In a previous post I explained why Taylor Sherman's 'seven myths' about Nehru were themselves myths. People who lived through the period understood what was happening better than current historians doing wholly useless 'archival research'.
In this post I will look in detail at another revisionist account given by Sherman of 'Sarvodaya' which Indians knew to be shit. That is why, after Indira returned to power, nobody raised a peep when Buta Singh put the boot into various Gandhian NGOs.
A Gandhian answer to the threat of communism? Sarvodaya and postcolonial nationalism in India Taylor C. Sherman London School of Economics and Political Science
It is an axiom of early postcolonial Indian history that Nehru and his statist conception of nationalism and of economic development dominated the political and economic life of India.
This is true. Politics in India is about gaining State power- the leaders get Ministerial offices, the rank and file get government jobs or contracts. Financiers of political parties, get to monopolize particular areas of the economy. No doubt, there were nutters roaming around in the rural areas pretending to be very Saintly or very Marxist, but they were laughed at. Politics is about Government jobs or contracts- nothing else.
As such, scholars have assumed, Gandhian ideas, especially radically non-statist answers to the problems of development, lost influence in this period.
They lost influence in 1937 when things like 'Nai Talim' (Basic Education) and 'khaddar' were discovered to be useless money-pits. Going forward, only one thing mattered- Government jobs and contracts while the Financiers got industrial licenses and soft loans.
This article explores Gandhian economic thinking, in the form of the Bhoodan Movement
which was a fraud. JP only came to understand this when the Naxals explained it to him. After that, he tried to get back into, first Bihari politics and then politics at the center. But, by choosing Morarji as PM, he destroyed his own legacy.
and three of the thinkers on sarvodaya economics in the 1950s: Vinoba Bhave,
who had agreed to roam around in the countryside while leaving all the money and the jobs in the hands of Nehru
K.G. Mashruwala
who had zero importance. He died in 1952.
and J.C. Kumarappa.
who did try to fight Nehru. He lost and was confined to Tamil Nadu where nobody gave a toss about him.
It goes on to demonstrate the complex relationship that these men and their ideas had with Nehru and various levels of the Indian state.
There was no relationship. Kumarappa was a Chartered Accountant with a Masters in Econ from some American University. He had some salience in the early Thirties but was subsequently ignored. Nehru had no time for him. To be fair, nobody did.
It argues that the non-statist ideas remained important in the development of the postcolonial Indian nationalism.
Some silly Westerners may have thought Bhoodan was a success. Indians didn't. The thing was a joke. When it comes to land, the only thing that matters is fungible title- i.e. stuff you can sell for money. Bhoodan didn't give anyone this. That is why there are 'Gramdaan' villages demanding to be stripped of that status so people can sell up and fuck off to the City.
Over the past decade or more, a reassessment of the early postcolonial history of South Asia has begun as historians have started to unearth new archival sources.
They are shit. Sensible people don't leave a paper trail. By contrast, any bureaucratic fantasy can get into the official record.
Independence and partition are no longer seen as a single moment, but as long, tangled processes.
They are seen in this way only by cretins. Both were once and for all events. They weren't 'processes' at all. On the other hand it is true that Mahatma Gandhi's assassination was a long tangled process. He'd keep getting up from his pyre and try running away till he was shot a few more times and carried back to the cremation ground. It was only in 1973, that Sanjay Gandhi succeeded in chopping off his head and driving a stake through his heart after which the old coot finally crumbled into ashes.
New research into citizenship, secularism and corruption has given us a more complex, and less rose-tinted view of India’s early years.
Mummy and Daddy, who lived through those years, had no such 'rose-tinted' view. That is why they either themselves emigrated or, at the very least, encouraged us to do so.
Even as this new research has questioned some of the earlier beliefs about the years of Nehru’s premiership (1947–64), two assumptions about the Nehruvian period have remained largely unexamined. The first is the centrality of the state to the programmes of economic development in this early postcolonial period.
The State did become central with the second Five year plan. Previously, there was much continuity with the British period though you could see that foreign 'Managing Agencies' were under siege. Still, the fact is, the Marwaris who took over such concerns generally managed to run them into the ground very quickly.
The second, and consequential, assumption is that Gandhian economic thought and Gandhian political activism were marginalised under Nehru.
They were. Bhave was a good sport about it because he preferred roaming around the countryside. JP was foolish enough to follow him. This was because the man was a cretin.
The research below casts a fresh eye on these two pillars of early independent Indian political life through an examination of the Bhoodan Yajna (Land-gifts Mission).
