In 1954, the leaders of two great political parties which controlled the 2 most populous countries met for the first and last time. To many observers, the INC and Pandit Nehru looked stronger than Mao- who was little known internationally- and his Chinese Communist Party which had only come into existence some 30 years previously whereas the INC was by then already a mass organisation with members in every corner of India and representatives in London and other foreign cities.
Indeed, Mao said to Nehru that he knew India was much ahead of China in industrial development. He also thought India was closer to going nuclear. China might need ten or fifteen years to catch up. But, Mao, made it clear, China would catch up. It would rise to a position where no combination of foreign powers could ever bully it again.
A couple of years later, Nehru rejected both the US and the USSR's offer of support for a permanent Security Council seat saying Communist China should get it first. Mao was planning for China to become a Great Power. Nehru was going in the reverse direction. India had projected force onto European and MENA and other battlegrounds during the two World Wars. That must never again be allowed to happen. India should remain poor and weak. Others must feed and defend it and wipe its bum.
Why was Nehru so defeatist? Sunil Khilnani gives us one part of the answer. Indians thought India was shit. It could achieve nothing on its own but must pretend to try anyway because...urm... Indians are shitty people. They do stupid shit.
Contemplating the 1950s, most of us slip into torpor.
The early Fifties were a time of hope. It was entirely possible that India would not turn into a shithole. Mao was treating Nehru as an equal in 1954. He would bitch slap the fool in '62.
Lodged between the exhilarating, tragic '40s
A bad period. Japanese bombardment, Famine, Partition- what was so fucking exhilarating about it?
and later decades of manoeuvrings, personality cults, self-mutilations and shimmering aspiration, the '50s seem a black & white newsreel.
No. It was classic black and white films like Naya Daur but also Pyaasa.
Press Fast Forward. Even better, Delete.
Who would delete Pyaasa?
The settled aura of the 1950s is a trick of retrospective vision. For the 1950s, as lived, were precarious times:
No. They were safe and featured rising material standards of living because of post-war global recovery.
years in which solutions to crises-political, economic and international-had to be invented on the fly in testing conditions.
There were no crises for India.
To some, this was the era when India took all the wrong turnings: towards socialism, big dams and vast industrial plants, non-alignment, bureaucratic babuworship.
Nothing wrong with taking a wrong turning if you then take the right turning and proceed apace.
But the truth is, as usual, more complex.
Khilnani knows shit about the truth.
The decade opened with India's future direction in limbo.
No. Nehru was PM and Nehru remained PM. Nobody expected any other result.
Gandhi was gone
A nuisance had been curbed.
and Patel, with whom Nehru battled for leadership of the Congress party, would be dead by December 1950.
Nehru was his Party's main vote-catcher. Since he was a Leftist, this enabled Congress to prevail over the various Socialist outfits while taking a strong line with secessionists and Commies.
Even as Nehru saw off other challengers, he struggled to get a strong grip over his party and government.
Not really. It was more a case of grumbling than struggling. The marriage between the machine politicians and their vote catcher was not warm or affectionate but it was a marriage of the traditional Hindu sort. Panditji was the husband. The Congress machine a reluctant, but resigned, spouse.
Inside the Congress, many of his colleagues opposed him
but hadn't enough support to do more than grumble impotently
and the regional bosses had real powers.
This is more to the point. However linguistic re-organization and the centralisation of economic power through the Planning Commission reduced their power. Still, it must be said, Nehru had no problem with strong leaders in the Provinces nor they with him. Abdullah, being a close personal friend, was an exception to this rule. Nehru jailed him but the two lurved each other greatly. Kashmiris can be a very peculiar people.
Outside, he faced vigorous criticism from the Hindu right,
He crushed them. The truth is Hindus wanted elected politicians with mass following to rationalize their Religion and get rid of wasteful or stupid, holier-than-thou, status competition between sub-castes.
economic liberals, socialists, Communists, as well as those pressing for recognition of linguistic identities.
These problems were successfully dealt with. The British inheritance was flexible and highly pragmatic. Nehru described himself as the last Englishman to rule India. The politics of the Thirties duplicated themselves in the Fifties under more favourable global circumstances.
There was no common political consensus for him to rely on.
