This essay re-examines the political and ideological positions of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, and some of his closest colleagues and advisers between 1945 and his death in 1964. This was a period when India apparently moved from colonial rule and the economic laissez-faire maintained by the British to inclusive democracy and central planning. In doing so, the essay considers what is often regarded as the demise of constitutional liberalism among many of India's political leaders and the rise of socialism. The analysis presented here attempts to further nuance this transition, following the work of scholars such as Sunil Khilnani,Footnote 1 Ramachandra GuhaFootnote 2 and Benjamin Zachariah.Footnote 3 What is emphasized, instead, is the emergence of what the political theorist Raymond Geuss has described, referring broadly to social and political theory, as “an amalgam of historically contingent” fragmentsFootnote 4 of different ideologies which in this case was brought together under the rhetorical umbrella of “democratic socialism.” This “amalgam” was the more fluid because it existed in a multilingual and multicultural society, long subject to the constraints of foreign domination.
The ideological “fragments” considered here which informed the policies of early independent India included an expansive conception of liberal democracy uneasily allied to a form of socialist central planning which echoed the USSR in economic practice, but not in political enforcement. The voices of the politicians, experts and public intellectuals that we can recover speak the language of democratic socialism, along with the late “liberal communitarianism” of T. H. Green, John Dewey, Harold Laski and Roosevelt's “New Deal,” as well as weak versions of Stalin's five-year plans. Alongside this again, eugenic themes, common both to political liberals, like John Maynard Keynes, and to “socialist eugenicists,” such as Karl Pearson, emerged in a particular Indian form. They were taken up as much by centralizers determined to make the Indian peasant productive as by businessmen pushing what might be called an early neoliberal economic agenda.
It is important to note here that these liberal, democratic and socialist ideologies and practices were not simply “diffused” to India from the West or the USSR, but took on wholly new forms within the diversity, cultural richness and conflicts of the subcontinent, a position recently argued by Shruti Kapila.Footnote 5 The idea of democracy, for instance, was infused with quite new meaning as a consequence of the reservations policy of B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit (untouchable) leader and a major draftsman of the Constitution of India. Nehru himself refashioned the old idea of the local assembly (the panchayat) to fit his concept of popular government. Ideas appropriated from the West were blended with both conservative and modernist Hindu themes.
Since this is a forum devoted to a study of global liberalism, the essay locates some fragments of political and social liberalism in the broadest sense in the Nehruvian amalgam of “historically contingent” ideologies. In his key work The Idea of India, Khilnani refers to the weakness of liberal ideas in twentieth-century India.Footnote 6 This is largely correct, if we are considering old-style liberal individualism and constitutionalism. Members of the erstwhile Indian Liberal Party, such as Srinivasa Sastri and Hriday Nath Kunzru, had become politically marginal, though they remained significant on issues concerning overseas Indians in Malaya and South Africa, for instance.Footnote 7 But late, communitarian liberalism was another matter. Ambedkar proclaimed, “I am not a liberal,” but his programme of social equality had been in constant dialogue with the ideas of his mentor, John Dewey, the leading American “liberal pragmatist.” A leftist figure, Rammanohar Lohia, declared that he was a “liberal in politics” but a socialist in matters of the economy. His writings emphasized equity and social justice, but also the rights of the individual and the duty of the state to limit intervention in social life: these were distinctly liberal themes.Footnote 8 Nehru acknowledged his debt to British constitutionalism, having been a liberal Theosophist early in his adult life, while later coming to admire the Soviet five-year plans.
One advantage of studying the history of political thought in action is that it helps to break down the hard-edged categories of political science and intellectual history such as socialism, liberalism and conservatism. In this case it shows how aspects of communitarian and economic liberalism could subsist with and “infect” what later commentators have seen as the dawn of pure socialism, central planning, conservative obduracy or religious zealotry in India. This sort of paradoxical ideological debate has by no means disappeared. Indeed, the recent world economic crisis, damaging “the BRICS,” has revived a version of it. For instance, the debate in 2013 between two of India's leading economists, Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, exemplifies this.Footnote 9 Bhagwati is pre-eminently a neoliberal economist concerned to demolish the constraints on wealth, entrepreneurship and foreign investment, which many trace back to Nehru's days. These constraints, he believes, have persisted even under the government of Manmohan Singh, who first decisively pushed India into the era of post-socialist economics in 1991. By contrast, Sen, a committed liberal democrat in politics, believes that state intervention remains essential to raise desperately low living standards among India's poor and save democracy itself in the longer run.
This essay consists of a series of short intellectual biographies illustrating the creation of the identity of Nehru's India through the clash, accommodation and rejection of ideologies appropriated from outside and transformed in the context of Indian “life worlds,” to employ Gadamer's phrase. Such biographies may be out of favour with political theorists, but in the Indian case it is essential to begin to construct them, not least because the key protagonists were mostly working politicians or lawyers who did not produce canonical ideological statements as such. A more general intellectual history can only emerge as this type of work proceeds.
THE PARTITION TRAGEDY AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE
First, the essay considers the ideologies and sentiments with which Nehru and members of his circle approached the key event and, for many, the greatest tragedy of twentieth-century South Asia: the Partition of 1947. It is not really possible to understand the post-Independence state in isolation from Partition. This is because the form of the state and its potentialities for development were to a large extent formed by the events of 1945–8. Equally, though dramatic political change was forced through by fear and contingency, the positions taken by the major actors were still influenced by powerful ideological “prejudices” (Gadamer again). In broad terms, the idea of an inclusive federal India, drawing its inspiration from the English-speaking liberal democracies—the USA, Canada and Australia—remained powerful until the early summer of 1947. It was epitomized by the British Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 which attracted support from many Indian politicians, including M. A. Jinnah's Muslim League.
