Lesson-7

Rise and Fall of Nehruvian Socialism

Topics covered: Introduction, Nehruvianism, Base of Nehruvian Socialism, Rise and

Fall of Nehruvianism, The Last of the Nehruvianism, Critical Views of Indian Historians
on Nehruvianism,

Objective

To analyse on what Nehruvian Socialism is all about.

To understand how far Nehruvian Socialism was successful and its far reaching
consequences.

Introduction
Bharat Ratna Jawaharlal Nehru (November 14, 1889 - May 27, 1964) was a leader of
the (moderately) socialist wing of the Indian National Congress during and after India's
struggle for independence from the British Empire. He became the first Prime Minister of
India at independence on August 15, 1947, holding the office until his death.

Nehruvianism
Nehru was fascinated by Soviet Union's Piatiletka or 5-year plan and tried implementing
the same for Indian Economy. He wanted India to have best of both Socialism and
Capitalism and hence went on to create Democratic Socialism of India. He wanted the
state to be the enterprenuer and all its citizens to be equal share holders. He strengthened
the democratic pillars of nation immensely by creating proper wealth distribution systems
at all levels. But this kind of system, where in the state is the enterprenuer, failed to
generate wealth for the giant nation. It resulted in corruption and stagnation. Gurucharan
Das in his book India Unbound captures the essence of Nehruvian Era by the sentence --
The cake is distributed even before it was baked.

The foundation of Nehru's social philosophy was the evolution of a secular socialist
democracy that was the antithesis of a totally privatised market-grab economy. He was
averse to the consumerist craze of the middle class, which has led to the bankruptcy of
capitalist mores. He said:

``On the one side there is this great and overpowering progress in
science and technology and their manifold consequences; on the
other, a certain mental exhaustion of civilisation itself."

Nehru's socialism was humanism-in-action for all people, high and low, party or no party.
In the Constituent Assembly, moving the Objectives Resolution, he made an eloquent
appeal to think of India as a whole and in a planet-wide perspective:

``A time comes when we have to rise above party and think of the
nation, think sometimes of even the world at large of which our
nation is a great part.''

Base of Nehruvian Socialism: The Soviet Economy

The economy of the Soviet Union was based on a system of state ownership and
administrative planning. Like other Communist states in the former Warsaw Pact, the
Soviet Union forged a centrally planned economy. Since the dissolution of the Soviet
Union (1991), all but a handful of the 15 former Soviet republics have dismantled their
Soviet-style economies.

Planning
Based on a system of state ownership, the Soviet economy was controlled through the
State Planning Commission and the State Bank. The economy was directed by a series of
five-year plans. For every enterprise planning ministries (also known as the "fund
holders" or fondoderzhateli) defined the mix of economic inputs (e.g., labor and raw
materials), a schedule for completion, and wholesale and almost all retail prices.
Drafting the five-year plans

Soviet planners under the ægis of Joseph Stalin set up the series of Five-Year Plans or
Piatiletkas (пятилетка) as nation-wide centralized exercises in rapid economic
development. Fulfilling the plan became the watchword of Soviet bureaucracy.

Putative five-year cycles became foreshortened with successes or abandoned in crisis.

However, many achievements of rapid development, particularly in heavy industry,
persisted despite economic upheaval. Altogether, there were 13 five-year plans. The first
one was accepted in 1928, for the five year period from 1929 to 1933 and completed one
year early. The last, thirteenth Five-Year Plan was for the period from 1991 to 1995 and
was not completed, as the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991.
Other developing countries have emulated the concept of central planning setting
integrated goals for a finite period of time: thus we may find "Seven-year Plans" and
"Twelve-Year Plans".

The People's Republic of China has also used Five-Year Plans, and still nominally does
so, though their relevance to the rapidly-developing parts of China where "socialism with
Chinese characteristics" (to all intents and purposes, market capitalism) has taken off are
doubtful.

Jawaharlal Nehru, impressed with Soviet Union's Industrial progress, implemented the
same for Republic of India. India has an extensive network setup to formulate 5-year
plans under the supervision of the Planning Commission. India is currently in its 12th 5-
year plan or Panch-Varsh Pranalika.

