Nehru

The history of regional sporting events in 20th century Asia yields insights into Western and Asian perspectives on what defines modern Asia, and can be read as a staging of power relations in Asia and between Asia and the West. The Far Eastern Championship Games began in 1913, and were succeeded after the Pacific War by the Asian Games. Missionary groups and colonial administrations viewed sporting success not only as a triumph of physical strength and endurance but also of moral education and social reform. Sporting competitions were to shape a "new Asian man" and later a "new Asian woman" by promoting internationalism, egalitarianism and economic progress, all serving to direct a “rising” Asia toward modernity. Over time, exactly what constituted a “rising” Asia underwent remarkable changes, ranging from the YMCA’s promotion of muscular Christianity, democratization, and the social gospel in the US-colonized Philippines to Iranian visions of recreating the Great Persian Empire.


      Based on a vast range of archival materials and spanning sixty years and three continents,Pan-Asian Sport and the Emergence of Modern Asia shows how pan-Asian sporting events helped shape anti-colonial sentiments, Asian nationalisms, and pan-Asian aspirations in places as diverse as Japan and Iran, and across the span of countries lying between them.

Since Independence, the Indian government had cultivated an international reputation for generosity  when it came to gifting baby elephants—often in response to requests from children. Nehru’s personal fondness for children aside, the highly favourable international publicity that accompanied these gifts advanced the diplomatic interests of a poor, young nation state looking for international aid, straining to remain non-aligned during the Cold War and aspiring to cultivate a positive image on the global stage.

In November 1959, India's Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, turned seventy. Having led his country since Britain's departure from South Asia in August 1947, Nehru's seventieth birthday stimulated debates, both inside and outside the Indian subcontinent, on India's future in a post-Nehruvian world. In the early 1960s, with the Indian premier's health deteriorating and Sino-Indian relations under strain, British and US policymakers evidenced increasing concern with whom, or perhaps more pertinently, with what, forces would govern the world's largest democracy after Nehru. This article, which draws upon recently released British and US archival records, provides the first assessment of Western involvement in the struggle to succeed Nehru which occurred within India's ruling Congress Party between 1960 and 1964. Moreover, it offers insights into Anglo-American concern that Nehru's health adversely affected Indian policymaking; the involvement of foreign intelligence services in India's domestic politics; and the misplaced expectations of British and US officials that the appointment of Lal Bahadur Shastri as India's second Prime Minister, in May 1964, would herald the beginning of a new and more productive relationship between India and the West.

As the dispute over Kashmir broke out in 1947, a plebiscite of the people of the state offered a mutually acceptable and ostensibly fair path out of the imbroglio. Critics have often laid the blame on Nehru, and the territory’s salience to India, for why a plebiscite was never held. Based on primary docu- mentation, this article makes the case that it was not a lack of commitment to the formula, but rather Nehru’s deeply held strategic and reputational fears that motivated, first, the set- ting of what Delhi saw as firm but fair pre-conditions, and after the conclusion of the US-Pakistan military pact in 1954, the complete rejection of the plebiscite option.

