Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Thursday said Nehruvian values of democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, socialist economics, and a non-aligned foreign policy are under attack and the party should fight for his vision of India.

Speaking at the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture delivered by historian Madhavan K Palat, she said the BJP disrespects and fears diversity, denying India’s “pluralism, our freedom of choice, which is integral to our fundamental rights”.

Arguing that it has become fashionable to decry Nehru’s contributions now, she said, “Today, when we take our democracy and pluralist social fabric for granted, it is easy to forget the magnitude of contributions made by titans such as Nehru and others of his time.”

Nehru, she said, had put his faith in a democratic system in a country that was ravaged by colonialism and Partition, and reduced by 1947 into one of the poorest and most exploited societies. “In doing so, he not only etched an eternal mark in the history of our nation but in his time went on to consolidate India’s democracy and entrench the foundational values of our polity, values to which we are still proud to lay claim.” These values, she said, can be summarised as the four pillars of Nehruvianism: democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, socialist economics, and a non-aligned foreign policy.

“These were integral to his vision of India. Today, this vision is fundamentally under attack, but it remains at the core of the true India that we must continue to fight for,” she said. Sonia said it is lamentable that those in power today are blind to this truth. “They lack the capacity, vision, and wisdom to uphold this legacy. The forces unleashed by our present rulers want to dictate to us what we can do, say or think. Their idea of unity is uniformity. They disrespect and fear diversity.”