It is 48 full years since Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, passed away on 27th May 1964. One of the top leaders of the Independence movement and the first Prime Minister, it was a usual debate in the early part of the 1960s, ” After Nehru, who?”. In fact, there was no clear answer from anybody. But it was the simple profiled Lal Bahadur Shastri who succeeded. Of course he did not reach back from his USSR tour and Indira Gandhi succeeded.

Jawaharlal Nehru was a socialist, but his ideas could not flourish as he surrendered his many ideas and thinking to the ‘Father of the Nation’, Mahatma Gandhi. But as Prime Minister, he realised the need of the country and started the Public Sector Enterprises for fast growth of the country. Insurance was nationalised. Large dams ( although at present it is termed as harmful to ecology)were constructed for irrigation, power projects etc. He was the joint architect of the Panchsheel. Of course, we had the hard experience of the suppression of the 1960 indefinite strike by his government, which he described as ‘Civil Rebellion’.

Now after almost 5 decades, whether the government headed by the same Congress Party don’t want to remember his memory with high level propaganda? Only a comparison with the high publicity given to former Prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and that the low-level publicity given to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is  to be noted.

Is the UPA government trying to erase the memory of the period when the slogan was the ‘Socialist Pattern of Society’ so that the people will not compare the anti-people  ‘neo-liberal policy’ with the earlier line.