DENIGRATION OF LENIN SYMBOLIZES HINDUTVA GANG’S HATRED FOR INDIA’S FREEDOM STRUGGLE
The reprehensible acts in Tripura by the Hindutva goons of razing statues of Lenin (1870-1924) who led the greatest October Socialist Revolution in 1917 and was the only head of a state (USSR) who supported the Indian freedom struggle, should not surprise anybody.
We must know why a great liberator and unwavering supporter of India’s independence, Lenin is being targetted by the Hindutva goons. It is being done because Hindutva goons are genetically opposed to democratic-secular India which came into being after a long glorious anti-colonial freedom struggle. Those who razed the Lenin statues (Tripura Governor, an old RSS cadre and perennial Muslim basher justified these criminal acts) are the children of those pre-Independence RSS/Hindu Mahasabha [HMS] leaders who brazenly opposed the Indian freedom struggle. These criminals aligned with the Muslim League [ML] against the Quit India Movement of 1942. When whole of the Congress leadership was in jails, Indian masses were being massacred for carrying Tricolour and India had been turned into a jail by the British masters, HMS led by Hindutva icon, Savarkar ran coalition governments with ML in Bengal, Sind and NWFP.
Shamelessly, another Hindutva icon, Syama Prasad Mookerjee was the deputy CM in the Bengal ML ministry. When Netaji attempted to liberate India militarily HMS in league with the RSS organized 'Military recruitment camps for the British armed forces'. It is not known by many that Indians lost 1857 War of Independence mainly due to the support of Gurkha army sent by the Hindu rulers of the Hindu State Nepal. For this support Terai region of India was gifted to Nepal by the British government.
What else can we expect from the children of such anti-national goons?
The Hindutva goons while razing Lenin’s statues in Tripura and abusing him in shameless words were also chanting BHARAT MATA KI JAI (Hail Mother India). Mother India whose liberation struggle their Hindutva icons of the time of the freedom struggle betrayed continuously. The denigration of Lenin by the Hindutva goons is not an insult of Lenin only but India’s great anti-colonial struggle with which Lenin not only sympathized but actively helped as we will see in the following...

THE FOLLOWING ILLUMINATING WRITE-UP ON LINKAGES BETWEEN LENIN/USSR & INDIAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE IS BY RENOWNED HISTORIAN, AMARESH MISHRA

WHY INDIAN PEOPLE VIEW TOPPLING LENIN'S STATUE AS AN ANTI-NATIONAL ACT...

WHY PRO-LENIN SENTIMENTS HAVE DEEP ROOTS IN INDIAN REALITY...

BJP's deleterious politics attacks our composite culture, seeks to tear apart our social fabric. However, a lesser known phenomenon has developed side by side. It came to light suddenly, with the toppling of Lenin's statue in tiny Tripura.

INDIAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE AS A MELTING POT

Right from 1857, India's Independence War was not fought in isolation. International ideas, theories, practices intersected in seemingly innumerable ways. Thus, not just our culture, but our freedom movement too, was a melting pot. Few know of the anti-British role played by Armenians, Arabs, Afghans, Anglo-Indians, even an Irish doctor, a Russian adventurer, Begum Hazrat Mahal's Egyptian-lady warriors, and 'Bob the Nailer', during 1857.

LENIN AND TILAK

The rise of Marxist and socialist ideas impacted India deeply. Lala Hardayal, one of the foremost freedom fighter figure during the early 20th century, contemporary of both Veer Savarkar and Shyamji Verma (eulogised by Modi), called Marx a 'modern Rishi'. Earlier, in the 1900s, during protests against Curzon's partition of Bengal plan, Bal Gangadhar Tilak developed his Swadeshi movement.

Advocating self-rule, the Swadeshi impulse was one of the first mass movements of India. The Bombay working class participated enthusiastically. The British targeted Tilak.

In 1908, Praful Chaki and Khudiram Bose, two Bengali youths, threw a bomb at the carriage of a British officer in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Chaki committed suicide but Bose was caught and hanged. Tilak, in his paper Kesari, defended the revolutionaries and called for immediate Swaraj or self-rule. Slapped with sedition charges, he was exiled to Burma for six years in 1909.

Bombay's working class hit the streets again to protest Tilak's incarceration. Himself in exile, the Russian revolutionary LENIN HAILED THE STRUGGLE OF THE INDIAN PEOPLE, especially, the working class upsurge. Slamming the British as brutes, Lenin wrote: "The most liberal and radical personalities of free Britain…become regular Genghis Khans when appointed to govern India, and are capable of sanctioning every means of 'pacifying' the population in their charge, even to the extent of flogging political protestors!”

Blasting the “infamous sentence pronounced by the British jackals on the INDIAN DEMOCRAT TILAK”, Lenin predicted that with the Indians having got a taste of political mass struggle, the “British regime in India is doomed”.

