Jawaharlal Nehru

Early life and entry into politics

Nehru was born into a wealthy Kashmiri Pandit family in Allahabad, the son of Motilal Nehru, a prominent lawyer who became a leading Congress figure in his own right. He was educated in England, at Harrow, Trinity College Cambridge, where he read natural sciences, and the Inner Temple, qualifying as a barrister before returning to India in 1912 to practise law and drift toward nationalist politics. His political outlook was reshaped by contact with Mohandas Gandhi from around 1919-20; Nehru, then in his early thirties, was drawn to Gandhi's mass mobilisation methods even as his own instincts remained more explicitly socialist, secular and internationalist than Gandhi's.

Rise within the Congress

Nehru took an active part in the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22 and was repeatedly imprisoned over the following two decades for civil disobedience activity, spending a cumulative total of roughly nine years in British jails across his political career. He was elected Congress president for the first time in 1929, presiding over the Lahore session that December, at which Congress adopted "Purna Swaraj" (complete independence) as its formal goal and authorised civil disobedience to pursue it, superseding the earlier, more limited demand for dominion status. He held the Congress presidency on several further occasions through the 1930s and 1940s, using the position to press the party toward a more explicitly socialist and planned-economy orientation, though he generally deferred to Gandhi on tactics and timing even where their views diverged, notably over the pace and character of economic and social change.

The 1930s and 1940s

Nehru participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement of the early 1930s, launched around the Salt March of 1930, and was repeatedly jailed through the decade. In 1936 and 1937 he again served as Congress president, using the platform to press the party toward closer identification with socialism and the peasant and labour movements, positions that put him at times at odds with more conservative Congress figures. He was among the Congress leaders imprisoned during the Quit India Movement of 1942, spending nearly three years in detention, his longest single term, during which he wrote The Discovery of India. He travelled internationally in the interwar period, including a visit to Republican Spain during its civil war and earlier contact with anti-colonial and socialist circles in Europe, developing the anti-colonial, non-aligned foreign-policy outlook that would later define his premiership. In the final negotiations preceding independence, he served as vice-president of the Viceroy's Executive Council in the interim government formed in 1946, positioning him as the effective head of government ahead of formal independence, and led the Congress side through the last rounds of talks with the Cabinet Mission and Lord Mountbatten.

Prime Minister of India

Nehru became independent India's first Prime Minister on 15 August 1947 and held the office continuously until his death, a tenure of nearly seventeen years spanning three general elections, in 1952, 1957 and 1962, all won comfortably by the Congress party under his leadership. His government pursued a mixed economy built around Five-Year Plans, administered through a newly created Planning Commission, and state-directed investment in heavy industry, dams and steel plants, alongside a policy of constitutional secularism and a foreign policy of non-alignment between the Cold War blocs, articulated with leaders such as Nasser of Egypt, Tito of Yugoslavia and Sukarno of Indonesia, including at the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states. Working closely with Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel until Patel's death in 1950, Nehru's government also completed the political integration of the great majority of former princely states into the Indian union, and it oversaw the drafting and adoption of the Constitution of India, which came into force in January 1950. His later years in office were marked by continuing tension with Pakistan over Kashmir and by the brief but militarily unsuccessful war with China in October-November 1962, a setback that damaged his standing and is generally regarded as a low point of his premiership. He died in office on 27 May 1964 and was succeeded, after a short interim under Gulzarilal Nanda, by Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Kashmir and domestic reform

The Kashmir dispute originated in the state's disputed 1947 accession to India amid a Pakistani-backed tribal invasion; Nehru's government fought the first India-Pakistan war over the territory and referred the matter to the United Nations, a step some later critics, including figures within his own government, judged to have internationalised and prolonged a dispute that remained unresolved for the rest of his life and beyond. On domestic policy, his government carried through the States Reorganisation Act of 1956, redrawing India's internal provincial boundaries largely along linguistic lines on the recommendation of the States Reorganisation Commission, addressing longstanding regional demands that had included, most visibly, agitation for a separate Telugu-speaking Andhra state. It also enacted the Hindu Code Bills of 1955-56, reforming Hindu personal law on marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption in the direction of greater legal equality for women, carried through parliament against conservative opposition chiefly through the sustained efforts of Law Minister B.R. Ambedkar with Nehru's backing. The economic strategy of the Second Five-Year Plan, associated with the statistician P.C. Mahalanobis, prioritised public-sector heavy industry over consumer goods, a model that built substantial industrial capacity but whose regulatory complexity was later criticised, including by Rajagopalachari's Swatantra Party, as a "licence-permit raj" that constrained private enterprise.