Bhave would also advocate gifting away entire villages- or even the entire state of Bihar. He thought farmers should give up the use of bullocks or horses or other animals. This was called 'rishi-kheti'. Why did people follow that nutter? One answer is that they could then invade the houses of richer villagers and search the place for dirty books or dirty pictures.
The Bhoodan Yajna was a Gandhian movement, initiated by Acharya Vinoba Bhave in 1951 as a step towards solving India’s ‘land problem’ and the communist uprisings which grew from it.
Land was a State subject. Some States had already made some progress towards land reform while in others the provisions of the Acts which were passed were evaded in one way or another. One ploy was to claim to have given away land in 'bhoodan'. This just meant pretending the land occupied by your laborers actually belonged to them. Since they had no legal title, the thing was meaningless.
Bhave, along with other prominent Gandhian thinkers, drew up blueprints for an economy based on the Gandhian principles of radical decentralisation that were encompassed in the idea of sarvodaya (uplift for all).
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi went a step further. He advocated yogic levitation for all. Why walk when you can fly? He made billions. Sadly, Mia Farrow wouldn't sleep with him.
An exploration of the Bhoodan movement, and the economic thinking of which it was part, first of all, throws a new light on Gandhian thought and nationalist politics after independence.
No. It merely proves that Indians thought stupid shit of that sort might fool the rustics because they were as stupid as shit.
Although, there has been a sharp increase in research on Gandhi’s thought of late,
because non-STEM subject academics have become stupider than shit
much of the existing research implicitly assumes that the ideas died with the man.
They were dead by 1937. Still, some money could be found for Gandhian schemes because it provided jobs for the boys and enabled the strangling of the organized textile sector which might start financing some other political party.
Even before the death of Gandhi in 1948, scholars have assumed that Gandhian approaches to India’s economic questions were either side-lined, or thoroughly co-opted, at least rhetorically, by India’s planners.
This was true. Everybody knew the maha-crackpot's schemes were money-pits. At least Basic Education pissed off the Muslims. Otherwise, as Zakir Hussain admitted, it was a stupid fraud.
Moreover, it has been argued that the nationalist leadership, now the ruling elite, sought to rein in Gandhian political activism, in the form of non-violent protest, as nationalism was directed through the channels of the state.
There was no need to rein in Bhave. He fucked off to the countryside willingly enough. The big surprise was that JP joined him. But then JP, like Kripalani, had never got to fuck his own wife. Eunuchs of that sort were bound to end up doing stupid shit
The transition to independence did indeed raise questions about the nature and direction the nationalist movement might take.
Nehru had the answer. Socialism of a vaguely Stalinist sort. Back then, that was what the cool kids were into.
But the existing scholarship elides the fact that each nationalist campaign had had not only negative, rule-breaking elements, but also positive, constructive elements, usually concerned with village reconstruction.
Nehru did bring in some American dude to do Village development. But he had a low opinion of rustics. If they developed- i.e. got a bit of money- they were bound to give it to some priest or else pay a lawyer to get them acquitted after they killed a relative or a neighbor.
It is argued below that this latter aspect of Gandhian thought, in the form of decentralised, non-statist (even anti-statist) efforts at economic transformation continued to be developed after independence.
They weren't developed. They simply festered in the more stagnant parts of the countryside.
This was so for a number of reasons. First of all, it continued because a spiritual successor to Gandhi emerged in the form of Vinoba Bhave, who took on the task of furthering Gandhi’s programme of village regeneration, and developed it in new ways via the Bhoodan movement.
Bhave had agreed to fuck off to the countryside leaving all the money and power with Nehru. That's why he was tolerated.
Second, whilst Nehru and the Congress leadership did discourage Gandhian-style political protests,
like what? The fact is beef bans were instituted in some states. Equally, there was State reorganization- e.g. the creation of Andhra Pradesh after some dude fasted to death.
they were also searching for ways of channelling the constructive energies of India’s masses to fight a new war, this time for India’s economic independence.
That was the idea behind the Second Five Year plan. But it quickly ran out of money. After that, Nehru concentrated on losing wars and biting the American hand which fed India.
Moreover, early postcolonial India never had the resources to pursue centralised planning for the entire economy.
It had some resources- the British war-time debt for example- and was getting some 'free money' from America. It could have invested those in exportable wage-good industries and thus had more foreign exchange for more such investment so the country climbed the value chain. That was what Japan's MITI was doing.
And the Constitution restricted the scope of government action when it came to land reform.
