Nehru’s idea of a secular polity was commingled with the idea of minority rights. Despite his insistence on scientific rationality in thought and culture, Nehru weighed its limitations in his Nietzschean moments of doubt, and argued for the cultivation of humility and beauty to overcome modern vapidity and acquire the value of synthesis to sort out intellectual and cultural difference.

To be tilted towards a socialist economy of growth through politically democratic methods was Nehruvian. The Planning Commission was based on Nehru’s interest in the Soviet economic system, where Joseph Stalin introduced the idea of the State Planning Committee in 1928. The first five-year plans included setting up premier education institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology and the All India Institute Of Medical Sciences. It also recommended setting up an irrigation network to improve agricultural productivity to meet India’s food demand. Nehruvian economic planning sought to establish a welfare state, but Nehru was also a democrat, who did not use Stalinist methods to forcibly collectivise agriculture.

Even though India found an ally in the Soviet Union, Nehru had a historical sense of Asian pride that made him connect with other nations across the world (mostly postcolonial, but also Tito’s socialist Yugoslavia) to forge the principle and passive force of non-alignment. To create a passive political movement on the world stage had a Gandhian ring to it, a sort of non-cooperation towards bipolar conflicts. But it was Nehruvian in shape and character. It was also perfectly Nehruvian to make the unique gesture as head of state to informally write to the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1958 to allow Boris Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature after the Soviet government refused to do so. The very next year, in 1959, Nehru was instrumental in the release of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in India (after it was temporarily banned in France and England among other countries). The Nehruvian in these instances emerges as a man seriously committed to not just the idea of free expression, but also a fierce believer in the freedom of the literary avant-garde.

The Nehruvian is also associated with a paradoxical tendency of power: he has been criticised for being soft and indecisive about annexing the princely states (Kashmir, Hyderabad…), and losing the war with China in 1962. Nehru never suffered the fantasy of war the way Mao Zedong, Stalin and Adolf Hitler did. On the other hand, Nehru is blamed for the arbitrary use of power in the case of dismissing the communist government in Kerala in 1959. The act reflected his own critical assessment of himself as a “Caesar” in the essay he wrote in 1937 titled, “Rashtrapati” under the pseudonym, ‘Chanakya’.

The Nehruvian era engenders nostalgia, or scorn, but it remains larger than the phenomenon of Nehru. It reminds you of a laid-back country, slowly finding its feet after the chains of colonialism were removed, and still trying to balance its heart after the bloodbath of Partition. A memorable sentiment and criticism of social disparity and loot of property during Nehru’s reign was echoed in the popular song by Sahir Ludhianvi in Phir Subah Hogi (1958), 'Chin-o-Arab humara', an elegiac mockery of Mohammad Iqbal’s 1910 pean to the borderless nation for Muslims, ‘Tarana-e-milli’. Ludhianvi also echoed the sombre hope of the era in his song from the same film, 'Wo subah kabhi toh ayegi'. The Nehruvian era was marked by despair and hope in the social sphere.

In politics, Nehru strongly held on to a middle ground under the double provocation of the Hindu Right and the secular Left. The infamous First Amendment of 1951 which curtailed free speech, for which Nehru has been criticised by scholars belonging to the Left and the Right, has strangely not been read (as I did in my recent book on Nehru) as a desperate attempt to curb the right wing's anti-minority rhetoric and the left’s China-centric propaganda.

If Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975 announced the first political break from the democratic standards of Nehru’s rule, the November 1984 riots marked a damaging moral complicity in the instigation of communal violence, and the post-1991 developments of liberalisation of the economy under the Narasimha Rao government (both Congress governments) depleted the promise of the Nehruvian socialist legacy in the minds of people. When you scissor the thread of the kite, it disappears from the horizon.

In an ironic twist of fate, in recent times, the charms of Nehruvian legacy have been contested (and trolled) by those who question his democratic credentials. He has been lampooned for a lack of masculinity; his pictures smoking and sharing an endearing moment with women friends and members of the family have been circulated as westernised acts of promiscuity; and his anti-majoritarian secularism is seen as minority appeasement the same way as it was understood in 1951, during the Constituent Assembly Debates.

Suddenly, the kite is back on the horizon, flying high, despite the many knots in the thread.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India (Penguin, Viking, 2022) The views expressed are personal.