Nehruvian Socialism: Rise And Fall

In 1997, when India celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence, the world paid
homage to its most populous democracy. Other countries had grown richer in those
postcolonial years. Many had escaped the political and religious convulsions that had so
often shaken the region. But almost alone in the non-Western world -- barring a short
interruption in 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency -- India had
clung doggedly to its democratic convictions. A slew of books commemorated the
achievement. One of the finest, Sunil Khilnani's ''Idea of India,'' described India's polity
as ''the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched by the American and
French Revolutions.''

Cherishing the revolution that began with independence in 1947, one does not find full
cause for jubilation until 1991, when India unleashed a series of economic reforms, the
start of an ''economic revolution'' that he believes ''may well be more important than the
political revolution.''

A newly installed government surprised everyone by easing foreign exchange

restrictions, devaluing the rupee, lowering import tariffs and undoing the Byzantine
controls that had stifled Indian industry. Many feel the reforms should have gone further,
but the results nonetheless have been dramatic: after decades of chugging along at the so-
called Hindu rate of growth (a dismal 3.5 percent per year), the economy grew by an
average of 7.5 percent in the mid-1990's. The growth in disposable incomes, and the
opening up of the country to world markets, has altered the face of Indian society,
creating a new consumer middle class.

Those reforms were forced upon India, adopted less than enthusiastically when the nation
found itself with foreign exchange reserves worth only two weeks of imports.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of Indian independence, a young man for the handsome
leader whose lofty ideals inspired a nation. But, echoing an increasingly common attitude
in modern India, Nehru's faith in Soviet-style central planning cheated the nation of the
prosperity enjoyed by some of its Southeast Asian neighbors. Nehru's revolution was
incomplete, delivering political liberty but failing to unshackle the nation economically.

By way of background, for 44 years India pursued an economic strategy from which it is
now seeking to extricate itself. The goals of this plan were primarily social: to provide all
citizens with basic human necessities, to ensure that India remained economically as well
as politically independent of foreign control, to narrow the gap between rich and poor,
and to solidify the foundations of democracy in the sprawling, newborn state. These goals
were remarkably ambitious, and (even more remarkably) they were essentially met.
Critics of Nehruvian socialism point to the lack of rapid economic growth during the
years when other Asian states were chalking up impressive trade figures. But this was
never part of the plan. Das (together with many economists) argues that it should have
been. Maybe so. Such arguments are easiest to make with 20-20 hindsight, and at the
time Nehru was instituting his program the consensus among Western economists
advising developing nations favored state-sponsored central planning rather than a free-
market approach.

He remained a starry-eyed admirer of Soviet brand of centralised Planning which he

introduced in India soon after the death of Patel to concentrate all economic strings in his
hand to control the polity. While the First Plan was on right course formulated on Patel's
lines by its emphasis on agriculture, the second one put India's economic train on the
wrong track of State Capitalism and priority for Heavy Industries, leaving the tertiary and
consumer sector to monopoly capital: Introduction of Quota-Licence-Raj led to large
scale generation of black money and corruption, aggravation of poverty so that by
continuing his policies further under leftist tutelage, the country was brought to the brink
of bankruptcy by 1991 by his dynastic successors as the original tilt was never corrected,
leading to perforce toeing of the IMF/WB line, aggravated by the West-oriented
globalisation. The story of this horrific downhill course in almost every economic sector
has been brought out in a highly interesting and enlightening account with full facts and
figures in this book Golden Age to Globalisation.

Gandhi even admitted in a speech at Rajkot in May 1939 that "Jawahar is quite convinced
that I have put the clock of progress back by a century" for his emphasis on rural
development first. But still Gandhi continued to back Nehru for prime leadership because
Nehru was "wise and ambitious enough to realise that without Bapu's support he could
never win supreme power". So unlike rebel Subhas who never professed fake loyalty to
Gandhi's ideals and was hounded out of the Congress and forced to leave the country,
fake socialist Nehru continued to be the spoilt heir as he was built up as darling of the
youth to counter Subhas's superior charisma, superseding even Gandhi in mass mind. The
tragic results of Nehru's Marxist obsession on top of Islamic and British ravages are
tellingly brought out by our friend Shri Daya Krishna, formerly of the Indian Economic
Service and a regular contributor to Organiser. The book is a compulsive reading for
those who want to understand the roots of the present economic crisis and its horrendous
consequences. Besides a review of 50 years of Planning, it meticulously examines every
aspect of the 9th plan to give a graphic picture of the alarming situation turning the
growth process into that of sheer battle for survival. The Rs. 1700 crore sterling balance
assets of 1947 have been turned into a per capita debt of Rs. 11820 by 2000-2001.