These various ideas suggesting a looser federal form for the new state were ultimately negated, however, by the hasty creation of two structures with a much stronger centre, which inherited late British colonialism's checks on regional power-holders. Fear of India's fragmentation into ethnic regions, combined with the need to drive equalizing social change from the centre against regional and conservative vested interests, was the critical reason why most politicians did not take the federal path. All the same, the Indian states did retain some degree of local economic initiative, a position which was approved by Indian businessmen, notably G. D. Birla, who believed that a degree of economic freedom for entrepreneurs was essential to get the economy moving. Early neoliberal politicians, such as Vallabhbhai Patel and Purushotham Das Tandon, had long been tussling with more radical socialists in the Congress's Planning Commission (established in 1938) regarding the extent of state powers over the economy.Footnote 10
Up to 1947, leftists and liberal Muslims had opposed Partition on the grounds that it would merely enhance “communalist” elements in both the successor states. According to Nehru himself, the whole of India's history of assimilation of cultural difference pointed towards the gradual emergence of a sense of unity, as he wrote in his book The Discovery of India. The masses of Hindus and Muslims were hardly distinguishable from each other. It was only recent psychological and economic differences between the Hindu and Muslim middle classes that made Muslim separatism even plausible. Pakistan was no solution for economic and social “backwardness.”Footnote 11 On the contrary, it was likely to strengthen the hold of “feudal elements” and “delay the economic progress of the Muslims.” Many state governors and chief ministers during Nehru's rule would have agreed with this statement and broadly acceded to his moderate socialist view of development.
Perhaps the most devoted secularists in the sense that they saw India as a community of different religions where politics, nevertheless, was not structured on religion were, unsurprisingly, progressive Congress Muslims. The meaning of secularism for progressive Indians was not the same as laïcité in France, a formal distance from public religion or religious institutions. Instead it was an ideology which attempted to balance religious commitments in the interests of the nation. The position of men such as Zakir Hussain,Footnote 12 M. A. AnsariFootnote 13 and Abul Kalam AzadFootnote 14 were closest to Nehru ideologically and, like him, deeply reluctant to acknowledge Muslim political separatism, or in the case of Hussain and Azad, Partition itself. Like him, too, they were committed to education, particularly primary and women's education, as a key dimension of nation-building during the first twenty years of independence through institutions such as the Indian institutes of technology, public universities and the Education Department of Delhi University, in particular.
Both Hussain and Azad had been inducted into nationalist politics by the alliance which Gandhi created between the Congress and the Khilafat movement between 1917 and 1922. As a Bengali, Azad had been close to the radical leader Aurobindo Ghose, and opposed the Partition of Bengal on the basis of a Hindu–Muslim divide in 1905 and, later, the creation of separate electorates for Muslims. As he argued in his book India Wins Freedom,Footnote 15 Islam had been a specifically Indian religion for a thousand years and Muslims should not be treated as “others.” Azad, who became minister of education, believed this essential “Indian-ness” of Islam to be embodied in an institution such as Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, which promoted modern knowledge and patriotism among its students. Jamia had been founded as early as 1920 as an anti-colonial institution outside the ambit of British education policy. Its Teachers’ Training College, created in 1932, promoted the engagement of Muslim youth with modernity and science, but without the commitment to political “separatism,” if not Partition itself, which continued to inflect the thought of many at the Aligarh Muslim University. Though Jamia was a predominantly Muslim institution, its modernist curriculum was not constrained by Islam, any more than British liberals were constrained by education in Church of England schools. Politicians in this tradition did not argue for the extension of sharia law amongst the Muslim community, nor for radical land reform. Hussain, Azad and Ansari were radical liberals or democratic socialists in politics. Azad emphasized universal citizenship, the humanistic element in Islam and its closeness to the moderate secularist Hinduism of figures such as S. Radhakrishnan.Footnote 16
The commitment to the Indian version of secularism and to centralised planning was naturally strong also amongst Nehru's closest associates and friends with a radical leftist orientation. One of the most significant here was the Keralan socialist V. K. Krishna Menon, later a controversial minister of defence in Nehru's Cabinet from 1957 to 1962. Menon had spent his early life in the UK, participating in the India League, which tried to press the case for Indian independence amongst British socialists and leftists. British intelligence sources regarded Menon as a crypto-communist, or possibly even a Soviet spy. It is certainly true that as Indian ambassador to the USSR he was one of the last to be admitted to Stalin before the dictator's death and he sympathized with Soviet foreign policy, even accepting the 1957 invasion of Hungary.Footnote 17
It is therefore striking to find Menon writing to Mountbatten in March 1947, urging the newly appointed viceroy to break the impasse with the Muslim League by acceding to the creation of many small “Pakistans,” each with control over their own economic policy, with their own chief minister and even their own flag, but without control over foreign affairs or defence.Footnote 18 This position was close to that of both B. R. Ambedkar and D. R. Gadgil, whom I go on to discuss, though it was the political rather than cultural separation of Hindu and Muslim leaderships which Menon emphasized by comparison with Gadgil. In other words his was a political stance, not a justification of Muslim “difference.” Later, in front of the United Nations in 1958, for instance, Menon justified Indian territorial sovereignty over Kashmir on the grounds of international law: the republic's inheritance of British paramountcy in the subcontinent. Yet at the same time Menon cannot really be classed as a Stalinist in regard to his domestic policy. In his home state of Kerala he went on to reject radical programmes of land reform during the 1950s.
