India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, is moving to dismantle one of the last reminders of founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's admiration for the Soviet Union's despotic leader Josef Stalin. In 1950 Nehru set up India's Planning Commission, a copy of the Soviet Union's Gosplan and similarly responsible for planning economic development. Gosplan died in 1991 along with the Soviet Union, but India's version has survived. In his first speech marking India's Independence Day, Modi said the commission will be replaced by a United States-style council of economic advisers.
