[The following text is Aditya Mukherjee’s presidential address at the 82nd session of Indian History Congress (IHC), conducted from December 28-30, 2023, at Kakatiya University, in Warangal, Telangana. Mukherjee, who was earlier with the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in his presidential address, spoke about the IHC’s role in the promotion of scientific, secular and anti-imperialist history over the past 85 years. This is the third and final part of a long speech. The earlier parts have been published in the previous issues of Janata Weekly.]

Building Democracy

The threat to Indian democracy posed by communalism, or by ‘communal fascism’, as Amartya Sen, perhaps first, described it,[109] is now perceived globally. Michelguglielmo Torri, arguably the foremost Italian scholar on India, has outlined the rapid growth in recent years of the forces trying to transform India’s secular democracy into a Hindu State (Rashtra) and the repressive authoritarian manner in which it is being done, leading to a situation where he says India can no longer be called a full democracy.[110] In fact, international bodies such as the V-Dem Institute of Sweden, the US-based Freedom House, and The Economist’s EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit), which produces the Democracy Index, are no longer accepting India as a full democracy. ‘A democratic backsliding’ is said to be occurring and India is being variously described as ‘a partially free democracy’, ‘a flawed democracy’ or even ‘an electoral autocracy’. The downgrading was based on what was perceived as the current regime promoting anti-minority feeling and legislation, the violation of human rights with ‘the diminishing of freedom of expression, the media and civil society hav(ing) gone the furthest’.[111]

How far we have moved from Nehru’s dream? What can we learn from Nehru?

For Jawaharlal Nehru, democracy and civil liberties were absolute values, which could not be compromised for any goal, however laudable, be it planning, economic development or social justice. This impacted critically on how these other goals were sought to be achieved. “I would not”, declared Nehru, “give up the democratic system for anything”.[112] In this he was reflecting faith in a non-negotiable core of the Indian national movement, democracy and civil liberties, best expressed by Mahatma Gandhi in his inimitable idiom: “Civil liberty consistent with the observance of non-violence … is the foundation of freedom. There is no room there for dilution or compromise. It is the water of life. I have never heard of water being diluted”.[113]

The 1931 Karachi Resolution of the Congress, which formed the basic kernel of the future Constitution of India, and was drafted by Nehru and moved by Gandhiji, had as its first item: “Every citizen of India has the right to free expression of opinion, the right of free association and combination, and the right to assemble peacefully and without arms”.[114] Nehru was “the strongest force behind founding the Indian Civil Liberties Union in 1936 as a non-party, non-sectarian organisation”.[115] Nehru persuaded Rabindranath Tagore to become the Honorary President of the Indian Civil Liberties Union and Sarojini Naidu as the functioning chairperson, and actively encouraged the formation of several such unions in the provinces.[116]

Freedom of the press was an essential aspect of civil liberties. Defining what he meant by the freedom of the press, Nehru said in 1940:

‘The freedom of the press does not consist in our permitting such things as we like to appear. Even a tyrant is agreeable to this kind of freedom. Civil liberty and freedom of press consist in our permitting what we do not like, in our putting up with criticism of ourselves…’[117]

Nehru’s commitment to a free press was absolute and remained as strong when he was in government as it was when he was leading the struggle against the colonial state. No cartoonist had to go to jail in his times, nor did stand-up comedians or journalists before they performed or were yet to write a story!

Apart from seeing democracy and civil liberties as essential values in themselves, Nehru strongly believed that a country as diverse as India could be held together only by a non-violent, democratic way of life, and not by force or coercion. Only a democratic structure that gave space to various linguistic, religious, cultural, political, and socio-economic trends to express themselves could hold India together. Almost as if anticipating the danger faced by the nation today, he said:

“This is too large a country with too many legitimate diversities to permit any so-called ‘strong man’ to trample over people and their ideas”.[118]

He was careful not to allow himself to fall prey to populism or plebiscitary/majoritarian democracy at a time when he, after Gandhiji’s and Patel’s death, towered over the Indian political spectrum and could easily smother opposition to himself and his policies. He correctly saw that the heart of democracy lay in respecting difference of opinion, even if it be that of a minority. He said on 2 June 1950, before the first general elections:

“I am not afraid of the opposition in this country and I do not mind if opposition groups grow up on the basis of some theory, practice or constructive theme. I do not want India to be a country in which millions of people say “yes” to one man, I want a strong opposition”.[119]

A telling example of Nehru respecting opposition and his conviction that India should not countenance any tendency towards the emergence of a ‘dictator’ or any one ‘strong man’, was a critique he wrote of himself under a pseudonym at a time when he was at the peak of his popularity. It was as if he was warning himself and the Indian people at large against any such tendency emerging in himself and in Indian politics! Elected President of the Indian National Congress for two consecutive years, he wrote an article (using the pseudonym Chanakya) titled ‘Rashtrapati’ or ‘President’ in a popular journal in October 1937, warning:

“Men like Jawaharlal with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in a democracy…. A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow- moving democracy. He might still use the language and slogan of democracy and socialism, but we all know how fascism has fattened on this language…. He has all the makings of a dictator in him— vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity, ability, hardness and with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient…. His over-mastering desire to get things done, to sweep away what he dislikes and build anew, will hardly brook for long the slow process of democracy…. Caesarism is always at the door, and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?”[120]

Nehru was warning himself and his people against any compromises with democracy and civil liberties. While he succeeded in great measure in himself sticking scrupulously to the democratic path and in making the democratic path a part of the common sense of the Indian people, the dangers he was alluding to have not lost their salience for India today, sixty years after the end of the Nehru era.

