Nehru: The Debates that Defined India 
New Delhi: The legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, continues to divide public opinion. What is beyond doubt is that the decisions he took during his tenure continue to impact the Indian polity today in more ways than one. What drove Nehru’s approach towards these decisions? Was there consistency in this decision-making, were there contradictions?
The book — Nehru: The Debates that Defined India (Published by Harper Collins) — captures Nehru’s complex personality through four very significant conversations that Nehru had with his interlocutors – the poet and thinker Mohammad Iqbal in 1935 on the fate of the Ahmaddiya community in India and the idea of Islamic Solidarity, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the eventual founder of Pakistan, in 1938, on the Muslim League’s demands to secure the future of Muslims in India, the Deputy Prime Minister of India Vallabhai Patel on foreign policy and the threat from China, and with the Jana Sangh’s Syama Prasad Mookerjee on the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution.
When the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, addressed both houses of Parliament during his reply to the Motion of Thanks, he repeatedly invoked the statements of Jawaharlal Nehru in his speech to remind the Congress party of the positions taken the country’s first Prime Minister on several pressing issues. It sums up how relevant Nehru still remains to our political discourse today, and this book goes a long way in explaining why that is.
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