Arun Bhatnagar, a former member of the IAS, attended St. Stephen’s College, Delhi in the early sixties. After retiring as Secretary (Personnel & Training) in the Union Government in 2004, he worked with the National Advisory Council (NAC) and, later, as Chairman, Prasar Bharati, New Delhi. He has had postings in the President of India’s Secretariat and in the Indian High Commission, London. Bhatnagar’s earlier Book, ‘India: Shedding the Past, Embracing the Future, 1906-2017’, was well-received as a historical narrative based on objective analysis of events and personalities. It depicted the early years of the twentieth century as a watershed and a turning point, with the All India Muslim League being founded in Dacca (Dhaka) in December 1906. He has contributed to English dailies and magazines from time to time and lives with his family in New Delhi.
Arun Bhatnagar’s second Book – Nehru Saga – derives its name and relevance from a letter of May 1972 of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to K. Natwar Singh, the then Indian Ambassador to Poland. A striking feature is an analysis of the political situation and the prospects for the approaching Lok Sabha Elections. The book is dedicated to Pandit Motilal Nehru (1861 – 1931) with whom the political journey of the Nehru Family really begins. When Indira was born to Jawaharlal and Kamala on November 1917, in Allahabad, Motilal, the fond grandfather, prophesied, ‘This girl is going to be worth more than a thousand grandsons.’ Decades later, the grand-daughter (now Prime Minister Indira Gandhi) said in an interview aired on French TV that it was not only her father who had influenced her in nationalist politics and that the entire family – her paternal grandfather, grandmothers, her mother as also uncles, aunts and cousins – had been involved in the Freedom Struggle. The narrative encompasses the decades between Motilal Nehru and Rahul Gandhi; these two (and the others, Jawaharlal, Indira, Rajiv, and Sonia) were Presidents of the Congress but not all have been Prime Ministers. As such, the political thread runs also through the Congress Presidency. Priyanka Gandhi’s entry into active politics has commenced in a year that marks the Centenary of her great-great-grandfather taking over as the Congress President at Amritsar in 1919. The issues raised in Bhatnagar’s book are of contemporary interest and should generate a debate on the role of the Nehrus, before and after Independence. About Jawaharlal Nehru, he says that no man was more adored in his lifetime than Jawaharlal and few have been more vilified after death. He demolishes the view that Nehru imposed a centralized model of economic growth on the country that had, on the contrary, emerged from a broad consensus among politicians, industrialists, scientists and economists on an import-substituting model of development. ‘Nehru Saga’ also carries a chapter on the Kashmiri Pandit community that has produced luminaries of the stature of Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and many others.
