The party itself – its recent pyrrhic victory at the polls notwithstanding – is a shadow of its former self. ![]() The Congress, which he had led and which was the lynchpin of the system of governance, has disintegrated. ![]() One government after another – whether his own successors or other alliances – has dismantled the state-planned ‘mixed’ economy he worked so hard to put into place. In India itself, Nehru’s legacy has come under sustained attack. Many of the new nations whose independence Nehru championed are now in deep crisis, a painful commentary on the failures of Nehru’s dreams of a new world order. The model of state-led socialism, which Nehru and a generation of nation-builders saw as the key to development and the fight against poverty and inequality, has failed. The Cold War, from which he fought hard to insulate the Third World, has come to an end, replaced by an unipolar world in which the neo-imperialist superpower, the uncovenanted legatee of earlier empires, presents dangerous new challenges to the sovereignty of nations. ![]() The European empires which Nehru challenged have long since disappeared. Forty years after his death, much of Nehru’s world has been lost, its certainties eroded, its structures demolished.
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