November 2009

Fortyfive years after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, has history done him justice? Regrettably not. In surveys that rank India’s best Prime Minister, he is placed below his daughter, and on some occasions he figures third. This is preposterous. Only three worthwhile books on him have appeared after his death: Hiren Mukherjee’s The Gentle Colossus, S. Gopal’s three-volume biography and M.J. Akbar’s Nehru: The Making of India.
Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundations of a democratic, secular, (…)

On the one hand, there is a growing demand for strengthening the panchayati raj system as there is a widespread realisation that genuine powers, functions and the resources to match them have not yet reached the panchayats. On the other hand, there is also a genuine concern that due to the present dominance of some big landowners-cum-contractors in several villages, the panchayats have been captured by them in several places and so they try to divert a lot of development resources for (…)

We have witnessed a new kind of social movements in recent world history. People in civil society everywhere are moving to mobilise themselves through a myriad of social move-ments beyond or besides, and often instead of, political parties, the state, and revolution. The community-based social movements mobilise and organise their members in pursuit of material and non-material ends, which they often regard as unjustly denied to them by the state and its institutions, including political (…)

The results of the by-elections for 31 seats in seven State Assemblies and one Lok Sabha constituency in UP are before us. The Congress has won all the three seats in Kerala, two in Assam, one in Chhattisgarh, and one each in West Bengal, UP, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan—in all 10, while its ally, the Trinamul Congress, has captured all the seven seats it contested in West Bengal. So the UPA’s tally is 17. Among the non-UPA parties Mayawati’s BSP ruling UP emerged the clear winner bagging (…)

IMPRESSIONS
There is a strong case for Bellary to be made a separate State, if not an independent, sovereign republic. That such a consummation will save both Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh from political paralysis is only an incidental benefit. The real gain will be the restoration of Bellary’s ancient royal glory under new kings.
Bellary is today mistaken for a backwater area. Some think it is Sonia Gandhi’s birthplace. Some others believe that Sushma Swaraj went to school under a (…)

Abdullah Abdullah’s refusal to take part in the Afghan presidential election runoff on November 7 is a watershed event. From his point of view, the former Foreign Minister did the sensible thing, having carefully assessed he had no stake whatsoever in a runoff that he had zero chance of winning.
President Hamid Karzai has also shown the door to Abdullah’s Western sponsors. They had approached in hopes of gaining a last-minute “deal” that would see Abdullah, their protégé, gain some (…)

[ November 14 this year marks Jawaharlal Nehru’s one hundred and twentieth birth anniversary. On this occasion we are publishing the following excerpts from Panditji’s speeches carried in Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthrology (edited by Sarvepalli Gopal). Thereafter we reproduce three pieces written on Nehru by Shyam Benegal, one of the country’s leading filmmakers, eminent historian Bipan Chandra and veteran diplomat A.K. Damodaran included in the volume Nehru—The Nation Remembers (Tributes (…)

Aristocratic in taste, democratic by tempera-ment and egalitarian by conviction, Jawaharlal Nehru comes through as a man with a finely tuned artistic sensibility, with an unceasing curiosity in the world around him, never losing his sense of wonder at the marvels of life and the universe. His deep and abiding faith in humanity committed him to the cause of freedom not only for his own country but also for those countries from whom the right of self-determination was taken away.
For (…)

We who have lived through one part or the other of the Nehru era look back on that period with nostalgia as a sort of Golden Age; we tend to regard those times as the “good old days”. In fact, those years were, more than at present, filled with poverty and misery. Yet, the existence of a Jawaharlal Nehru made all the difference.
Nehru’s place in history would be assured by the leader’s role he played in the anti-imperialist struggle. As a national liberator, he was second only to (…)

Of the many achievements of Jawaharlal Nehru as a national leader, world statesman and a sensitive individual who had the rare opportunity of shaping the destinies of a whole nation and, at the same time, possessed the gift for standing back and eyeing with some detachment his own strengths and weaknesses, and also commenting upon them in an anxiously honest fashion, the institutional aspects are the most impressive. In spite of the many popular taunts and repeated gibes, Jawaharlal was no (…)