Sonia Gandhi accused ideological groups of attempting to dismantle the foundations Nehru laid — from secularism and democracy to scientific progress — under the guise of selective historical critique.
BY PC Bureau
New Delhi, December 6, 2025 — Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi has accused the ruling establishment of orchestrating a deliberate and systematic campaign to vilify India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, with the ultimate aim of erasing his legacy and rewriting the country’s history to suit a narrow ideological agenda.
Speaking at the inauguration of the Nehru Centre India at Jawahar Bhawan in the capital on Friday, Gandhi described the ongoing criticism of Nehru as nothing less than a centrally driven political project.
“Let there be no mistake,” she said. “The sole and primary objective of the ruling establishment today is the vilification of Jawaharlal Nehru. It is not merely an attempt to diminish a towering historical figure; it is a crude, self-serving effort to demolish his multifaceted legacy and, in the process, dismantle the very social, political, and economic foundations on which modern India was built.”
She charged that the ideological forces behind this campaign are the same ones that remained aloof from the freedom struggle, played no constructive role in the framing of the Constitution, and, in her words, “created the poisonous atmosphere that led to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi” in 1948.
LIVE: Launch of The Nehru Centre India | New Delhi. https://t.co/oe3tDZS1SB
— Congress (@INCIndia) December 5, 2025
Gandhi acknowledged that Nehru, like any leader of his stature, remains open to scholarly analysis and legitimate criticism. “A figure of Nehru’s magnitude will always invite scrutiny of his decisions and policies — and that is perfectly healthy and necessary,” she said. However, she warned against the growing trend of judging him in isolation from the extraordinary challenges of his era: Partition, communal riots, integration of princely states, refugee rehabilitation, and the task of building a modern nation-state virtually from scratch.
“What we are witnessing today,” she continued, “is not honest critique but a deliberate distortion — a systematic attempt to denigrate, demean, defame, and ultimately erase Nehru’s universally recognised role in the independence movement and in laying the foundations of a secular, democratic, and scientifically tempered India.”
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Broader context of the Nehru debate
The latest round of sparring is only the most recent chapter in a decade-long ideological battle over historical narrative in India. Since 2014, several initiatives — including renaming of schemes and institutions earlier associated with the Nehru-Gandhi family, revised textbooks, and greater emphasis on figures previously given less prominence — have been interpreted by the Opposition as a concerted effort to diminish the Nehru-era legacy.
Topics that repeatedly surface in this debate include:
• Nehru’s China policy and the 1962 war
• The handling of Kashmir in the late 1940s and early 1950s
• Economic policies of the “licence-permit raj” and their long-term impact
• Secularism and the treatment of Hindu-majority sentiment in the early decades
The Congress and left-leaning historians counter that such selective focus ignores Nehru’s monumental achievements: establishment of premier scientific and educational institutions (IITs, IIMs, CSIR labs, atomic energy programme), land reforms, the non-aligned movement, and the creation of a secular democratic republic amid the trauma of Partition.
As India approaches the 75th year of Nehru’s death in 2024 (and now moves into the subsequent commemorative cycle), the battle over his legacy shows no signs of abating, with rival ideological camps using it to define competing visions of what India is — and what it should be.
