Nehru was a great man and his leadership was the key to the stability that India achieved. The republic could have very easily fragmented in those early years. India's minorities, if you can call 200 freaking million people as minorities, protect us against the worst excesses of majoritarianism. India would probably become some theocracy without them.
i agree with the highlighted part, nehru was the stabilizing factor in his own way and he was among the few real internationalists in the congress and should not be forgotten for co-founding the "non-aligned movement".
for the rest of your post and for the economic/social problems india today faces now, my previous post describes the complications there-in and the op describes it even better.
i also agree with you in the fact that it has been a singular failure among the non-socialist ordinary muslim masses that they did not reject the confining official tag of "minority" and i will extend this to the other minorities too.
while nehru is respectable to a big extent, he failed his own desire to make the average indian a person of scientific temper and that is purely because he failed to evolve a progressive political system that while internationalist in nature would also look at the indian social situation in 1947 and arrange a way to make them progressive humans rather than indians confined to a particular community and reluctantly engaging with other self-absorbed communities.
d. as for choosing Socialism instead of Capitalism, is self-evident of the greatness of Mr. Nehru.
there is no alternative to socialism.
how can any sane person reject a idea that all humans are equal and each has a right to justice and a good life??
one instance, if socialists in india had not existed, there would not have been employee unions... the indian software/services industry is a highly capitalist coolie system that is largely bereft of humane ideas and does not have a employee union... do you know what happened to workers of ibm-india and tcs last year??
extend this to other social/economic problems that india has had for a long long time.. it is socialist/progressive that brings such problems to light and agitates to remove them.
you must be of younger age... you should ask a former maoist why college students from andhra were joining naxalism in the early 90's.
but speaking of nehru, he was not socialist enough... i say this as a socialist myself.
You forgot to mention his greatest achievement that is, letting the country partitioned just to be the PM.
i agree with you in this.