Jawaharlal Nehru, also known as Pandit (Hindi: “Pundit” or “Teacher”) Nehru, (born November 14, 1889, Allahabad, India - died May 27, 1964, New Delhi), India's first independent prime minister (1947-64), who founded the government of Parliament and is known for its neutral (incompatible) policies on foreign affairs. He was also one of the major leaders of the Indian NGO in the 1930s and 40s.
Jawaharlal Nehru was India's first prime minister after independence. He has previously been one of the leading leaders of the Indian National Congress, attracting the country's intellectuals and youth in the movement. His descendants, including Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Rahul Gandhi, were also prominent Indian leaders.
Jawaharlal Nehru was raised mainly by Westerners. As a boy, he had been educated at home in India, especially with a series of English governesses and teachers. He continued his education in England, Harrow School in London and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Jawaharlal Nehru was a prominent leader of the Indian National Congress and an independent organization. He used to balance the religion and culture of Mahatma Gandhi with worldly and modern views, thus expanding the organization's appeal. In 1947 he became India's first prime minister and served until his death in 1964.
Jawaharlal Nehru helped lead India to independence, which ended the British raj. As the first Prime Minister of India, he worked to make India an important member of the international community. He expelled the Portuguese from Goa but was less successful in conflicts with China over Arunachal Pradesh and Pakistan over Kashmir.
The early years
Nehru was born into a Kashmiri Brahmans family, known for their administrative and literary skills, who had moved to Delhi in the early 18th century. He was the son of Motilal Nehru, a well-known lawyer and leader of the Indian liberation movement, who became one of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi's allies. Jawaharlal was the eldest of four children, two of whom were girls. The sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, later became the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly.
For 16 years, Nehru was educated at home by a series of English governesses and teachers. Only one of them - an Irishman and Belgian writer Ferdinand Brooks - seems to have touched him. Jawaharlal also had a respected Indian teacher who taught him Hindi and Sanskrit. In 1905 he went to Harrow, a prestigious English school, where he lived for two years. Nehru's academic achievement was outstanding. From Harrow he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent three years earning honors degrees in natural science. When he left Cambridge he qualified to become a lawyer two years later at Inner Temple, London, where he passed his exams “without honor or shame.”
The seven years Nehru spent in England left him in a dark world, at home and not in England or India. Some years later he wrote, "I have become a great combination of East and West, unknown everywhere, at home." He returned to India to find India. The tug-of-war and the pressures his foreign experience would have worked on his personality had not been completely resolved.
Four years after returning to India, in March 1916, Nehru married Kamala Kaul, also from a Kashmiri family based in Delhi. Their only child, Indira Priyadarshini, was born in 1917; he will also serve (under his married name Indira Gandhi) and (1966-77 and 1980-84) as Prime Minister of India. Moreover, Indira's son Rajiv Gandhi succeeded his mother as prime minister (1984-89).
Studying politics
Upon his return to India, Nehru had at first tried to settle down as a lawyer. Unlike his father, however, he had a definite interest in his career and was not happy with the law or the law firm. At that time he could be described, as most of his generation, as a nationalist who wished for the freedom of his country, but, like many of his contemporaries, he had never made precise ideas on how to achieve it.
The historical record of Nehru reveals his interest in Indian politics while studying abroad. The letters he wrote to his father at the same time express their same interest in the liberation of India. But it was not until the father and son met Mahatma Gandhi that they were urged to follow in his political footsteps where one of them developed any explicit ideas of how to gain freedom. The level at Gandhi that impressed both Nehrus was his persistence in action. Gandhi said the mistake should be not only condemned but also challenged. Earlier, Nehru and his father had despised the conduct of modern-day Indian politicians, their nationality, with the exception of a few notable ones, which consisted of endless speeches and lengthy decisions. Jawaharlal was also impressed by Gandhi's persistence in fighting against the British Indian Empire without fear or hatred.
Nehru met Gandhi for the first time in 1916 at the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) in Lucknow. Gandhi was 20 years older than he was. And it never seems to have a strong sense of identity. Gandhi does not mention Nehru in the record as he did when he was arrested in the early 1920's. This omission is understandable, because Nehru's role in Indian politics followed until he was elected president of the Congress Party in 1929, when he presided over a historic period in Lahore (now Pakistan) that proclaimed full independence as a political party in India. Until then the aim of the party was to govern.
Nehru's close association with the Congress Party began in 1919 shortly after the outbreak of World War I. At that time, the first wave of nationalism and repression of the government led to the assassination in Amritsar in April 1919; according to an official report, 379 people were killed (although some estimates were very high), and at least 1,200 were injured when a local British military commander ordered his soldiers to shoot at a crowd of unarmed Indians gathered in a completely closed area of the City.
When, in late 1921, prominent leaders and staff of Congress Party were banned in some provinces, Nehru went to prison for the first time. Over the next 24 years, he would serve another eight years, the last of which took place in June 1945, after being imprisoned for nearly three years. In all, Nehru spent more than nine years in prison. In his case, he has described his terms of imprisonment as a normal contact in the life of an unusual political worker.
His political studies with the Congress Party lasted from 1919 to 1929. In 1923 he became general secretary of the party for two years, and again in 1927 for another two years. His interests and activities led him to travel to many parts of India, especially to his native United States (now Uttar Pradesh state), where his first exposure to poverty and the decline of farmers greatly influenced his basic ideas for resolving those important issues. Although extremely inclined toward socialism, Nehru's homosexuality was out of place. The entry of his political and economic ideas was his visit to Europe and the Soviet Union between 1926-27. Nehru's genuine interest in Marxism and his socialist thinking are rooted in that journey, though it has not increased his appreciationknowledge of communist theory and practice. His subsequent imprisonment enabled him to study Marxism in depth. He is interested in his ideas but is praised for some of his methods - such as the army and the hypocritical hunt for communism - he never presented himself to accept Karl Marx's writings as a revealed text. From that point on, his line of economic thinking remained as Marxist, adjusted, where necessary, in Indian conditions.
