(Born on 14th November, 1889-64)
Jawaharlal Nehru, fondly known as Chacha Nehru was born on November 14, 1889 at Allahabad, U.P. He was an Indian Nationalist Leader and Statesman who was the First Prime Minister of Independent India (1947-64)
The son of a wealthy Brahman lawyer from Kashmir, he went to England at the age of 16 and was educated at the Harrow School and the University of Cambridge. Returning to India in 1912, he practiced law for some years and in 1919 joined the Indian National Congress, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi Nehru soon became a leader of the nationalist movement; between 1921 and 1945, he was imprisoned nine times by the British administration for his activities on behalf of Indian independence. He served as president of the Congress party from 1929 to 1931, a position he subsequently held six times. Nehru remained a supporter of Gandhi until the latter’s death in 1948. However, he put forth a militant program involving the adoption of all possible measures short of armed resistance to the British.
In 1942, Nehru replaced Gandhi as the recognized leader of the National Congress party. Four years later, when the British began preparations for withdrawal from India, he was invited to form an interim government to organize the transition from dependency to independence. During the following year, Nehru attempted to prevent the partition of India into separate Hindu and Muslim States but he was unsuccessful and seperate Muslim state known as Pakistan was founded. In August 1947, following the final withdrawal of the British and the establisment of India as a self governing dominion within the commonwealth, Nehru was elected Prime Minister. He continued to the post when India became a republic in 1950 and was returned to office repeatedly until his death on May 27, 1964 in New Delhi.
As Prime Minister, Nehru was deeply involved in carrying out India’s five year plans and pursuing a policy of peaceful co-existence with nations of every political tendency. He supported the United Nations Resolution on Korea in 1950, opposed the British and French move in 1956 at the Suez Canal and told an aggressive China in 1959 that he would defend India’s borders with armed force. Under his guidance, India became an influential force within the so called non-aligned nations.
He was a writer and his writings include letters published under the titles Glimpses of World History, Letters to Chief Ministers (5 vol; 87-90) and an autobiography published in the U.S. as Toward Freedom (1941); his addresses and articles were collected and published under the titles The Unity of India (1941) and Independence and After (1950).
He was a kind, caring person who loved kids and saw them as the future leaders of the nation. Rose was his favourite flower and a symbol of love which he always wore on his coat. His bird was a white dove which meant peace. In India, Children’s Day is observed on 14th November every year. Late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s message of love and peace is spread on this day as he had great love for kids.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation on Gandhiji’s Assasination
‘The Light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. Our beloved leader, Bapu, as we called him, the Father of the Nation is no more.. And yet I am wrong for the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. A thousand years later, that light will still be seen.
14th November is Children’s Day – The Day is celebrated on Chaha Nehru’s Birth Anniversary. He was known as ‘Chaha Nehru’ as he was too fond of kids and children loved him and called him by this name in affection.
Nehru The Making of India By M J Akbar
Chapter from the Book
Nehrus are believed to have migrated, Noar, or Naru, in Badgam district and the other near the small town of Tral. Another claim says that the family came from the Rainwari area on the outskirts of Srinagar. (A famous family, as is well known, suddenly gets many ancestors.)
However, it is certain that the Nehrus were part of the Mughal court and had some zemindari rights over a few villages. But by the generation of Mausa Ram Kaul and Saheb Ram Kaul, Raj Kaul’s grandsons, the inheritance had dissipated, perhaps in direct proportion to the decline of Mughal power. Mausa Ram’s son, Lakshmi Narayan, shifted his loyalty and became the first vakil of the East India Company, which had acquired a formidable presence by now at the Mughal court. His son, Ganga Dhar, became a kotwal (chief constable) in the police at a very early age and held that job when the Mutiny reached Delhi in 1857. Ganga Dhar Nehru was only thirty;. And it was that holocaust which, after a century and half, forced the descendants of Raj Kaul to leave the city which they had adopted.
From the ‘feeble, cowardly and contemptible’ Emperor Farrukh Siyar to the no less feeble, cowardly and contemptible Bahadur Shah Zafar, the Nehrus served as bureaucrats to the kingdom. Their fortunes vacillated with the uncertainties of the time; it was an age when emperors died of that very fatal epidemic called intrigue, and the court was a bedlam of climbers using every weapon known, from conspiracy to poetry, to usurp a little more from the collapsing treasury of a debilitated empire. Those aristocrats with any desire for calm kept away from Delhi; others, with more ambition, like the Marathas and Jats, extracted a heavy price in return for letting the Mughal facade remain; yet others, invaders from Persia, came, looted and returned. And slowly, from the east, the troops of John Company worked their way up, their de facto power transformed by degrees into de jure authority.
