Because he, like MANY “third-world” leaders of the time, were educated in western UNIVERSITIES where leftist/socialist ideas were all the rage among academics of that generation. That is still the case, but he and his contemporaries didn’t have the benefit of what today’s “third world” leaders have : the ability to see how socialism has worked (or rather, hasn’t worked) in practice. India and even more so Africa were blighted for a generation by socialist policies that were indoctrinated into their leaders by professors at the western universities where they studied. One could almost say that these western academics used Africa and Asia as their guinea pigs in a grand EXPERIMENT, which wasn’t successful — to put it mildly.

Also, Nehru had misplaced bitterness towards the capitalist system. I say misplaced, because what the British practiced in India was not true capitalism. In a true market economy, the government does not manipulate production, create monopolies, etc. The British did all that and *wrongly* called it “capitalism”, which Nehru then blamed for India’s woes and *wrongly* came to see socialism as the panacea that would bring healing.

I’m not joking : India would have been a first world country by the mid-1980s had it adopted capitalism rather than socialism when it became INDEPENDENT in 1947. Its economy only really began to take off in the 1990s when Manmohan Singh started MOVING it, slowly, in a less socialistic and more capitalistic direction.