Nonsense! There was great continuity between the Nehru of 1937 and the Nehru of 1957. In 1936 he told the INC in his Presidential address- I am convinced that the only key to the solution of world’s problems and India’s problems lies in socialism and when I use this word I do not use it in a vague humanitarian way but as a scientific economic doctrine … I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation and subjection of Indian people except through socialism …
That means ending of private property except in a restricted sense and the replacement of the present profit system by a higher idea of cooperative service. It means ultimately a change in our instincts, habits and desires. In short it means a new civilisation radically different from the present capitalist order.
In other words, Nehru was the new Manu of a New Man based on a caste system whose Manthrins, or Mandarins, would be useless and boring. Did Nehru really think that 'kulaks' would voluntarily give up their land and cows? Would they be happy to see those cows slaughtered to boost beef and hide exports? Nehru said 'the problems that trouble us are essentially middle class problems, like the communal problem, which have no significance for the masses.' But some peasants consider the cow holy whereas other peasants think it makes for good eating. Religion matters at a fundamental economic level more to the masses than to the classes. Lawyers and bureaucrats and Ministers can treat religion and economics and defense strategy as topics for debate or an academic or sentimental type. But this is not the case for the 'kisan' or 'jawan'. The soldier is the son of the peasant. He will join with his Daddy in beating the fuck out of any middle class revolutionaries who turn up to propose 'collectivization'. On the other hand 'Bhoodan' was hilarious. Everybody gave away everybody's else's land.
Nor were there effective instruments-apart from the inherited ICS bureaucracy-to engage in what was then called 'nation building' let alone to aggressively pursue social change.
In other words, the Gandhians were useless. All those khaddar workers- or, later on, bhoodan workers- were utterly shit. By contrast, Mao's cadres were good at beating and killing people though they could also 're-educate' them by lecturing them in between beating and killing them. That's how Communism works. A new Man is created in a Pavlovian fashion by beating and the 'reinforcement' involved in getting to eat well while beating and killing bourgeois idealists or class enemies.
The crises years of the 1940s had eroded the state's -ability to ensure security:
Because power had been handed over to Provincial Ministries in 1937. But, by 1950, Congress had expanded the state's coercive capacity. Nehru could fuck up Commies and ensure they stayed fucked up in a manner which was the envy of the Brits in Malaya or, later, the Americans in Vietnam. That's why the US and the USSR were prepared to give India China's seat on the Security Council. Nehru had kicked Commie and Muslim ass and made himself master in his own Hindu house. Unfortunately, Nehru hated Hindus. He wanted them to remain poor and weak till they finally changed their instincts, habits and desires and became as boring and vacuous as himself.
the British, preparing for exit, had gradually drawn down state capacities,
No. They had transferred power to Indians who decided after Independence not to have a powerful Army and to leave the Navy under a British Admiral. However they did expand the constabulary for 'Police Action'- i.e. killing Commies or kicking Muslim ass.
and the Indian leadership-emerging blinking from jail-was in no position to develop alternatives.
Nonsense! It inherited the full machinery of coercion and quickly expanded it.
In the international domain, India's options were constrained, as pressure built for the country to choose a tent in one or other of the Cold War camps.
Not really. India was Hindu. Hindus hadn't done well in defending themselves. Their latest Mahatma was the nutter Gandhi. Stalin didn't want a basket-case on his hands. The Americans disapproved of Nehru's living in a fantasy world but understood that China's rise would influence other newly independent countries. Thus, some money was given to India so Liberal Democracy wouldn't look like a complete disaster in comparison with Communist tyranny.
Gravest of all was the economic situation: the effects of Partition, which disrupted economic networks and created a large refugee population, were now superimposed upon endemic poverty.
The refugees were welcome to eject Muslims. If they failed to do so, they were useless and might as well starve or vote Communist.
Food and basic necessities were in short supply, and capital too was scarce.
India was an agricultural country untouched by the ravages of war. Why was food in short supply? The answer is that Food had been under Indian control since 1937. India's food situation worsened under Nehru. By the Sixties, the country was living 'ship to mouth'.
Such were the unpropitious circumstances in which India embarked on its great transformation: from a territory where
elected Indians had been running the Provinces since 1937 and elected Indians had been running the Center since 1946
an authoritarian colonial state ruled over a repressive traditional agrarian order into an open democratic society linked into a single economy.
Democracies don't feature dynasties. It is considered unusual if the PM's daughter becomes PM and then her son becomes PM and then her daughter-in-law presides over the Nation acting as regent for her idiot son.
As India effects this transition, it turns out the 1950s was the decisive decade.