Now, unfortunately, ‘Mukti’ (deliverance) from any opposition is declared as the goal; Congress mukt, ‘Lutyens Delhi’ mukt, Left-liberal mukt, andolanjeevi/parjeevi (agitationists/parasites) mukt, independently thinking universities like JNU mukt, NGOs mukt, Amnesty International India mukt, Human Rights Organisations mukt, are some examples of what ‘Bharat’ must be mukt of!

Apart from nurturing a robust opposition through a free expression of ideas through an independent media, Nehru also paid a great deal of attention to other critical institutions of a functional democracy, such as the parliament. The respect he gave to the parliament and parliamentary practice and code of conduct, right up to his death, was legendary and could be an abject lesson to our present parliamentarians. He took great care to institutionalize the cabinet system of government. Not only did he not usurp all powers to himself, he refused to give in to the tendency among many of his colleagues to leave important policy decisions to him. C.D. Deshmukh, who was Finance Minister in Nehru’s cabinet from 1950–56, recorded in his autobiography that “Nehru as head of the cabinet was gentle, considerate and democratic, never forcing a decision on his colleagues…”[121]

Nehru was very careful in trying to build democratic institutions with as little interference of the state as was possible whether it be the judiciary, bureaucracy and other institutions. This was particularly true of academic institutions with which all of us here are particularly involved. He said in December 1947:

“A university stands for humanism. For tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and the search for truth … If universities discharge their duty adequately, then it is well with the nation and the people. But if the temple of learning itself becomes a home of narrow bigotry and petty objectives, how, then, will a nation prosper or a people grow in stature?”[122]

Some of the finest institutions were created and nurtured in his time. Unfortunately, many of these institutions, like my university, JNU, are struggling to survive the current assault on them where ‘the adventure of ideas’ and dissent is suppressed, often brutally. Students are beaten up, arrested and put in jail for years and even denied bail, faculty is intimidated and efforts are made to alter syllabi to suit the government’s communal bias. The ‘temple of learning ‘ is indeed becoming a ‘home for narrow bigotry.’

Almost all the institutions of democracy so carefully nurtured by Nehru are under threat.

Economic Development with Democracy and Sovereignty

If maintenance of sovereignty and democracy with civil liberties were two non-negotiables bequeathed to independent India by the Indian national movement, then all efforts at post-colonial transformation in India had to occur within these parameters. However, never before in history was the process of transition to industrialism or the process of primitive accumulation of capital accomplished along with democracy. The Nehruvian attempt at industrial transformation with democracy was thus a unique attempt. Nehru was deeply conscious of this and often spoke about it being an uncharted path, “unique in history”.[123]

The non-negotiable commitment to democracy meant that the necessary ‘surplus’ required for investment in order to facilitate the transition to industrialism could not be raised forcibly on the backs of the Indian working class and peasantry or on the basis of colonial surplus appropriation as happened in other countries in the past.[124] Nehruvian state intervention and planning was to be consensual and not a command performance. The path of extracting surplus out of agriculture through ‘expropriatory’ land tax or forced collectivization; of forcing surplus out of labour though slavery, indentured labour and in the absence of organized trade union rights or of forcing surplus out of the people of other countries through collection of tribute from colonies, was not open to India. While, during colonial rule, the Indian peasant often ended up handing over more than half of his gross produce as land tax and rent, after independence a democratic regime based on popular will meant that not only was there no tax, or surplus extraction through other forms from agriculture (on which an overwhelming majority of the Indian people were dependent), but a net transfer of income to agriculture occurred through state subsidies. Also, trade union rights to the working class were guaranteed from the very beginning and were exercised vigorously. Of course, the question of appropriating colonial tribute from other countries did not even arise. In fact, even after Indian independence, Nehru remained a relentless champion of liberation movements against imperialist domination in other parts of the world.

Similarly, the non-negotiable commitment to sovereignty meant that the transition to modernity could not be accomplished with foreign aid, foreign capital or foreign intervention in any manner that would make India a junior partner of any advanced country, however powerful it may be. The imperative of maintaining sovereignty was a natural pointer towards the Nehruvian non-alignment policy in the post-World War II Cold War situation where the world was divided into two power blocs.

(a) Industrial Transformation

Nehru and the early Indian planners had correctly understood that political independence was of little value if it could not be used to acquire first economic and then intellectual independence. In a special letter to the Chief Ministers in 1949 he warned them, “in any real sense of the word this fight for freedom is not over, though we may be politically free. It is not over in the economic sense…”[125] At independence, because of the colonial structuring of the Indian economy, India was almost completely dependent on the advanced world for capital goods and technology for making any investment. It produced virtually no capital goods. In 1950, India met nearly 90 per cent of its needs of machines and even machine tools through imports. This meant that despite political independence, it was completely dependent on the advanced countries for achieving any economic growth though investment.

