Editorial Note, Mar-Apr, 2015

The year 2014 marked the 125 th birth anniversary and 50 death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. During that year the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust had organised a series of lectures assessing Nehru’s role in building independent India. Two of those lectures are published in this issue of Social Scientist. We plan to publish more lectures in forthcoming issues, because we feel that a proper assessment of Nehru is essential in the present juncture, when his role, and indeed the entire significance of the anti-colonial struggle, is being questioned. The attack is not just from the Hindutva forces, which though politically ascendant at present constitute a minor force intellectually, but also from neo-liberals making common cause with imperialist historiography, and even from extreme Left and ‘independent’ Left writers who implicitly downplay the centrality of imperialism.