The last of the Nehruvians

PARAMESHWAR NARAIN HAKSAR, who died at age 85 on November 27, was
perhaps the last survivor of the cadre of policy-planners, diplomatic strate- gists and
administrators ass-ociated with Jawaharlal Nehru's early nation-building project. He died
a disillusioned man, pained at the questioning of the main premises - democracy,
secularism, socialism and non-alignment - of that project. Haksar was not just an
individual, nor a powerful ex-bureaucrat. He was an institution. His life and career hold
many lessons about India and the world, and about the strengths and weaknesses of the
Nehruvian legacy.

Haksar was among an elite crop of well-educated youth who were personally inspired
and influenced by Nehru. He switched from a promising career as a barrister at the
Allahabad High Court to the foreign service, at Nehru's instance. Those were the heady
days of non-alignment. Haksar played no mean role in crafting some of the details of
India's foreign policy. Non-alignment was not an easy posture to adopt for a country then
subject to the intense pressure of bloc rivalry, in particular pressure from the West under
whose domination India's entire administration had been shaped for over a century. Non-
alignment became viable only because of Nehru's distrust of free-market capitalism, a
certain commitment to equality, an admiration for state planning, and, globally, the
existence of the Soviet Union as a countervailing force to the Western bloc.

Non-alignment had a dual aspect: at the doctrinal level, it advocated autonomy from both
East and West; at another level, it connoted the independent foreign policy of a newly
liberated state in the vanguard of the decolonisation process, which sought to reform an
unequal global order. India's foreign policy complemented the Nehruvian attempt to
pursue a relatively autonomous path of development: "socialism" or a "mixed economy",
combining private property and regulated capitalism, with a measure of distributive
justice. This coherence was unique.
Haksar was schooled in policy-planning derived from this coherence within a milieu of
institution-building based on the Nehruvian vision. In the first quarter-century following
Indepen-dence, India gave birth to myriad institutions - in administration, science and
technology, the arts, academics, trade, industry and agriculture. These institutions, some
of the world's best, and most unmatched in the Third World, formed the powerhouse of
nation-building. If India was to have state planning, it had to create not only its own
Planning Commission, but also other institutions such as the Indian Statistical Institute
(P.C. Mahalanobis' alma mater) and the Delhi School of Economics (V.K.R.V. Rao's
creation, at one time truly outstanding), to service it. To achieve food self-sufficiency,
India would build not only the Sindri fertilizer plant; it would also create the wherewithal
to design, build and equip such factories.

It was not enough to allocate funds to new public sector companies; it was necessary to
create a cadre of managers too. Industry promotion had to be accompanied by term-
lending credit institutions, for example, the Industrial Development Bank of India, the
Industrial Credit and Investment Corpo-ration of India (now ICICI), and so on. The
planning was meticulously detailed to the point of creating windows to handle foreign
currency loans to industry which, it was recognised, would need to import capital goods.
In this institutional flowering figured the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research,
the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the Indian Council of Medical Research;
the five Indian Institutes of Technology; the Indian Institutes of Management; the chain
of Councils of Social Science, Historical and Philosophical Research; the Sahitya, Lalit
Kala and Sangeet Natak Akademis; and companies in fields as diverse as electronics,
earth-moving equipment, railway construction, silicon chips and machine tools.
Associated with them were pioneers and institution-builders, from Visvesvaraya to
Lovraj Kumar, from S.S. Bhatnagar to H.T. Parekh, from D.S. Kothari to K.D. Malaviya.
These were people with foresight. For instance, without Malaviya - and his remarkable
understanding of the importance of hydrocarbons - the Oil and Natural Gas Commission
(now Corporation) could not have come into being, Bombay High would not have
happened, and India would have been devastated by the oil shocks of the 1970s.