The 1930s were the crucial decade. The War was an interregnum. What the Fifties showed was that the ICS was okay, the British inheritance was okay, Congress was okay- but just being okay isn't enough in a competitive world.
For two reasons: because of what did happen during these years, and equally because of what did not.
Both were determined in the Thirties. The course had already been set. Had, there been no War and had India remained a Dominion with a weak Center, Partition and the Chinese invasion (because of the Anglo-American nuclear umbrella) would have been avoided. Real interest rates would have been lower and industrial development would have been more rapid at least in some Provinces. There could have been Land Reform at the Provincial level but there wouldn't have been much centralized planning save such as accompanies Federal Budgeting in the usual way. This would have been preferable to what obtained. The fact is the Brits had a good blue-print for India. Gandhi and Nehru and Jinnah didn't. They were lawyers not administrators or statesmen. Their amateurishness imposed a heavy price on the Nations they fathered. The Brits had a plan to slowly devolve power and gradually raise up a class of liberal politicians who could get voters to agree to new taxes which revenue would be spent so sensibly that voters would experience a net benefit. Income would rise, Tax revenue would rise and more public goods would become available. It must be said, Motilal Nehru and C.R Das originated the Indian policy of refusing to mature as politicians. They entered the Legislature to frustrate its actions. This was the behaviour of a retarded adolescent. Congress's problems, India's problems, were always self-created. Motilal and Jawaharlal pretended that any type of cooperation with the Brits was evil. Then J.P and Lohia and so forth said the same thing about Congress. Finally, Mrs Gandhi showed that the repressive apparatus of the State had greatly expanded. Congress hadn't really won Freedom. It had sulked in jail till the Brits found it convenient to hand over power to them. Under Indira, Congress lost its freedom. It's jail was Dynasticism.
The middle class politics of the Congress could have always been rolled up by the Brits. Nehru, in 1936, admitted as much saying- 'when our propertied classes were hit hard by the Government’s drastic policy of seizure and confiscation of monies and properties, and were thus induced to bring pressure for the suspension of the struggle.' The Brits could have killed off 'satyagraha' by expropriating its financiers. Nehru understands that Congress was the interlocutor the Brits wanted to have and it suited them if Congress behaved childishly because that gave them more legitimacy as the maai-baap Sarkar dealing with a fractious teenager. He also understand that if he, like Mao, had been supported by the masses, not the 'monies' of the classes, then and only then would he have been a true revolutionary.
The trouble was that Nehru and Congress were middle class. Nehru says 'How is this problem to be solved then? Inevitably, we must have middle class leadership, but this must look more and more towards the masses and draw strength and inspiration from them. The Congress must be not only for the masses, as it claims to be, but of the masses; only then will it really be for the masses. I have a feeling that our relative weakness to-day is due to a certain decay of our middle class elements and our divorce from the people at large. Our policies and ideas are governed far more by this middle class outlook than by a consideration of the needs of the great majority of the population. Even the problems that trouble us are essentially middle class problems, like the communal problem, which have no significance for the masses.'
Religion did matter to the masses. It determined who you could marry and who would stand with you in a fight. Nehru may have thought of Socialism as a universal religion- a Din Illahi. But Socialism has an infinity of squabbling sects. Also, that shit is stoooopid. The masses tell it to fuck off. They have their own leaders who will squeeze rents out of the modern sector and such of the middle class as can get by in the knowledge economy.
The period saw three fundamental accomplishments.
Which the British had already accomplished for India
Most foundational was the consolidation of the state and its assertion of sovereignty over the social.
Meaningless jibber jabber. Patel did a good job strong-arming the Princes- but that's about all that was required.
Law was established
by the Brits
as a basic tool for India's self-transformation. Law became the means to express the ambition to abolish caste and remedy historical injustice through 'reservations'.
Which were there in the 1935 bill passed by Westminster.
So too, unjust religious practices were changed through reform of Hindu law.
This was why the Hindus wanted democracy. The fact is, new laws had to be passed so as to prevent vexatious litigation over stuff like your parents having been sva-gotra and thus your not having a right to inherit.
Law is usually seen as the principle of stability, rather than of change, in society.
In India it is seen a fucking nuisance.
India's interpretation was unusual interpretation, and consequential.
But the entire legal system was and remains British.
It
No. The Brits
gave law and the courts a central role in our politics, not merely in defending rights but in pursuing social goals.
Or just being a fucking nuisance.
