There is not any scarcity of books about India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who led the nation from its independence in 1947 till his loss of life in 1964. From British historian Judith Brown’s authoritative Nehru: A Political Life (2003) to the more moderen—and extra adulatory—Nehru: The Invention of India by Shashi Tharoor, the Indian opposition lawmaker and former United Nations diplomat, every makes clear that there’s little query that Nehru helped forge the trendy Indian state.

There is not any scarcity of books about India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who led the nation from its independence in 1947 till his loss of life in 1964. From British historian Judith Brown’s authoritative Nehru: A Political Life (2003) to the more moderen—and extra adulatory—Nehru: The Invention of India by Shashi Tharoor, the Indian opposition lawmaker and former United Nations diplomat, every makes clear that there’s little query that Nehru helped forge the trendy Indian state.

As prime minister, Nehru tutored the newly impartial India in parliamentary democracy and helped knit collectively a various land via imaginative language policy, underneath which these attending faculty would study Hindi, English, and a regional language. He original a particular foreign policy, forging a path that sought to avoid superpower battle. And he helmed the nation via many challenges, from resettling refugees from Pakistan after the Partition of India to integrating India’s princely states into the nascent union.

Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths, Taylor C. Sherman, Princeton University Press, 304 pp., $39.95, October 2022.

Like any political chief, Nehru was not with out flaws. Even sympathetic observers have admitted that his religion in a mixed economy, which allowed personal enterprise whereas reserving a job for the state in selling financial growth, didn’t lead to sustained progress or considerably cut back poverty. His neglect of the military and makes an attempt to appease China regardless of a border dispute led to the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Nehru’s achievements, nonetheless, appear to far outweigh his questionable political decisions, particularly given what almost 200 years of British colonial rule wrought in India. But that isn’t the view of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) underneath Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In latest years, Nehru’s legacy has come underneath sustained assault. This criticism is usually polemical: The present authorities finds it politically expedient to demonize Nehru within the public sphere whereas it enacts insurance policies that shake the very foundations of the Indian state. These makes an attempt to undermine Nehru’s legacy—in addition to that of his Indian National Congress social gathering, the BJP’s principal opposition—will little doubt acquire momentum as nationwide elections method subsequent 12 months.

Historian Taylor G. Sherman’s ebook Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths enters the dialog towards this political backdrop. Sherman, who teaches on the London School of Economics, writes deftly about Nehru and what he bequeathed to India. Despite the considerably provocative title, her well-researched ebook doesn’t search to discredit the previous Indian chief however relatively to supply a nuanced evaluation of his achievements and failures. Sherman demonstrates that whereas Nehru initiated a number of visionary packages, they usually met political, institutional, and societal obstacles to implementation. This extra complicated evaluation of Nehru is a far cry from the caricature that the BJP is attempting to foist on the Indian citizens, which casts Nehru as inept and idealistic to a fault.

Sherman challenges the notion that Nehru was the only architect of contemporary India, which is handled as an article of religion amongst a few of his admirers. She focuses on seven coverage areas, arguing that the chief’s views have been hardly monochromatic for any of them. In Sherman’s telling, Nehru was a patron who delegated duties to these he trusted to hold out his imaginative and prescient; these subordinates didn’t all the time share his perspective, and have been generally clumsy in implementing his objectives or thwarted by native authorities. (For instance, regardless of Nehru’s personal dedication to secularism, he couldn’t be certain that its ideas took maintain on the grassroots degree.) In every case, Sherman reveals how myths have developed about Nehru and the way cautious scrutiny of the accessible proof is important to know his insurance policies of their historic context.

Sherman argues that Nehru’s doctrine of nonalignment—nonetheless embraced by India in the present day, although missing a lot of its lofty rhetoric—failed to provide coherent coverage outcomes. Despite Nehru’s dedication in precept to the doctrine (and regardless of Soviet overtures), India remained squarely located within the Anglosphere within the preliminary years after independence, with hyperlinks starting from commerce to protection acquisitions. Meanwhile, Nehru’s appeasement of China match his worldview, but proved to be a catastrophe that culminated within the 1962 border battle. Among different issues, Nehru devoted inadequate assets to navy preparedness. When China’s battle-hardened People’s Liberation Army attacked, the Indian Army discovered itself underequipped to resist the onslaught.

Nehru’s imaginative and prescient of nonalignment belonged to a particular historic context: He was decided to maintain India from being drawn into superpower battle through the Cold War and sought to forestall the militarization of the nation, as an alternative specializing in financial growth. Today, the BJP consciously avoids utilizing the time period nonalignment in favor of pursuing so-called strategic autonomy. By distancing itself from nonalignment, the ruling social gathering goals to convey to its supporters that it has thrown off the shackles of Nehru’s period. But removed from adopting a principled international coverage, India’s present authorities has taken a callously instrumental method to its diplomacy. The slender pursuit of India’s personal pursuits appears to trump all different issues.

