Nehru spent over nine years in British jails before leading India
Between 1921 and 1945 Jawaharlal Nehru was locked up eight separate times, adding up to more than nine years behind bars. The man who emerged became India's first prime minister and held the job for over sixteen years. He began life very differently, as a pampered heir educated at Harrow, where classmates called him Joe.
Nehru was born in Allahabad on 14 November 1889, the first child of Motilal Nehru, one of the richest barristers in British India and twice president of the Indian National Congress. He called his childhood sheltered and uneventful: home tutors, a mansion named Anand Bhavan, and a brief teenage flirtation with theosophy after Annie Besant initiated him at thirteen. One of his sisters, Vijaya Lakshmi, later became the first woman to preside over the United Nations General Assembly.
At Harrow a school prize of books about Garibaldi fired his imagination, and in his daydreams India and Italy blurred together. He took a natural science degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1910, absorbing Shaw, Wells, Keynes and Russell, then qualified as a barrister in London in 1912. Back home he disliked both the law and lawyers. Politics steadily took over, and after meeting Mahatma Gandhi in 1916 and seeing the repression of 1919, both he and his father embraced Gandhi's methods.
By 1923 he was simultaneously general secretary of Congress, head of its provincial branch and mayor of Allahabad. As Congress president in 1929 he demanded complete independence. When Congress launched the Quit India campaign in 1942, he went along reluctantly, having preferred to back the Allied war effort, and spent a long spell in prison. His wife Kamala bore a daughter, Indira, in 1917, who would later become India's first woman prime minister.
On 15 August 1947 he delivered his celebrated Tryst with Destiny speech and raised the national flag at Delhi's Red Fort. As prime minister he championed parliamentary democracy, secularism and science, won elections in 1951, 1957 and 1962 and helped found the Non-Aligned Movement to keep newly independent nations out of the Cold War blocs. He also wrote widely read books, including The Discovery of India. He died in office on 27 May 1964, and his birthday is celebrated as Children's Day.
Source: Jawaharlal Nehru