FORESIGHT was crucial to Haksar's understanding of power, foreign policy and nation-
building. He was acutely aware that a good section of the Indian establishment refused to
acknowledge the need for holistic thinking and institutionalisation. Twenty years ago, he
wrote: "There is... insufficient... coordination between the political elements of our
foreign policy and the economic, commercial and security aspects... Our (Foreign)
Ministry is particularly weak in institutionalising forward thinking... And, from time to
time, one discerns display of egotism... which is not only fatal in diplomacy but is
destructive of institutional arrangements. I have always felt that a group of earnest men
working together are preferable to a genius... Lack of teamwork is our weakness. Our
diplomacy, therefore, falls short of optimal results." ("India's Foreign Policy and its
Problems", Patriot, 1989). Similar views are to be found in his Premonitions and his
autobiographical One More Life.
Haksar won laurels not so much in the Foreign Office as in strategising the abolition of
privy purses, the nationalisation of banks, insurance and foreign oil companies, the
liberation of Bangladesh, the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty, and the Shimla accord with
Pakistan. In the period 1967-73, he was Indira Gandhi's most important adviser. He
understood, better than perhaps any of her other advisers, that a Left-leaning pro-poor
orientation would be critical to her success. He also actively promoted a foreign policy
stance critical of Western hegemonism.

Haksar never claimed credit for India's policy of supporting the Bangladesh liberation
movement to the point of waging war with Pakistan. But he was its real architect. As he
was of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of the Cabinet Secretariat, the Shimla
accord, and many administrative arrangements and procedures. It is easy to understand
the rationale of the Haksar strategy vis-a-vis Bangladesh: the West Pakistan
establishment was incapable of accommodating East Pakistan's legitimate demand for
equality and autonomy; the country had to split. It is not so easy to appreciate the logic of
Haksar's advocacy of the Shimla accord after India had decisively trounced Pakistan in
1971. Haksar himself explained the rationale pithily:

"The most painful and difficult moment in our mutual relationship was reached in
December 1971. Pakistan lay shattered. Several of its tehsils were under occupation of
our army, resulting in displacement of nearly a million people; 93,000 prisoners of war
were in our custody affecting several lakhs of families in Pakistan...'Negotiating from
strength' has been made part of diplomatic coinage. But to negotiate with someone who is
manifestly weak is even more difficult... The Simla negotiations were thus full of
difficulties... If these... were successfully concluded it was due, in large measure, to the
correctness of our approach to Pakistan as it emerged out of the trauma of its partition
and to the overwhelming support which the country gave to that approach.

"What were the essential elements of that approach? First, a recognition that Pakistan
continued to have an unresolved crisis of its national identity... Only a resumption of the
interplay of political processes could possibly resolve the crisis and lead to Pakistan's
normal political, economic, social and cultural evolution. India must not do anything
which would impede this process... Secondly, the common people of Pakistan must know
of India's interest in maintaining the integrity of Pakistan.

"Thirdly, India must not, under any circumstances, add to the stock of political capital of
diverse elements in Pakistan's military, civilian establishments and among the motley
combination of political adventurers who play upon Indophobia-mixed Islamic atavism...
And finally, the moment of defeat must never be converted into a moment of
humiliation."

It is rare to see this kind of insight among our present policymakers. (Indeed, the BJP's
ideologues malign the Shimla agreement as a "betrayal".) Haksar had a refined
understanding of foreign relations. He repudiated the thesis that strength derives from
military force - an idea that is bandied about today as obvious wisdom in defence of
Pokhran-II. In a lucid passage, Haksar debunks this: "The very concept of force as the
basis of state policy has become a kind of fetish.... The West cannot think of dialogue
unless it is based on force. President Reagan, for one, says: 'The only way to negotiate for
peace is from a position of strength'..." But "it should be clear to anybody that
negotiations 'from a position of strength' cannot by their very nature be constructive,
since they are intended to impose one's will... on one's partner. They rule out the
possibility of achieving mutually acceptable, balanced results." Such mature
understanding and refined thinking is rare today.

