Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru, born 14 November 1889 in Allahabad to the wealthy barrister Motilal Nehru, was educated at Harrow, Trinity College Cambridge, and the Inner Temple before joining the Indian National Congress. A protégé and chosen political heir of Mahatma Gandhi, he served as Congress President in 1929 at the Lahore session that adopted the Purna Swaraj (complete independence) resolution, and again in 1936, 1937, 1946 and 1951. His "Tryst with Destiny" address, delivered to the Constituent Assembly at midnight on 14–15 August 1947, marked the transfer of power. As head of the Interim Government from September 1946, he became independent India's first Prime Minister, also holding the External Affairs portfolio for the entirety of his tenure. He won three successive general elections (1951–52, 1957, 1962), establishing the dominance of the "Congress system."

Nehru's domestic programme rested on parliamentary democracy, secularism, scientific temper and a socialist-leaning mixed economy. He institutionalised central planning through the Planning Commission, set up by a Cabinet resolution in March 1950, and launched the First (1951–56) and Second (1956–61) Five-Year Plans, the latter built on the Mahalanobis model prioritising heavy industry. The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 reserved commanding heights for the public sector, producing the "temples of modern India" — Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur steel plants, the IITs, and the Bhakra-Nangal dam. He backed the Hindu Code Bills (1955–56), reforming Hindu marriage, succession and adoption law, and the linguistic reorganisation of states through the States Reorganisation Act, 1956. In foreign policy he authored Non-Alignment, co-formulated the Panchsheel (Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence) with Zhou Enlai in 1954, and convened the Bandung Conference (1955), forerunner to the Non-Aligned Movement formally launched at Belgrade in 1961.

Nehru's later years were clouded by the failure of the "Forward Policy" and the Sino-Indian War of October–November 1962, which exposed military unpreparedness and forced the resignation of Defence Minister V. K. Krishna Menon. His handling of Kashmir — referral to the UN Security Council in 1948 and the framing of Article 370 — remains contested. He died in office on 27 May 1964 and was succeeded, after a brief Gulzarilal Nanda interregnum, by Lal Bahadur Shastri. His legacy endures through the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty and the term "Nehruvian consensus."

For the UPSC examination, Nehru is central to GS Paper I (post-independence consolidation, nation-building, economic planning) and the optional papers in History and Political Science. Prelims frequently tests dated facts — session presidencies, the 1950 Planning Commission, the 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution, Panchsheel 1954, Bandung 1955. Mains questions typically probe analytical angles: the "Nehruvian model" of development versus the Gandhian and Bombay Plan alternatives, the institutional foundations of Indian democracy, and a critical appraisal of his China policy in light of 1962. FSOT and CSS aspirants encounter him as the architect of Non-Alignment and a leading Third World statesman of the early Cold War.