5/29/2023 0 Comments Nehru by Walter Crocker![]() ![]() Jawaharlal Nehru's place in the Indian imagination is complicated by the fact that no fewer than five generations of his family have been active in politics. Once, Nehru embodied all of India's hopes now, it seems, he merely represents its disappointments. For a man so greatly venerated in his lifetime has been comprehensively vilified since his death. ![]() For the people of India, he is George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one." Half a century later, one savours these words with an ironic amusement. In 1957, when Nehru was at the height of his powers, the Canadian diplomat Escott Reid wrote that "there is no one since Napoleon who has played both so large a role in the history of his country and has also held the sort of place which Nehru holds in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. But will the legacy of Hamid Karzai still be debated in public 50 or 60 years hence? And what will the Iraq of 2050 be saying about the record of Iyad Alawi or Ayatollah Sistani? These questions are prompted by the deeply contentious legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India for its first 17 years as a free nation. After years of living under one kind of dictatorship or another, Afghans can now openly criticise those who rule them. One of the privileges of democracy is that it allows you to excoriate politicians who are long dead as well as those who are still living. ![]()
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