Nehru legacy undermined daily by those who rule us today: Sonia

TIL Desk/National/New Delhi/ Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has alleged that the Nehruvian legacy was being “undermined” by those presently in power who have “contempt” for the country’s first prime minister for all that he did to build an India which they want to change for the “worse”.

Speaking at an event to relaunch Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s book ‘Nehru: The Invention of India’, the former Congress president said Jawaharlal Nehru, as India’s first prime minister, “consolidated democracy and entrenched the basic values of India’s polity — values to which we are still proud to lay claim.”

“What are these values. Shashi Tharoor summarises them as the core pillars of Nehruvianism — democratic institutional building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics and foreign policy of non-alignment. These values were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally being challenged today,” she said on the eve of Nehru’s birth anniversary. But, that vision remains at the core of “our time-tested beliefs”, Gandhi said.