When it involves secularism, Sherman reveals how politicians through the Nehru period—together with these within the Congress social gathering—confirmed scant curiosity in defending the rights of India’s non secular minorities, particularly Muslims. Recruitment to authorities workplaces confirmed blatant bias, and other than iconic buildings, many Muslim monuments and mosques have been at greatest uncared for and at worst vandalized. Despite Nehru’s makes an attempt to increase aid to Muslims displaced by the Partition of India, native notables stymied his efforts. The coverage limitations he confronted stemmed from a wide range of elements, together with an absence of administrative capability and the shortcoming of high-level officers to compel native authorities to comply with via on directions.

Over the many years, the BJP has recommended that Nehru and his successors pursued a kind of “pseudo-secularism,” appeasing India’s non secular minorities. To ensure, a few of those that adopted Nehru within the Congress social gathering have pandered to sure subsets of India’s Muslim neighborhood. In 1986, for instance, then-Congress chief Rajiv Gandhi used his parliamentary majority to court docket the Muslim vote by overturning an Indian Supreme Court judgment that granted alimony to a Muslim girl, overriding the strictures of Muslim private regulation. But finally, the historic proof doesn’t justify tarring Nehru with this specific brush. Today, the BJP actively seeks to marginalize Muslims and deny them equal rights underneath the Indian Constitution; the ruling social gathering has attacked Nehru’s successors to justify its personal insurance policies.

Those dedicated to free market reforms in India have critiqued Nehru’s supposedly unyielding dedication to doctrinaire socialism—primarily calling him an ideologue. But as soon as once more, Sherman demonstrates that other than Nehru’s penchant for Soviet-inspired five-year plans that set out particular financial targets, India hardly embraced socialism underneath his management. At the time, the nation largely didn’t nationalize essential industries and as an alternative exhorted enterprise leaders and entrepreneurs to change into good nationalists and work to enhance the nation’s financial lot. These insurance policies ended up favoring a handful of corporations, resulting in a largely oligopolistic market that did little to learn the Indian client. Today, the BJP additionally seems to favor a handful of enterprise homes—most notably, these owned by Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani—making its critiques of Nehru’s insurance policies ring relatively hole.

Sherman’s most telling dialogue has to do with how Indian democracy functioned underneath Nehru’s watch. The typical account means that other than just a few lapses, democracy swiftly took root underneath Nehru and proved resilient. Sherman writes that electoral democracy with common suffrage did emerge rapidly in India, drawing on the work of Israeli historian Ornit Shani. However, she reveals that even the Congress social gathering was not above resorting to political chicanery regardless of its vital reputation; its stalwarts additionally used the powers of their workplace to pursue monetary positive factors. As early as 1956, when the federal government handed the Companies Act, a provision within the laws permitted company donations to political events.

Such doubtful practices, now rampant in India, seem to have lengthy antecedents. Under BJP rule, the obvious instance is the promotion of electoral bonds, which people and firms can buy from a government-owned financial institution after which donate to the political social gathering of their alternative. With no transparency requirement, well-heeled folks and teams can direct monetary assets to their most popular social gathering or candidate—presumably with the purpose of influencing coverage decisions.

The BJP has made a concerted effort to distance itself from Nehru’s legacies, from diplomacy to financial policymaking. Given the primary prime minister’s lionized function in founding the nation and setting it on its democratic course, plainly the BJP has wanted to tear down a few of Nehru’s myths in an effort to construct its personal. The ruling social gathering has characterised Nehru’s coverage failures as his alone, together with the dealing with of the border dispute with China and his makes an attempt to manage the financial system. The technique is designed to divert consideration from the BJP’s personal shortcomings, together with its deeply flawed insurance policies towards Beijing. The ruling social gathering has created its personal model of Nehru, depicting him as vainglorious, hopelessly idealistic, and dedicated to flawed insurance policies. And up to now, it has labored, interesting to many individuals within the BJP’s electoral base.

In the face of this narrative, Sherman’s ebook doesn’t basically undermine or have fun Nehru’s contributions to the early Indian republic. Instead, it offers a nuanced account of the extraordinary political chief and his time in workplace. As any chief of his stature and tenure, Nehru pursued a number of questionable insurance policies. But he helped construct unity within the wake of India’s independence and laid the groundwork for India’s industrialization and a number of establishments. A phase of India’s studying public will little doubt learn Sherman’s ebook with the care it deserves, however amid the present political atmosphere—and because the nationwide election approaches—it’s potential that it’s going to not obtain the eye that it ought to. The BJP doesn’t appear fascinated about recognizing Nehru’s achievements, nor keen to study from his errors.