The decade's second defining impulse was the will to create institutions, from the Atomic Energy and Planning Commissions to the Election Commission (a body that has proved crucial to maintaining India as a democracy).
But Nehru kept the Salt Bureau. There is still an Indian Salt Service. Indeed, the Opium Bureau survives as the Central Bureau of Narcotics.
The performance of these institutional spawn was, and is, uneven. But overall, the energy invested in creating new institutions gave public life a structural density that has helped to sustain an open society.
Fuck off! Creating bureaucratic Departments does not sustain shit.
Third, the state secured the subcontinent as a zone of relative peace with conditions of economic stability under a democratic government.
Because nobody wanted any big chunk of a starving shithole. Anyway India had inherited a good army and a kick ass Police Service.
This sounds unremarkable, until one thinks of the rest of Asia in the decades after World War II.
They did better than India except for Burma after it got rid of Indians.
Across Asia, two patterns emerged: zones wracked by civil or interstate war
which, apart from Yemen and Afghanistan, still did better economically than India.
and a mosaic of authoritarian regimes. India, too, faced similar challenges; yet it managed to achieve a stable, inflation-free environment under an elected government. Without this feat, India's later development would have been impossible.
But this feat was only possible because that was what was inherited from the Brits. We might add that Hindus don't kill Hindus for religious reasons. That's it. That's the whole story. Having lots of Hindus and inheriting a British administrative and legal and political system makes for certain amenities. But if you have a Planning Commission doing stupid shit, then the economy worsens.
Many of today's battles revisit the 1950s trenches.
Which came up in the Thirties. The difference is the War economy made the Nehruvian path feasible.
How should the economy work? What is the role of the state?
Three things that did not happen during the 1950s were equally consequential. First and foremost: the government failed to educate the citizenry.
Because its citizens saw little benefit in education. A Prince, like the Gaekwad of Baroda, could enforce compulsory education- but only by extorting heavy fines from parents who didn't send their kids to school. What was important was the coercive power of the state. Obviously, the fact that no school exists is no excuse for your not sending your kid to school. However, there is little point prosecuting those who cannot pay. Bombay did make education compulsory in 1939 but refused to prosecute offenders. What did work and was feasible was paying a little money to get kids into schools. Travancore gave grants to poor families and then free mid-day meals. Only after attendance was 80 per cent did they make education compulsory.
From the Planners point of view. Free, compulsory education would have cost about 9 billion Rupees. The Government was only prepared to spend a little under 2 billion over the plan period. One positive aspect was that everybody agreed that Gandhian 'Basic Education' was a money-pit.
India began the decade with a mere 18 per cent of its population classed as literate; a decade later, the figure had increased by only 10 percentage points and 85 per cent of India's women remained illiterate. A useful comparison is China, whose per capita GDP in the 1950s was lower than India's. Although China began the 1950s with a literacy rate similar to India's, it made a concerted effort to educate women. Female literacy increased by around 3.5 per cent a year for much of the decade, and by the early 1960s, around 40 per cent of Chinese women were literate.
China could use compulsion. Also, Chinese officials who did not submit fabricated statistics tended to get shot.
The 1950s set a long pattern for education-rhetorical attention, practical neglect. And even that attention was fitful. Nehru's huge prime ministerial correspondence contains astonishingly little sustained discussion of primary education. And it is sobering to realise that even when Maulana Azad headed the education ministry, the ministry lacked competence to utilise the monies allocated to it.
The Maulana, gossip averred, was no friend of sobriety.
A second missed opportunity was the inability to alter India's unequal distribution of land ownership.
Land, like Education was a State subject.
Again, a comparison with other Asian countries shows that in the countries that later enjoyed sustained economic growth, land reform was a pillar-a key precondition of the East and South East Asian economic miracles.
Nonsense! Korea and Taiwan had land reform because the Japanese had been chased out. Japan had land reform imposed on it by the Americans. What land reform did Malaysia have? On the other hand, the Shah of Iran did impose land reform. It was a disaster. That's why he had to run away.
There was an American Ambassador who'd keep biting Nehru's ear off with demands for land reform. Nehru explained that the Indian farmer had shit for brains. Give him land and he will mortgage it to pay for his daughter's wedding. The older view, amongst Nehru's class, was that if the peasant has a good harvest and thus gets his hands on a good sum of money, he doesn't spend it on drink or dowries. He uses it to pay a lawyer to get him acquitted after he has killed a couple of his neighbors.
