Data de nascimento: 14. Novembro 1889
Data de falecimento: 27. Maio 1964
Jawaharlal Nehru , também conhecido como Pandit Nehru ou Pandita Nehru, foi um estadista indiano, que foi o primeiro primeiro-ministro da Índia, desde 1947 até 1964. Líder da ala socialista no congresso nacional indiano durante e após o esforço da Índia para a independência do império britânico, tornou-se no primeiro-ministro da Índia na independência, de 15 de agosto de 1947 até sua morte.
Figura líder do movimento de independência indiano, Nehru foi eleito pelo Partido do Congresso para assumir o posto inaugural de primeiro-ministro da Índia independente, e reeleito quando Partido do Congresso ganhou a primeira eleição geral da Índia em 1952. Como um dos fundadores do Movimento Não-Alinhado, foi também uma figura importante na política internacional do pós-guerra.
Filho de um rico advogado e político indiano, Motilal Nehru, Nehru tornou-se um líder da ala esquerdista do Congresso Nacional Indiano, quando ainda bastante jovem. Ascendendo até tornar-se presidente do Congresso, sob a orientação de Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru foi um líder carismático e radical, defendendo a independência completa em relação ao Império Britânico. Na longa luta pela independência da Índia, em que foi uma peça chave, Nehru foi finalmente reconhecido como herdeiro político de Gandhi. Ao longo de sua vida, Nehru foi também um defensor do socialismo fabiano e do setor público como o meio pelo qual os desafios de longa data do desenvolvimento econômico poderiam ser abordados pelas nações mais pobres.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, livro Glimpses of World History
The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds
Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People - Página 83, Jawaharlal Nehru - John Day Company, 1942, 993 páginas
— Jawaharlal Nehru
As quoted in Building A Life Of Value : Timeless Wisdom to Inspire and Empower Us (2005) by Jason A. Merchey, p. 74
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
The Discovery of India (1946), Context: The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
The Discovery of India (1946), Context: The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
The Discovery of India (1946), Context: The discovery of India — what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is today and what she was in the long past. Today she is four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling. If this is so in the present, how much more so to grasp that multitudinous past of innumerable successions of human beings. Yet something has bound them together and binds them still. India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads. Overwhelmed again and again her spirit was never conquered, and today when she appears to be a plaything of a proud conqueror, she remains unsubdued and unconquered. About her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
The Discovery of India (1946), Context: History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their view. Or, at any rate, the victors' version is given prominence and holds the field. <!-- pp. 287-8.
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958), Context: Essentially I am interested in this world, in this life, not in some other world or future life. Whether there is such a thing as soul, or whether there is survival after death or not, I do not know; and important as these questions are, they do not trouble me the least. <!-- p. 15 (1946)
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Speech to the US Congress (13 October 1949), Context: We have achieved political freedom but our revolution is not yet complete and is still in progress, for political freedom without the assurance of the right to live and to pursue happiness, which economic progress alone can bring, can never satisfy a people. Therefore, our immediate task is to raise the living standards of our people, to remove all that comes in the way of the economic growth of the nation. We have tackled the major problem of India, as it is today the major problem of Asia, the agrarian problem. Much that was feudal in our system of land tenure is being changed so that the fruits of cultivation should go to the tiller of the soil and that he may be secure in the possession of the land he cultivates. In a country of which agriculture is still the principal industry, this reform is essential not only for the well-being and contentment of the individual but also for the stability of society. One of the main causes of social instability in many parts of the world, more especially in Asia, is agrarian discontent due to the continuance of systems of land tenure which are completely out of place in the modem world. Another — and one which is also true of the greater part of Asia and Africa — is the low standard of living of the masses.
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Context: I want to go rapidly towards my objective. But fundamentally even the results of action do not worry me so much. Action itself, so long as I am convinced that it is right action, gives me satisfaction. In my general outlook on life I am a socialist and it is a socialist order that I should like to see established in India and the world.
