Book Review: In ‘Nehru’s India’, Aditya Mukherjee Counters False Narratives About India’s First Prime Minister

Published : Dec 10, 2024 22:30 IST - 9 MINS READ At a time when the forces of Hindutva are relentlessly denigrating Jawaharlal Nehru’s contribution to the freedom of our country and the first 17 years of nation-building in independent India, the historian Aditya Mukherjee brings welcome clarification to the debate largely by citing Nehru’s own words and expanding on their import in the present context. Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future By Aditya Mukherjee Penguin, 2024 Pages: 208 Price: Rs.499 Mukherjee, an emeritus professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, weaves his story around Nehru’s unmatched “Idea of India”, his lifelong crusade against communal thought and action, his profound belief in democracy and the institutions of democracy enshrined in the Constitution, and the democratic ethos and value system. Secularism as constitutional imperative The author cites the famous phrases from Nehru’s “magisterial magnum opus”, The Discovery of India, comparing the evolution of the Indic civilisation over five millennia with “some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed”, but with “no succeeding layer” hiding or erasing “what had been written previously”. “Nehru saw the need to cultivate a “scientific temper” among the general population as a critical component of human development. This made the Nehruvian development story “unique” in the annals of world history.” To give this ideological position political and practical substance, Mukherjee recalls that Nehru got the All India Congress Committee to declare “that there would be no alliance, cooperation or understanding, explicit or implicit, between the Congress and any organization which is essentially communal”.