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Jawaharlal Nehru
FAST FACTS
Jawaharlal Nehru
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BIRTH
November 14, 1889
Prayagraj, India
WAFA
May 27, 1964 (age 74)
Delhi, India
TITLE / OFFICE
Prime Minister, India (1947-1964)
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
Indian National Congress
ROLE
Indus Water Treaty
Salt March
Delhi Agreement
NOTES FAMILY MEMBERS
Father Motilal Nehru
Daughter Indira Gandhi
Fighting for Indian Independence
After the Lahore session of 1929, Nehru emerged as the country's academic and youth leader. Gandhi cleverly promoted him to the presidency of the Congress Party over the heads of some of his elders, hoping that Nehru would attract the youth of India - who at the time were getting into a very difficult situation - in Congress. Gandhi also correctly calculated that, with more responsibility, Nehru himself would be inclined to continue moving forward.
After the death of his father in 1931, Nehru moved to the inner party of the Congress Party and drew closer to Gandhi. Although Gandhi did not officially appoint Nehru as his political successor until 1942, Indians in the early 1930's recognized Nehru as Gandhi's natural follower. The Gandhi-Irwin Treaty of March 1931, signed between Gandhi and the British struggle, Lord Irwin (later King Lalifax), marked the agreement between the two Indian dissenters. It ignited one of Gandhi's most effective public disobedience organizations, launched last year as Salt March, in the camp where Nehru was imprisoned.
Expectations that the Gandhi-Irwin Agreement would be a precursor to a more liberated Indo-British relationship have not been confirmed; Lord Willingdon (who succeeded Irwin as viceroy in 1931) detained Gandhi in January 1932, shortly after Gandhi's return from the second Round Table conference in London. He has been charged with felony criminal mischief for trying to seduce a minor Nehru was also arrested and sentenced to two years in prison.
The three Round Table Conferences held in London, held to promote India's progress in independence, eventually led to the Government of India Act of 1935, which provided the Indian provinces with a popular independent government system. Finally, it provided for a system of government composed of independent provinces and princely provinces. Although the federation has never existed, provincial independence was introduced. In the mid-1930's, Nehru was deeply concerned about the situation in Europe, which seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. He was in Europe early in 1936, visiting his ailing wife, just before he died in Lausanne, Switzerland. Even then he emphasized that in the event of a war, India was close to democracy, although he emphasized that India could only support Great Britain and France as a free country.
While the elections following the introduction of provincial autonomy brought the Congress Party to more provincial power, Nehru faced a dilemma. The Muslim League under Mohammed Ali Jinnah (the future creator of Pakistan) is badly organized in polling stations. Congress, therefore, unreasonably rejected Jinnah's request for the formation of Congress-Muslim League governments in other provinces, a decision Nehru supported. The ensuing conflict between Congress and the Muslim League intensified into a heated debate between Hindus and Muslims that would eventually lead to the division of India and the formation of Pakistan.
Imprisonment During World War II
At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the commander, Lord Linlithgow, had bound India for war without consulting independent ministers of the provinces. A high-level congressional order withdrew its provincial departments as a protest, but Congress's action left the political sector almost open to Jinnah and the Muslim League. Nehru's views on war differed from Gandhi's. Initially, Gandhi believed that any support given to the British people should be given unconditionally and that it should be a non-violent person. Nehru argued that non-violence has no place to prevent violence and that India should support Great Britain in the fight against Nazism but only as a free country. If it couldn't help, it shouldn't stop.
In October 1940, Gandhi, relinquishing his original position, decided to launch a limited civil disobedience campaign in which prominent Indian freedom fighters were elected to participate one by one. Nehru, the second of those leaders, was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. After spending more than a year in prison, he was released, along with other Congressan inmates, three days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. When the Japanese invaded Burma (now Myanmar) on their way to the Indian border in the spring of 1942, the British government, facing a new military threat, decided to take action against India. Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps, a former British military cabinet member close to Nehru and familiar with Jinnah, with suggestions for resolving the constitutional crisis. Crimps' mission failed, however, because Gandhi had accepted nothing but freedom.
The move by Congress was then passed on to Gandhi, who asked the British to leave India; Nehru, though reluctant to discourage the war effort, had no choice but to join Gandhi. Following a Quit India resolution passed by the Congress Party in Bombay (now Mumbai) on August 8, 1942, the entire congressional committee, including Gandhi and Nehru, were arrested and imprisoned. Nehru came out of that - his ninth and last imprisonment - only on June 15, 1945.
Within two years of being released, India would be liberated and liberated. The viceroy's last attempt to reconcile the Congress Party with the Muslim League failed. The former Labor government in charge of the wartime administration Churchill sent, as one of his first actions, a Cabinet delegation to India and later replaced Lord Wavell with Lord Mountbatten. The question was not whether India should be independent but whether it included one or more independent states. The rivalry between Hindus and Muslims, which culminated in late 1946 in wars that killed about 7,000 people, made partition on the continent inevitable. When Gandhi refused to accept it, Nehru hesitated but faced reality. On August 15, 1947, India and Pakistan emerged as two separate independent states. Nehru became India's first independent prime minister.
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