It was Jawaharlal Nehru’s 137th birth anniversary on November 14, 2026, which is celebrated as Children’s Day in India. Children’s Day on November 14 was officially established and first celebrated as a national commemoration after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964 (with the Indian Parliament passing a resolution that year to mark his birthday), though informal birthday celebrations and rallies (such as the 1957 event at New Delhi’s National Stadium) took place during his lifetime. Before 1964, India celebrated Children’s Day on November 20, aligning with the date designated by the United Nations for World Children’s Day.
The connection between Nehru’s birthday and Children’s Day is said to be based on several key factors:
Affection for Children (“Chacha Nehru”): Nehru was deeply fond of children and enjoyed spending time with them. Youngsters affectionately called him “Chacha Nehru” (Uncle Nehru).
Vision for Education and the Future: Nehru strongly believed that children are the foundation and real strength of a nation. He famously emphasised that the way children are nurtured and educated determines the future of the country.
Post-Independence Legacy: As India’s first Prime Minister, he laid the groundwork for prominent educational, scientific and institutional frameworks aimed at youth development.
Shift in Date After 1964: Before 1964, India observed Children’s Day on November 20 (aligned with the UN’s Universal Children’s Day). However, following Nehru’s death in May 1964, the Indian Parliament passed a resolution to officially shift Children’s Day to November 14 to honour his legacy and lifelong dedication to children’s welfare.
Though this day is celebrated across schools in the country as Children’s Day, with political changes since 2014, our first Prime Minister has been increasingly castigated, demeaned, demonised and relegated to the background, with all the blame for the country’s woes being laid at his feet. In fact, India’s political, economic, social and cultural histories are being rewritten. So, one doesn’t know exactly what our children are being told on Children’s Day, but it is likely that there are more songs and dances and the like, which are normally passed off as culture, than celebrations of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who led post-Independence India and, for almost two decades, lifted it out of the ravages wrought by colonialism.
For sure, besides Nehru, there were other giants, such as Vallabhbhai Patel, who built modern India from the ground up, side by side with Nehru, and all of them had clarity of vision for this country. That some things went awry a couple of decades after Independence is not the fault of our first leaders, because the individual or even collective choices and decisions of later leaders are their own. In fact, the choices and decisions of our present-day leaders are theirs to own. Dead or alive, the day of reckoning arrives the minute posterity decides to open the debit and credit ledger. As a corollary, there is no last word in history because newer aspects of the past emerge every so often in numerous ways. History is vibrant and visible in every aspect of human lives and interactions — but we don’t know it or disregard it — because every generation believes that its present encompasses the totality of time. And therein lies the trap in which we get ensnared over and over again.
To quote Ramachandra Guha (Crocker’s Nehru, The Telegraph, November 14, 2026), the book Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate, by Walter Crocker, who served two separate spells of roughly three years apiece as Australia’s High Commissioner in New Delhi in the 1950s, “is the product of years of his close observation of Nehru — the man and the politician, which begins with details of Nehru’s family, his education, and his intellectual influences. Crocker was, like many others before and since, deeply impressed by Nehru’s qualities as a writer. He provides summaries of Nehru’s three major books, writing of his Autobiography that ‘it paints a portrait, warts and all, of an unusual man and, in the main, often an unusually attractive man.’”
“The central chapter of Crocker’s book naturally deals with Jawaharlal Nehru’s years in office. He judges Nehru’s most significant achievement as Prime Minister to have been that he held the country together against all the odds stacked against it — namely, religious rivalries, poverty and illiteracy, pervasive inequalities, and difficult neighbours. A second achievement was his encouragement of the growth of parliamentary democracy and of independent institutions. A third achievement was forging a secular State open to people of all faiths, while piloting a series of social reforms, particularly on behalf of women’s rights.”
“On Nehru’s economic policy, Crocker’s verdict is mixed. He praises the five-year plans for building the necessary technical and industrial infrastructure of a modern economy, yet (justly) criticises them for the proliferation of licences and controls and the lack of attention to agriculture. Crocker observes that in the Prime Minister’s mind, ‘the Marxist and the liberal strains remained muddled and were not worked out into a functioning synthesis.’ This was particularly true, perhaps, of Nehru’s economic thought.”
The point is that Crocker’s book is an objective appraisal of Nehru, which is what our children must be made aware of so that, when they grow up, they can independently decide Nehru’s place in the history of independent India. Are our children today being provided with the opportunity to think for themselves and develop critical thinking skills? Children’s Day must transcend songs, dances and sweets to include learning why they celebrate this day and the man whose birthday they are commemorating. The same goes for every person who is commemorated on their birthday or remembered on the day of their demise. This also means that it is quite futile to belittle a person who is commemorated because, sooner or later, children will question why they are celebrating this or that day.
The other aspect that needs focus is that, while India commemorates the birthday of our first Prime Minister every November as Children’s Day because of his deep affection for children, this is a day that not every child gets to celebrate. Poverty makes education inaccessible to many, forcing them into labour, very often bonded labour, or leaving them vulnerable to trafficking. Then there are children who are enrolled in schools only on paper because there is no school building or road to reach their schools, no water supply or other essential school infrastructure, and no teachers or books. One can only imagine Nehru’s pain in the place he is in now because he did not discriminate in his fondness for children. And what about the children outside the privileged circle? Will they ever celebrate Children’s Day? Will they ever get to sing songs, dance and savour sweets? Will they ever get to determine the future of the country?
Monalisa Changkija is a Dimapur-based veteran journalist, poet, and former Proprietor, Publisher and Editor of Nagaland Page.