Academic literature on the topic 'Nehruvian Leadership'

This article analyses the trends of India’s foreign policy in recent years under the light of political and economic dynamics, with a focus in its regional surrounding. The text locates an inflection towards economic liberalization undertaken in the beginning of the 1990´s, and then moves on to the context of economic expansion in the 21st century. The achievements and limits of those processes are taken into consideration. In the political realm, as the legitimacy of the Indian National Congress (INC) was brought to check, so was its hegemony, in a process that has favored the rise of political agencies identified with hindu nationalism and communalism, such as the BJP. Overall, the hallmarks of Indian politics that prevailed since independence under leadership of the Congress Party are left behind: economic nationalism, secular politics, and international non-alignment. In this context, the broad orientation of Indian foreign policy also has changed. The text analyses the consequences of this inflection in the regional context, focusing the Neighbors first policy and the priority given to infrastructural connectivity with Southeast Asia (Look East and Act East policies), as well as the recent intensification of business in the African continent. Altogether, the expectations of an alternative civilizatory horizon in the context of the Cold War which has nurtured Nehruvian politics, has given place to a pragmatic rationality that accepts the United States leadership and as such, draws strategies adapting to the mercantile trends that typify globalisation.

India, now the world’s fifth-largest economy and a rising power in the world started its journey in the international realm by choosing to remain strategically autonomous under the umbrella of the Non-Alignment Movement. India, also a founding member state of the Non-Alignment Movement stayed true to its decision for more than two decades by not moving into any of the two primary security blocs (US, USSR) during the Cold War. India, then under the leadership of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru decided to delve into the waters of non alignment because it simply wanted to stay away from another looming crisis that was the Cold War. Jawaharlal Nehru and the foreign policy makers of India had already seen two bloody world wars and the disaster that was brought by it. Quite understandably, India didn’t want themselves to engulf in another global conflict. However, with the swiftly changing times in the global order, Indian Foreign Policy went through tremendous changes. New opportunities arose for new partnerships. From Non-Alignment in the 20th century, Indian Foreign Policy has come far with its outreach much broader and well-versed in contemporary times. India understood the need to multi align themselves after the fall of Berlin Wall which saw the end of the erstwhile USSR. A broken Russia was not in the interest of India but they had to quickly change their strategy to fill the massive vacuum of support left by the USSR. That is when, India slowly started to reach out to West and it’s allies. Indian Foreign Policy has truly moved on from Nehruvian Idealism to Strategic Realism and Economic Pragmatism. India now has strong relations with multiple poles of power while still exercising its strategic autonomy without much external influence from a certain or any blocs of power. To study the following, relevant data or references will be taken from various reliable books written by experts in the International Relations field. References will also be taken into account from journals, articles and other published research papers from scholars.

This chapter provides a backdrop to the rest of the book, showing how education became the vehicle that linked neoliberalism with Hindu nationalism and allowed to it permeate Indian society. It opens by explaining the origins of India’s national identity and how the Nehruvian doctrine (Lall, 2001) defined Indian citizens after independence in 1947. It engages with the inclusive nature of this approach, showing how India’s key policies and its Constitution embraced this vision and translated it into the education system. The chapter also engages with the Nehruvian vision for an educated India and the development of a higher education system, and briefly engages with the main education policies and reforms that took place between 1947 and the 1990s. The chapter then turns to the economic reforms of 1991 under the leadership of PM Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, which emerged in an increasingly neoliberal global economic climate. The chapter further examines how the increasingly neoliberal reality led to economic disaggregation and deregulation as well as decentralization, the rise of regional parties, and larger inequalities between India’s north and south.

Even though the escalation of the Vietnam war was the most significant Asian crisis of the 1960s, we rarely ever think about Indian diplomacy during this conflict. But what makes the second Indochina crisis of 1965–6 particularly interesting is that the post-Nehruvian foreign policy shifts vividly reflected in the contestations and debates on India’s posture and strategy towards the Vietnam war. Hence, we will be able to evaluate Indira Gandhi’s foreign policy in the extended neighbourhood very early in her tenure when domestic rivals contested her leadership and authority at a time of significant flux in Indian politics. In many ways, this phase marks the final displacement of Nehru’s peacemaker role conception with an alternative security seeker role.

This chapter highlights several reasons for the persistence of Jawaharlal Nehru's image as the architect of independent India. Nehru was not only India's first prime minister; he served for seventeen years, longer than any other leader to follow him. However, there are also important dispositional and methodological forces behind the rise of the Nehru myth. Many scholars, publishers, readers and podcast producers continue to prefer to understand the past through the lives of exemplary individuals. Moreover, for over thirty years, the clearest, most coherent source of material on postcolonial India has been the Second Series of the Selected Works of Nehru, published by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. The chapter considers how the myth of Nehru's indisputable and indispensable leadership in India was propagated by Congress, at least in part, to keep an exhausted prime minister in his job. It looks at the proliferation of Nehru iconography after his death and describes the Nehruvian consensus.

Abstract This chapter charts the rise and fall of the Majlis-e-Mushāwarat, the most important Muslim outfit of the sixties and seventies. If disunity had been the Achilles’ heel of Muslim politics throughout the Nehruvian period, at its close Congressmen and Leaguers, clerics and lay politicians, nationalists and Islamists, all concluded that the chasms between them, in fact, counted for very little. More united than divided them. The nationalist Muslims were beginning to grow impatient with the Hindu leadership; Leaguers were never particularly hot-headed to begin with. The maulanas and career politicians were agreed on the need to protect the sharia. India’s Islamists were in fact rather conventional nationalists; nationalist Muslims were not above exceptionalist pretentions. They all broadly shared in what could be called an Indian Muslim ideology. Here, then, lay the justification for the birth of the Mushāwarat. But impulses to unity came on sufferance. A concatenation of crises accelerated this belated appreciation, the most important of which was Nehru’s death in May 1964. Hindu prejudice played a part, too, as did trouble brewing in the borderlands; the underrepresentation of Muslims in the services; the short shrift given to the Urdu language; and the sharp increase in violence against Muslims.