- Lived:
- 14 November 1889, Allahabad (Prayagraj) – 27 May 1964, New Delhi; the life ran through Harrow and Cambridge, nine spells in colonial prisons, and seventeen years in the Prime Minister's office
- Field:
- statesman — first Prime Minister of India (1947–64); historian by jail-cell vocation
- The Big Idea:
- That a poor, illiterate, freshly partitioned country could govern itself as a full democracy from the first day — every adult voting, the press free, the army in its barracks — and that the same state could build the dams, steel plants and laboratories a modern nation runs on.
- In their words:
- "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." (14–15 August 1947)
- If you remember one thing:
- Nearly every country decolonized between 1947 and 1964 fell within a generation to a coup, a strongman or a one-party state. India — the poorest, biggest, most improbable of them all — kept voting. That is the top line of Nehru's ledger; 1962, Kashmir and slow growth are entries in the same honest book.