I'm fine with him choosing neutrality if he was not blinded by ultra-pacifist thinking. Promoting and maintaining peaceful relations with all the big powers and neighbours does not mean you have to strip down India defence capability and then expect it to perform out of the blue against another large power that spent a decade in active conflict and plenty of funding in comparison. What happened to the pacifist thought? Its same reason he left kashmir situation partially completed instead of letting IA (which had not got underfunded yet at that point) finish the job and then go to the UN after (and not before that).
Like I said hope for the best, prepare for the worst. You should never prepare for the best based on idealism. It will never work out as long as the majority of the world (Even in your own country) do not think that way.
I have talked with people like
@Joe Shearer and others about this before. Hindsight is 20/20 but we must learn from history. No I do not blame him as a person for every single decision he took....be it centralised statist philosophy, socialist affinity, secularist principles and many other things. Yes he had little way to know for sure how it would manifest in India (especially seeing the USSR growth story). What I do blame him for is his stubborn idealism (often ignoring what better men than he is in particular areas advised on many matters) and complete lack of focus on scaling up basic education for the country in those crucial formative years (for some reason he felt people will educate themselves magically to run the new temples of India).
He did not take seriously what socialism called for, first and foremost....for the workers to unite through education and awareness. That is what a country like the USSR did. It was given same importance or even more importance than promotion of heavy industry at the beginning (mass literacy campaigns). So why ignore the base pragmatic requirement (education and literacy) for chasing the fancy notions that come later (industrialisation) of the very doctrine he espoused? Answer: idealism and incompetence to study the pragmatic fundamental underlying details of the development models of even the socialist societies he admired.
Even with all the stuff that did not turn out well after hindsight (Hindu rate of growth etc etc because of massive debt ridden inefficient govt enterprise and stifling bureaucracy that choked the common man)...we would have at least inherited a much better educated population at whenever the camel's back broke (it would have been earlier than 1991 I feel because more educated masses creates more demand for modern goods and ability to do enterprise which creates a huge pressure on a rigid socialist govt).
Those are thus the two things I definitely blame him for: foreign policy/security idealism (you can be non-aligned but prepare and maintain a reasonable stick...they are not mutually exclusive)....and lack of focus on education.
It (education) is a huge requirement no matter what economic and political model you choose for a country and its even more important for a democracy where you put much responsibility and faith into the masses of people to choose who governs them....and this was known by the fundamental economic thinkers of the time and before.....but it was deliberately ignored by Nehru because he was again living in a world of idealism where workers would educate magically when you create the factories for them with the initial resources available to a grossly underdeveloped but massive country).
I am taking this line of reasoning since I feel this particular thread calls for it. Now in a completely different context of thread, I would argue for many of Nehru's merits and good decisions (they of course are there, no one is 100% good or bad). But on the sum total I would say he did more harm than good....but yes a lot can be attributed to hindsight we have today....except the two fundamental glaring errors I pointed out that he grounded in his idealism. Pragmatism always trumps idealism when it comes to a good leader....because with pragmatism you dont have to get lucky with things so important as national security and human capital development.....which are a million times more important than economic doctrine which was indeed a bit of a coin flip at that time given what the world had experienced for the last 100 years or so.
I judge only what can be judged by evidence. Other stuff I give the person benefit of the doubt (i.e when he/she had next to no way of knowing how something would turn out). If someone is naturally idealistic instead of pragmatic, I will judge them when they apply this philosophy stubbornly (against others advice) to areas that are so important to the long term well being of a country....with the evidence available of what they had read, studied and got influenced by....and still decided to blindly and deliberately gamble on some new thing that never had been done before (industrialisation + universal suffrage/democracy before mass education).
He played his part (esp in context of changing the leadership from foreign to domestic....what we call independence). But he is not the one that bears the most credit for it (unity)....definitely in comparison to the British who did the legwork like the former empires before them (foreign and domestic) that through hook or crook created a large political entity and the administration and bureaucracy to run it....and ranks below Nehru (who @dadeechi explains well in his post)...who in turn ranks below netaji (who was ready to put actions to words and would not have done something as foolhardy as Nehru did w.r.t Kashmir and Aksai Chin) and above all Patel (Bismarck of India).
Other leaders fit in this ranking in different areas and the common folk of India somewhere on average between Nehru and Netaji...and about par with the British in the larger context....but Gandhi I don't put anywhere near the top (w.r.t unity....his role was more geared to independence). Gandhi acquiesced to partition so quickly....it just needed some bloodletting and threats for him to abandon all those Muslim leaders who wanted to stay united with India....because of this ultra-pacifist doctrine. That same doctrine where he said the jews better let Hitler kill all of them without resisting because its morally defensible (after claiming to be a student of the Gita). Yeah....no.
