Sunday, December 28, 2008

The Lost Decades

Kanhaiyalal Maneklal Munshi is one of the forgotten titans of the era which saw great personalities like Nehru, Gandhi and Sardar Patel leaving their mark on the Indian polity as well as history and geography. He was a prolific writer and thinker as well as an educator and an eminent lawyer.

Post independence, Munshi served in the central cabinet in a ministerial capacity and as governor of Uttar Pradesh, from 1952 to 1957. He was a staunch supporter of personal liberties and freedoms and a proponent of free market economy and capitalism. Disillusioned by the ongoing erosion of personal liberties and individual freedoms by the state under Nehru's misguided socialist policies, he left the Congress Party and joined the liberal Swatantra Party in 1959. He has outlined his reasons for doing so in this document.

Nehru was one of the greatest sons of India, there can be no doubt about that. But what happened under his stewardship was that independent thought was stifled and a coterie of yes- men gathered around the centers of power, intent upon increasing the state's powers at the expense of the individual. And this legacy was furthered by Indira Gandhi. It was not until the nineties that India finally started breaking free of this Nehruvian legacy of socialism which has resulted in two generations of the Indian people being held back from achieving their full potential and migrating away from the stifling atmosphere prevalent in India. India lost its most promising and brilliant minds to the 'Brain Drain' during this era.

'Breaking free of Nehru' is a book by Sanjeev Sabhlok. You can download half of the book from this link and go thru it. If you feel what Sanjeev has to say is relevant, you can also purchase the book, which is available in print now. I highly recommend you do that and find out for yourself what Sanjeev has to say about why India has lagged behind the world in almost all spheres and what should be done to remedy that.

1 comment:

Vinod_Sharma said...

Nehru's many disastrous policies are still being followed, thanks to the fact that his descendants and the coterie they have assiduously built around them continue to rule this nation.

India will break free from Nehru only once the family business passes decisively into the hands of true professionals on the basis of merit alone. Till that happens, things are going to remain pretty much the same and the much needed paradigm shifts will not be put in place.