Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Nehru for Today

  1 June 2014

  May 27 this year marked Jawaharlal Nehru’s fiftieth death anniversary. On this occasion we remember him by reproducing the following excerpts from his speeches and writings. We are also reproducing N.C.’s Editor’s Notebook in Mainstream on Nehru’s twentieth death anniversary and publishing several articles by academics, scholars, journalists offering tributes to Nehru by highlighting his abiding relevance in the present context.
  Nehru for Today
  We talk a great deal about democracy but in (…)

• Twenty Years After

  1 June 2014, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  From N.C.’s Writings
  In the sultry summer morning of May 27, 1964, when Jawaharlal Nehru left the land of his birth and its people whose affection he earned in abundance, nobody in this wide world of India had any idea how this country would look twenty years later, how the life and living of its toiling millions would change, how the nation would conduct itself in the comity of nations. As his funeral cortege wended its way through the vast humanity wrapped up in tearful mourning, the one (…)

• Remembering Nehru

  1 June 2014, by Badri Raina

  “Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
  England hath need of thee: she is a fen
  Of stagnant waters....we are selfish men;
  O raise us up, return to us again;
  And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.” —William Wordsworth
  When you died, without notice, from
  A heavy heart, I was twenty three, but
  Cried all day long, uncontrollably.
  It felt as though our umbilical cord
  Had been severed from that infinitely
  Caring , infinitely daring, infinitely
  Childlike god who (…)

• Indian Democracy: Debt to Jawaharlal Nehru

  1 June 2014

  by Mridula Mukherjee
  The Nehru era ended half-a-century ago, bringing to a close the age of innocence and excitement marked by the epic struggle for freedom’s tryst with destiny and the first phase of independent India’s efforts to redeem that pledge. And yet, the strong roots sent down by the founders of the Indian nation have ensured that we just concluded our sixteenth general election with an electorate of over 800 million of whom a staggering 64 per cent cast their votes. And yet (…)

• Jawaharlal Nehru: The Architect of Modern India

  1 June 2014, by Barun Das Gupta

  Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi’s second-in-command in the country’s freedom struggle and the architect of post-independence India, passed away fifty years ago on May 27, 1964. His contributions during the freedom struggle and as the first Prime Minister of India are manifold and are worth recalling.
  It was he who put India’s freedom struggle in the international context. He explained to the then Congress leaders that India’s struggle was a part of the worldwide struggle against (…)

• Nehru’s Legacy in the Present Juncture: Assessing Economic Successes and Failures

  1 June 2014, by Arun Kumar

  Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, passed away fifty years back in 1964. It is time that an objective assessment is made of his contri-butions to the nation at that critical juncture of its existence.
  The newly independent nation was grossly underdeveloped due to the colonial rule. Colonisation led to India falling considerably behind the advanced nations in every sense due to the drain of wealth and lack of invest-ment in the economy.
  The gap in infrastructure between Britain and (…)

• Don’t Deny Nehru’s Great Contributions

  1 June 2014, by Bharat Dogra

  In normal times, there should be no necessity of re-emphasising Jawaharlal Nehru’s many-sided invaluable contributions. But these are not normal times. In recent times one has seen very strong efforts, visible and not so visible, to deny to Nehru his great contributions as a dedicated freedom fighter, one of the most important builders of India’s secular democracy and as a world statesman unfolding significant policy-perspectives like non-alignment. Some powerful forces new seem to be (…)

• Nehru and the Peasantry

  1 June 2014, by Dipak Malik

  When I met the Panchayat Pradhan of the village, a sprightly young man in his thirties on a dusty bazaar site about 40 km away from Banaras, I could see his self-confidence. He came from a Dalit background. Yet, when we decided to have a lunch meeting under the shadow of the neem tree, the Rajputs, the former principal of a reputed nearby college and other powerful village personalities showed a bonhomie unimaginable 50 years back in that feudal bastion of the green expanse of Eastern UP. (…)

• Nehru’s Vision, its Development and Dismantling

  1 June 2014

  by Nirupam Sen
  This subject can be adequately addressed only in a full book. In a short article I can only highlight some features of relevance to our times. Shortly after Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary in 2013, the President of the Indian National Congress condemned Nehru’s “character assassination”. This became possible because her Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, had first assassinated Nehru’s vision and legacy.
  Nehru’s vision of India’s development and the policies he adopted (…)

• Jawaharlal Nehru as a Kashmiri

  1 June 2014

  by Mohd Yousuf Dar
  Jawaharlal Nehru is widely acclaimed as the architect of modern India. He played an important role in the long struggle for national freedom, and later as the greatest political leader of free India. Jawaharlal Nehru was born at 11:30 pm on November 14, 1889 at Allahabad. Nehru was the eldest child and the only son of a very prosperous lawyer-politician, Motilal Nehru, who practised law at the High Court of Allahabad. His mother’s name was Swarup Rani Kaul. The young (…)