India's land policy (like its primary education policy) was in the hands of the regional state legislatures. The 1950s, when the Indian National Congress controlled both the Central and state legislatures, was the optimal time to push through legislation.
It was the optimal time to reduce the burden of Land Revenue/Agricultural Income Tax by 'benami' transactions- i.e. showing that all your land was actually owned by hundreds of starving imaginary people.
But the battle was evaded, and lost. The result was the forfeiture of a crucial instrument both to raise agricultural productivity and to effect economic redistribution, fundamental problems with which we still struggle.
This is misleading. People cared about their kids and their land and their religion. Interference in any of these areas carried a risk of a backlash. The optimal solution was where a vulnerable minority owned the land, they could be deprived of it with popular support. Otherwise, no matter what the legal regime, the strong would hold land though they may no longer pay any revenue for it.
A third failure was in the international realm. India's foreign policy during the 1950s is usually framed in the context of the Cold War's Soviet-American rivalry; many now criticise Nehru's policy of equidistance from the superpowers.
No. They think Nehru was a loony for getting suckered by the Chinese who took his pants down, wrecked his rectum, and caused him to die a broken man.
In fact, this was very effective, given India's interests and meagre resources. The actual failure lay elsewhere-the inability to work out a positive regional stance.
There could be none. The region was a shit show. Burma and Sri Lanka wanted rid of Indians and went crazy each in their own idiosyncratic way. Pakistan was always a shitshow and will always remain a shitshow. India wasn't wholly a shitshow- at least for Hindus.
This is most clear in the case of Pakistan. The irresolution of the Kashmir dispute has kept the subcontinent the least integrated region of Asia and has blocked the region's economic development.
What resolution could there be? What was important was the Indus Water treaty. Kashmir turned out to be a positive for India because Pakistan moved prematurely against it and this caused American aid to be cut down and thus it lost its chance to grow rapidly. Had Pakistan bided its time and done growth first before gambling on a military adventure, there was a chance that Hindu India would once again have faced an Islamic threat on its Western border. Indeed, in 1939, Gandhi predicted that Indian Muslims would ally with Punjabis to take over the subcontinent. The Hindus would be supine or divided. By weakening India, Nehru made Hindus more anxious to hang together rather than wait to hang separately.
Still more important was the failure of India's China policy, the country with which we share our longest border. Nehru's China policy, in which he was so personally invested, suffered a slow deflation through the closing years of the decade. The policy's collapse in October 1962, when Chinese forces routed Indian troops, should have come as no surprise. The cloud which ever since has enveloped our relations with China has only just, and slowly, begun to dissipate.
Khilnani was writing this 20 years ago. China had gone back to its Fifties approach but India can't be tempted in that direction.
It is striking how many of today's battles revisit the trenches of the 1950s.
There were no trenches in the Fifties. Nehru ruled, the conservatives drooled. They were stupider than him. They were welcome to use cow-dung to purify their houses while remembering their glory days in prison with the Maha-crackpot.
How should the economy work?
It shouldn't. That's something all Indian political parties are in agreement about. The thing should be a shitshow- just like the administration and the judiciary.
What should be the role of the state?
It should enrich those in power and their nephews and pimps.
What are the terms of redistribution?
Buying votes is not redistribution- it is commerce.
What role shall we have in the world?
That of the largest completely unimportant portion of humanity.
The persistence of these questions is cause for frustration-but also reassurance. Beginning in the 1950s, we have accrued a body of experience from which we can learn, if we choose to learn.
Or yearn, if we choose to yearn ; or churn if we choose to churn ; or earn a little money- which is what Khilnani is doing by writing this facile shite.
Authoritarian societies, committed to forgetting, obliterate their pasts.
Crap societies, committed to being crap, talk worthless shite about their past and future and present.
They live in a permanent present, defined by the exercise of political will. Democracy is the most historical of political forms.
Except for monarchy.
Indeed, it is nothing else but history.
That's monarchy.
And the 1950s launched us on a historical quest: to try to master our present by making whatever sense we can of our own cumulative choices.
That might help us masturbate but it won't help us master shit.
Our own history is the resource we have to drawOkay, okay. I get it. Khilnani can suck his own cock. He is a Yogi-Bhogi. Good for him. Perhaps he has attained immortality. Fifty years from now he'll still be recycling this article by drawing on his own resources- i.e. sucking himself off.
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