S. Vikram
On May 27, every year, India remembers Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first Prime Minister, who passed away on this day in 1964. More than six decades later, Nehru refuses to remain a figure confined to history textbooks.
In an era of sharp political polarisation, economic disruption, and renewed debates over federalism, secularism, and democratic institutions, Nehru has moved from history into current affairs. He is both deified and vilified, yet his core convictions about what India is — and what it can become — feel strikingly contemporary.
Nehru’s most profound contribution began well before Independence. While the freedom movement had strong roots among the educated elite, it was Nehru who, alongside leaders like Subhas Chandra Bose and others on the left, consciously took the struggle to the working classes and peasantry.
His travels across the country, his engagement with trade unions, and his writings emphasised that political freedom would be meaningless without economic justice. He helped develop the socialist wing within the Indian National Congress, pushing resolutions on fundamental rights, agrarian reform, and industrial policy that would later shape the Directive Principles of the Constitution.
The Karachi Resolution of 1931 and the Faizpur session bore his imprint. These ideas were not abstract; they reflected a belief that Independence must address poverty, inequality, and exploitation.When India became free in 1947, Nehru faced the staggering task of governing a subcontinent fractured by Partition, impoverished by colonial extraction, and diverse beyond imagination.
Hundreds of princely states, multiple languages, religions, castes, and regional identities had to be woven into one sovereign democratic republic. Nehru’s real strength lay not merely in administrative skill but in his deep, almost spiritual conviction about the destiny of India as a people, not merely a geography.
He saw India as a living civilisation capable of renewing itself through its own children, however poor, illiterate, or recently colonised they might be.This faith made him an uncompromising democrat. Unlike many leaders who emerged from anti-colonial struggles, Nehru refused to suspend democracy for “developmental” reasons.
He held regular elections, respected Parliament, and nurtured institutions — the Planning Commission, public sector undertakings, IITs, IIMs, CSIR laboratories, the Election Commission, and an independent judiciary. He believed that only through democratic participation could the energies of a vast population be harnessed.
Critics rightly point to economic shortcomings and bureaucratic inefficiencies of the licence-permit raj, yet the institutional scaffolding he helped build has largely endured, allowing later generations to reform and liberalise without dismantling the basic democratic order.
His secularism was not a Western import grafted onto Indian soil but a practical necessity born from the same faith in the Indian people. After the horrors of Partition, Nehru understood that a nation aspiring to modernity could not afford majoritarian dominance or religious fragmentation.
He championed equal citizenship, minority rights, and a clear separation between religion and state policy. For him, secularism was the glue that held India’s pluralism together. It was an act of trust: trust that Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and others could coexist and contribute to a shared national project. In today’s climate of identity politics, this vision is debated fiercely.
Yet Nehru’s record shows a leader who consistently prioritised national integration over electoral majoritarianism. Perhaps the most moving aspect of Nehru’s leadership was his willingness to trust the people despite their visible disadvantages.
He addressed millions in dusty towns and villages, speaking in Hindustani, invoking poetry and science in the same breath. He believed that an illiterate peasant possessed an inherent dignity and potential that centuries of colonial rule had suppressed but not destroyed.
His famous words capture this conviction eloquently: “Who lives if India dies and who dies if India lives?” For Nehru, India was not an abstraction or a map. India lived through its people — their aspirations, struggles, and shared future.
As an institution builder, Nehru’s record is formidable. He laid the foundations of modern science and technology policy, championed non-alignment in foreign affairs to preserve strategic autonomy, and worked to create a civil service that, while often criticised, provided administrative continuity to a fragile new nation.
His commitment to parliamentary democracy set norms that future leaders, even those who differed with him ideologically, largely followed. The Constitution itself, though primarily drafted under Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s stewardship, reflected the broad socialist and democratic consensus Nehru had helped foster within the Congress.
Of course, Nehru was not without flaws. Economic growth remained sluggish for decades, agricultural transformation was incomplete until the Green Revolution (which came after his death), and certain centralising tendencies created long-term tensions with states. His handling of Kashmir and the 1962 conflict with China continue to invite criticism.
Yet even his critics acknowledge the sheer scale of the nation-building project he undertook under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. On this death anniversary, as India grapples with rapid technological change, social churn, and global realignments, Nehru’s central message retains relevance: a nation is ultimately its people.
No amount of economic progress or military strength can substitute for faith in the democratic potential of ordinary citizens. His insistence on building institutions that outlast individuals, his refusal to reduce India to a single religious or linguistic identity, and his belief in science tempered by humanism offer a compass for contemporary challenges.
Nehru once wrote that India was ‘a lady with a past and many lovers.’ He sought to give her a future worthy of her civilisational depth while embracing modernity. In an age that often mistakes loud assertion for strength, Nehru’s quiet, persistent faith in India’s people — flawed, diverse, argumentative, yet capable of greatness — stands as his greatest legacy.
As we remember him, the question he posed echoes: Who lives if India dies? The answer lies not in statues or slogans, but in our continued willingness to trust the genius of the Indian people and to build a republic that belongs to all of them. That was Nehru’s deepest conviction. More than ever, it remains our unfinished task.