A STATE REPRESENTING HINDUS?
In fact, it is significant that many Indian politicians of opposing political persuasions either acceded to the idea of cultural difference between Hindus and Muslims or saw the creation of some kind of “Pakistan” as the only way of proceeding towards their vision of India's political and economic future. Here an important aspect of the prevailing sentiment of 1945–8 was a widespread view amongst Congress leaders, intellectuals and the business community, in the words of S. Gopal, Nehru's biographer, that while India should not be a “theocratic state” as such, it should nevertheless be “a state which symbolized the interests of the Hindu majority.”Footnote 19 This view Gopal attributed to a wide range of Nehru's supporters and rivals, such as Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad. Their position was supported by Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and a large part of the Congress leadership in Bengal.Footnote 20 It was also fiercely backed by the Hindu Mahasabha, the Hindu majoritarian organization, though its leaders demanded that “Hindu India” should extend into the areas which became Pakistan. The issue was not religion as such, but the territorial coherence and identity of the new state. It therefore provides a context for the idea of economic development which is the main issue discussed in this essay.
As suggested earlier, this sentimental and territorial coherence of the state provided the background to the deliberations of the Cabinet Mission of 1946, when two federated unions, Pakistan and Hindustan, weakly linked at the centre, were under consideration. It also informed the rapid and epochal decisions to enact a complete Partition of the country made by Mountbatten and the political leadership between May and August 1947. In fact, historians have probably overstated the support among Congressmen themselves for a completely secular and inclusive state along Nehru's lines. Much opinion seems to have favoured a “state for Hindus,” just as Jinnah called for “a state for Muslims,” though not yet an Islamic state.Footnote 21 This perhaps helps provide an ideological background to the ultimate acquiescence of much of the Indian leadership in the complete Partition of the subcontinent, painful as it was for them.
Jinnah himself drew attention to this symmetry in 1946, citing “a great professor, Dr Gadgil,” to the effect that “a Hindu state or more fully a federation of Hindu national states” is the only proper description of the new Indian Union. To call it a “Hindu state” brings out its “dominant and most significant characteristic,” Gadgil argued.Footnote 22 Gadgil, director of the Gokhale Institute in Pune, which had been named after western India's iconic liberal politician, and later one of the key intellectual forces behind Nehru's economic planning, serves as an important gauge of Indian intellectual history over this period. In 1946, during the deliberations of the Cabinet Mission, Gadgil wrote The Federal Problem in India. This tract was not published by the Gokhale Institute until 1947, by which time full Partition was on the table.Footnote 23 But it illustrates a wide range of Hindu opinion. It stated, “Muslims and Hindus in India must be considered as not forming one community, but two communities desirous of cultivating traditions which are in the main divergent.” It was not possible or desirable for Hindu and Muslim regions to be forced into a union. Hence “a Muslim” and a “non-Muslim” federation must come into existence.Footnote 24 Gadgil wrote of Muslims as a “tight-knit community.” Conversely, though some Hindus were “heavily impregnated with the results of past Muslim rule,” a “large number of Hindu regions do not share in these traditions” and demand the “rebuilding of society on Hindu foundations.” Implicitly, some form of division was essential. In this respect, the Hindu Mahasabha—the integral Hindu party—was an equivalent to the Muslim League. Unfortunately, though, these two bodies could not agree because the Mahasabha still clung to the irrational and “mystic” cry for the “integrity of India.”Footnote 25
Here Gadgil's ideas bore a striking similarity to those of the Dalit (untouchable) leader B. R. Ambedkar, who was also to be a founding figure of the early Republic of India. Ambedkar went further than Gadgil, arguing that the Muslims were not simply a community; they were a nation in the sense understood by Ernest Renan, the French philosopher. Hindus and Muslims had opposing historical myths: their imagined historical communities, in Benedict Anderson's sense, were fundamentally different.Footnote 26 The future West Pakistan at least had a common language and was economically self-sufficient. Both Gadgil and Ambedkar were worried by the immediate problem of the potential splits within the Indian Army between Muslim, Sikh and Hindu. Both of them also pondered the recent history of multi-ethnic empires and federal states: the former Ottoman Empire, the United States, Austria–Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For Ambedkar, looking into the past, forcibly holding the Greeks within the Ottoman state, or the Czechs within Czechoslovakia, eventually guaranteed the collapse of both these polities. Gadgil then looked into the future. Even if “India”—meaning the whole territory of British India—could be held together, he envisaged a gradual escalation of inter-communal tensions so that after the ten-year period of accommodation set by the Cabinet Mission, a more dangerous break-up was likely to occur.Footnote 27
Both Gadgil and Ambedkar feared that in any surviving union the “centre could not hold.” The union government would be “colourless,” in Gadgil's view, and unable to raise taxation for defence, welfare provision or the development of communications. Many of these concerns emerged strongly in the Constituent Assembly debates of 1946–9. The two men's priorities in this area were, however, significantly different. Gadgil had already written much about the need for central state support for rural development. Ambedkar agreed, but his more immediate concern was the fate of the Dalits. The state would have to act rapidly to counter the “scandal of untouchability” through reservation policy. “Internal slavery,” he wrote, was no better than the enslavement by an external master, such as the British. The state, contrary to Hegel, did not represent the “march of God on earth.”Footnote 28 Instead, it should be a pragmatic and democratic form of government devoted to the alleviation of inequality. He was proposing a fast-track version of the liberal pragmatism of John Dewey.
