The Rise and the Fall of the Nehru-Gandhis, The Telegraph

In 1906, an Allahabad lawyer named Motilal Nehru wrote to his son Jawaharlal, then a student at Harrow: ‘I think I can without vanity say that I am the founder of the Nehru family. I look upon you, my dear son, as the man who will build upon the foundations I have laid and have the satisfaction of seeing a noble structure of renown rearing up its head to the skies.’

The words were prophetic. For close to a century, Motilal’s descendants exercised a powerful and often dominant influence on Indi...