This was a neo-colonial type situation, which needed immediate remedy. And this is what the famous Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy tried to reverse by adopting a heavy industry or capital-goods industry based industrialization. During the first three Five Year plans (1951–65), industry in India grew at 7.1 per cent per annum. This was a far cry from the de-industrialization process of the 19th century and the slow industrial growth between 1914–47. More important, “the three-fold increase in aggregate index of industrial production between 1951 and 1969 was the result of a 70 per cent increase in consumer goods industries, a quadrupling of the intermediate goods production and a ten-fold increase in the output of capital goods”.[126] This pattern of industrial development led to a structural transformation of the colonial legacy. From a situation where, to make any capital investment in India, virtually the entire equipment (90 per cent) had to be imported, the share of imported equipment in the total fixed investment in the form of equipment had come down to 43 per cent in 1960 and a mere 9 per cent in 1974, whereas the value of the fixed investment in India increased by about two and a half times over the period (1960–74).[127]

This was a major achievement towards self-reliance and it considerably increased India’s autonomy from the advanced countries in determining her own rate of capital accumulation or growth. It thus created the key condition for non-alignment or relative independence from both the power blocs. In my understanding no amount of diplomatic finesse could achieve and sustain the objective of non-alignment without the economic basis of relative autonomy having been created. It was this un-structuring of the colonial structure which was to later enable India to participate in the globalization process with considerable advantage to itself. The policy of non-alignment in other words was as much a function of the strategy of economic development chosen by India, as it was a product of the Indian national movement’s commitment to world peace and sovereignty of nation states. Conversely, non-alignment became a viable strategy only as India began to gain economic sovereignty.

As India at independence did not have a sufficiently large indigenous private sector to take on the massive task of developing capital goods industries, the only other option was to develop it through the public sector. The option of basing the development of this sector on foreign capital did not arise as the Nehruvian consensus was that sovereignty would be achieved only if its industrial development was primarily built indigenously and was not based on foreign capital. The public sector was clearly seen, by a wide spectrum of opinion, which included the capitalists and the Left, as the alternative to foreign capital domination.[128] The public sector soon transformed the industrial and infrastructural landscape in India. In Nehru’s time four major steel plants at Rourkela, Bhilai, Durgapur and Bokaro came up in the public sector. Large number of capital goods industries, infrastructure projects and other areas requiring large investments, which the Indian private sector could not have developed at that time, were started in the public sector. To list just a few, Indian Telephone Industries, Bhakra Dam, Damodar valley Corporation and the Hirakud Dam were started in 1947–1948 itself; Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT), Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Hindustan Shipyard, Bharat Petroleum, Heavy Engineering Corporation, Indian Oil Corporation, Hindustan Antibiotics, Hindustan Insecticides, Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, National Mineral Development Corporation were started in the 1950s and National Building and Construction Corporation, Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Limited, Fertiliser Corporation of India, Shipping Corporation of India, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Bharat Earth Movers were started in the early 1960s.

It is important to point out that these public sector undertakings were not loss making ‘white elephants’ acting as a drag on national resources in Nehru’s time, which some of them did become in later decades. On the contrary they contributed to resource mobilisation in India apart from creating a self-reliance in critical areas. The Public Sector savings were throughout the Nehruvian period 1950–51 to 1964–65 considerably higher than the private corporate sector.[129] Nehru could proudly announce while inaugurating the second HMT factory in 1961 that “this factory has been made out of the profits or the surplus of the older Hindustan Machine Tools factory”.[130] Today’s neo-liberals who push for indiscriminate privatisation totally ignore this aspect.

While reducing dependence on foreign capital and technology for making indigenous investment was one way of gaining and keeping the country’s sovereignty intact, other strategies were adopted as well. India undertook a deliberate strategy of diversifying its foreign trade so that her dependence on any one country or bloc of countries was reduced. As a result, the geographical concentration index (GCI) of trade with foreign countries declined sharply. GCI of India’s exports declined from 0.69 in 1947 to 0.22 in 1975. There was a similar decline in GCI in the case of imports. Significantly, the result of the declining GCI was that the share of the metropolitan countries of the West, which earlier dominated India’s trade, declined sharply. For example, the share of UK and USA in India’s exports, which was 45 per cent in 1947, fell by more than half and by 1977 it was only 20 per cent.[131] This was partly achieved by the increase in India’s trade with the Socialist bloc (which bailed out India at a time when she was extremely short of foreign exchange by allowing barter and Rupee trade) and other underdeveloped countries.

In recent years, however, there has been a growing tendency, particularly among neo-colonial scholars like Tirthankar Roy and Meghnad Desai, to dismiss or run down the economic achievements of the Nehruvian era. Looking back from the vantage point of the high growth rates since the economic reforms of 1991, the Nehru years are described as the wasted opportunity. The strategy of trying to reverse the colonial structuring of the Indian economy through a mixed economy with a substantial public sector and an inward oriented, import substituting self reliant growth, which involved protecting the fledgling domestic industry, was seen as the main problem.[132] As Meghnad Desai put it, “the first 40 years of India’s independence were wasted”.[133]

This assessment is completely a-historical. It is oblivious of the massive increase in all indicators of growth, per capita GDP, industry, agriculture, savings, investment or domestic capital formation that occurred in the Nehruvian period as compared the to the colonial times. Also it ignores the fact that the growth parameters in Nehru’s time compared extremely favourably when compared to other countries of the world at the same stage of development including UK, USA, France, China and Japan.[134] Further, this assessment ignores the global structural context. If the post 1991 strategy was adopted in the 1950s, India would surely have headed towards becoming a ‘banana republic’. Conversely, it would not make any sense to have the 1950s economic strategy in the 1990s when the nature of the global economy, including the Indian economy, had undergone fundamental changes.[135] The Nehruvian era created the conditions for the future opening up and growth by ‘un structuring’ many aspects of the inherited colonial structure. Other post colonial countries too required this period of 30 to 40 years of un structuring before opening up. China needed the Maoist phase before Deng’s opening up in the late 1970s was possible. Today’s India is possible because of the base laid in the early decades after independence and has not emerged despite it.