In fact, the further we go beyond Nehru himself, even in his own inner circle, we find a great deal of ambivalence towards the territorial status of Muslims in India, both before and after Partition. If we take the case of Gobind Ballabh Pant, the Uttar Pradesh (UP) leader and later chief minister of the state, we detect an intellectual stance closer to that of the Hindu Mahasabha than to that of Nehru, Pant's revered leader. It is true that Pant objected vigorously to the Mahasabha's call for “direct action” against Partition in August 1947.Footnote 29 But his language, symbolism and what I called “meaningful practices”Footnote 30 constantly tipped towards Hindu populism. His convocation address to the University of Allahabad in December 1946 on “the Unity of India” seems on first reading like a paraphrase of Nehru's Discovery of India and contained the usual gestures towards the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar as a fount of communal harmony.Footnote 31
Yet in this speech India rapidly became the land of the Hindu sages, beginning with Kapila and ending with Bhaskar.Footnote 32 The recently deceased Madan Mohan Malaviya, once described to me by S. Gopal as a “communalist,” and certainly someone distrusted by the Muslim leadership, was a brahmarishi, according to Pant. Allahabad was “Prayag,” a blessed Hindu place. Elsewhere, his language was even clearer. Congress would remove discrimination against “Hindi and the Nagri script.”Footnote 33 While denouncing the “two nation theory” of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Pant pointed out that Gandhi should be trusted because, above all, he had helped to prevent “cow-slaughter.”
Thus both Nehru's “developmentalism” and his multi-faith, and strongly secularist, vision of India's future had somewhat less purchase in 1947–50 than many historians have suggested, compared with the more free-market stance of most of the Congress leadership (and Mountbatten) and the soft Hindu populist stance of many others, notably Patel, Pant and Tandon. Nehru also had to fall back on conservative former Indian ICS officers who had been involved in wartime economic governance, somewhat to his own discomfiture.Footnote 34 Nehru, observed Gopal, did not expect his officials to be “partners in ideology.”Footnote 35 In addition, Nehru's own liberal stance on popular representation and democracy was in conflict with the need to get economic growth moving ahead rapidly. So most interpretations stress the pragmatic, ad hoc nature of the changes over the first three years of independence. Yet I want to argue that this pragmatism was, nevertheless, inflected by strong, but varied, ideological commitments which were held both by the prime minister and by his immediate circle of supporters, officials and political allies.
THE IDEOLOGICAL SOURCES OF “NEHRU’S JUDGEMENT”
The essay next considers Nehru's “political judgement,” as Khilnani terms it, in some particular cases. One is struck above all by Nehru's regular invocation of affect or emotion in his discussion of political concepts, quite unlike the statements of “scientific” Marxists or even many Indian socialists. Discussing the need to limit the range of nationalization of industry in 1948, Nehru is aware, of course, of Mountbatten's view that large-scale nationalization would deter desperately needed foreign capital from investment in India. He also noted that it was better to spend money building new industries than “buying up existing ones,”Footnote 36 thus implying a degree of compensation to owners, which would have been incomprehensible in the cases of the Soviet Union, China or Vietnam. But Nehru also emphasized the need to retain the “goodwill” of expert personnel and colleagues. He admitted to a “strong tendency towards” socialism, but the slate “could never be wiped clean” and “intelligence” demanded a “gradual” approach. Again, he often referred to his own “non-doctrinaire” version of socialism. Evidently, central planning was needed to diminish inequality and poverty, but this had to be achieved “through democratic planning without too much compulsion.”Footnote 37
This emotional contractualism with the populace, even the old elites, as much as fear of a right-wing reaction, counselled Nehru to limit zamindari (landlord) abolition to large landowners while protecting the property of the yeomanry and of smaller landowners. Reading Nehru's remarks about rural development, one also gets the sense of an almost Ruskin-like emphasis on small-scale improvement, even though he is widely associated only with the promotion of large-scale industry. Nehru was appalled by the poverty which he saw in places such as Kanpur, where “big industry” had spawned impoverished labourers’ villages.Footnote 38 Of course, Gandhians attacked Nehru's vision, and Radhakamal Mukerjee, the prophet of economic regionalism,Footnote 39 denounced Nehru's government for too rapid industrialization. This was, Mukerjee said, to “put the cart before the horse.” What was needed first was basic protection and security of living for the people, which could be assured by the introduction of scientific farming and careful rural planning to peasant holdings, not through any form of collectivization. Industry should be developed in association with agriculture, not in opposition to it. Equally the left attacked Nehru, and continues to do so, on the ground that land redistribution did not go far enough.
All the same, it is clear that Mukerjee's and Nehru's positions were not so far apart. Nehru's collectivization was far from Mao Zedong’s. The prime minister praised examples of refugee settlement and rural uplift, powered by panchayats (local deliberative bodies), emphasizing small-scale cooperation, rather than the universal development of heavy industries. It seems fair to say that both Nehru and Mukerjee inherited some of the ideas promulgated by the communitarian liberal G. K. Gokhale before the First World War.
Nehru's judgement was exhibited in the stance he took in international relations, though many would make an exception for his rigid position on the Kashmir issue. Nehru saw India, like Truman's USA, as a great multi-ethnic society which represented the future of humanity better than the smaller European nation states which had dragged the world to disaster. Earlier he had referred to G. D. H. Cole's vision of a future Indian democracy lying between the coming socialist societies of China–Japan to the East and an Ottoman–Arab Islamic state to the West.Footnote 40 Nehru was appalled by the “avidity” of the great powers and believed in building connections with other emerging post-colonial nations through a new “spirit of Asia” signalled in the Bandung Pact and his pressure for a World Peace Conference.Footnote 41 This idea of “the spirit of Asia” had recurred constantly during the twentieth century. In Nehru's youth Okakura Kakuzo's work The Ideals of the East (1903) had deeply influenced Indian intellectuals.
