Congress leader Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday alleged that the Nehruvian legacy was being “undermined” by those in power who have “contempt” for the country’s first Prime Minister for all that he did to build an India.
The present regime wants to change it for the “worse”, she added.
Speaking at an event to relaunch party leader Shashi Tharoor’s book Nehru: The Invention of India , the former Congress president said Jawaharlal Nehru, as India’s first Prime Minister, “consolidated democracy and entrenched the basic values of India’s polity — values to which we are still proud to lay claim.” “What are these values. Shashi Tharoor summarises them as the core pillars of Nehruvianism — democratic institutional building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics and foreign policy of non-alignment. These values were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally being challenged today,” Ms. Gandhi said on the eve of Nehru’s birth anniversary.
But, that vision remains at the core of “our time-tested beliefs”, Ms. Gandhi insisted.