No. But it was a State subject and the Center was happy for it to remain so. The Center ceased to levy agricultural income tax in 1961 though some States continued to do so.
Therefore, in the agrarian sector, the government had to limit itself to acting as a catalyst for change and encouraging independent improvements.
No. It could have had a Green Revolution in the Fifties. It just couldn't be arsed.
It is argued below that Gandhian non-statist economic thought and activity pursued by the three thinkers examined here, Vinoba Bhave, J.C. Kumarappa and K.G. Mashruwala, existed in productive tension with the statist policies of the Nehru government.
There was no fucking tension. Only Kumarappa tried to fight Nehru but he was kicked in the goolies and subsequently ignored. One may say there was some tension between those who favored private enterprise and less capital-intensive development and the Mahalanobis camp but the latter won hands down. It was a Pyrrhic victory because the cash ran out. Budgets matter. Plans do not. Still, by then the license-permit system had been 'captured' by powerful business houses.
This is because these Gandhian approaches seemed to provide answers to the pressing questions of how to direct the energies of the masses, and of how to foster economic change with limited state resources.
Why tax alcohol to fund Schools? Let the students 'earn while they learn'. Moreover, with 'each one teach one', India will soon become a country where everybody has a PhD in Quantum Physics.
These Gandhian thinkers, although reasonably well known, have not been subjected to much scholarly scrutiny.
But they were laughed at often enough.
Ramachandra Guha is
a cretin. Naturally he likes other cretins.
one of the few authors to evaluate these men, their thought and their achievements, albeit in very brief essays. The work in which Guha does this is, by his own estimation, a work of ‘appreciation and depreciation, not an impersonal work of “scholarship”’. Indeed, Kumarappa and Bhave appear in Guha’s work as ‘adversaries’.
They were. Bhave never forgot that Kumarappa had refused to sanction the use of donated funds to pay Gandhi's Ashramites for 'relief work'. This was because those nutters were utterly useless. Also the fellow was a fucking Christian! He probably ate beef and drank wine and, worst of all, had sex with his wife! I tell you, Christianity is a Satanic Religion! That is why Amrika is so rich. Now those bastards are trying to corrupt Mother India by giving 'free money'- i.e. trying to seduce her into wearing lipstick and brassiere! Chee, chee! Mummy should just starve to death muttering 'Ahimsa! Ahimsa!' She should not be gadding about in tight blouse and silk saree.
Moreover, they stride his stage as hero and villain, as Kumarappa’s humble and practical approach to village reconstruction is contrasted to that of Bhave, who is condemned as ‘devoid of the capacity for self-criticism’ and suffering from a ‘lop-sided sense of priorities’.
Guha is Tamil- like Kumarappa. Bhave was a Hindu Saint.
Guha has then been followed by other scholars, who paint Kumarappa as the true Gandhian, adhering to an anti-statist programme, and declare Bhave to be, pro-state, and pro-Nehru, though no evidence is cited to substantiate this assertion.
The evidence is that Bhave was happy to leave all the money and power in Nehru's hands. He liked wandering around the countryside. Since he was a devout Hindu, there probably was religious merit to be gained by taking his 'darshan'.
Although, there were important differences between the three Gandhian thinkers discussed below, the following research suggests that it is not necessarily helpful to regard those individual Gandhians, who developed the Mahatma’s ideas after his death as in competition with one another over Gandhi’s legacy.
But that research is not helpful at all. It is stupid.
Instead, Gandhian thought—Gandhi himself rejected the idea of Gandhism for its implied rigidity —was, true to its origins, both flexible and capable of encompassing different opinions on an issue. Indeed, Vinoba declared, ‘there is not a single problem in life…whereon all the close associates of Gandhi will declare the same mind’. And this was as it should be: ‘it is much better to allow thought to work freely than to beat and drive and shut it up into the rigidity of a system’.
This is certainly true if the thoughts in question are stupid and useless. Still, maybe Bhave's followers gained religious merit and have been re-born on paradisal planets where they live for ten billion years without having sex or looking at dirty pictures.
The research which follows, therefore, remains sensitive to the differences between these thinkers, but aims to tease out the common economic programme that united them in the first decade after independence.
Kumarappa wanted to raise agricultural productivity without much capital investment. This involved stuff like composting and other such shibboleths of the agrarian socialists of an earlier period in the West. Bhave's idea was village communities as one big, happy, family which shared and shared alike and abstained from looking at dirty pictures. There were also some cottage industry enthusiasts. Sadly some earlier schemes, which featured Morris dancing or learning to hang from trees by your tail while eating bananas, fell by the wayside.
