Imagining Nations, Creating States: Nehru, Ben-Gurion and an Analogical Study of India and Israel in Post-colonial Asia

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister (1947–64), and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister (1948–54; 1955–63), played substantial roles in shaping two modern nation-states in post-Colonial Asia. The article is anchored by a comparative study of the two leaders who influenced nation-building through their individual political values and ideological convictions. The key question posed here is what similarities existed in the nation-building roles these figures played and how they may have contributed to the trajectories followed by their respective nations. Nehru and Ben-Gurion were both modernists in terms of their political visions of a secular, socialist-democratic and egalitarian state. Although the two men never met and remained on non-speaking terms because India had reservations about forging ties with Israel, they both represented qualities of leadership in Asia.