Nehru's generosity of spirit and inclusive political judgement was most in evidence when dealing with the “communal issue” during the crisis of Partition between 1946 and 1948. But he found himself embattled by Hindu reaction on many occasions during his premiership. This was notably the case in 1950, when more than a million Hindus fled East Pakistan and there were countervailing attacks on Muslims in India. One of the centres of this new outbreak of Hindu–Muslim discord was UP, Nehru's home state. Some 200,000 Muslims migrated from the state as they came under pressure and P. D. Tandon, himself president of the provincial Congress, urged Muslims to adopt “Hindu culture.”Footnote 42 Nehru stamped hard on this sentiment and disciplined his lieutenant, Pant, who was recalled to Delhi.
Nehru exhibited, I think, a form of Fabian socialism, very close to the “communitarian liberalism” espoused by Hobson, Hobhouse, Green and, in India before 1914, Gokhale. This politics was inflected with notions of trust, loyalty and hope, rather than the rigorous political-economic analysis favoured by India's Communists or Socialists. A former Harrow- and Cambridge-educated Theosophist, Nehru himself acknowledged his own complex emotional and ideological heritage, including “the Indian or the European, for after all, I have that European or English aspect also.”Footnote 43 His political thought represented, in fact, a classic case of a “historically contingent amalgam of ideological fragments,” to repeat Raymond Geuss's phrase.
NEHRU’S TEAM: GOBIND VALLABH PANT
I now return to Pant, but this time in his guise as a developmentalist. As a radical Hindu liberal with a “tendency to Socialism,” Pandit Gobind Ballabh Pant was one of the closest of Jawaharlal Nehru's immediate entourage. Only on Hindu–Muslim problems did he move away from Nehru's inclusive position. Pant's biographer, M. Chalapathi Rau, stressed Pant's nation-building role in fashioning the republic's linguistic provinces, while at the same time praising him for his pragmatism on issues such as nationalization and landlord abolition. In this way he became, in Rau's view, a somewhat unlikely hybrid between Herbert Asquith and Bismarck—a British liberal and a German military nationalist.Footnote 44 Pant was not an abstract thinker. His sonorous speeches seem mainly to have been sermons to justify his political pragmatism as chief minister of UP and later as home minister in the few months before his death in 1961. Yet there were two issues on which Pant deliberated where one gets a sense of a wider intellectual programme: rural labour and the role of the state in economic development.
As a Brahmin from Almora in the UP hills and later as a lawyer in Allahabad during the 1919 peasant agitation, Pant grew up with an acute awareness of issues of rural labour. In the later nineteenth century the hill regions still maintained a system of forced labour which Pant and his colleagues viewed as a form of slavery. Peasant farmers and rural workers were regularly made to offer personal service or part of their crop to landlords, officials and the upper castes.Footnote 45 In the hill regions, this was particularly onerous as ordinary people were coerced into carrying crops and other loads up and down the hills for their masters. Here, as across India, these non-monetary perquisites became more valuable as the value of rent became erratic during the Great War and the Depression. Pant was active in the movement to abolish these forms of labour coercion.
Yet Pant's own caution and gradualism were very much in evidence when he came to discuss the issue of landlordism both before Independence and as chief minister of UP after 1948. He made a sharp distinction between large-scale landlordism in Bengal and in Russia, for instance, and the situation over much of the hills and Indian plains where smallholders were predominant.Footnote 46 Poor rural families might often be tenants in one place and very small landholders in others. A blanket attack on the zamindars, the landlords, would therefore damage the move towards social equality rather than advance it, he believed.
Pant's political ideas were rarely expressed in theoretical terms, but he had long grappled with questions of laissez-faire and state intervention. We find him in vigorous dispute in 1936 with the finance member of the Indian government, Sir James Grigg. Pant argued that if Britain had already moved away from laissez-faire and was inspired in its programmes of house building by major economists and politicians, such as Lloyd George, Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes and Harold Laski (all far from being centralizing socialists), how was it that the Indian government still adhered to rigid ideas of small government?Footnote 47 Pant invoked Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, who was trained as an engineer and had been treasurer of the Mysore state between 1912 and 1919. Visvesvaraya had used state funds to promote large-scale irrigations works.Footnote 48 He founded factories and educational institutions in Mysore, calling on Indian business to invest capital to promote rapid industrialization.
As in the cases of Nehru and P. C. Mahalanobis, who will be discussed shortly, social, industrial and scientific advance were deeply interconnected in Visvesvaraya's and Pant's understandings of economic planning. They participated directly in the Nehruvian consensus on this issue and approved Congress's creation of the National Planning Committee in 1938.
NEHRU’S TEAM: D. R. GADGIL AND P. C. MAHALANOBIS
If we move from Nehru's associates among the politicians to academics and public figures associated with the Planning Commission and the three five-year plans, a much more considered intellectual lineage becomes apparent. P. C. Mahalanobis, who founded the Indian Statistical Institute, represented, above all, a version of the tradition of Bengali scientific and mathematical modernism which counted P. C. Ray amongst its luminaries. It was now turned out towards detailed statistical analysis of economic problems.Footnote 49 In this respect, Mahalanobis believed that rural psychology needed to be totally transformed and oriented to constructive industrialism. Though Mahalanobis continued to talk to Radhakamal Mukerjee and the earlier school of “economic regionalists,” he effectively turned their arguments on their heads. Mukerjee had insisted that small-scale industry had to be adjusted to the mentality of the peasant and that technical innovation had to be closely controlled so that “crimes against trees and water” could be avoided. The peasant was a total person and this included his religious and cultural life. Mukherjee was, in effect, a more economically prescient and informed version of Gandhi. Such culturalism played little part in the planning regime of Mahalanobis, who insisted on the objective validity of scientific knowledge.