LENIN, NEHRU AND GANDHI

The 1917 Bolshevik revolution under Lenin fired the Indian political imagination and affected profoundly, its course. Russian developments inspired the Ghadar movement, Khilafat impulse, and the Reshmi Roomal Tehrik.

Nehru was to write later that "almost at the same time as the October Revolution led by the great Lenin, we in India began a new phase in our struggle for freedom. Our people for many years were engaged in this struggle with courage and patience. And although under the leadership of Gandhi we followed another path, WE WERE INFLUENCED BY THE EXAMPLE OF LENIN".

Evaluating the Russian revolution, GANDHI himself said that “nations have progressed both by evolution and revolution”, and that "history is more a record of wonderful revolution than of so-called ordered progress”.

Afraid of the Indian Freedom Movement learning from the Russian revolution, or other struggles, like the Irish Independence war, British Indian authorities, began spreading canards against Lenin. Writing in Kesari, TILAK DEFENDED LENIN. Tilak wrote that, "LENIN WAS IN FAVOUR OF PEACE...he only wants justice for oppressed...he is popular among the people and the army because he distributed land amongst the peasantry".

LENIN AND BHAGAT SINGH

In the 1920s, several Indian freedom fighters took the revolutionary path. Bengal revolutionaries of 'Yugantar' and 'Anushilan' quoted Lenin freely; in North India, the Hindustan Republican Army (HRA) emerged as a major force. Taken over by BHAGAT SINGH and CHANDRASHEKHAR AZAD after the 'Kakori episode' and the arrest of Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaque Ullah and Thakur Roshan Singh, HRA was changed to HSRA--with the 'S' standing for Socialist. Lenin, ESPECIALLY HIS OPEN SUPPORT TO INDIAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE, deeply influenced Bhagat Singh and Azad.

Under Gaya Prasad Katiyar, a HSRA team went to Russia for arms training. Bhagat Singh himself wanted to go to Russia. But developments in the wake of Lala Lajpat Rai's death, led Bhagat Singh to kill Saunders, a British officer. Later, Bhagat Singh was arrested in 1929 for throwing a non-lethal bomb in Delhi, inside the Parliament hall.

During his prison term/trial, Bhagat Singh read a lot of Marxist literature. Singh's jail manifesto spoke about HSRA's aim as being, THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A SOCIALIST SOCIETY.

On 21st January, 1930, Bhagat Singh and his comrades read out a telegram in the British Court  that they wanted to send to Russia. The telegram sent "REVOLUTIONARY GREETINGS TO THE GREAT LENIN". Earlier, in September, 1929, Jatindra Nath, another staunch, HSRA admirer of Lenin, died in Bhagat Singh's arms during the historic,  jail hunger strike. When, finally, Bhagat Singh was summoned to be hanged, he was reading Lenin.

In 1930, the Chittagong armoury raid shook the British authorities. Kalpana Datta, a member of the Indian Nationalist Army under Surya Sen, was an ardent admirer of Lenin. Datta later joined the Communist Party of India.

In the 1930s, Lenin inspired Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, Jai Prakash Narayan, and several other prominent freedom fighters, including Subhash Chandra Bose. From Allama Iqbal and Hasrat Mohani, to Subramaniam Bharati, Premchand and Nirala, almost all poets, men and women of literature, spoke in glowing terms about Lenin.

This is the reason why there is general condemnation of BJP's act in Tripura. Toppling of Lenin's statue has become a symbol of how RSS INTENDS TO TOPPLE THE DIVERSE AND PLURALISTIC LEGACY OF THE INDIAN FREEDOM MOVEMENT!

What happened at Tripura is being seen as an attack on Indian nationalism...thus, RSS and supporters of the attack, are being seen as anti-national forces...ROOTED IN INDIAN REALITY, PRO-LENIN SENTIMENTS ENJOY POPULAR SUPPORT IN THE COUNTRY...PUBLIC CONDEMNATION OF THE ACT HAS CAUGHT THE ENTIRE POLITICAL CLASS OFFGUARD...