For these early postcolonial Gandhian economic thinkers, capitalism and communism were more similar than different, and both were equally flawed.
Like Sex. Nobody should have sex. It is dirty.
As an alternative, these men articulated a vision of economic organisation that was based on the principles that they believed would truly liberate not only India, but the world from the troubles spawned by the existing economic ideologies.
Also people should learn yogic levitation. You could hover in the air shitting on your crops so that they gain valuable fertilizer.
India’s Land Problem and the Threat of Communism All of these questions arose because India’s future seemed to hinge on how to reform agrarian relations so as to ensure economic progress and avoid political revolution.
But the Brits had given the States the power to do as much or as little land reform as they liked. True, the Courts might try to stop this but it is an easy matter to beat the fuck out of Judges till they see sense.
Anyway, it was the Americans who kept biting Nehru's ear off about land reform.
By 1947, the idea that the country had a ‘land problem’ was one of the orthodoxies held across the political spectrum in India.
AO Hume founded the INC because he understood this problem. His mistake was to think Indians gave a shit about agriculture.
Of course, this issue had a long history, one tied intimately to India’s experience of colonialism. It had been a maxim of the nationalist movement that British rule had impoverished India.
Kumarappa got his Econ degree hoping to prove the 'drain thesis'. But nobody actually believed it. The fact is, after Burma went its own way in 1937, an almost wholly agricultural country could not feed itself.
And after independence, it was universally agreed that in order to secure India’s economic freedom, the land problem had to be addressed.
Some State Governments, e.g. Fazlul Haq in Bengal, had already begun land-reform. The Communists knew that collectivization was the orthodox solution but didn't want to admit this. Nehru's own half-way house was the Village Cooperative but Charan Singh put his foot down. Meanwhile there had been about as much land reform as was feasible. Some absentee landlord did lose a lot of land. Others were able to retain considerable 'benami' holdings. But productivity could only rise if there was infrastructure investment, availability of hybrid seeds, nitrogenous fertilizers etc. Still, it was only when American food-aid became conditional, that India embraced a partial Green Revolution- i.e. one centered on a few districts with decent infrastructure.
Sherman offers an American style analysis where Bhave's bhoodan was seen as a way to outflank the Communists. But this was not the Indian view. Why? We knew the Commies were lying. They didn't give a shit about 'land to the tiller'. Still, those tillers who belonged to dominant castes would take the land one way or another. Anyway, only an actual agriculturist caste politicians- people like Chavan or Charan Singh- had any salience. Their people would decide the outcome in any case. As for Commies, it is actually great fun to hunt them down and kill them. Since the Army was recruited from the sons of 'kulaks', killing kulaks led to swift retribution.
. After Gandhi’s death, Vinoba and a selection of other Gandhian thinkers, including J.C. Kumarappa and K.G. Mashruwala, developed the notion further.
They didn't develop shit. Mashruwala knew 'Nai Talim' had failed. Bhave knew Congress had no use for Gandhian nutters but bore no malice because he liked wandering around the countryside. Kumarappa was easily marginalized. This was because Nehru did not matter. Kamraj Nadar did. You need to get the ear of actual farmer's leaders if you want to shape agricultural policy.
Whilst they debated with them, Vinoba and his fellow travellers adopted many of the same concerns as the communists, and proposed their own solutions to India’s problems.
If the Commies told stupid lies, the Gandhians could easily match them.
In fact, their quarrel was as much with capitalism as it was with communism.
Neither of which mattered in an almost wholly agrarian country. Still, so long as the farmer could scarcely feed himself while America fed the Cities, some urban blathershites could engage in pointless debates.
Drawing upon Gandhi’s works, as well as Geddes’ Cities in Evolution, and the thought of the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati,
unknown in the North. Tamils would be surprised to hear he had any thoughts.
together they elaborated a critique of capitalist and communist political economy, and sketched out a vision of a non-violent social and economic revolution for India, and for the world.
If everybody is very nice, then niceness will increase. Also, yogic levitation can come in handy if you want to poop upon your crops.
One of Vinoba’s close associates, K.G. Mashruwala, developed the most elaborate critique of the two systems.
Even the Gujjus thought him retarded. Bhave, however, was a Brahmin Saint. Getting blessing from him might get you a better re-birth.