Haksar was badly humiliated by Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency and shunted off to
the Planning Commission from his powerful position as Principal Secretary to the Prime
Minister. Later he bowed out of office altogether. One may or may not approve of his
reluctance to condemn Indira Gandhi: "I will not comment on (her)... She's no more.
She's part of history. Historians will judge her by what she's done." But Haksar was
extraordinarily dignified in the way he dealt with the dilemmas in whose creation he had
himself played a part: for example, the overcentralisation of the Prime Minister's Office
(PMO), which led to its potential for authoritarian misuse, reliance on intelligence, which
was proving less and less trustworthy, the failure of a number of institutions such as
RAW to deliver.
In his later years, Haksar often acknowledged the limitations of his approach, indeed that
of his generation of institution-builders. The approach was a top-down one, to which
administrative instruments are central. It never took popular participation as necessary or
vital to official programmes. It was gender-blind, insensitive to environmental
considerations, and often uncomprehending of micro-level realities. Thus, its grand
visions often ended up in unimplementable programmes.
Haksar bitterly complained 20 years ago: "Life demands constant renewal. And our
country is crying for renewal - political, economic, cultural and spiritual. Without such a
renewal, our diplomats... might be reduced to... seller(s) of anti-earthquake pills of
Lisbon. This would be amusing but not edifying... in recent years, both the institution of
the Foreign Office as well as the foreign service are being eroded. Wisdom would require
halting and reversing the process." This never happened.

In his later years, Haksar did try to rethink the top-down approach. For instance, he
associated himself with the Delhi Science Forum and initiatives on human rights,
secularism, opposition to mindless neo-liberal policies. He also produced an excellent
report on the functioning of the three cultural Akademis. This had an incisive analysis of
their failures, frailties, and patronage-driven character, and made many thoughtful
recommendations for reform. (Needless to say, these are yet to be implemented.)

Despite his limitations, Haksar remained a committed believer in democracy and the
freedom of expression. It is well known that he criticised the suspension of fundamental
rights during the Emergency. But few people know that he had to plead Satyajit Ray's
case to Nehru. Ray's classic, Pather Panchali, was initially banned from being screened
abroad. "My wife and I happened to see this film and we were both struck by its beauty.
We felt it was the kind of film which should be entered at one of the international film
festivals... I was informed that as the film showed India's poverty, it was not suitable for
being entered in foreign film festivals. A great battle ensued to have the order banning the
film removed." Haksar approached Nehru, who was furious: "What is wrong about
showing India's poverty? Everyone knows that we are a poor country. The question is:
are we Indians sensitive to our poverty or insensitive to it? Satyajit Ray has shown it with
an extraordinary sense of beauty and sensitiveness."

Haksar's world was far from cheerful in the evening of his life. Indeed, it got dark after he
lost his eyesight more than 10 years ago. And it became even darker after Hindu
communalism's recrudescence, and increasing loss of the integrity and sense of purpose
of the Indian state. It is no poetic justice that Haksar should have passed away just as
Hindutva's ascendancy is giving way to decline after the comprehensive setback the
Bharatiya Janata Party received in the latest Assembly elections in three States.

Critical Views of Indian Historians on Nehruvianism

"Tryst with Debt and Destitution" - The Downhill Course of Nehruvian Socialism
V.P. Bhatia

ONE of the cruelest ironies of post-Independence India is that the three much vaunted
Nehruvian pillars of the State-Democracy, Socialism and Secularism have been reduced
to ashes by the one-man autocracy installed by Gandhi's blessings in the teeth of his
Congress Party's opposition.

For, while the one-legged Democracy turned into dynastic dictatorship, his phoney
Socialism turned Nehru's 'Tryst with Destiny' into 'Tryst with Debt and Destitution'. It
became a populist slogan to dupe the masses, while really adding the ravages of a new
inner imperialism to those of earlier one of Islamic and British Imperialisms so that
survival is now the most crucial problem before millions of Indians battling for meagre
resources of land and water.