It is truly, a turning point...in the coming political war against fascism, this act will play a major role...
[This write-up is an exclusive work of renowned historian, Amaresh Mishra. On this site my name appears due to a formatting characteristic of the academia.edu]

Este trabajo analiza el proceso de construcción del movimiento nacional indio y la subsiguiente creación en 1947 de un Estado independiente del Imperio británico. En particular, el análisis se centra en los procesos y actores principales, Jawaharlal Nehru y Mohandas Gandhi, que han
permitido a la India establecerse como una democracia estable e inclusiva a pesar de su alta heterogeneidad cultural, el trauma de la Partición con Pakistán y la continua inestabilidad regional. Utilizando la teoría contractualista
rousseauniana como marco teórico, el artículo utiliza los conceptos de legalidad y legitimidad como base para el análisis.

This article focuses on the campaign for AMU’s minority status (1965–1981), at the intersection of student politics and Muslim politics. What started in 1965 as an internal university dispute on student quotas soon transformed into a central Muslim issue. The campaign crystallized mounting resentment against the government and provided a common platform to heterogeneous forces–students, teachers, as well as Muslim organizations of different shades and hues–who all claimed to serve Muslim interests. This campaign thus played a key role in the reconfiguration of Muslim politics in the 1960s. It contributed to the re-emergence of the demand for Muslim minority rights, largely delegitimized after partition. It provided a platform for an increasingly assertive Muslim leadership which claimed to represent the Muslim community. Finally, it constituted a laboratory for issue-based coalitions, which, in the absence of a strong Muslim political party, became a dominant feature of Muslim politics, especially in North India. These changes must be read in the wider context of the post-Nehruvian period. The campaign participated in the emergence of counter-narratives, which questioned Congress’s “hegemonic” discourse on secular nationalism. Through student mobilization and issue-based coalitions, it also facilitated the emergence of contentious voices outside party structures. As such, the campaign participated in the larger pluralization of Indian politics, marked by the erosion of Congress’s dominance, much before the post-Emergency crisis.

आजादी के बाद के भारत को लेकर नेहरू और गांधी  मतभेद

नलिन चौहान

जवाहर लाल नेहरू से महात्मा गांधी के  मतभेद बहुत पहले से थे। नेहरू उन्हें नेता मानते थे, लेकिन साफ कहते थे कि आजादी के बाद गांधी की सनक के लिए कोई गुंजाइश नहीं होगी। गांधी की धार्मिकता, रहस्यवादिता, पश्चिम-विरोध और उनका देश-दुनिया का सपना नेहरू की राय में गलत था। नेहरू मानते थे कि जीत पश्चिम की होगी। गांधी के जाने के बाद उन्होंने पश्चिम को इस देश में जिताया। देश के सारे लोग जो पश्चिम से प्रभावित हैं, नेहरू की इस पापग्रन्थि से पीड़ित है।

“India” had been involved in the United Nations even in its wartime incarnation, inasmuch as the Crown Government of the colonized region brought the territory into the Second World War and, in turn, voted to support various institutions created to deal with the challenges wrought by the conflict.  Among the most prominent of these was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), the mission of which was to aid countries negatively impacted by the military campaigns.  The British Government of India strongly signaled its support even as the subcontinent weathered the effects of one the worst famines ever encountered in the region.
UNRRA was based in the United States and led by several men who considered themselves friends of India, most notably famed New Yorkers Herbert Lehman and Fiorello LaGuardia.  Over the next several years, UNRRA pushed to create an Indian office and to incorporate Indians into administration based in the US, in a good faith effort to circumvent charges of imperial complicity.  So the agency leadership was especially surprised when they ran into resistance from India’s anti-colonial icons.  UNRRA was too blind to the pernicious stranglehold of imperialism the Indians believed, and so had to be challenged, even as it was admired.  The encounter thus exemplifies colonial India’s efforts to challenge and undo Great Power/Global North/Western control of UN bureaucracies from the outset, and to reset both the tone and the substance of international relations by insisting on shared responsibilities and mutual respect.