Mahalanobis's brief, but approving, foreword to Devabrata Bose's Problems of Indian Society (1968) makes it clear that he saw industrialization as a major force in loosening the country's caste hierarchy, which restricted economic growth. It would equalize wealth in the rural areas and weaken marriage restrictions by “expanding opportunities between man and woman in industrial areas.” Mahalanobis pointed to the “steady increase in the number of inter-caste and also Hindu–Muslim marriages.”Footnote 50 Detailed statistical knowledge, he implied, was essential to monitor such developments. Evidently, Mahalanobis drew on and transformed the contemporary transnational trend towards both centralized economic planning and the use of sample surveys and social statistics. He had encountered the work of the British social statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson while studying mathematics and physics at Cambridge, where he also met the noted mathematician Ramanujan. His own statistical journal, Sankhya (Number) was modelled on Pearson's Biometrica.Footnote 51 Equally, his great faith in the transformative capacity of heavy industry was reinforced by observation of the Soviet Union and, later, Communist China, and also by conversations with noted European socialists, such as J. B. S Haldane and Joan Robinson.
Yet at the same time, Mahalanobis was also representative of a specifically Indian rationalist tradition.Footnote 52Sankhya meant not only “number” but something like a rational understanding of the universe. Mahalanobis's family, from the famous Brahmin small gentry of Bikrampur in East Bengal, had converted to the rationalistic strain of the reforming Brahmo Samaj. His father was an activist in the widow remarriage campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century. Mahalanobis himself was connected with the Samaj throughout his life, opposing the reintroduction of rituals and paying homage to the memory of the founder of the Samaj, Rammohan Roy.Footnote 53 In fact it is striking how many of the Bengali intellectuals of the Independence generation, including Satyajit Ray, the film-maker, and Nirad Chaudhuri, the self-declared “Unknown Indian,” were Brahmos or were influenced by the Samaj. For his part Mahalanobis declared that he was not a Hindu, but added paradoxically, a “Brahmo by religion.” He also revered the great Bengali sage Rabindranath Tagore, himself supposedly a covert Brahmo. So Mahalanobis's cultural and religious stance stood on that intriguing Indian cusp between pantheism and what might be called “pan-atheism.” As he once said, the human race would be improved by “thinking about him who cannot be known, by trying to know.”Footnote 54
At any rate, for Mahalanobis, progress was dependent on knowledge: knowledge of irrigation statistics, of educational statistics and particularly of statistics about the size, shape and capabilities of people. In 1925 he had published a paper on the characteristics of Calcutta's Anglo-Indians based on measurements of the skull size, nasal length, etc.Footnote 55 He concluded that these families were the result of unions between upper-caste Hindus and Europeans. There is definitely a whiff of eugenics about this and a later “anthropometric study of the United Provinces.”Footnote 56 Yet Mahalanobis did not display the almost pathological social Darwinism of his early mentor, Karl Pearson, who claimed to be a socialist yet proclaimed war against “inferior races,” including the Jews.Footnote 57 In both economic and social thought he was closer to the archetypical paternalist liberal, John Maynard Keynes, whom he cited on several occasions. Nevertheless, we see here an Indian colonization of what Nicholas Dirks has called “the ethnographic state.” Colonial observation of “tribes and castes” was appropriated and transformed into a national project by the Indian Statistical Institute and the National Sample Survey which Mahalanobis led. The Congress's Planning Commission had also discussed eugenic measures to promote a stronger race in 1940.Footnote 58 All these statistical and eugenicist tools were deployed in support of Nehru's centralized developmental planning during the 1950s and early 1960s, though the promise of planning was, at best, stunted by regulation, red tape and bureaucracy, giving rise to the so-called Permit Raj.
Whereas Mahalanobis represented the melding of developmental sociology with a particular style of Bengali scientific modernity, D. R. Gadgil's ideological stance in public life represented a coming together of three dominant strains of western Indian political thought. First, he inherited the statistical liberalism of nineteenth-century Congress leaders. Second, he was committed to the communitarian developmental liberalism of Gokhale. Rural development delivered through properly funded and directed rural cooperatives was the key dimension of Gadgil's practical economic policy, enunciated as the first director of the Gokhale Institute. Finally, though, Gadgil was deeply influenced in his youth by the uncompromising nationalism of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was a frequent visitor to the house of his maternal uncle.Footnote 59 The young Gadgil met Tilak and read his Gita Rahasya, the commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, which endorsed struggle and a new beginning.Footnote 60 Perhaps Gadgil later came to see the economic struggles and political violence which beset the young Republic of India in this light. V. M. Dandekar records that Gadgil had little sympathy with Gandhi's political stance, which he regarded as “anti-intellectual.”Footnote 61
Gadgil had in common with Mahalanobis a deep concern with statistics. But his interests lay in localized collections of data on farm sizes, indebtedness, the position of wells and so on, as exemplified in his work on the environs of Pune. Gadgil also had an interest in the historical origins of inequality, which had received the attention of Telang and R. C. Dutt in the nineteenth century. Gadgil's Industrial Evolution of India in recent Times represented a more detailed, but milder, version of Naoroji's criticism in his Poverty and un-British Rule in India of 1893. Gadgil argued that the administration lacked “the human and the local touch” and that it was bound by “financial limitations” and “prejudices.”Footnote 62 Notably he argued that even in times of boom and “commercialisation,” poorer farmers hamstrung themselves with debts which they could not pay off during later periods of depression.Footnote 63 Above all, the cooperative movement had failed to keep pace with either the limited economic expansion of the late nineteenth century or the Great Depression.