Above all, secularism has become blatant anti-Hinduism for virtual Islamisation of India
by Nehruvian bid to crush Hindu Nationalism, that bedrock and spinal chord of Indian
Nationalism, into communalism. He almost outlawed any mention of it. The half-baked
un-Indian generations reared up under Nehruvian shadows especially those lording over
the media and the academia because of a near monopoly situation of the pampered
Marxist managers of the Nehru-Gandhi dynastic establishment have raised Muslims to
the status of super-class, inflating their ego and even inciting them to perpetrate the
gruesome incidents like that of Godhra and justifying their depredations in J&K the name
of Kashmiri identity and autonomy to scarve out an Islamic State.

"Secularism sacrificed the idea of 'Hindustan' and refused to accord it legitimacy."-

Shiva Naipaul

As Shiva Naipaul, the talented brother of the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, says in one of
his essays "India and the Nehrus", describing Nehru as the "un-English Englishman", the
secular state is so afraid of its minorities, so wracked by the mischiefs of Pakistan that it
has sacrificed Hindustan as a notion, and refused to accord it legitimacy." (Vide The
Unfinish Journey (p. 63) Shiva Naipaul, it may be pointed out, was a most travelled
writer and died suddenly in 1985 at the age of 40 and was highly prized for his literary
flair even at that young age. Like his elder brother V.S. Naipaul, he too came to India to
search for his ethnic Hindu roots. He was greatly disgusted by the political obscenity of
dynastic installation of Rajiv after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

Anyway, secularism having degenerated into the profession of inciting the minorities,
giving a political veto to the Muslim votebank and socialism converted into crony
capitalism under a tattered populist garb, it would be interesting to know how the
inevitable tragic phenomenon occurred. 'Inevitable' because Nehru's commitment to
Socialism was superficial and populist opiate to cover up his lack of understanding of the
Indian realities. Jinnah rightly described him as "superficial and vain busybody obsessed
with international affairs who did not know the ground under his feet". His charisma
mainly consisted of his having been groomed as a "glamour boy of Gandhi", as Rajendra
Prasad and Sardar Patel described him. He was deliberately cultivated as a mass
mobiliser in the elections of 1937 while Patel was propped-up as "organisation man" and
the manager of the Parliamentary wing of the party by Gandhi. Thus aristocratic,
westernised Nehru's arrogance was further boosted by his role as a charismatic
campaigner when he claimed to have addressed at least one crore people and cheered by
many more on the roadside during his whirlwind tours of UP and Bihar. However, he
skated on thin ice, as he skimmed through mass meetings without knowledge of the
Indian poor's plight. His head was in the clouds, as Mountbatten said, and his profession
of socialism mere skin deep, because he had imbibed hybrid Marxist ideas from Soviet
Russia during a three-week tour in 1927 and of Fabian Socialism from England. Unlike
Gandhiji, he was a great imitator of Western urban civilisation.
He remained a starry-eyed admirer of Soviet brand of centralised Planning which he
introduced in India soon after the death of Patel to concentrate all economic strings in his
hand to control the polity. While the First Plan was on right course formulated on Patel's
lines by its emphasis on agriculture, the second one put India's economic train on the
wrong track of State Capitalism and priority for Heavy Industries, leaving the tertiary and
consumer sector to monopoly capital: Introduction of Quota-Licence-Raj led to large
scale generation of black money and corruption, aggravation of poverty so that by
continuing his policies further under leftist tutelage, the country was brought to the brink
of bankruptcy by 1991 by his dynastic successors as the original tilt was never corrected,
leading to perforce toeing of the IMF/WB line, aggravated by the West-oriented
globalisation. The story of this horrific downhill course in almost every economic sector
has been brought out in a highly interesting and enlightening account with full facts and
figures in this book Golden Age to Globalisation.
Gandhi even admitted in a speech at Rajkot in May 1939 that "Jawahar is quite convinced
that I have put the clock of progress back by a century" for his emphasis on rural
development first. But still Gandhi continued to back Nehru for prime leadership because
Nehru was "wise and ambitious enough to realise that without Bapu's support he could
never win supreme power". So unlike rebel Subhas who never professed fake loyalty to
Gandhi's ideals and was hounded out of the Congress and forced to leave the country,
fake socialist Nehru continued to be the spoilt heir as he was built up as darling of the
youth to counter Subhas's superior charisma, superseding even Gandhi in mass mind. The
tragic results of Nehru's Marxist obsession on top of Islamic and British ravages are
tellingly brought out by our friend Shri Daya Krishna, formerly of the Indian Economic
Service and a regular contributor to Organiser. The book is a compulsive reading for
those who want to understand the roots of the present economic crisis and its horrendous
consequences. Besides a review of 50 years of Planning, it meticulously examines every
aspect of the 9th plan to give a graphic picture of the alarming situation turning the
growth process into that of sheer battle for survival. The Rs. 1700 crore sterling balance
assets of 1947 have been turned into a per capita debt of Rs. 11820 by 2000-2001.
To quote from the book to complete last week's picture of the Islamic roots of India's
woes, compounded by Nehru's subsequent Soviet style and Westernised pro-urban
planning bringing India to the near bottom of the under-developed economies, the
following may be noted:
"The trend for concentration of wealth among Muslim jagirdars, nawabs, military
personnel and the nobles gathered momentum during the last hundred years of Mughal
rule. Around the middle of eighteenth century, thus, about 8000 Muslim families out of a
population of about 160 million, collected over one-third to one-half of the gross national
product of India.

