Wealth & Money Quote by Jawaharlal Nehru

Spoken with the calm gravity of someone who had to turn slogans into institutions, Nehru’s line is less a moral complaint than a warning about political physics. “Forces” does a lot of work: capitalism isn’t framed as a cabal of villains but as a system with built-in momentum. If you don’t counter-steer, it drifts toward concentration. The phrase “if left unchecked” is the hinge, smuggling in Nehru’s core argument for a postcolonial state that intervenes not out of ideological vanity, but out of necessity.

The subtext is India’s predicament at independence: a society emerging from extraction and famine, with vast inequality and thin administrative capacity. Nehru is signaling that freedom from empire won’t automatically produce economic freedom at home; without guardrails, the new nation could reproduce old hierarchies under a new flag. His choice of “tend to” is rhetorically savvy. It avoids absolutism and leaves room for markets, while still insisting that outcomes aren’t neutral. That moderation helped Nehru sell a mixed economy to a democratic electorate and to elites nervous about outright socialism.

The intent is also international. In the mid-20th century, newly independent countries were being courted by capitalist and communist blocs. Nehru’s critique positions India’s nonalignment as principled, not evasive: skeptical of laissez-faire inequality, wary of totalizing state control. It’s a line designed to justify planning, regulation, and redistribution as democratic self-defense, not revolutionary fervor.