(b) Agricultural Transformation

Another canard spread about Nehru is his supposed neglect of agriculture while focusing on industrial development. Nehru was acutely aware of the complementarity of agricultural and industrial growth. Also, India’s food security was an area of great concern because the maintenance of India’s sovereignty and ability to stay non-aligned and the welfare of the vast masses of India was involved. Indian agriculture had stagnated and even declined under colonial rule and at independence India was faced with acute food shortage and famine conditions in many areas. 14 million tonnes of food had to be imported between 1946 and 1953. There could be no sovereignty if India was dependent on food aid for its very survival. Indian agriculture needed to be revolutionized and Nehru took up the task on a war footing. As Nehru clearly stated in parliament on 15 December 1952:

“We certainly attach importance to industry, but in the present context we attach far greater importance to agriculture and food and matters pertaining to agriculture. If our agricultural foundation is not strong then the industry we seek to build will not have a strong basis either. Apart from that, the situation in the country today is such that if our food front cracks up, everything else will crack up too. Therefore we dare not weaken our food front. If our agriculture becomes strongly entrenched, as we hope it will, then it will be relatively easy for us to progress more rapidly on the industrial front, whereas if we concentrate only on industrial development and leave agriculture in a weak condition we shall ultimately be weakening industry. That is why primary attention has been given to agriculture and food and that, I think, is essential in country like India at the present moment”.[136]

Nehru pushed through the extremely difficult task of land reforms in India within a democratic framework, basing himself on the long and powerful heritage of the national and peasant movements. A remarkable achievement in contrast to the forced land reforms achieved in Soviet Union or China costing millions of lives or the land reforms of Japan under an army of occupation. By 1957 the back of the over 150 years old Zamindari system was broken. Cooperative and institutional credit considerably weakened the stranglehold of the moneylender. Loans advanced by such institutions increased by more than fifteen times, rising from Rs. 0.23 billion in 1950–51 to Rs.3.65 billion in 1965–66. Such institutional reforms were combined with major investments in scientific agricultural research, irrigation and electric power projects.[137]

Nehru made no false dichotomy between agriculture and industry. Keenly aware that an agrarian transformation was not possible without an industrial and infrastructural transformation, i.e., without electricity, tractors, pumps, chemical fertilizers, etc., he pushed for industrial transformation simultaneously with the agricultural reforms. Electricity generation, for example, increased by over 1300 per cent under his guidance between 1950 and 1965.[138]

The combination of institutional changes (land reforms) and massive state sponsored technological change transformed Indian agriculture rapidly. During the first three plans (leaving out 1965–66, a drought year), Indian agriculture grew at an annual rate of over 3 per cent, a growth rate more than eight times the annual growth rate of 0.37 per cent achieved during the half century (1891–1946) of the last phase of colonialism in India.[139]

Attempts are sometimes made to contrast Nehru with his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri, the latter in his all too brief tenure being credited with the ushering in of the Green Revolution strategy. The reality is somewhat different. It is clear that by the late fifties and early sixties, as the benefits from the land reforms that could be carried out in Indian conditions had begun to peak and the possibilities of agricultural growth based on extension of agriculture, i.e., bringing more area into cultivation, were also reaching their limit, Nehru’s focus inevitably shifted further towards technological solutions. Even the New Agricultural Strategy, associated with the Green Revolution, of picking out select areas with certain natural advantages for intensive development with a package programme (the IADP or the Intensive Agricultural Districts Programme) was launched in 15 districts, one for each state, on an experimental basis during the Third Plan in Nehru’s lifetime—a practice which was to be generalised on a large scale a few years later. As one of the major scholars of the Green Revolution, G.S. Bhalla, put it:

“The qualitative technological transformation in India—the Green Revolution …came about not during his lifetime but soon after his death. But the foundations for the technological development were laid during Nehru’s time”.[140]

Nehru thus not only brought about major institutional reforms (land reforms) in Indian agriculture he also laid the foundations for the technological reforms, the basis of the ‘Green Revolution’, which made India food surplus in a remarkably short period.141 No wonder, Daniel Thorner, one of the keenest observers of Indian agriculture since independence, noted:

“It is sometimes said that the (initial) five-year plans neglected agriculture. This charge cannot be taken seriously. The facts are that in India’s first twenty one years of independence more has been done to foster change in agriculture and more change has actually taken place than in the preceding two hundred years”.[142]

(c) Anticipating the Knowledge Revolution

Jawaharlal Nehru saw focus on scientific education at the highest level as a necessary part of achieving and maintaining sovereignty by reducing dependence on the advanced world. He was acutely aware of India’s backwardness in science and technology, an area deliberately left barren in the colonial period, and therefore made massive efforts to overcome this shortcoming. An unprecedented increase occurred in the educational opportunities in science and technology in the universities and institutes set up in the early years after independence. Almost all the major institutions in this area from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute of Management (IIM), the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Atomic Energy Commission, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, (with the first atomic reactor going critical in 1956 and the first rocket tested from Thumba in 1963!), the Indian National Committee for Space Research (the predecessor of Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO), the National Physical Laboratory, the National Chemical Laboratory, National Metallurgical Laboratory, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), The National Institute of Virology, The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and numerous other such institutions were all set up in the Nehruvian era. (One must mention here that for Nehru cultivating ‘knowledge’ was not to be limited to the scientific area. In the 1950s, under his initiative, the Sahitya Academy, Sangeet Natak Academy, National School of Drama, Lalit Kala Academy and the National Council for Applied Economic Research, NCAER , the Indian Statistical Institute, were set up as was the Film and Television Institute of India, FTII, in 1960, The National Institute of Design and the National Council of Educational Research and Training, NCERT, in 1961).