In Mashruwala’s view, capitalism and communism shared more than their warring proponents cared to admit. They held a common ‘attitude towards life’, and were based on similar fundamental principles. Both, according to Mashruwala, were premised on the idea that there was an inherent conflict between man and nature, and that the development of man was dependent upon his successful exploitation of the environment around him. The aim of both was to expand profits, trade and commerce in order to ‘achieve as much as possible, and as rapidly as possible with as few men and animals as possible’.
By contrast, India wanted to achieve nothing by being as stupid as possible. Did you know that Stalin had sex? So did Churchill! Tell me, how can you differentiate between two such utterly Satanic personalities? As for FDR, I tell you, he was looking at dirty pictures all the time!
In an economy and society inspired by the sarvodaya approach, things would be much different.
There would be no dirty pictures.
One of the major thinkers on the question of how to build a Gandhian economy was J.C. Kumarappa. A Christian from Tanjore in today’s Tamil Nadu, Kumarappa
his original name was Cornelius. He came from an excellent family
had received his education in commerce and economics at Syracuse and then Columbia universities in the United States.
He had qualified as a CA in Britain. Ten years later he did a Masters in America.
Unlike Mashruwala or Bhave, Kumarappa took up a number of positions within the Congress Party and at various levels of government during his career. He was, for example, a member of the Congress Party’s National Planning Commission. But in 1952, he helped in founding the Arthik Samata Mandal (Association for Economic Equality), in protest at some of Nehru’s economic policies.
They weren't particularly radical at that time. Interestingly, conservative Finance Ministers tended to embrace Nehruvian gigantism once they understood that begging bowl diplomacy might bring in 'free money'. Nobody told them about the crowding out effect. Free money is inflationary.
As they outlined their vision for a Gandhian economy, Kumarappa, Bhave and Mashruwala,
showed that though their souls might be very holy, their heads were full of shit.
placed two objectives at the centre of their plans: self-sufficiency and the spiritual and moral development of the individual as a man (women’s economic, spiritual and moral development were largely ignored).
If men stopped sticking their dicks into women, they would soon rise up on their own.
With these goals in mind, and adhering to the Gandhian principles of truth
i.e. telling stupid lies
and non-violence,
sulking
these thinkers visualised alternative arrangements for employment, production, consumption and trade.
Instead of producing stuff, why not send good thoughts into the Cosmos?
Together they insisted that the starting point for thinking about any economic arrangements ought to be providing employment for all.
This can be easily done by getting rid of money. We can now give everybody a job by paying them with good wishes.
Employment was the key not only for self-sufficiency at the individual level, but also for the development of one’s personality. In Kumarappa’s words, ‘Work is to our higher faculties what food is to the physical body. The occupation we follow should contribute towards the growth of our personality.’
When a Chartered Accountant tells you that, you tell him he is deluding himself. He would have been a boring pile of shite even if he had trained as a belly dancer.
Such an approach required a different attitude to work, especially to manual labour, as well as to remuneration. Men ought to be paid for their work, but wages should not be based on an appraisal of a man’s physical or intellectual skill. Rather, everyone who wholeheartedly served society would be entitled to a ‘living wage’.
If you are alive, then whatever you receive equals that 'living wage'.
From employment, these men naturally turned to the question of production. Here, the aims of personal development and self-sufficiency were developed further. Just as Gandhi had been wary of the effects of industrialisation and mechanisation, these three men, too, were sceptical of the value of an industrialised economy. Industrialisation, especially factory work, Kumarappa argued, was ‘not conducive to the growth of the whole man and his full development as a personality’.
But being a Gandhian blathershite had an even more poisonous impact on that nutter's personality.
Indeed, the repetitive, mindless work of the factory worker only ensured that ‘men are made part of the machine’
whereas the machine should be made to work more like men. It should take lessons in salsa dancing and consider whether maybe it is gay, not just bi-curious.
to a point where they lose initiative. The alternative was to choose a form of work that would contribute to the personality. As everyone was to work, this meant choosing means of production that were labour intensive, rather than labour-saving. As such, production ought to be decentralised, devolved to the village.
This was before Mao came up with the idea of backyard steel furnaces.
Production was to focus first and foremost on food, clothing and shelter for everyone, and then on village industries.
These nutters hadn't noticed that production already focused on these things.
On the one hand, these priorities clearly reflected India’s economic crisis of the early 1950s. During this period, the country suffered from severe shortages and was on the border of famine at times.
Affluent Indians knew that their poor were at the mercy of the monsoons. But they themselves were not. The poor could go and self-sufficiently fuck themselves.
