— education, economy, science, transportation, and foreign policy. Within months of India’s independence, the country lost its son, Mahatma Gandhi, at the hands of a Hindu communalist, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Nathuram Vinayak Godse, who had been writing most critically of what he and his associates regarded as Gandhi’s perfidy and pro-Muslim acts. Unlike in the Portuguese colonies in Africa, such as Angola and Mozambique, there were no Portuguese settlers in the Portuguese Indian possessions of Goa, Daman, and Diu, despite a long rule of four and one-half centuries. A major achievement of the Nehru era was the adoption of India’s constitution. The Constituent Assembly had been convened before India’s independence based on the provincial elections of 1946.