National expenditure on scientific research and development kept growing rapidly with each plan. For example, it increased from Rs. 10 million in 1949 to Rs. 4.5 billion in 1977. Over roughly the same period, the stock of India’s scientific and technical manpower increased more than 12 times from 190 thousand to 2.32 million. A spectacular growth by any standards, a growth whose benefits India reaps today as the world moved towards a ‘knowledge’ society, a move which Nehru anticipated.[143] It is because Nehru anticipated the knowledge revolution that India today is able to participate in this global phenomenon and nearly half of India’s GDP is generated from the service sector a significant part of which is based on the knowledge revolution. It is not despite Nehru but because of his farsightedness that India has reached where it has.

One may add that the focus on scientific education at the higher level was not counterpoised to primary education as is often alleged. Nehru’s commitment to primary education from the days of the 1931 Karachi Resolution drafted by him, which committed the state to providing free and compulsory basic education, remained steadfast. The Government system of primary school education during the Nehruvian era, insufficient though it was, is in stark contrast to the near destruction of that system in today’s India where even the poor are increasingly forced to access whatever little education they are able to from the rapacious private sector. Enrolment in schools increased from 23.5 million in 1950–51 to 67.7 million in 1965–66, a significant increase of 188.1 per cent. (While the increase in admissions at the degree level for engineering and technology increased by 502.4 per cent in the same period, the huge difference is explained partly by the fact of the low base from which it started in 1950–51, only 4.1 thousand admissions, increasing to 24.7 thousand in 1965–66, and partly because the need to catch up in this area was critical in maintaining a sovereign, independent path of economic development.)[144] Rather than building on the public education system painstakingly built up in the Nehruvian era at the school level, as well as, at the highest level, it is either being allowed to die, or active efforts are made to dismantle it. The National Education Policy of 2020 now being pushed is a good example of this dismantling, with the state increasingly withdrawing its role in education and handing over this sector to the private sector and even more ominously to foreign universities.

Keeping Focus on the Poor

Nehru’s success in keeping India on the democratic, civil libertarian path against considerable odds (while most other post-colonial countries faltered on this count), by itself ensured that the poor were not altogether left out of the development process or that their condition was not totally ignored. It is now well recognized that democracy is critical for the survival of the poor. It is democracy in India which has ensured that an inflationary path to growth, which hits the poor hardest, was never adopted. The trend rate of inflation in India since independence had not touched two digits for several decades.[145] Till 1963 it did not exceed 2 per cent per annum. No government in India irrespective of their political ideology has been able to ignore the political implications of uncontrolled inflation.

Also, it is democracy and civil liberties that ensured that no large scale famine deaths could occur in India since independence, despite some extreme conditions created by climatic shocks, while more than 40 million died in famines in China in the late 1950s and 60s, which the world got to know decades later because of the absence of a free media. Amartya Sen has repeatedly emphasized the role of civil liberties and a free press in preventing such mass man-made disasters. With more than 70,000 newspapers and about 700 satellite channels and with nearly 30 newspapers having a daily readership of more than a million it is not easy to keep famine conditions under cover in India.

While political democracy was understood by Nehru to be a necessary condition for people’s empowerment, it was by no means taken to be sufficient. As he put it in 1952:

“If poverty and low standards continue then democracy, for all its fine institutions and ideals, ceases to be a liberating force. It must therefore aim continuously at the eradication of poverty…. In other words, political democracy is not enough. It must develop into economic democracy also.”[146]

Nehru was deeply aware that active efforts had to be made and institutional structures created which would enable the mass of the people to achieve a life of dignity. He set up the massive Community Development Programme in 1952 aimed at ameliorating all aspects of people’s lives in the remote villages, from improvement in agricultural methods to communications, education and health. His basic objective through this programme was “to unleash forces from below among our people” by creating conditions in which spontaneous growth from below was possible. The ultimate aim was “progressively producing a measure of equality in opportunity and other things”.[147] A veritable army of Village Level Workers (Gram Sewaks) and Block Development Officers was spread out in the countryside to achieve this task. As a tendency towards bureaucratization began to emerge in this programme, Nehru tried to integrate it with the Panchayati Raj institutions (elected local self-governing bodies) and set up a large programme of cooperatives in banking, marketing and other services benefiting and empowering millions of peasants.[148] Emphasizing the critical role of local village level self-governing cooperative institutions, Nehru said:

“I feel more and more that we must function more from below than from the top. The top is important of course and in the modern world a large measure of centralisation is inevitable. Yet too much centralization means decay at the roots and ultimately a withering of the branches and leaves and flowers. Therefore we have to encourage these basic organs in the village”.[149]

However, the struggle to make these local institutions function in favour of the most deprived was not an easy one in a society greatly divided by class, caste and gender. In fact, decades after Nehru passed away, Rajiv Gandhi took the initiative to re-invigorate Panchayati Raj by proposing that elections to these bodies be made mandatory and that the deprived castes, tribes and women be given adequate representation in them, which resulted in the 73rd and 74th amendments in the Indian Constitution in 1993. The process of trying to empower the poor and disadvantaged is still carrying on as it must in the future, but the foundation was laid by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nehru was deeply influenced by Marxism since the late 1920s. His contribution in embedding and then making widely acceptable the socialist ideal of empowering the poor among the Indian people was immense. The fact that not only the Communists and Socialists but an overwhelming majority of nationalist opinion in India since the late 1930s accepted socialism as an objective was to a great extent because of Nehru. So deeply did this idea get rooted among the Indian people as a whole that as late as 1980 when the decidedly right-wing Jan Sangh, which had nothing to do with socialism or the national movement, and whose predecessors, the Hindu Mahasabha, and heroes, like Savarkar, were accused of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, was reborn in its new avatar as the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), it chose to declare its creed as ‘Gandhian Socialism’!