As such, the first priority of the nationalists was to feed India’s population. Bhave and his associates shared this aim; but they thought the best way to achieve it was through cultivation for family-level and village-level self-sufficiency in food. On the other hand, self-sufficiency was not just a matter of survival. Village industries, including the production of cloth, oil and jaggery were the key components of the drive for self-sufficiency because they were central to man’s spiritual development.
Which involves not looking at dirty pictures. Bhave knew that India could not just feed itself but export a lot of food if only ten million people remained as farmers and the rest worked in factories or in construction etc. But, in that case Indians might start looking at dirty pictures.
A man working in a village industry would make a full product himself, rather than serving on a production line: to do so he would have to be resourceful and creative. His work would then become a means of self-expression. In Kumarappa’s words: ‘It helps one to grow.’
To grow stupid and to die prematurely- sure.
This was a question of personal as well as national well-being, for the cultivation of this kind of independent thought was required in a young democratic country: ‘Politically village industries provide the conditions for the development of democracy.’
The development of the democracy of the country which invades India- maybe. But Indians knew that without guns and planes and tanks, the country would once again be subjugated by an alien- or semi-alien (i.e. Pakistan)- race.
The inputs for such production were to be chosen for their non-violent characteristics.
The Royal Navy had enabled India to enjoy Pax Britannica. But the Brits had fucked off.
Here, ahimsa (non-violence) was understood along the more substantive lines imagined by Gandhi.
If you keeps muttering Ahimsa, the invader may be content to loot and enslave you rather than sodomize you and then slit your throat.
Echoing theories of imperialism developed by Hobson and Lenin, Kumarappa suggested that violence, in the form of imperialism, was a danger when economies over-produced one product, or when they were overreliant upon non-renewable inputs.
Very little violence was involved in the creation of the British Raj. Imperialism thrives if it runs things better than any available alternative. Sadly, it may decide the game is not worth the candle.
Thus, he reasoned that, each country should focus on producing food, clothing and shelter to meet the needs of its people first and foremost.
He hadn't noticed that this had been happening for thousands of years.
As far as possible, therefore, in a Gandhian economy, raw materials ought not to be exported, but rather, they ought to be processed where they were harvested.
Because there are no economies of scope and scale in manufacturing- right?
To this end, Bhave suggested that the Government of India ought to declare some areas of production to be ‘reserved industries’, so that only villages where raw materials were produced would be allowed to develop industries that used those products.
Something like this did happen. The Ambanis got their start because they were actually villagers growing polyethylene terephthalate on their small holding.
Moreover, in a Gandhian economy, one should develop industries based on what today we would call renewable resources. Kumarappa divided natural resources into two categories: those that belonged to what he called the ‘current economy’, and those that made up the ‘reservoir economy’. The former were permanent, in that they were renewable; the latter were not.
Sadly Kumarappa was not renewable. When he died, he stayed dead.
Again, like Lenin and Hobson, Kumarappa argued that the depletion of natural resources that were of a fixed quantity, such as iron or oil, led to competition and ultimately violence.
Kumarappa hadn't noticed that the Arabs had reached Sindh before they had any oil. Violence existed even in the stone age.
Instead, renewables were the key to peace: ‘The more we base our order on the current economy, the less will be the violence.’
Sadly, nations with stone age technology soon get displaced by invaders who are more efficient at killing.
The ethics of production was accompanied by a corresponding ethics of consumption. Here too, Bhave and his fellow travellers relied on two indigenous terms, developed earlier by Gandhi: tapas (austerity) and aparagriha (non-possession).
Though what sustained Gandhi was donations- more particularly from industrialists
Tapas was ideal because an attitude of austerity encouraged one to sacrifice one’s land, labour or property for others.
e.g. invaders. Why not also sacrifice one's anal cherry to them?
The idea was to aspire to spiritual fulfilment via the pursuit of self-discipline in the form of restricted consumption, rather than self-indulgence in the form of over-consumption.
Gain spiritual fulfilment by just dropping dead already.
Non-possession was an extension of austerity and an essential characteristic of a non-violent society. Bhave connected aparagriha to an understanding of the origins of happiness. ‘At present’, he observed, ‘greed and possession are…the ruling principle the world over.’
That is why people are looking at dirty pictures. Chee chee!
But as a man pursues wealth, he not only becomes burdened with worry and disease, he also loses the ‘love of his fellow men’.
Bhave had to keep moving around otherwise his 'fellow men' would have realized he was a stupid bore.
