Sonia Gandhi speaking at a seminar "Renewing India's Commitment to Jawaharlal Nehru's Vision"

New Delhi: Congress President Sonia Gandhi said on Tuesday that any deviation from the Nehruvian vision would be disastrous for a country with such diversity and deprivation as India. She was speaking at a seminar on "Renewing India's Commitment to Jawaharlal Nehru's Vision", to mark the 50th death anniversary of the first Prime Minister. Sonia Gandhi argued that the policy of inclusive development, transparency and secularism that the UPA government had pursued in the past 10 years was only an updated version of Nehru's idea of India. "The four pillars of Nehruvianism: democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, socialist economics and a foreign policy of non-alignment — all of them were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally challenged by some in the prevailing political climate today, but which remain at the core of our party's beliefs," Sonia Gandhi told the seminar. Without taking any names, the Congress President said: "It is fashionable today to decry Nehruvian socialism as a corrupt and inefficient system that had condemned India to many years of modest growth levels."