For a thousand years, Iqbal’s narcissus mourns its own blindness before a true man of vision is born in the garden. In the long and turbulent garden of modern India, Jawaharlal Nehru was such a figure. Sixty-two years after his death on 27 May 1964, the arguments around him have only intensified. That, in itself, is a measure of his stature. Ordinary politicians are remembered for office; foundational figures are contested because they continue to shape the moral vocabulary of a nation.

To remember Nehru in this anniversary week is not to place him beyond criticism. No serious tribute requires idolatry. Nehru was fallible, as all humans are; accountable, as all statesmen must be; and vulnerable to disappointment, as all dreamers become. But to reduce him to the anxieties and polemics of later generations is to miss the scale of what he attempted. He inherited not a ready-made nation-state but a wounded civilisation emerging from conquest, poverty, Partition and communal slaughter. He helped turn a subcontinent of immense diversity into a functioning democratic republic. That he did so without surrendering to authoritarian temptation remains one of the great achievements of the twentieth century.

Nehru’s first and most enduring gift to India was the democratic habit. At independence, democracy in India was not inevitable. The country was poor, largely illiterate, socially fractured and administratively fragile. Many believed parliamentary democracy would not survive such conditions. The easier path would have been paternalism: a benevolent strong hand, postponing liberty in the name of order and development. Nehru rejected that path. He believed democracy was not a luxury to be enjoyed after prosperity but the discipline through which a diverse people could learn to live together.

He accepted opposition not as a nuisance but as the natural condition of republican life. He respected Parliament, tolerated a critical press, protected disagreement, and........

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