As a result, both rich and poor were unhappy in the present order of things. The solution was to swap the ideal of possession for the ideal of non-possession.
Just fucking drop dead already.
Of course, this ideal did not rule out consumption altogether.
Nor did it rule out being as rich as fuck.
But one had to live within one’s means, and use resources following the principles of non-violence. Thus, the Gandhian consumer would not consume anything produced in unethical circumstances.
Sadly, the also refuse to eat my shit even though I produced it in a very ethical manner.
Kumarappa held that when one used a product that had been made using dishonourable methods, then one became party to the violence of production.
Thus Kumarappa was a party to the violence of Jim Crow America because he had gone there and used their stuff.
Violence, in this sense, was broadly conceived, and included exploitation of labour by paying people less than was required to make a living.
In which case, they would cease living.
Kumarappa went on to speculate that if a consumer were only made aware of the fact that the price he was paying was not fair to the labourers behind a product, then, ‘he himself will probably not be at peace’.
Yet this guy ate food though he knew that the dudes growing it weren't paid fairly at all.
This natural morality of the consumer, in Kumarappa’s thinking, could be brought to the fore in reorganising the world’s economic order.
But that requires either financial or military power. These guys had neither.
Sherman records Government support for Bhave's Bhoodan but focuses only on the Communist threat as its motivation. Actually, Nehru needed a way to silence the Americans who were pushing land reform as a panacea. Also, the new Hyderabad State needed a respite to consolidate itself.
. Nehru invited Bhave to New Delhi to speak to the members of the Planning Commission who had just drawn up a draft for the country’s first Five Year Plan. Whilst in the capital, he met the Prime Minister and the President, and spent hours in conversation with the Planning Commission’s S.K. Patil. How might we understand this relationship? On the practical level, it was obvious to Nehru that India’s land problem needed a solution that could both overcome the opposition of the landlords, and circumvent the constitutional requirement to provide compensation to the landlords for any land taken away from them. The Bhoodan movement, if successful, could further both of these aims.
More particularly because any given landlord could be pressurized into doing it though he might take the matter to court later on.
On a different plane, after Gandhi’s death, Indian politics had seemed to lose its ethical dimension. Because of his own exemplary life, Bhave’s association with the political elites in Delhi would invest their decisions with greater authority.
He could get the Americans off Nehru's back. After all, India has snake-charmers and Yogis who lie on beds of nails- right? Obviously, they'd do land-reform in their own way.
This was not all cynical political posturing: Nehru was genuinely bereft at Gandhi’s passing,
his passing gas, maybe. But, the truth is, nobody missed that nuisance.
not just personally, but politically too.
Nonsense! If Gandhi had not died, Nehru would have had to imprison him sooner or later.
Bhave was consciously (if only partially) embraced as a potential successor to Gandhi as the moral guiding light to the nation. Gandhian nationalism had a strong ethical dimension, and Bhave’s reception represented an acknowledgement that the ethical aspect of the national movement could have a place in postcolonial nationalism.
Hilarious! This silly lady doesn't get that there was always an 'ethical' aspect to Indian nationalism.
That being said, Bhave was not able to replace the Mahatma.
He didn't try. The maha-crackpot was, first and last, a fund raiser.
Nehru often replied to Bhave’s letters about larger subjects, from the redrawing of India’s internal borders to the goals of a planned economy, with a simple acknowledgement that they did not see the issue from the same perspective.
Also Nehru ate meat and had sex. That type of behavior can cause people to start looking at dirty pictures.
Within the Government of Hyderabad, Vinoba’s mission in Telangana was also well received.
Hopefully some nice Muslim or Commie would shoot him thus permitting another big massacre.
For one, he had access to the areas that had been off-limits to the authorities.
Those areas hadn't been 'off-limits' to the Army.
Whereas officials had mostly let the force of arms convey their anticommunist message to the people, they were pleased to have someone talking to the masses. B. Ramakrishna Rao,
who passed their first Tenancy act
then minister for Land Revenues and Education, voiced the hope that the communist leaders would hear Vinoba’s message and ‘realise
they themselves weren't the stupidest people on the planet. Why should the Reds have the monopoly go lying about what they would do with the land? Landlords too could pretend they had given 'land to the tiller'.
the harm they are doing to the country by the violent methods adopted by them’.102 As it became clear that the Acharya had received donations of more than 12,000 acres of land in Telangana, the Government of Hyderabad did what it could to assist the transfer of property rights.
Back then, civil servants still retained some British era illusions re. Government promises.