Most of the policies being pursued by the pesent Government (2014) aim to undermine the Nehru's legacy of faith in composite culture, pluralism and scientific temper. Also many BJP ideologues are blaming him for partition tragedy amongst others. This is totally contrary to the history of Indian Nationalism.

This article introduces the concepts of untimely coincidences of modes of production and structural contingencies in global capitalism to the study of neoliberalism in India and beyond. I argue that these concepts are crucial to revive a historical anthropology, which shows that neoliberalism is one of several possible manifestations of capitalism, past and present. The analytical gain of such a revised view on neoliberalism is then exemplified by a historical–anthropological account of the development of India’s first special economic zone, the Kandla Foreign Trade Zone, from 1965 to the late 1980s. Based on these findings, I conclude my plea for conceptual changes in anthropology’s approach to periodising national and global histories of neoliberalism.

सरदार पटेल बनाम झूठों के संघी सरदार
हमारे देश के किसी भी प्रमुख राजनैतिक नेता दुवारा भारत के प्रथम ग्रहमंत्री, सरदार वल्लभ भाई झावर भाई पटेल जैसे क़द्दावर नेता के वारिस होने का सपना देखना एक स्वाभाविक बात है। मरते दम तक कांग्रेस से जुड़े रहने वाले सरदार की पूजनीय हैसियत रही है और देश के उप-प्रधान मंत्री के रूप में ही वे दुनिया से दिसम्बर 15, 1950  को विदा हुए। पिछले कुछ सालों में उनकी विरासत के दावेदारों में अचानक ज़बरदस्त वृद्धि होई है। सरदार की विरासत हतियाने के काम में आरएसएस/भाजपा के नेताओं दुवारा, विशेषकर, नरेंदर भाई मोदी के गुजरात के मुख्यमंत्री और बाद में देश के प्रधान मंत्री बनने के बाद काफ़ी तेज़ी आयी है। लाल कृष्ण अडवाणी, केशु भाई पटेल और प्रवीण तोगड़िया एक ही समय में खुद को 'छोटा सरदार' या 'लोह-परुष' कहलवाना  पसंद करते थे। मोदी तो सरदार की जगह खुद को विराजमान मानते हैं। सरदार की विरासत के बहुत सारे दावेदार हों इस में किया बुराई हो सकती है, लेकिन परेशानी यह है की बीसवीं शताब्दी के अंत में पैदा हुए यह वारिस, उनकी अपनी सार्वजानिक घोषणाओं के अनुसार, आरएसएस से जुड़े हैं।  और यह वही संगठान है जिसे देशद्रोही मानकर सरदार ने आज़ाद भारत के प्रथम ग्रह-मंत्री रहते हुए, नाथूराम गोडसे दुवारा (जनवरी 30, 1948) गाँधी जी की हत्या के बाद फ़रवरी 4, 1948 के दिन प्रतिबन्ध लगाया था। 
पूरा लेख पढ़ें जो समकालीन दस्तावेज़ों पर आधारित है।

PM MODI IN PARLIAMENT: POVERTY, FARMERS' SUICIDES, UNEMPLOYMENT, HINDUTVA TERRORISM, RAPES, VIOLENCE AGAINST WORKING CLASS NOT PROBLEMS BUT NEHRU IS!
PM Modi's speeches in both the Houses of Indian Parliament on February 7, 2017 while defending Motion of Thanks on President Ram Nath Kovind's address belied hope which some political analysts carried that Modi after becoming PM would mature and overcome Hindutva traits  of double-speak, rabble rousing and resort to lies which he learnt in the RSS shakhas. While replying he showed that he remains a Hindu nationalist which he claimed to be his identity while talking to Reuters in 2013 as CM of Gujarat. He resorted to lies, half-truths and demagogy as a seasoned Hindu nationalist.

