Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad, India, on November 14, 1889. The First Prime Minister of Independent India (1947–1964), who founded parliamentary government and became known for his neutralist (nonaligned) foreign policy, died on May 27, 1964, in New Delhi. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was also a key figure in India's independence movement. (Mahatma) Gandhi.
Jawaharlal Nehru was born in a family of four children, two of them were females. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, a sister, eventually became the United Nations General Assembly's first female president. Nehru was schooled at home by a succession of English governesses and tutors until he was sixteen years old. Only one of them, Ferdinand Brooks, a part-Irish, part-Belgian theosophist, seemed to have had an impression on him. Jawaharlal was also tutored by a renowned Indian tutor. Nehru spent seven years in England and returned to India in a hazy half-world, neither at home in England nor in India. "I have become a weird blend of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere," he wrote a few years later. He returned to India in order to learn more about the country. The conflicting pulls and strains that his international experience would exert on his psyche were never fully addressed.
In March 1916, four years after his return to India, Nehru married Kamala, a Kashmiri woman who had also relocated in Delhi. Indira Priyadarshini, their only child, was born in 1917 and later served as Prime Minister of India (1966–77 and 1980–84) under her married name of Indira Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's son, was Prime Minister from 1984 until 1989, succeeding his mother.
When he returned to India, Nehru attempted to establish himself as a lawyer, who wished for his country's freedom, but, like most of his contemporaries, he had not formulated any concrete views on how to achieve it. In 1916, at the annual conference of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) in Lucknow, Nehru met Gandhi for the first time. He was 20 years Gandhi's senior. Neither of them appears to have made a great first impression on the other. In an autobiography he dictated while imprisoned in the early 1920s, Gandhi makes no mention of Nehru. From 1919 to 1929, he served in the Congress Party as a political apprentice. He served as the party's general secretary for two years in 1923, and for another two years in 1927. His interests and obligations carried him across India, particularly to his native United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh state), where his first encounter with the peasantry's overwhelming poverty and degradation had a major impact on his core concepts for fixing such critical problems.
Following his father's death in 1931, Nehru rose through the ranks of the Congress Party, becoming close to Gandhi. Although Gandhi would not officially name Nehru as his political successor until 1942, the Indian public recognized Nehru as the logical successor as early as the mid-1930s to Mahatma Gandhi and the British viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), signed the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in March 1931, signalling a truce between the two main protagonists in India. It was the culmination of one of Gandhi's more effective civil disobedience activities, the Salt March, which had begun the year before and resulted in Nehru's incarceration. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact did not pave the way for a more relaxed phase of non-British relations; in January 1932, shortly after Gandhi returned from the second Round Table Conference in London. Nehru was also arrested and condemned to two years in prison for attempting to mount another civil disobedience movement.
The Governance of India Act of 1935, which gave the Indian provinces a system of popular autonomous rule, was the product of three Round Table Conferences convened in London to further India's progress toward self-government. In the end, it established a federal structure made up of autonomous provinces and princely realms. The Congress Party subsequently passed the initiative to Gandhi, who demanded that the British leave India; Nehru had little choice but to join Gandhi, despite his reluctance to jeopardize the war effort. Following the Quit India resolution passed by the Congress Party in Bombay (now Mumbai) on August 8, 1942, the entire Congress working committee, including Gandhi and Nehru, was arrested and imprisoned. On June 15, 1945, Nehru was released from his ninth and final incarceration. India was to be partitioned and freed within two years of his freedom. The viceroy's final attempt to unite the Congress Party and the Muslim League, Lord Cavell, failed. One of the first acts of the Labor government, which had succeeded in deposing Churchill's wartime cabinet, was to despatch troops. Lord Cavell was succeeded by Lord Mountbatten after a Cabinet visit to India. It was no longer a matter of whether India would be independent, but rather whether it would be divided into one or many independent states. The subcontinent's division was inescapable because of Hindu-Muslim animosity, which peaked in late 1946 with rioting that killed over 7,000 people. While Gandhi refused to accept it, Nehru agreed, albeit grudgingly and realistically. India and Pakistan became two separate independent republics on August 15, 1947. Nehru was India's first prime minister after independence.