Nehru was able to give the socialist ideal such wide acceptability in India partly because he made a very early break from a narrow, sectarian and rigid interpretation of Marxism which India’s leading historian of the modern and contemporary period, Bipan Chandra, called “Stalin Marxism”.[150] Nehru was among the first in the world to make this break from Stalin-Marxism. Roughly at the same time as the famous Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, (with whom comparisons have already been made in the beginning of the address), Nehru, in the late 1930s, was groping for a strategy of social transformation in a democratic or semi democratic framework, which was different from the insurrectionary and violent Bolshevik model that was not suitable for such situations. Nehru was fortunate in being witness to and part of the Gandhian struggle for freedom which was till then and perhaps remains till today “the only actual historical example of a semi-democratic or democratic-type state structure being replaced or transformed, of the broadly Gramscian theoretical perspective of a war of position being successfully practiced”. The fact that Gramsci saw this “as the only possible strategy” for social transformation “in the developed countries of the west” underlines the huge significance of the Gandhian movement to the world as a whole.[151]

Learning from the practice of the Gandhian movement made it easier for Nehru to break from the Stalin-Marxist paradigm and argue somewhat precociously that, while there could be no true democracy without socialism, there could be no socialism without democracy. He insisted that civil liberty and democracy had to be basic parts of socialism. The socialist transformation required societal consensus, the consent of the overwhelming majority of the people. It could not be a minority revolution led by a band of highly committed revolutionaries, a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. It was also not enough just to have a majority. To succeed, it had to be a socialism acceptable by all sections, by an overwhelming majority. Nehru was anticipating what later events were to validate and what was to be slowly accepted globally by increasing sections of the left. He made this shift long before this change was acceptable to any significant trend in the communist movement in India and the world. The emergence of Euro-communism, which made similar assumptions, occurred only in the 1970s, and 80s. Nehru’s shift was, therefore, for very long analysed by the orthodox Left as the ‘diluting’ of his commitment to socialism for various reasons such as pragmatic pressures, the influence of Gandhiji or even his alleged desire to be in power.

By the late 1930s, Nehru began to veer towards the position that Socialism could not be brought about by coercion or force. How can you arrive at a consensus by force? He argued that to achieve the desirable end of socialist transformation one should not adopt the means of hatred and violence, and that a socialistic pattern of society could be achieved through non-violent and peaceful means. Fully in tune with the Gandhian notion that wrong means could not achieve right ends, he declared:

“There is always a close and intimate relationship between the end we aim at and the means adopted to attain it. Even if the end is right and the means are wrong, it will vitiate the end or divert us in a wrong direction”.[152]

Also, arriving at a socialist consensus would mean that one would have to view it as a process and not an event arrived at in a ‘revolutionary moment.’ This would have to be a long drawn out process with its ups and downs, a process which may have to at times slow down, moderate or tone down its immediate goals, in order to carry the bulk of the people along, including those who held opposing positions. Nehru writing from prison in the 1940s describing his understanding of how the National Planning Committee (NPC), set up by the Congress in 1938, should move in a socialist direction, argued:

“…this was to be attempted in the context of democratic freedom and with a large measure of cooperation of some at least of the groups who were normally opposed to the socialist doctrine. That cooperation seemed to me worthwhile even if it involved toning down or weakening of the plan in some respects”.[153]

Nehru was to retain throughout his life this nuanced persuasive style of functioning while remaining resolute in his goals, which brought him the support, love and admiration of the millions in a manner which was surpassed only by Gandhiji. And as a true disciple of the master, while appealing to all sections of society, he succeeded in keeping his gaze focused on the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged. His great achievement was that he got a very large part of Indian society, individuals and institutions, to share his socialist vision. In the Nehruvian period, from the planning commission and the public sector bureaucracy to the media and popular films, the socialist objective was seen as a desirable one, not defined in any narrow fundamentalist way but as Nehru broadly outlined it.

The land reforms, the Green Revolution, the Community Development Programme, the emergence of the public sector, the focus on education and health being a public responsibility, protecting of working class rights, the popularising of the socialist ideal were giant steps taken by Nehru that greatly contributed towards an equitable society. Many of these steps are being reversed today with the privatisation of public sector enterprises and more shockingly handing over education and health to the rapacious private sector, rapid informalisation of labour with no trade union rights and making a mockery of the socialist ideal. The results are there for the world to see. India is witnessing obscene levels of inequality where we boast of our large number of billionaires while nearly half our children are malnourished. The world was shocked by the images of floating dead bodies in the river Ganga, victims of the Corona epidemic, as the relatives of the deceased were too poor to do the last rites of their dear ones or that of thousands of migrant workers walking hundreds of miles to their villages at temperatures of 45 degrees centigrade, dragging their old and infirm and children to avoid starvation because of the sudden lockdown without adequate state support. We are slipping rapidly in the human development index and are today shamefully ranked 111 out of 125 countries in the Global Hunger Index, below many sub-Sahara African countries and much below every other South Asian country, with Sri Lanka at 60, Nepal 69 and Bangladesh 81![154]

Sixty after his death, with infinitely higher economic capacity to empower the poor, when we falter miserably on this count, we realize how important it is to remember Nehru’s legacy.