Most historians have not paid that much attention to the Indian National Army (INA) and its leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, who has often merited little more than a few footnotes. This has been in line with Field Marshall Slim’s assessment of the INA as having failed to make any significant military contribution, and with the political consensus focused on the figures of Gandhi and Nehru.
However, three developments may begin to change that…

It is well known fact that moderniy has always been explained and understood by a set of objective conditions, institutional formations and their transformation. By slightly departing from what has already been told, this book entails the experimental realities of intellectual disposition as a normative intervention by drawing a biographical sketch of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. This book seeks to invite attention of a variety of dispositions embedded in him as nation-builder, architect of modern india and a post-colonial intellectual. Nehru visualised a series of public reasons to realise a society with spirit of democracy, secularism, and socialism. His engagement with modernity, as a national leader, had profound impact upon the way development and progress of the nation was conceived in the post-colonial India. The author critically evaluates how Nehru negotiated with the criteria of modernity. This book not only would open up debate on the questions of modernity among the social scientist but also evoke those who are engaged in the process of modernity.

Last few years there is a concerted attempt on the part of the ruling BJP to ignore and undermine the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minster of India, the architect of Modern India. In the international meets his name is deliberately ignored. He does not find a mention in the National archives Museum on 'Quit India' movement. In many school books chapters on him are being deleted. The Government spokespersons are trying to attribute all their failures of present government to Nehruvian policies. At social media level dirty propaganda about his being a man living in luxury, his ancestors are making rounds. The misinterpretation of events of history is being used to the hilt to blame him for partition and Kashmir issue. Mr. Modi went on to say that Nehru did not attend the funeral of Sardar Patel! Let's have a brief recap of the man immortalized in his work of laying the foundations of modern India in the fields of industries, technology, agriculture, education and science. He was exposed to the global issues and became a committed to anti imperialist struggles, stood against racism and believed in equality of all nations. Coming to India; he came under the magic spell of Gandhi and went headlong in to participate in freedom movement. The major highpoints of his contribution is to give the call of total independence as President of Congress. He adapted simple Khadi (handspun cloth) in his life style. As a participant of the freedom struggle he was jailed time and over again, the total period of his being in jail was 3259 days! He was a prolific reader and writer. His books 'Autobiography', 'Discovery of India' and 'Letters of a father…'have become a permanent part of Indian-world literature. The question of partition was a very intricate one with British determined to divide the country, this became easy for them due to the fall out of Savarkar's 'Two Nation theory' and Jinnah's adamant demand for 'separate Islamic country', Pakistan. It was Sardar Patel who first realized that partition is inevitable, while Nehru was to come to this realization months later. In matters of Kashmir, as Patel pointed out in his speech in Junagadh, he was willing to let Kashmir go if Hyderabad was merged in India. It was Sheikh Abdullah's insistence that Nehru came forward to have the 'treaty of accession' and sent the army to quell the aggression from Pakistan.

""As the British Empire receded, India and Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, preserved the ‘Westminster’ political system left by their colonial rulers. Both South Asian countries became independent in the late 1940s, though in widely differing styles: India fought a violent campaign of mass political activism and would become a republic, while Sri Lanka negotiated independence by a gentlemen’s agreement among the indigenous elite and remained a realm. Both nations adopted the ‘Westminster’ political system of their colonial master, producing results and reactions that would shape each country profoundly.
Harshan Kumarasingham analyses the crucial first decade of independence, assessing the events, decisions and political environment of these ‘Eastminsters’.The impact of cultural conditions on the constitutional and political exercise of executive power gives an invaluable insight into how the ambiguous and flexible tenets of the Westminster system were interpreted in a local context, where the Western-educated elites were often at variance with the masses.The principles of cabinet government are explored to examine how successfully the purported checks and balances of the Westminster model operated in this crucial nation-building era, along with the critical role of political figures like Prime Ministers Nehru and Bandaranaike.This period also witnessed the early challenges of forging a modern state with major ethnic, linguistic, religious, class-based and regional tensions, which both India and Sri Lanka still wrestle with.
The adaptable Westminster system was an essential element in the political development of these South Asian nations. Understanding the legacy and influence of the Westminster system allows the reader to fully understand the politics, institutions and society of today’s India and Sri Lanka."

