Saturday, March 26, 2005

Nehru - The Invention of India - Shashi Tharoor

The title of the book is misleading. It brings visions of a book that is about to denounce Nehru's policies and generally show that Nehru isn't what we thought him to be.
This however is not the case. The book is a biography of sorts tracing Jawaharlal Nehru's life and views from an undistinguished teenager to the undisputed Leader of Free India.
My only exposure to Nehru is through the reading of The Discovery of India. A book that went more or less over my head, but had the unmistakable stamp of a person who loved India and identified with its people.
This book is not great. But it is a book about a great person and some of the attributes do rub of on the book. As the author himself puts it , its a book by a layperson for laypeople. Its not comprehensive, the author only brings out incidents and quotes he wants to dwell on. It is however distinguished by its last chapter, where the author looks at Nehur's policies and what they have meant to India with of course the benefit of Hindsight. The four main policies of Nehru
a. Democratic Institution Building
b. Secularism
c. Socialist economic policies
d. Non alignment
There is no doubt in the author's mind (or mine) that the first two were ..indeed are .. necessary for India to survive. It is the third and fourth policies which the author believes are partly responsible for India's poverty and corruption. While i do not know enough of the Socialist economic policies and their impact, I am certain that the policy of Non Alignment was the right one to follow. It is only today that people can smugly predict that India should have stood with the USA in the cold war instead of being part of a Non Aligned Movement. Taking sides in the cold war would undoubtedly have been wrong.
The book has some of the more memorable quips by Nehru which makes we want to search for the full text on the Internet or read some more on Nehru's speeches and perhaps on that front alone this book has served its purpose

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