ABSTRACT
If a person had the luxury of choosing the moment in historical time in which to be remembered, Jawaharlal Nehru ought to have chosen the year 1955. The newly-independent Indian state, of which he was now prime minister, was a greatly-admired model for colonial nations struggling for independence, and Nehru himself was an appealing national leader: urbane, sophisticated and intellectual, committed to social justice, democratic, not sectarian. India had begun to recover from the traumas of a partition conducted on the basis of religious community, which had led to the formation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Under Nehru’s leadership, India had successfully resisted internal pressures to define itself as ‘Hindu’, which would have meant consigning its substantial minority of Muslims to the implicit status of foreigners, and leaving other minorities in an ambiguous position. Under his leadership, India’s hopes of rapid economic development and an eventual emergence from poverty were generally considered to be bright; the rest of the world was beginning to look to India as a model for planned development in the non-communist underdeveloped world. Nehru’s form of socialism seemed to avoid the authoritarian tendencies of the Soviet model; his credentials as a democrat who was not a puppet of the Western bloc were greatly enhanced by his being among the leaders of an emerging group of non-aligned states and by his opposition to the Korean War.
