Forty-five years after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, has history done him justice? Regrettably not. In surveys that rank India’s best prime minister, he is placed below his daughter, and on some occasions he figures third. This is preposterous. Only three worthwhile books on him have appeared after his death: Hiren Mukherjee’s, The Gentle Colossus, S. Gopal’s three-volume biography and M.J. Akbar’s Nehru: The Making of India.

Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundations of a democratic, secular, pluralistic India. He established the atomic agency and the planning commission. The IITs are his gift. The great dams and steel plants have Nehru’s imprint on them. From 1947 to 1957, he was a prominent Asian world statesman. Was he a great man? I share Isaiah Berlin’s definition of greatness. “to call someone a great man is to claim that he has intentionally taken... a large step, one far beyond the normal capacities of men...permanently and radically alters the outlook and values of a significant body of human beings...his active intervention makes what seems highly improbably in fact happen.” Nehru fulfills every aspect with distinction.

Now we come to his record as foreign minister. The Nehruvian foreign policy framework has stood the test of time. No Central government has thought it necessary or desirable to jettison it. Why? Because no government or party has come up with an alternative foreign policy. Take non-alignment. Nehru has been denigrated on this issue, but here are some facts. Its membership now consists of nearly one hundred and twenty countries. The observers include China, Russia, Canada, the US, Japan, Germany, France and several more. The agenda today is obviously different from what it was in the ‘40s, ‘60s or ‘90s. The NAM has to re-invent itself to deal with new issues, terrorism, Muslim fundamentalism, globalisation, environment, drug trafficking, and global migration.

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