Politics & Power Quote by Jawaharlal Nehru

Aggression rarely shows up wearing a villain’s cape; it shows up carrying a shield. Nehru’s line is a scalpel aimed at the oldest propaganda trick in statecraft: reframing an offensive move as reluctant self-protection. The power here is in the word "habit" - not "strategy" or "lie", but a patterned reflex. He’s arguing that the defensive pose isn’t an occasional cover story; it’s the default alibi of expansion.

The sentence also does something slyly democratic. By saying "every aggressor nation", Nehru refuses to make this a pathology of one culture or one era. He’s warning newly independent states - and the postwar world watching blocs harden - that moral clarity can’t depend on a flag’s color. Defense is the most emotionally purchaseable justification a government can offer its public: it converts fear into consent, and consent into legitimacy. Once the aggressor claims "we had no choice", the messy questions about motives, resources, borders, and prestige get recast as survival.

Context matters: Nehru governed India through decolonization’s hangover and the Cold War’s pressure campaign. Non-alignment wasn’t just idealism; it was a refusal to let superpowers sell their interventions as "security". The subtext is a demand for skepticism toward official narratives, especially when they arrive prepackaged in the language of threat. Nehru is, effectively, teaching citizens and smaller nations a diagnostic test: when a powerful state insists it is merely defending itself, start checking who is moving forward, and who is being moved.