Despite the tragedy of the brief battle with China in 1962, Nehru remained the darling of his people for the 35 years from 1929, when Gandhi chose him as president of the Congress session in Lahore, until his death as prime minister in 1964. His secular political approach contrasted with Gandhi's religious and traditionalist attitude, which had given Indian politics a religious cast during Gandhi's lifetime—misleadingly so, because, while Gandhi may have appeared to be a religious conservative, he was actually a social nonconformist trying to secularize Hinduism. The true difference between Nehru and Gandhi was not in their views on religion, but rather in their views on civilization. Unlike Nehru, who spoke in a more modern tone, Gandhi spoke in a more traditional tone of ancient India's splendors. In the context of Indian history, Nehru is significant because he imported and transmitted modern values and methods of thinking, which he adapted to Indian situations. Apart from stressing secularism and India's fundamental unity, despite its ethnic and religious diversity, Nehru was preoccupied with leading India into the contemporary era of scientific discovery and technical growth. He also instilled in his people a sense of the importance of social care for the destitute and outcasts, as well as a respect for democratic norms. One of his proudest achievements was the modification of the ancient Hindu civil law, which allowed Hindu widows to finally enjoy equality with men in matters of inheritance. The non-Indian crisis of 1962, on the other hand, exposed Nehru's nonalignment wishful thinking. When Chinese forces attempted to overrun the Brahmaputra River valley in the northeast as a result of a long-standing border conflict over the state of Arunachal Pradesh. Nehru's subsequent appeal for Western aid effectively rendered his nonalignment strategy meaningless. China quickly withdrew its forces.
Throughout Nehru's tenure as Prime Minister, the Kashmir area, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan, remained a constant issue. He made preliminary efforts to settle the conflict between the two new countries in the months following the subcontinent's partition in 1947, while Singh, the maharajah of Kashmir, determined which country he would join. However, when Singh selected India, combat erupted between the two factions. In the region, the UN negotiated a cease-fire line, and Nehru proposed territory changes along the line, but they were rejected. That line of demarcation has remained the dividing line between Indian and Pakistani administrations in the region. In his efforts to tackle the situation of the Portuguese province of Goa, India's last foreign-controlled entity, Nehru had better luck. Although the military seizure of the island by Indian forces in December 1961 caused outrage in many Western countries, Nehru's move was justified in hindsight. The Portuguese colonial presence in India had become an anachronism after the British and French left. Both the British and the French had peacefully withdrawn. Nehru had to find a strategy to evict the Portuguese if they were not willing to follow suit. After attempting persuasion, he allowed a group of unarmed Indians to march into Portuguese territory in a nonviolent demonstration in August 1955. Despite the fact that the Portuguese opened fire, In his efforts to tackle the situation of the Portuguese province of Goa, India's last foreign-controlled entity, Nehru had better luck. Although the military seizure of the island by Indian forces in December 1961 caused outrage in many Western countries, Nehru's move was justified in hindsight. The Portuguese colonial presence in India had become an anachronism after the British and French left. Both the British and the French had peacefully withdrawn. Nehru had to find a strategy to evict the Portuguese if they were not willing to follow suit. After attempting persuasion, he allowed a group of unarmed Indians to march into Portuguese territory in a nonviolent demonstration in August 1955. Despite the fact that the Portuguese opened fire, Nehru held off on attacking the demonstrators for six years, pleading with Portugal's Western allies to persuade its government to relinquish the colony. Nehru could claim that neither he nor the Indian government had ever been dedicated to nonviolence as a policy until India ultimately struck. Not long after the conflict with China, Nehru's health began to deteriorate. In 1963, he had a minor stroke, and in January 1964, he had a more serious attack. He died of a third and deadly stroke a few months later, During his 17 years as Prime Minister, he promoted democratic socialism as the guiding star, emphasizing the importance of India achieving both democracy and socialism. He made progress toward that goal with the aid of the Congress Party's overwhelming majority in parliament during his period of power. Democracy, socialism, unity, and secularism were the four foundations of his domestic policies. During his lifetime, he was largely successful in preserving the edifice supported by those four pillars.
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