Arguably, then, it was the strain of economic and social thought derived from Gokhale's pragmatic liberalism, with its concern for agricultural cooperation, which was most significant for Gadgil. Throughout his academic and public career in the Planning Commission, he remained focused on attempts to fortify tenant right and limit peasant indebtedness. He was suspicious of the mathematical idea of the “perfection of the market” which sometimes seems to have underpinned the approach of Mahalanobis himself. It was no accident that, in addition to the Gokhale connection, Gadgil recognized the economic thought of Harold Laski, on one occasion giving the Laski Memorial Lecture at the Laski Institute of Political Science in Ahmedabad.Footnote 64 Laski's notion of a decentralized “guild socialism” was very close to his own position. Gadgil's idea of a specifically Indian form of localized social and economic development also seems quite close to Radhakamal Mukerjee's “economic regionalism,” though devoid of its freight of religious rumination. Both men argued for the development of “intermediate technologies.”Footnote 65
Critically, then, Gadgil occupied a median position between Gandhi's near-anarchic view of village self-government, spinning and counter-industrialism, and the top-down planning programme of Mahalanobis or, in the political sphere, state interventionism in the form of reservations urged by B. R. Ambedkar. Mahalanobis wanted to reforge the “village habits and psychology” to force peasants to engage with “the industrial outlook with interests in tools, gadgetry and new innovations.”Footnote 66 By contrast, Gadgil pressed for a softer, bottom-up version of local cooperation. Yet Gadgil remained in tune with Mahalanobis to the extent that he saw local cooperation as a stage in development towards an industrial society, rather than as an existentially desirable form of rural life like Gandhi and his supporters.Footnote 67
These differing intellectual positions within Nehru's advisers reflected their various institutional and educational backgrounds. But it also seems likely that their regional context played a part, too. Maharashtrian and Gujarati rural society had long been dominated by small independent landlords and substantial tenants who had shown continuous resistance to British land-revenue policy, moneylenders and urban intrusion. Gadgil must have realised that any overcentralized philosophy of economic planning could well have alienated them. By contrast, Mahalanobis's experience was drawn from Bengal, where the peasantry had long been dominated by the state and landlords. Here, “village habits and psychology” perhaps seemed more malleable to the liberal and later socialist elite.
NEHRU’S TEAM: RADHAKRISHNAN—VEDANTA AND THE END OF CONFLICT
The final member of Nehru's diverse circle discussed here is Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosophy professor, Indian ambassador and finally second president of the republic. Radhakrishnan differed quite sharply from the other actors mentioned here. Gadgil and Mahalanobis distantly set their economic and social projects against the background of a Hindu or Brahmo idea of the progressive development of the human spirit. Radhakrishnan asserted with textual rigour, as Gopal wrote of his father, that “the divine was already present in the self and that the goal of cosmic evolution was the release of the imprisoned splendour in all men and women.” If the ape could evolve into man, “the human could become the divine.”Footnote 68 As he stated in his Kamala lectures in Calcutta in 1942, Christianity was only one religion among many and the West had forfeited all right to moral superiority through warfare and greed, a point he emphasized more vigorously when the lectures were published in 1948 three years after the dropping of the atomic bomb.Footnote 69
Radhakrishnan was, in fact, one of the last of the great “counter-preachers,” the public men who turned the ideological tables on the West and placed the study of Advaita Vedanta, the “monism” of the Vedic literature, at the apex of human achievement. This was a distinguished line stretching from Sankaracarya, through Keshub Chandra Sen to Vivekananda. But Radhakrishnan's learning made it possible for him to mount a sustained intellectual challenge to Western theorists, while simultaneously employing idealist philosophers such as Henri Bergson to refute materialists, Marxists and European cultural supremacists. Radhakrishnan argued that Western philosophy needed to engage again with the concept of “spirit,” so that ultimately Hegel trumped Marx, or indeed Sankaracarya trumped the Sankhya tradition of hyper-rationalism.
For Nehru, Radhakrishnan's worth was his ability to project at home and abroad the moral gravity and uniqueness of India. As a philosopher–statesman, he was one of the few who could take up Gandhi's own mantle after 1948. Yet Radhakrishnan's beliefs did more than simply legitimate the texture of his politics; they actively informed it, whether as ambassador to the USSR and the UN, or as president. In 1942 he praised the Atlantic Charter as a humane document, but castigated Churchill for excluding colonial subject peoples from it. After the atom bomb fell, he used the Bhagavad Gita to urge humanity to retreat from the world's conflicts, reflect on the horror of war and return to the world armed with the spirit of nishphal karma (“desireless action”). This, of course, did not rule out the necessity of principled war for Radhakrishnan any more than it did for the hero Arjuna in the Gita.
