ARCHITECT OF MODERN INDIA
On Jawaharlal Nehru’s contribution to shaping India into a modern industrial power.
INDEPENDENT India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, envisioned a modern India that would be an industrial powerhouse built on a foundation of agricultural growth and advances in science and technology. And he was a man in a hurry. On one occasion, this builder of modern India said: “Modern economy is symbolised by the jet plane and atomic energy. The world moves very rapidly today, and even the techniques you considered advanced are out of date before you catch up with them. I am all for the latest techniques; let there be no mistake about it” (Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, Volume 3, March 1953-August 1957, Publications Division, Government of India).
A couple of years earlier, in 1951, he stated how he hoped to achieve his aims: “I want to go rapidly towards my objective. But fundamentally even the results of action do not worry me so much. Action itself, so long as I am convinced that it is right action, gives me satisfaction. In my general outlook on life I am a socialist and it is a socialist order that I should like to see established in India and the world” (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Volume 5, 1987, page 321).
Nehru initiated the Five-year Plan process with the establishment of the Planning Commission in March 1950 to achieve these objectives. Nehru explained in The Discovery of India: “I am all for tractors and big machinery, and I am convinced that the rapid industrialisation of India is essential to relieve the pressure on land, to combat poverty and raise standards of living, for defence and a variety of other purposes. But I am equally convinced that the most careful planning and adjustment are necessary if we are to reap the full benefit of industrialisation and avoid many of its dangers. This planning is necessary today in all countries of arrested growth, like China and India, which have strong traditions of their own.”
Nearly seven decades later, in the era of globalisation, the India growth story perhaps misses a statesman-socialist in the Nehruvian mould. The photographs in this feature provide more than a glimpse of Nehru as a statesman and his foreign policy initiatives as Prime Minister. His role in the formation of the Non-aligned Movement, in India’s position as a member of the Commonwealth, in India’s relations with the Soviet Union and China and other neighbours, and his unflinching support to the United Nations have been documented all too well to need repeating. Nehru would have been an ideal foil to the present-day votaries of unbridled privatisation in all areas of development, be it the economy, education, agriculture and even social welfare.
The photographs are part of a collection of more than 700 rare and compelling images, including from the archives of The Hindu, that appear in Jawaharlal Nehru: An Illustrated Biography edited and published by A. Gopanna, a senior Congress functionary in Tamil Nadu. The coffee-table book is a veritable treasure trove on Nehru. $