When Priyanka Gandhi stood up in Parliament to defend Jawaharlal Nehru, it was personal. For the first time in years, the family that carries the Nehru-Gandhi name pushed back not with sarcasm or selective nostalgia, but with emotional rhetoric. The BJP’s savage criticisms of Nehru may be political, but for Priyanka and Rahul, they cut at something deeper: ancestral inheritance. Because they are not merely defending a historical figure. They are defending a legacy that their family presides over and too often allowed to atrophy.
India is a nation with a long memory and a longer habit of revisiting its arguments. At the centre of these recurring debates stands Jawaharlal Nehru; idealistic, flawed, ambitious, and inescapable. The BJP’s frequent invocation of Nehru is often framed as obsession, but it is worth understanding what lies beneath. Part of the reason is simply that Nehru built concrete, institutional and intellectual installations that form the blueprint of modern India. When the BJP attacks him, it is engaging not merely with a historical figure but with the architect of the very state it governs. Nehru’s achievements are not small, and they are not abstract. The IITs and IIMs, which today act as India’s global calling cards, began under his watch. The dams of the early Republic such as Bhakra Nangal and Hirakud still generate electricity, provide irrigation, and stabilise regional economies. The Atomic Energy Establishment, the early labs of the CSIR, the Planning Commission, cultural academies, scientific institutes—all were attempts to build a nation that could stand on its own feet. Even governments that came after him benefitted from this inheritance. Liberalisation in the 1990s succeeded partly because the educational and scientific base existed. India’s space and nuclear achievements rest on foundations poured in the 1950s. Startups today thrive because the talent pipeline created by these institutions never truly dried up. However, his daughter Indira Gandhi centralised power to an extent that strangled the very democratic ethos Nehru considered sacred. The Emergency did more damage to the institutional spine of India than anything Nehru’s critics now accuse him of. Rajiv Gandhi had his bursts of reformist brilliance but lacked the discipline to build at Nehru’s scale. Sonia Gandhi’s era relied heavily on welfare architecture; and some of it was lasting but it did not produce the kind of nation shaping institutions Nehru considered the bare minimum for a developing republic. Priyanka and Rahul inherit not just Nehru’s name but the debris of an inheritance poorly maintained. Which is why Priyanka’s intervention felt almost defensive, even poignant.
The BJP’s disagreement with Nehru is ideological. It prefers cultural revival over cosmopolitan modernism, political centralisation over federal looseness, market reform over state-led planning. These are legitimate political differences. What becomes less productive is when Nehru is used as an all-purpose scapegoat for present failures. What India lacks today is not a perfect interpretation of Nehru, but the intellectual seriousness with which he approached the business of building a nation from scratch. No government—Congress or non-Congress—has matched Nehru’s institution-building ambition. The BJP’s governance may be assertive and energetic, but to date it has not produced institutions as defining as the IITs, IIMs, or atomic establishments. The UPA was prolific in legislation but not in long-term structural creation. And so Nehru, paradoxically, looms ever larger. The BJP returns to him because they disagree with the India he imagined. The Congress returns to him because they have little else left that commands universal respect. And Priyanka returns to him because she must, because history made her a custodian of a garden her own party forgot to water. Nehru’s legacy is neither the BJP’s punching bag nor the Congress’s inheritance alone. It is India’s inheritance.
It is equally true that Nehru left behind ambiguities and blind spots: an over-centralised planning apparatus, a romantic foreign policy, and political idealism not always matched by administrative realism. Later governments grappled with these contradictions. The BJP’s hostility often stems from a genuine philosophical disagreement: its belief in strong political centralisation, cultural revival, and market-driven reform runs counter to Nehru’s worldview. But political economy is not theology since legacies are debated, corrected, reinterpreted. That is normal for a democracy. What becomes unproductive is when Nehru becomes a substitute for present-day debate. The risk is not that Nehru is over-discussed, but that he becomes a stand-in for the real, difficult questions India faces today: how to build the next generation of institutions, how to create equitable economic growth, how to balance cultural identity with constitutional pluralism, and how to prepare for technological and climatic disruptions that dwarf the challenges of the 1950s. Liberalisation brought markets, not new academies. The UPA years were rich in welfare design but thin on institution-building. In the end, the BJP’s relationship with Nehru resembles an unresolved romance: part resentment, part envy, part grudging admiration. They want his legacy erased, yet can’t stop circling around it. They want history rewritten, yet remain tied to the history they condemn. The man they insist ruined India is the man they cannot live without. If Nehru could see it, he would probably be disappointed because he, unlike his critics, believed India’s leaders should face the challenges before them, not seek refuge in ghosts time left behind.