Non-Alignment Legacy of Nehru
- New Delhi Progressive Peoples Sector Pub 1976
- 223 p.
The name of Jawaharlal Nehru is dear to all of us. We remember how heroically he led our struggle for freedom against a mighty colonial power. We remember how he gal vanised the entire nation, from east to west, from north to south. The freedom movement, which finally triumphed in the transfer of power, embraced the entire nation.
Nehru took the reins of power in the travails of parti tion, amidst the agony of millions. Healing their wounds, rendering succour to them, he never lost sight of the picture of a new India he had drawn before the people. An indus trialised India, freed from the backwardness of the past, deli vered from the shackles of a medieval economy-such was the vision of the land he had started rebuilding.
He had thought of this new India, not only in terms of its geographical boundaries, but as part of this wide world of ours shrunk into compactness, into a kind of oneness brought about by new historical processes. All through the freedom struggle he had fired our imagination with the pros pects of linking our fate with that of fellow Asians, with the progressive forces the world over.
Freedom came to us when the cold war had already des cended upon the world. The embers of the cold war had just died out when calls for a new holocaust were given, when the West indulged in sabre-rattling. The talk of military blocs in Europe, America and Asia was in the air. Our erst while colonial power, in collusion with the United States,