"Builders of Modern India" Short Speech Main points to include -current generation people who have led india on route of technology - 3-4 lines about how jawaharlal nehru laid foundation for modern india
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For a younger generation to truly appreciate the visionary Nehru was, our historians need to recast him more credibly
Jawaharlal Nehru died 53 years ago this month — May 27, to be precise. His memory continues to dim in an increasingly young country that hardly remembers him. There is very little informed appreciation of the man, more responsible for conjuring the India we live in today than any of his contemporaries, Patel and Bose included. Incomparable Gandhi of course, stands a class apart and a step above, belonging to a different order altogether.
As legacies go, Nehru’s is a mixed bag of spectacular achievements and humongous failures — just as we continue to reap the benefits of the former, we have never ceased enduring the ill-effects of the later
The India that Nehru took charge of in 1947 was miserably poor, hardly literate and unable to feed itself. It was also traumatised by a violent partition. Incredibly, Nehru, while fire-fighting to bring together and consolidate our country, found the time to do things that transformed it.
He had a lot to show for his 17 years as Prime Minister among them the reform of India’s antiquated Hindu laws for instance, and an empathy-loaded approach to India’s marginalised tribal communities believing that “People should develop along the lines of their own genius.”
All the institutions that India is proud of today were founded in his time — our IITs, IIMs, NID, the Atomic Energy Commission the precursor to ISRO, the Indian National Committee for Space Research to name a few.
The country’s first atomic reactor Apsara, went critical in 1956 and India successfully tested its first rocket from Thumba in late 1963. Critical as one might be of the now defunct Planning Commission, under Nehru, it undoubtedly brought a sense of purpose as well as focus to the task of transforming India into a modern state.
Of all his successes, the greatest was the creation of the modern Indian state. It was his personal achievement. Nehru worked hard to ensure a major portion of British India emerged as one country and, equally importantly, as the successor state to the British Indian Empire. That India became a secular democratic republic with a modern constitution and universal adult franchise can, almost entirely, be credited to him.
Nehru’s stellar record as Prime Minister was, however, marred by two major failures: the manner in which Partition happened, resulting in the emergence of a hostile Pakistan; and his inability to quickly settle the border dispute with China. Thanks to Nehru, we now have two formidable enemies, joined at the hip, on our frontiers, when, with some deft handling, neither ought to have been our foe.
Recipe for mayhem
In the final negotiations leading up to Independence, Nehru and the Congress held nearly all the aces. Freedom from a Britain, bled and impoverished by World War II, no longer had to be wrested for it was now available for the asking. Instead of leveraging a British desperation to get out of the sub-continent, Nehru acquiesced to a hare-brained scheme to split the British-Indian empire into two- within a matter of weeks — a guaranteed recipe for mayhem on a mass scale.
He would have done well to ‘hasten slowly’ ensuring a velvet- divorce that would not have required the movement or death of so many millions, generating the kind of long-lasting inter-communal hatreds which destroyed religious accommodations built over a millennium in the sub-continent. Our historians, unpardonably avoid a discussion on this even as most of the documents relating to the transfer of power are now in the public domain and read together contradict all commonly accepted accounts of partition.