'Nehru': The Saint's Tactician

By Shashi Tharoor

North of New Delhi, in the foothills of the Himalayas, lies the extraordinary city of
Chandigarh. Built in the 1950's, it was an almost totally new creation, planned and
designed by the French modernist architect Le Corbusier, and strongly promoted by
India's first prime minister after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru. Everything about this
new state capital had to be a model of rationality: streets and avenues, geometrically laid
out, were identified by numbers. Houses, in various standard sizes, were allocated to
government workers strictly according to rank. The scale is huge, concrete the favored
material. Chandigarh was to be the monument of modern India, free from ancient
customs and superstitions, free from the colonial past, free to celebrate a brave new age.
The flaws of Chandigarh are now plain to see. Empty concrete plazas crack in the Indian
summer heat. The main government buildings look stranded, like alien monsters plunked
in the wrong terrain. The idea of Chandigarh was astounding in its ambition and high
hopes, but bound to fail, like all the other modernist utopias that sought to design human
life by numbers. Chandigarh, built to express Nehru's vision of India, now stands as a
reminder of its limitations.

Vision is at the heart of Shashi Tharoor's short biography, "Nehru: The Invention of
India." For Nehru, in this account, was generally stronger on the vision thing than on
practicalities. The best part of the book is the concluding chapter, a good summing up of
Nehru's triumphs and failures. Nehru's idea of India was very much a product of his own
background as an English-educated, upper-class, anti-imperialist, leftist, rationalist
intellectual. He created a model of development that was the exact opposite of today's
China. Whereas China now has an increasingly liberal economy run by an illiberal state,
Nehru's staunchly liberal democratic state was in charge of a closed economy.

As Tharoor rightly says, "Nehru's India put the political cart before the economic horse,
shackling it to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice above economic
growth, and discouraged free enterprise and foreign investment." Our contemporary
partisans against globalization would no doubt approve of this, but it explains why much
of India is still stuck in poverty.

Like many intellectuals, Nehru had, as Tharoor says, a "lifelong tendency to affirm
principles disconnected from practical consequences." Although born into a family of
high-caste Hindus, Nehru was a thoroughly secular man, who wished to keep religious
passions far from politics. This might seem farsighted and indeed sensible for a leader
who contrived, with remarkable success, to turn a huge continent, containing many
languages, faiths and cultures, into a modern democracy. But as happened in the former
Soviet empire, which Nehru unwisely admired, frozen-out passions, once the thaw sets
in, gather heat with a vengeance.

Democratic politics have to find a way of accommodating communal feelings, and

Nehru's lofty disdain for all faiths, except "scientific socialism," helped to provoke the
kind of religious extremism that is now causing so much damage. A man who saw
religion as nothing more than "senseless and criminal bigotry" was not best placed to
understand the concerns of Muslims who feared the domination of Hindus in the struggle
for independence. His advice to a Muslim friend that he should read more Bertrand
Russell was typical of his own background and taste, but perhaps not the most useful
counsel he could have given. And the aggressive secularism of Nehru's Congress Party,
though intellectually appealing, was unable to contain the religious chauvinism of a rising
Hindu middle class.