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. Eastminster - The Westminster System in India and Sri Lanka

2. Mixed Messages? India's Responses to its British Legacy

3. The Indian Version of First Among Equals - The Battle for Executive
Ascendency

4. Indian Federalism - A Paramount Mechanism

5. 'Think of Ceylon as a little bit of England' - Sri Lanka and the British
Legacy

6. Unconventional Conventions - Power Partnerships in the Sri Lankan
Executive

7. Sri Lankan Communalism - A 'Canker' Ignored?

8. India and Sri Lanka's Eastminsters Compared

9. Conclusion

‘Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book presents an
interesting comparative discussion on how the Westminster system has worked
in India and Sri Lanka... Not much has been written so far on the political
history of these two nations in the early years of independence and this
book fills a major gap in the historical literature on decolonization in
South Asia.’
– PROFESSOR SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY, Victoria University of Wellington

‘This fine book deepens our understanding of what happens to the
Westminster model when it travels east... Harshan Kumarasingham has a gift
for making complex, exotic material intelligible and compelling to non-
specialists. I say this with conviction as a South Asia specialist, since
the story of ‘Eastminster’ in that region contains especially complex,
unfamiliar features which Kumarasingham understands and brilliantly
conveys. – PROFESSOR JAMES MANOR, University of London

‘An important and timely book...This book will be of enormous interest to
students and scholars with a comparative interest in decolonization,
democracy and the post-colonial state. It will also be of great value in
informing contemporary debates about how democracy in the Commonwealth can
best be nurtured and sustained.’
– PROFESSOR PHILIP MURPHY, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of
London

‘This is the first book to compare India’s and Sri Lanka’s experience of
the Westminster system, and how they reshaped their British parliamentary
legacy. Kumarasingham’s fascinating account will be of keen interest to
students of history, politics and constitutions.’
– PROFESSOR ROBERT HAZELL, CBE, University College London

India is considered the world's largest democracy. It has nearly 815 million eligible voters. Just a few years after its independence in 1947, the authors of the Indian constitution of 1950 took the extraordinarily bold step of establishing universal suffrage and all adult citizens of India received the right to vote. According to certain scholars, with this singular act, India became the world's first large democracy to adopt universal suffrage from its very inception as an independent country.

"""India and the Quest for One World is the gripping story of India's quest to create a common destiny for all people across the world based on the concept of 'human rights'. In the years leading up to its independence from Great Britain, and more than a decade after, in a world torn asunder by unchecked colonial expansions and two world wars, Jawaharlal Nehru had a radical vision: bridging the ideological differences of the East and West, healing the growing rift between capitalist and communist, and creating 'One World' that would be free of empire, exploitation and war.

Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru's sister, would lead the fight in and through the United Nations to turn all this into a reality. An electric orator and outstanding diplomat, she travelled across continents speaking in the voice of the oppressed and garnering support for her cause. The aim was to lay the foundation for global governance that would check uncontrolled state power, address the question of minorities and migrant peoples, and put an end to endemic poverty. Mahatma Gandhi's legacy would go global. All that stood between the Indians and success was their own fallibility, diplomatic intrigue, and the blinding haze of mistrust and overwhelming fear engendered by the Cold War.

As Manu Bhagavan recounts the story of this quest, iconic figures are seen through new eyes as they challenge all of us to imagine a better future. Based on seven years of research, across three continents, this is the first truly international history of newly independent India."""

From the Palgrave Macmillan Foreword by Akira Iriye and Rana Mitter: "This book takes one of the best-known concepts in contemporary international society, the idea of 'human rights', and completely changes our understanding of how it emerged in the post-war era....  One of the most fascinating aspects of [India and the Quest for One World] is the way that it addresses the transnational aims of the series by linking the domestic and the supranational.... The history of human rights will never be the same again."