A leader of Stature

Had Jawaharlal Nehru been alive today he would be 120 ..

The wish to write about Nehru ji because of the conversation I had with a Cabbie from accross the border .
He was lamenting the lack of leadership after partition . We in India have indeed been privilaged .

"It is fashionable now to criticise Nehru's economic policies. He was castigated for making the public sector occupy the commanding heights of Indian economy. He was criticised for not linking up with western market economies.

It has to be remembered that the Indian private sector did not have the resources and motivation to invest in infrastructural sectors of the economy which required long-term investments and gestation periods. More importantly, between 1947 and 1955, all his efforts to get the major western powers involved in infrastructural development did not get a positive response. It was in consequence of this predicament that he entrusted the responsibility of mobilising resources and channelling them to fundamental sectors of the Indian economy to the government and the public sector.
While the decisions that he took seem logical and relevant to those times, the question to be answered is whether he would have continued the same policies had he lived into the '80s. Whatever his faults, he was alert and sensitive to changing domestic and international situations. Who knows, he might have been an equally active participant in the process of economic liberalisation and modernisation?

Nehru had a profound belief in India's destiny as a moral and stabilizing force in inter-state relations. He had faith in the Indian people and an equally strong hope that their maturity and civilisational wisdom would ensure for India an important role in the world. His education in the West, and his exposure to the political movements of Europe in the first three decades of this century, combined with his eclectic sense of history, made him realise that science, technology and economic modernisation and development were essential pre-requisites to fulfill the vision of a free India that he had in mind and to which he devoted three-fourths of his life.

Regardless of the fault lines, Nehru remains the most important architect of free India. "

as told by J.Dixit .


Athough we at time focus more on what we dont have rather than what we do have .

It has become fashionable for us to critisize the leaders and the policies but we will not do anything about them . We keep forgetting that collectively we are a force to reckon with .

Like the slogan for 2009 that is from Jaago re

I CHANGE INDIA CHANGES