Independent India's first and longest-serving prime minister, who governed from 1947 to 1964 and, more than any other single figure, stamped the new nation as a secular, democratic, state-planned, and non-aligned republic — entrenching parliamentary rule and free elections, building industry through Five-Year Plans, and leading the bloc of nations that refused to choose sides in the Cold War, while leaving behind the contested record over Kashmir, the 1962 defeat by China, slow growth, and his daughter's later succession that frames India's arguments with itself to this day.
At the stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru told a free India it had a 'tryst with destiny.' The empire was leaving. But the subcontinent was already burning. Partition was splitting it into India and Pakistan, and the trains arriving in the capital carried the dead. Nehru's task was not to celebrate a victory. It was to build a single democratic state out of a wounded, mixed society of hundreds of millions, and to keep it secular, electoral, and intact while it bled. He held that job for seventeen years. The shape of India today, and most of its arguments with itself, still run back to the choices he made in them.