Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru was India's first prime minister and held office for seventeen years, shaping the republic's institutions, economy and foreign policy. Born in Allahabad in 1889 to a wealthy Kashmiri Brahmin lawyer, he was educated at Harrow, Trinity College Cambridge and the Inner Temple, and returned in 1912 to a legal practice that did not interest him. He was drawn into politics by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 and by Gandhi, whose methods he accepted and whose religious idiom he never shared; Nehru was a secularist and an admirer of science and of Soviet planning. He was Congress president at the Lahore session of 1929, which demanded complete independence, and spent about nine years in British prisons, writing The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History in them. He became prime minister at independence in August 1947, immediately facing partition, the killing of perhaps a million people, the movement of some fifteen million, Gandhi's assassination, the integration of the princely states and the first war over Kashmir. He built a parliamentary democracy that held elections and survived, and enforced secularism as a constitutional principle. His economic policy was state-led industrialisation through five-year plans, public-sector steel plants, dams and the IITs, which built capacity and also entrenched a licensing bureaucracy that slowed growth for decades. He co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement and promoted the Panchsheel principles with China — which invaded in 1962 and defeated India badly, a humiliation that broke his health and his standing. He died in office in 1964. His daughter and grandson both became prime minister.
- Lived: 1889 CE – 1964 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: head_of_state, independence_leader, statesman
