ABSTRACT
Nehru attempts to find an answer to the problem of the conflict between centralization and individual freedom. The police State transformed itself into the modern State, ‘a complex, paternal organism with a large number of departments and spheres of activities, and innumerable contacts with the individual citizen’. Conscience being an individual concern, and all individuals not being competent enough to apply conscience in its proper meaning, statesmen would perhaps stand behind the law in order to preserve the State itself. Nehru’s faith in individual freedom and civil liberty is fundamental, but when he speaks of them he does so in the context of a civilized orderly State. The individual’s conscience, if not always in absolute control, is at least a factor in his decisions and notions. The crowd dominates the individual but lacks a conscience of its own.
