by VINAY LAL
Colonel Gamal A. Nasser of Egypt (left), Burmese Prime Minister U Nu (2nd from left), Nehru (2nd from the right), and an aide to Nasser, Major Salah Salem, ushering in the Burmese New Year in traditional costume at Bandung, Indonesia, Aapril 1955.
Five decades after his death, Jawaharlal Nehru still generates passions among Indians who are animated by questions over the country’s future. Writing from my perch in Los Angeles, I do not, for example, see anything remotely resembling the buzz about Nehru in American discussions about John F. Kennedy, another immensely charismatic leader of a democracy who was assassinated just months before Nehru passed away in 1964. We could say, of course, that Nehru was a titan among men, and that unlike Kennedy, who occupied the American presidency for less than three years, Nehru held sway as independent India’s first Prime Minister for seventeen years. If Amartya Sen is to be believed, it is the argumentative Indian in every Indian that keeps Nehru visible to the Indian public, loathed and perhaps admired in equal measure.
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