Scientific Temper

Nehru’s focus on the need to develop a ‘scientific temper’, a term he coined in his Discovery of India, which the Constitution of India reiterated in article 51A laying down the fundamental duties of every citizen of India, is being made a mockery of today. Nehru said:

“The scientific temper points out the way along which man should travel…. It is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of evidence, the reliance on the observed fact and not pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind – all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and solution of its many problems”.[155]

Nehru tried to imbibe this spirit in his thinking and action throughout his life.

What a contrast today. The Guardian quoted the current Prime Minister, mixing up mythology about Gods and Goddesses with history and science, while inaugurating a new modern hospital in Mumbai:

“We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time,” the prime minister told a gathering of doctors and other professionals at a hospital in Mumbai … “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb….We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery”.[156]

The Hindustan Times reported that Governor of Bengal, doing violence to both science and history, said “while addressing a science and engineering fair in Kolkata …that mythological character Arjuna’s arrows had nuclear power and chariots mentioned in the Mahabharata actually flew”.[157] He has since been promoted to become the Vice President of India. The erstwhile RSS chief (sarsangchalak) K.S. Sudershan, an engineer by training, tells us about how Sage Bharadwaja and Raja Bhoj in times gone by not only ‘described the construction of aeroplanes’ but discussed ‘details like what types of aeroplanes would fly at what height, what kind of problems they might encounter, how to overcome those problems, etc’.[158]

No wonder Corona was being fought with state patronage with Gobar (cowdung), Gomutra (cow urine), Thali (metal plate) banging, Tali (clapping), shining mobile phone torches, Ganga-snan (dip in the Ganges) and unverified medicines made by a much favoured yogi!

In sum, it is as if the political leaders have reversed their roles. From that of pulling up society and bringing it in line with the highest global civilizational values, a role performed by the leaders of the Indian national movement like Gandhiji and Nehru, to that of pushing society back by appealing to sectarian identities, acquisitive instincts and traditional prejudices. The hegemonic ‘Idea of India’, the ‘common sense’ of the Indian people created by the Indian national movement is today severely challenged. And that challenge is not coming from a ‘backward’, ‘traditional’ people but from their leaders and the state machinery.

Nehru’s fantastic effort to raise India from what Tagore called the ‘mud and filth’ left behind by the British has now been replaced with the Indian people being pushed back into that same ‘mud and filth’ of ignorance, obscurantism, dis-empowerment, unfreedom and above all communal hatred.

Notes

109. Amartya Sen uses this term as early as 1993 to describe one segment of Hindu communalism, in an article he wrote shortly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu communalists, see Amartya Sen, “The Threats to Secular India”, The New York Review, 8 April 1993 issue.

110. Michelguglielmo Torri, ‘India 2020: The deepening crisis of democracy,’ Asia Maior, Vol. XXXI, 2020.

111. All the citations in this para are from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia india-56393944 and https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/a-more nuanced-democracy-there-is-no-need-for-it-to-be-only-what-the-west-says-it-must be/ accessed on 28 October 2021 at 10.08 pm.

112. Karanjia, The Philosophy of Mr. Nehru, p.123 quoted in Bipan Chandra, “Jawaharlal Nehru in Historical Perspective” in The Writings of Bipan Chandra: The Making of Modern India from Marx to Gandhi, New Delhi, 2012, p. 136, emphasis mine.

113. Harijan, 24 June 1939, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 69, p. 356.

114. Pranab Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, et.al., eds., Congress and the Making of the Indian Nation, Vol. II, Academic Publishers, 2011, p. 19. This volume is a collection of important resolutions, manifestoes and speeches relating to the Indian National Congress from 1920 to 2009.

115. Mridula Mukherjee, “Civil Liberties and Indian Nationalism”, in Rohit Azad et.al., ed., What the Nation really Needs to Know: The JNU Nationalism Lectures, HarperCollins, Noida, 2016, p. 73.

116. See SWJN, 1st Series, Vol. 7, pp. 420–21, 425–28.

117. SWJN, 1st Series, Vol. 11, p. 367.

118. Karanjia, see f.n. 106.

119. Speech at Trivandrum, 2 June, 1950, in The National Herald, 3 June 1950, cited in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, A Biography, Vol. 2, 1947–1956, New Delhi, 1979, p. 68.

120. The article was published in The Modern Review of Calcutta in November 1937 in the name of Chanakya with the title “Rashtrapati”, See SWJN, Vol. 8, 1st Series, pp. 520–23.

121. C.D. Deshmukh, The Course of my Life, Delhi, 1974, p. 205.

122. SWJN, 2nd Series, Vol. 4, p. 208.

123. See e.g., Minutes of the fourth meeting of the National Development Council, New Delhi, 6 May 1955, File No 17(17&/56-PMS) in SWJN, 2nd Series, Vol. 28, p. 371. See also my “Introduction” in Aditya Mukherjee, ed., A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress, Vol. V, 1964–84, New Delhi, 2011.

124. See Aditya Mukherjee, “Empire: How Colonial India made Modern Britain”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLV, No 50, 11 December 2010, chapter 2 in Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India, for a detailed discussion of how colonial surplus appropriation aided the process of primitive accumulation in the West.

125. 4 June 1949, LCM, Vol. 1, 1985, p. 371.

126. A. Vaidyanathan, “The Indian Economy Since Independence (1947-70)”, in Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. II, Delhi, 1983, p. 961.