As the Cold War took hold, this attitude served the Republic of India well. In Moscow between 1949 and 1954, Radhakrishnan knew of the repression employed by Stalin. He nevertheless considered that centralized planning had brought great benefits to the Russian people and that the majority favoured socialism. Above all, he urged accommodation and adjustment on both the Soviet Union and the West: moral and political problems were rarely solved by armed conflict. In his mind, a late Vedantism, reminiscent of Swami Vivekananda, informed the politics of non-alignment. As vice-president he urged the policy of “developing the graces of mind and the virtues of spirit” on the great powers, as well as on China and Vietnam.Footnote 70
Radhakrishnan undoubtedly provided something powerful and different to Nehru's circle and policies: a degree of spiritual gravitas. But it would be unrealistic to ignore the fact that this was not always a harmonious grouping. Quite apart from the conflicts over Hindu–Muslim relations when Pant found himself on the wrong side of Nehru, or disagreements about the role of the free market which went back to the days of Vallabhbhai Patel, there were also negative reactions to Radhakrishnan's patrician deportment. When the question came up of his succession as president to Rajendra Prasad, for instance, some politicians from the south told Nehru that they would rather have a president from another part of India than a Brahmin from Tamilnadu, a reflection of the rise of non-Brahminism and regionalism in the young republic.Footnote 71
THE END OF AN ERA
Historians and economists have been ambivalent, to say the least, about the legacy of the first two decades of independent India. As the initial spurt of GDP growth slowed in the mid-1950s, they began to articulate criticisms of the Nehruvian regime which were later epitomized in the phrases “Permit Raj” and the “Hindu rate of growth.” These criticisms of the policies of Nehru and his generation have persisted to the present day, partly as a justification for the liberalization of the economy after 1990. So, it is argued, aversion to dependence on Western aid made India equally dependent on the USSR, which was later revealed to be economically sclerotic itself. The emphasis on the expansion of state-run heavy industry choked off more efficient small production. Land reform was too limited to achieve any degree of income equalization, while the failure to tax larger agrarian incomes left the state penniless. “Socialism” had also, and paradoxically, still allowed the persistence of a self-interested capitalist class. By 1962 Gadgil himself was pointing to the takeover of the country by the “ugly business-man,”Footnote 72 a trope that became more prominent during the rule of Indira Gandhi.
Others argue that the preservation of caste reservations created a “creamy layer” of rich peasants, which left behind vast swathes of the urban and agricultural poor. It also created a formalistic democracy at the mercy of “identity politics.” Nehru's hopes for world peace across a socialist ecumene were smashed by the wars in Korea and Vietnam and, most bitterly, by India's own military failure in the conflict with socialist China, which should have been a friend. Imperialism, which the United Nations and the Bandung Pact were supposed to terminate, had taken a new lease of life with the Suez adventure, the war in Algeria and the beginnings of the American War in Vietnam. To Gopal, ending the final volume of his biography, Nehru “seemed a prophet frustrated, with his hopes unfulfilled.”Footnote 73
Yet we must avoid the “infinite condescension of posterity.” First, it is clear from Nehru's own writings that he felt that the very survival of the fragile independent state was at risk for at least the first decade of his premiership. His policies were therefore calculated responses to danger. There was no easy transition from the “steel frame” of British rule to the governance of a stable republic. The trauma of Partition had been followed by successive waves of refugees flooding across the new borders. It had also led to a mini cold war with Pakistan interrupted by real conflict in 1948. Separatist cries had been heard across the country: in Kashmir, amongst the Sikhs of the Punjab, in the north-east and the south. These fissiparous aspirations had been held in check by the brave, and by no means predictable, decision to institute universal suffrage. Moderate land reform had limited the Communist-led movement, which surged into the open in the Telangana uprising of the late 1940s. But more radical reform might well have greatly increased the danger from separatists and sparked a reaction from the privileged, quite apart from shattering the fragile unity of the Congress itself. So many of the decisions on economic and social policy, rather than being half-hearted or indecisive, as critics then and now allege, were reflections of “Nehru's judgement.”
Yet, to sum up, the policies and politics of Nehru's era cannot simply be reduced to political instrumentalism or simple “good judgement” in an atmosphere of fear. For Nehru and his circle also inherited a great weight of ideologies, sentiments and “prejudices,” in Gadamer's sense of the word, from earlier Indian liberals, socialists and anti-colonialists. These were precious doctrines precisely because they had originally been forged in the depths of a humiliating subjection to colonial rule.
Alongside the often qualified support for heavy industry, for instance, Nehru's team instituted a system of local responsible government in the shape of Panchayati Raj. While historians have tended to dismiss this system as corrupt, or a failure, it was nevertheless ideologically critical and politically symbolic. To Nehru this was the most revolutionary development in India. This was the “real Swaraj [self government] of the people.”Footnote 74 His top-down approach to planning was always modified by personal experience of the self-empowered peasant associations which he encountered when he drove out from the city of Allahabad into the countryside in 1920 and 1921. Nehru believed, along with Pant, that, as one observer put in 1920, the cry “all power to the panchayats” would presage a true recovering of liberties, unlike the case of the Russian Revolution. This was because the peasant assemblies would be affiliated to, and mould, the Congress Party, rather than becoming its servile agents. These, though, were not Gandhi's anarchic village assemblies overseeing handloom weaving, but those of Gadgil's mentor, the liberal Gokhale, who always insisted on the significance of economically productive local cooperatives.
To this pattern of ideas Nehru similarly brought an insistence on women's rights, long respected in his own family, and a commitment to republicanism which had also been a favored doctrine among some sections of the elite for generations. These sentiments echoed the political philosophy of earlier Indian liberals and the moderate socialists who succeeded them. Equally, the centralizing statistically empowered drive for heavy industry favoured by Mahalanobis drew on the ideas of Indian political economists stretching back at least to Naoroji, who insisted on tariff protection and the need to build local units of production even if they were initially less efficient than foreign ones. In the case of Radhakrishnan, a Vedantic urge for harmony and progress informed his contribution to Nehru's policy of non-alignment. Finally, Nehru himself subscribed to, and yet modified, a whole host of sometimes contradictory doctrines, adjusted to that long-past “age of the expert” which lay between the first atomic bomb and the launch of Sputnik.
