Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru comes before us as a great Nationalist, Internationalist and Humanist. Piscuss. (2003)
Jawaharlal Nehru‘s midnight speech of 14 August 1947 pledged India to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity. The sentence holds all three identities in order: the nation first, the world beyond it, and humanity as the measure of both. For Nehru they were not rival loyalties but widening circles of one outlook.
Nehru the Nationalist
- As Congress president at Lahore (December 1929) he presided over the Purna Swaraj resolution. He spent close to nine years in British prisons across the struggle.
- His nationalism was civic and composite, not religious. The Discovery of India (written in Ahmednagar Fort, 1944; published 1946) pictures India as an ancient palimpsest, layer upon layer of culture with none wholly erased: unity in diversity, set against both Hindu and Muslim communalism.
- It was also economic: the Karachi Resolution (1931), the National Planning Committee (1938) and later the Plans aimed at a self-reliant industrial base without which freedom would be hollow.
Nehru the Internationalist
- At the Brussels Congress of Oppressed Nationalities (February 1927), which founded the League against Imperialism, he represented the Congress. Thereafter he placed India’s struggle within a worldwide one against imperialism and fascism.
- Glimpses of World History (1934), letters to his daughter from prison, wrote India into world history. He declined to meet Benito Mussolini in 1936, visited Republican Spain in 1938, and backed the Congress medical mission to China the same year.
- On the eve of independence he convened the Asian Relations Conference (1947); as Prime Minister he co-authored Panchsheel with China (April 1954). He shaped Bandung (1955) and co-founded Non-Alignment (Belgrade, 1961). Non-alignment preserved strategic autonomy in a bipolar world while championing decolonisation and disarmament.
Nehru the Humanist
- An agnostic, he grounded ethics in human dignity rather than scripture. He urged a scientific temper, a phrase from The Discovery of India that entered Article 51A(h) in 1976.
- Secular humanism in law: the Hindu Code Acts (1955–56) extended equality to women within the family against orthodox resistance.
- Institutions of reason, from the IITs to atomic research, were meant to free people from want and superstition. His tribal Panchsheel asked that tribal communities develop along the lines of their own genius.
Limits of the Portrait
- Nationalist: the Kashmir reference to the UN (1948) and the plebiscite pledge internationalised a domestic dispute; critics also fault the centralising, Congress-dominated state.
- Internationalist: the 1962 war with China exposed Panchsheel’s trust in goodwill. The muted response to Soviet action in Hungary (1956) looked like a double standard, and force in Goa (1961) sat awkwardly with pacifist rhetoric.
- Humanist: Partha Chatterjee reads him as nationalism’s moment of arrival, in which a modernising elite state spoke for the people rather than through them.
Conclusion
Nehru’s greatness lies in fusing the three: a nationalism that was inclusive, an internationalism that refused bloc subordination, and a humanism rooted in reason. His realism failed in 1962, but his framework endures. India’s 2023 G20 presidency theme, One Earth, One Family, One Future, echoes the widening circles he first drew.