127. See Aditya Mukherjee, “Planned Development in India 1947-65: The Nehruvian Legacy”, in Shigeru Akita, ed., South Asia in the 20th Century International Relations, Tokyo, 2000. Also in Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence, New Delhi, 35th reprint 2020, ch.25. These figures are from an extremely persuasive piece by Vijay Kelkar, “India and the World Economy: A Search for Self-Reliance”, Paper read at Seminar on Jawaharlal Nehru and Planned Development, New Delhi, 1980, reprinted in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 15, No. 5/7, February 1980.

128. See Aditya Mukherjee, “Planning and the Public Sector: Perspectives of the capitalists and the Nehruvian Left”, Political Economy of Colonial and Post Colonial India. See also, Aditya Mukherjee, Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, New Delhi, 2002, 10 and 11.

129. Pulapre Balakrishnan, “The Recovery of India: Economic Growth in the Nehru Era”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLII, Nos. 45–46, 17 November 2007, Table 4, pp. 62–63.

130. Ibid.

131. These figures are from Vijay Kelkar, “India and the World Economy.”

132. See for example, Tirthankar Roy, “Economic Legacies of Colonial Rule in India: Another Look”, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Vol. L, No 15, 11 April 2015.

133. Address at Bhoothalingam Centenary celebration, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 21 February 2009, organized by the National Council of Applied Economic Research. See also his Rediscovery of India, Bloomsbury, 2011.

134. For a detailed comparison of the growth parameters in Nehru’s time after independence with the colonial period as well as with other countries at a comparative stage, see Aditya Mukherjee, ‘Return of the Colonial in Indian Economic History: The Last Phase of Colonialism in India,’ Presidential Address, 68th session of the Indian History Congress, (Modern India), 2007 in Aditya Mukherjee, Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India, and for a very similar understanding see the insightful article by Pulapre Balakrishnan, “The Recovery of India: Economic Growth in the Nehru Era, EPW, Vol. XLII, No. 45-46, 17 November 2007.

135. See Aditya Mukherjee “Indira Gandhi: Shaping the Indian Economy, from Increased Dirigisme to Economic Reform”, Ch 16 in Political Economy of Colonial and Post-colonial India, and my chapter, ‘Indian Economy 1965-1991’, in Bipan Chandra et. al., India Since Independence, for a discussion of the changes in the internal situation and the global situation and the nature of world capitalism requiring a shift in economic strategy.

136. Jawaharlal Nehru, Speeches, Vol. 2, Publications Division, GOI, New Delhi, 1954, p.89.

137. See my chapters 29-32 in India Since Independence…

138. Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai, Planning for Industrialisation, London, 1970, p.74 and Table 25.3, Growth in Infrastructure Health and Education, in “Indian Economy, 1947-1965: The Nehruvian Legacy”, in India Since Independence, p. 454.

139. See George Blyn, Agricultural Trends in India, 1891-1947: Output, Availability, and Productivity, Philadelphia, 1966, Table 5.8, p. 119, K. N. Raj, Indian Economic Growth: Performance and Prospects, New Delhi, 1965 for the pre and post independence figures respectively. See also Mridula Mukherjee, Colonialising Agriculture: The Myth of Punjab Exceptionalism, New Delhi, 2006. See also Chs. 29–33 discussing the Land reforms and the Green revolution, in India Since Independence.

140. G.S. Bhalla, “Nehru and Planning – Choices in Agriculture,” Working Paper Series, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1990, p. 29.

141. See for a detailed discussion, my chapters (29-33) on Land Reform and The Green Revolution in Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence…

142. Daniel Thorner, The Shaping of Modern India, Allied, New Delhi, 1980, p. 245, addition in parenthesis mine.

143. See “Indian Economy, 1947-65: The Nehruvian Legacy”, in Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence….

144. The statistics given here are from Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai, Planning for Industrialisation, London, 1970, p. 74.

145. Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Development Planning: The Indian Experience, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1987, p. 83.

146. LCM, 16 June 1952, Vol. 3, p.18.

147. Jawaharlal Nehru, Speeches, 5 Volumes, New Delhi, 1983, Vol. 2, pp. 50–56.

148. See my chapter on Cooperatives and an Overview of Land Reforms in Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence.

149. LCM, 5 July 1952, Vol. 3, pp. 38–39.

150. Bipan Chandra, “Jawaharlal Nehru in Historical Perspective”, in The Writings of Bipan Chandra: The Making of Modern India from Marx to Gandhi, New Delhi, 2012 for an incisive analysis of Nehru, particularly the nature of his vision of ‘socialism’ and social transformation.

151. Ibid., chapter 1 and 2.

152. Jawaharlal Nehru, Speeches, Vol. 2, p. 392, quoted in Bipan Chandra, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru in Historical Perspective’.

153. Discovery, p. 441.

154. https://www.globalhungerindex.org/pdf/en/2023/India.pdf and https://www.globalhungerindex.org/ranking.html accessed on 23 November 2023 at 8.05 pm.

155. Discovery, pp. 570–71.

156. The Guardian, 28 October 2014,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/indian-prime-minister-genetic science-existed-ancient-times accessed on 19 August 2021.

157. Hindustan Times, 14 January 2020, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india news/arjuna-s-arrows-had-nuclear-power-chariots-flew-says-bengal-governor dhankhar-draws-flak/story-M185xVdjIP8JbzTsSDRkOJ.html accessed on 19 August 2021.

158. See the RSS mouthpiece Organiser, 4 November 2001.

(Courtesy: The Wire.)