Statement of 1951, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru Vol. 5 (1987), p. 321
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958), Context: Many a Congressman was a communalist under his national cloak. But the Congress leadership stood firm and, on the whole, refused to side with either communal party, or rather with any communal group. Long ago, right at the commencement of non-co-operation or even earlier, Gandhiji had laid down his formula for solving the communal problem. According to him, it could only be solved by goodwill and the generosity of the majority group, and so he was prepared to agree to everything that the Muslims might demand. He wanted to win them over, not to bargain with them. With foresight and a true sense of values he grasped at the reality that was worthwhile; but others who thought they knew the market price of everything, and were ignorant of the true value of anything, stuck to the methods of the market-place. They saw the cost of purchase with painful clearness, but they had no appreciation of the worth of the article they might have bought. <!-- p. 136
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Context: The most effective pose is one in which there seems to be the least of posing, and Jawahar had learned well to act without the paint and powder of an actor … What is behind that mask of his? … what will to power? … He has the power in him to do great good for India or great injury … Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in a democracy.
He calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately slave to the heart … Jawahar has all the makings of a dictator in him — vast popularity, a strong will, ability, hardness, an intolerance for others and a certain contempt for the weak and inefficient … In this revolutionary epoch, Caesarism is always at the door. Is it not possible that Jawahar might fancy himself as a Caesar? … He must be checked. We want no Caesars.
Article in Modern Review (1936) by a pseudonymous author signing himself "Chanakya", later revealed to have been Nehru himself; as quoted in TIME magazine : "Clear-Eyed Sister" (3 January 1955) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,892893,00.html & "The Uncertain Bellwether" (30 July 1956) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,867026-8,00.html
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958), Context: India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else, and Hindu and Muslim and Sikh and others take pride in their faiths and testify to their truth by breaking heads. The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere has filled me with horror, and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests. And yet I knew well that there was something else in it, something which supplied a deep inner craving of human beings. How else could it have been the tremendous power it has been and brought peace and comfort to innumerable tortured souls? Was that peace merely the shelter of blind belief and absence of questioning, the calm that comes from being safe in harbour, protected from the storms of the open sea, or was it something more? In some cases certainly it was something more.
But organized religion, whatever its past may have been, today is largely an empty form devoid of real content. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has compared it (not his own particular brand of religion, but other!) to a fossil which is the form of an animal or organism from which all its own organic substance has entirely disappeared, but has kept its shape, because it has been filled up by some totally different substance. And, even where something of value still remains, it is enveloped by other and harmful contents. That seems to have happened in our Eastern religions as well as in the Western.<!-- p. 241
— Jawaharlal Nehru
Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958), Context: Organised religion allying itself to theology and often more concerned with its vested interests than with the things of the spirit encourages a temper which is the very opposite of science. It produces narrowness and intolerance, credulity and superstition, emotionalism and irrationalism. It tends to close and limit the mind of man and to produce a temper of a dependent, unfree person.
Even if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him, so Voltaire, said … perhaps that is true, and indeed the mind of man has always been trying to fashion some such mental image or conception which grew with the mind's growth. But there is something also in the reverse proposition: even if God exist, it may be desirable not to look up to Him or to rely upon Him. Too much dependence on supernatural forces may lead, and has often led, to loss of self-reliance in man, and to a blunting of his capacity and creative ability. And yet some faith seems necessary in things of the spirit which are beyond the scope of our physical world, some reliance on moral, spiritual, and idealistic conceptions, or else we have no anchorage, no objectives or purpose in life. Whether we believe in God or not, it is impossible not to believe in something, whether we call it a creative life-giving force, or vital energy inherent in matter which gives it its capacity for self-movement and change and growth, or by some other name, something that is as real, though elusive, as life is real when contrasted with death. <!-- p. 524 (1946)
— Jawaharlal Nehru
A Tryst With Destiny (1947), Context: The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.
Quicktime excerpt http://www.harappa.com/nehrumov.html
