Nehru -the ways of shaping of nation post- independence
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Jawaharlal Nehru (/ˈneɪru, ˈnɛru/;[1] Hindi: [ˈdʒəʋaːɦərˈlaːl ˈneːɦru] (About this soundlisten); 14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964) was an Indian independence activist and, subsequently, the first Prime Minister of India, as well as a central figure in Indian politics both before and after independence. He emerged as an eminent leader of the Indian independence movement, serving India as Prime Minister from its establishment in 1947 as an independent nation, until his death in 1964. He was also known as Pandit Nehru due to his roots with the Kashmiri Pandit community, while Indian children knew him better as Chacha Nehru (Hindi: Uncle Nehru).[2][3]
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After independence in 1947, India was among the poorest countries in the world. Two centuries of plunder, neglect, and exploitation by the British, had left a country of over 300 million people destitute and lost. India’s entire infrastructure, it’s economy, it’s bureaucracy, it was all designed and built solely to serve the needs of British industry and further Britain’s interests. India had been drained of its resources and manpower, so that Britain could win wars on the European continent; the Bengal Famine would kill 3 million Indians in WW II, because Churchill did not wish to ‘waste’ grain on his Indian subjects when there were Englishmen to feed. And as a final parting gift, the British co-engineered the Partition in 1947, leading to around 14 million refugees and mass killings all over the subcontinent. Half the population of India now lived below the poverty line, and over 80 percent of the people were illiterate. The country was famine-ridden and life expectancy was around 30 years. The per capita income, the agricultural output, and the food grains output had all been continuously shrinking for the previous three decades. Around 1700, the Mughal Empire produced one-third of the global GDP. For the Indian republic in 1947, this was less than 10 percent.
There was every possibility that India would end up as just another post-independence basket case. However, as the world watched India, expecting it to fail, quite the opposite happened. When the 1950s rolled by, and consecutive 5-year plans were drawn up and executed, it came to the world’s attention that India was doing remarkably well; Percival Griffith, a former colonial administrator who was highly sceptical of India’s capabilities, wrote in 1957 that post-independence foodgrain production had been ‘spectacular,’ and that India was succeeding in doing what he himself had thought impossible. He noted that it was ‘impossible to travel round India (…) without feeling that the country has entered a new, dynamic phase,’ and that ‘the signs of a rise in the standard of living are unmistakable.’(1) British economist Barbara Ward remarked in 1961 how in India a ‘process of continuous growth (…) covers everything from Tata’s works at Jamshedpur, producing over half a million tons of steel a year, down to the villager selling his first maund of rice in the market.’ Ward further wrote that ‘investment in all sectors, including agriculture, almost double between the first and second plans,’ and that ‘the Indian record in both infrastructure and industry is one of substantial advance on a broad front, (…) like the big push needed to achieve sustained growth.’ (2) From over 40 years of zero-percent growth between 1900–1947, India saw the economy grow to 4 percent annually until 1962, putting it ahead of China, Japan, and the UK.
On who we should congratulate for this remarkable achievement, the American political scientist Michael Brecher was quite clear:
whatever progress has been achieved is primarily due to the efforts of the prime minister. Indeed he is the heart and soul and mind of India’s heroic struggle to raise the living standards of its 390 million people.
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