Man or woman, ruler or peasant, no one remains relevant in totality some five decades later. But such is the bruising attack on Jawaharlal Nehru, his ideals and his economics, that anyone scanning the public debates of the day would happily conclude that one man alone is to blame for all our current ‘mess’. This ‘economic debacle’ is at the heart of a right-of-centre attack on the Nehruvian way—shorthand for the socialist economics that defined India till the mid-1980s. It is not only right-wing inter­net warriors (usually based in the US) who use the term ‘Hindu rate of growth’ to lead the charge against Nehru. As top Nehru scholar Pulapare Balakrishnan of the Centre for Dev­el­opment Studies points out, much of the criticism of the man comes from sections of India who have really benefited the most from policies of those times.

Actually, and ironically, there is much in Modi’s apparently novel blueprint that reminds us about the much harder challenges and choices faced and made by Nehru and his team for a newly independent India, a country taking fundamental steps in building a modern economy. Consider Modi’s vision: a push for manufacturing through a make-in-India programme; plans for more IITs, IIMs and AIIMSs; lowering the fiscal deficit; executing infrastructure projects. As Modi is discovering, the res­earch bodies set up by Nehru remain relevant today, with the private sector chary of investment in R&D.

Three areas where most experts feel Nehru fell far short of expectations is in tackling poverty, primary and secondary education and healthcare. Poverty remains a challenge which no government since then has been able to meet while relying only on welfare programmes like PDS. The state of school education and healthcare seem to be further slipping into an abysmal state, with governments looking to the private sector to fill the gap. The contradictions within the BJP’s education policy—roping in the RSS to formulate modules on the one hand, with an avowed intention to prepare the youth for job market challenges on the other, has alarmed many experts. They wonder which is worse—neglect of primary and secondary education during and since the Nehru era or the current saffron hues in education?