Tharoor, a high-ranking official at the United Nations, is sharp on Nehru's flaws. But he
also stresses his great achievements. Without Nehru there might not even be an Indian
democracy, which may be cracking like Chandigarh's concrete plazas, but is still
functioning, despite all the violence and corruption that goes with it. Most great
anticolonial leaders in Asia and Africa, though almost invariably given to fine democratic
rhetoric, ended up betraying the liberties they fought for, and became worse tyrants than
the imperialists they had bravely dislodged. Not Nehru.
He was well aware of the temptation, however. Tharoor quotes from a fascinating article,
written in 1937, warning that Nehru "has all the makings of a dictator in him - vast
popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride. . . . He must be
checked. We want no Caesars." The pseudonymous author was Nehru himself. He was
unique among his postcolonial peers in treating parliamentary politics and procedures
seriously and never taking away people's freedom to criticize him. The same cannot be
said for Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, who did fall for the temptation of crushing
dissent. That she was voted out of office nonetheless showed the resilience of the
institutions her father had built.

On the life of Nehru, Tharoor has far less of interest to say. There is nothing wrong with
short biographies as a genre. In fact, if done well, they can be both entertaining and
illuminating. But there has to be a special angle, a new insight, something to lift it above
being just a potted biography. Tharoor fails to add anything much to what we already
knew about Nehru and his times: the Amritsar massacre of 1919, Gandhi's march to the
salt marshes of Gujarat, Mohammed Ali Jinnah's quarrels with the Congress Party,
Winston Churchill's blimpish imperialism.

All these things are familiar to anyone who has seen Richard Attenborough's
hagiographic movie about Gandhi. And that is the problem. Tharoor calls his book a
"reinterpretation" of his hero's life. But it is not. Instead, like the movie, it is mostly a
polished rehash of pious Nehruvian interpretations of modern Indian history. In the
conventional Congress Party view, for example, Jinnah was to blame for the partition
between India and Pakistan and the terrible bloodshed that followed. Reality was more
complicated. Jinnah had good reasons to be suspicious of the Hindu leaders, no matter
how secular they were in their views. He may have been maddening at times, but it could
be argued that Nehru and his Hindu colleagues did not do enough to accommodate him.

On the independence struggle, Tharoor is equally conventional. To be sure, British

governors were often obtuse, and sometimes brutal. Brig. R. E. H. Dyer's order to shoot
unarmed civilians in Amritsar was a ghastly crime. But Tharoor describes it as an
arbitrary act without provocation. In fact, crowds had run amok in the area, and the
civilian government felt it had lost control. Moreover, the British did not whitewash
Dyer's actions, as Tharoor would have us believe, but relieved him of his command.

Winston Churchill is rarely mentioned in Tharoor's account without being called

"egregious" or some such negative term. To say that Churchill fought tooth and nail
against Indian independence is true enough, but to ascribe this purely to Churchill's racist
contempt for the Indian people is to miss the point. Churchill, like many others, was
convinced that Britain without its empire would no longer be a world power, and he was
right. He also realized that the British Empire could not exist without India. One may call
this egregious, but the issue is political, not racial.

Still, the life of Nehru is interesting enough to be worth reading, even in a glib,
conventional book such as this one. Tharoor's style is smooth and pleasant enough. But
those who already know the facts can only look forward to a more solid book, or a true
reinterpretation.

Summary
Nehru was fascinated by Soviet Union's Piatiletka or 5-year plan and tried implementing
the same for Indian Economy. He wanted India to have best of both Socialism and
Capitalism and hence went on to create Democratic Socialism of India. He wanted the
state to be the enterprenuer and all its citizens to be equal share holders. He strengthened
the democratic pillars of nation immensely by creating proper wealth distribution systems
at all levels.

Assignment

What was the cause of the downfall of Nehruvianism? What was the concept or theory
that has substituted Nehruvianism?

What are the various school of thoughts related to Nehruvainism. How was Piatiletka the
base for Indian Economy? What changes did Nehru make in the Soviet Planning System
according to Indian Economy?