Indian politics has a strange hobby. Some leaders become statues with pigeon problems. Some become boring exam answers. And then there is Jawaharlal Nehru, the Great Indian Satan in a sexy namesake jacket permanently trending and permanently blamed. Border issue? Nehru’s bad. Bureaucracy slow? Nehru’s colonial hangover. China? Definitely Nehru. If the Wi-Fi drops, give it a minute and someone will connect it to 1954. As a riposte, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has argued that Nehru has become a “convenient scapegoat”—a phrase that matters now, because at this point, Nehru isn’t just a former prime minister. He is a symbol his post-mortem opponents use to explain whatever they don’t like about modern India. This is bigger than party politics. It’s about narrative control. Societies love simplistic origin stories comprising heroes and villains. The French blamed Voltaire for French society’s moral decline. Ancient Rome blamed dead emperors as wrongful dictators. Political theorist René Girard argued that communities often project their tensions onto symbolic scapegoats. In India’s case, Nehru has become the all-purpose historical villain for anyone who thinks post-1947 India took a wrong turn.
Why him? Because in today’s ethos he represents a whole vibe: secularism, elite English-speaking liberalism, socialism, non-alignment, all which made up the early republic’s blueprint. If you want to rewrite India’s founding story, Nehru is the main character you have to dethrone. Both readings are partial truths. Both are politically useful. Neither is historically complete.
But here’s the part people skip. The India Nehru inherited in 1947 was not a stable country waiting for a TED Talk. It was bleeding from Partition and flooded with refugees. It inherited famine-scarred agriculture, negligible industrial capacity, fractured institutions, refugee crises, and near-bankrupt finances. Expecting flawless policymaking in such conditions is intellectually equivalent to blaming the Wright brothers for not inventing in-flight GPS. Moreover, the continuity of institutions across seven decades means that failures cannot logically remain frozen in 1964. In his famous “Tryst with Destiny” speech, he literally warned that independence was just “a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.” His non-alignment policy tried to keep India independent during the US-Soviet Cold War. But it also came with blind spots, especially regarding China, culminating in the 1962 defeat that is the biggest dent in his legacy. Nehru wasn’t flawless. The point is that turning him into the single source code of every modern problem is what historians call presentism: in this case, judging decisions made in 1947 as if the people making them had Google, hindsight, and 75 years of data.
Nehru believed the way forward for new India was institutions and science. “It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty.” Which is why he pushed for research institutes, big dams, heavy industry, and planning commissions as a holistic developmental state package. Was it bureaucratic? Yes. Did it slow growth later? Arguably. But it also created the industrial base and higher education system that later governments continued to use. Thus, contemporary Indian political rhetoric increasingly resembles a tenant who denounces the architect while continuing to live comfortably inside the building.
The proof of post-colonial Indian democracy’s strength is it didn’t slide into military dictatorship in the 1950s the way many post-colonial countries did. That democratic muscle memory didn’t appear by accident. The deeper issue is what kind of India people want now. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has described today’s ideological shift as a “redefinition of the nation along cultural lines.” That’s not just about Nehru. It’s about changing the founding story itself from a civic, secular republic to a more explicitly civilisational narrative. If you want to do that, you have to challenge the Nehruvian framework. But the uncomfortable truth is blaming a dead leader for everything is convenient because he can’t respond. Nehru once said, “Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.” But facts are complicated while narratives are easier. Nehru gets accused of contradictory crimes: building too strong a state and too weak a state; being too socialist and not socialist enough; or, being too Western and not Indian enough. When one person can be blamed for opposite failures, it usually means he’s become a symbol, not a serious historical argument.
When a country turns history into a morality play with one permanent villain, it stops asking harder questions about present decisions. In the end, Nehru’s greatest historical achievement may not be nation-building or non-alignment. It may be his posthumous transformation into India’s most durable multipurpose excuse—a founding father who has been repurposed into a founding alibi.