The government drew up special land revenue rules to this end: transfers were exempted from stamp duty and registration fees; land revenue was remitted for three years on wastelands brought under cultivation within two years of the grants; the state government provided 5,000 rupees in travelling expenses to the local committee, which was to oversee the distribution of lands, and it instructed the local revenue officers to ‘provide all facilities’ to the members of the committee, to aid in the success of the mission.
Bhoodan committees did provide a few jobs- and opportunities for unjust enrichment- for Party members.
By 1953, B. Ramakrishna Rao, now the newly elected chief minister, Swami Ramananda Tirtha, president of the Hyderabad State Congress, and Chandi Jaganatham, secretary of the Praja Socialist Party had all become members of the Hyderabad State Bhoodan Yajna Association.
Lots of people gained land from the peasants by getting a seat on such 'Associations'.
Again, it is clear that the Bhoodan movement was not side-lined at the state level. Nor can we say it was simply incorporated, rhetorically, into the existing statist programmes. Instead, we see Hyderabadi politicians engaging with the movement in two ways. Like Nehru, they seized the opportunity to find a solution to the land problem that avoided the pitfalls of working through the formal mechanisms of government.
i.e. actually doing the thing
At the same time, especially by 1953, the activities of these elected politicians can be seen as an attempt to set the agenda for postcolonial nationalism.
Elected politicians set agendas everywhere and at all times. This silly lady doesn't get this.
It would not be a nationalism of confrontation and law-breaking.
Because there was no fucking Imperial power. But there was plenty of confrontation and law-breaking.
But nor need it be completely directed solely by the state. Instead, participation in the Bhoodan movement seemed to offer the prospect of charting a course for postcolonial nationalism that would continue the constructive, non-statist, popular side of the nationalist programme.
No. What soon became clear was that the thing was purely cosmetic. Lawyers appreciated this new tool to defeat the ends of justice.
Conclusions Gandhian economic ideas were not marginalised by Nehru and the planners of postcolonial India; they were simply non-statist.
They provided an excuse for doing nothing or extracting a rent from existing producers.
Bhave, Mashruwala and Kumarappa were seeking bottom-up solutions to India’s economic problems, solutions which were orientated towards the cultivation of the individual.
They were useless nutters. However, they could be useful to pull the wool over the eyes of stupid foreigners who might be inclined to fill India's begging bowl from time to time.
As such, they engaged in conversation with politicians and officials, but their vision of the respective roles of the state and of the individual was so different from Nehru’s that these ideas could not have been incorporated into existing plans.
Sadly, no sensible ideas were incorporated into the Second Five Year plan.
Both Nehru and Bhave were keenly aware of this. The engagement that we see from politicians and officials can, instead, be understood as
cosmetic and useless. The sad thing is that some stupid mathematical economists were able to take the country in the wrong direction.
a means of trying to develop the constructive, popular and even ethical aspects of the nationalist movement in a new postcolonial environment. As for the ideas themselves, the broader political ideas of Bhave, Mashruwala and Kumarappa, help fill the gap in the intellectual history of India.
No. They were a throwback, or echo, of previous stupidity. While the Brits ruled, there may have been some point to coming across as a species of Holier-than-Thou Quaker. But not after Independence.
Beyond their economic ideas, these three men thought and wrote widely on spiritual matters, a side of early Indian nationalism that has only begun to be explored.
By whom? Indians had explored the fuck out of that shit when it first appeared.
On the political side, Gandhi’s death (1948) and the Emergency (1975–77)
which Bhave supported
are connected by these thinkers, and also by the persona of Jayaprakash Narayan, who was a close associate of Gandhi,
no. He was a close associate of Bhave.
dedicated his life to sarvodaya and rural uplift in the 1950s and 1960s, and led the Navnirman movement in the 1970s
JP led the 'sampoorna kranti' shitshow in Bihar. Navnirman was Gujarati.
which helped to precipitate the Emergency. Indeed, Gandhian non-statist movements are a thread that runs through Indian popular politics from independence, to the advent of the Aam Aadmi party in the twenty-first century, a thread which remains largely unexplored by historians.
Indians know their history better than 'historians'. The fact is, only very stupid people do PhDs in History. Gandhi-giri is about getting government jobs and contracts. 'Non-statist' movements may involve getting some money from credulous Westerners by peddling nostrums of various sorts. But the better solution is to teach people how to levitate and thus become a billionaire. Why content yourself with telling stupid lies about economics or politics? Why not tell stupid lies about the gaining of magical powers?
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