Nehru Read online

  Achievements

  An undoubted achievement of the government headed by Nehru—until his last four years or so he was so much the head as to be the government—was to hold India together. Eighty million Muslims were lost and formed Pakistan; but the rest of India, now running into nearly 500 million people, with fourteen different official languages and many others spoken which have no official status, is a going concern. This is comparable to running Europe as a single political entity; and it remains an achievement to Nehru’s credit even though it was the British who created India as a single political entity and even though their creation was not seriously threatened during Nehru’s prime ministership. Nehru’s fight to keep the English language, though he wobbled on the matter in his last weary years, was due to his understanding of the unifying forte of English in India over and above the intellectual and international advantages which English gave to India.

  His next achievement was to encourage the growth of the parliamentary and cabinet system which the British started in India. He made it work; and he also made the majority of Indian politicians in his time want to make it work. Moreover, he maintained his own leadership by democratic means. Over and over again Nehru demonstrated that he had no equal, let alone superior, in the game of parliamentary politics in India. In his later years he was living too much on his wits; but what wits they were, and what political wits! However much of myth or magic there might have been in Nehru’s prestige with the masses there could be no doubt about the reality of the weapons in his politician’s armoury. Thus he usually displayed the acutest sense of timing. It was displayed brilliantly in the debates on the Sino-Indian border affair in 1959–60; an affair which would have destroyed almost any other prime minister in any other country; and again in getting rid of S.K. Patil and Morarji Desai50 and other ministers through the so-called Kamaraj Plan51 in 1963. Thanks to his timing, combined with his fighting courage and his agility of mind, Nehru dominated Parliament even when the majority were critical and, in the last years, in their moods of disillusionment, actively hostile. Further, he had resilience in uncommon measure. Again and again I have seen him so tired and worn out that I thought the beginning of the end was in sight; then, a couple of days later, I have run into him and found him looking as though nothing had happened. Even disloyalty of the ominous kind, such as President Prasad’s kite-flying speech on the President’s powers in 1960, or the same President’s opposition, not always above board, to Nehru’s social policies, seemed to leave Nehru unshaken. (He defeated Prasad’s moves by astute moves of his own, including spells of silence and then referring the memorandum on the President’s powers, which he lured Prasad into writing, to a technical group for a report on it. Their report in effect killed the President’s pretensions.) So with disloyalty and ingratitude from other quarters. Finally, Nehru countered any Indian tendency to fly to extremes. He was nearly always the moderator and the conciliator, seeking out how to smooth away and not to ruffle the prickles among his colleagues. He had learnt, though not easily, that the first rule in politics is to suffer both fools and self-seekers gladly. And he had learnt another lesson, namely, when he must bow to opposition and to retreat.

  His third achievement was the modernising of India—making it a secular state, free to all religions and to atheism; piloting through a variety of social reforms, notably the legal changes on behalf of women’s rights as against Hindu orthodoxy; and, as the basis of the great revolution he wanted to bring about, the three five-year plans.

  The Plans

  The five-year plans aimed at raising the standard of living by modernisation in general and by industrialisation in particular, and by setting down what Nehru called, with a vagueness typical of his pragmatism but prudent under the circumstances, ‘a socialist pattern of society’.

  Nehru had long been interested in planning. Before the war he insisted on trying to interest Congress in it. He got little support except from the left-wing group which later formed the spearhead of the communist movement in India. When he became prime minister he gave the plans the highest priority, and members of the Planning Commission the rank of cabinet ministers with himself as the chairman. A large secretariat was set up.

  The plans run into thousands of pages and were being enlarged continuously. They began in 1951; the Third Five-Year Plan finishes in 1966.

  Their main emphasis was on investment for capital formation, and especially for heavy industry and its subsidiaries. They could be carried through only by reducing popular consumption, low as this already was, in order to put savings into hydroelectric schemes, steel plants, factories, and so on. The promised rise in the standard of living was therefore for the future, not for this generation.

  As home savings could not be enough for the great size of the plans, aid had to be got from the foreigner. The degree of financial dependence on the foreigner was (and remains) another major characteristic of the plans. This had gone so far that by 1963 even essential imports were dependent on the bounty of the foreigner. Hence Indian efforts to get aid in cash (preferably) or in goods untied to any specific project. By the end of 1960 India had already received Rs 18,000 million in the shape of loans and Rs 6,000 million in the shape of grants. In the first half of the 1960s the required figure was estimated to be not less than £12,000 million. The Aid to India Consortium52 has been raising over $1,000 million a year in recent years. Yet India’s unfavourable balance of payments continued to get more and more unfavourable. The fruition of the plans will in fact depend upon the willingness of the foreigner to go on pouring in aid. India at times had been using the Cold War, much as she attacked the Cold War as an institution, for getting both sides to give her aid, though usually she had no need to do this as she could count on both sides playing against each other, the East against the West and the West against the East. The US and other Western powers committed themselves to a heavy load of aid as an insurance against communism in India; risky insurance to say the least, even if communism has any solid prospects in India; and in any case the foreign aid will probably have slight effect on communism, one way or the other. They have in effect underwritten India’s planning programme. Lovers of India hope they will continue to do so; but in such a way as to avoid taking on a bottomless pit. India was well aware of the emotional compulsions behind the West’s interest in her plans, and, at least until the defeat inflicted on her troops by the Chinese in 1962, not a few Indians were secretly rather contemptuous of them—of the West’s fear of communism. Indian leaders cannot be blamed for taking advantage of these compulsions. There was not much inhibition about asking for aid; and, according to some critics, not much gratitude. A frequent note was: aid should be bigger. Will India be able to retain complete independence under these circumstances? The independence of the foodless or the heavily mortgaged debtor is normally precarious. Or will the future see some saviour of the people, some Indian Sukarno,53 rising in India to agitate for the repudiation of the huge foreign debt, in the name of breaking the neo-colonial yoke?

  Meanwhile inflation has been playing its usual baneful role of social damage; for ‘deficit financing’, the contemporary euphemism for falling back on the printing press for money, became an accepted part of the plans in Nehru’s time. Prices nearly doubled during the time I was in India. They are still rising. Taxation has gone up even higher. The landowning classes have been obliterated; peasants cannot own more than about 30 acres of land; even this figure might be reduced, thanks to the land ceiling legislation,54 which is some of the most ill-considered and merely emotional or merely political legislation of post-independence India. (The abolition of landlords not only infringed the property rights promised by the Constitution but, combined with the land ceiling legislation, has deprived the Indian village and countryside of the class which, alone living above the animal subsistence level, could aid rural civilisation and at the same time could afford to experiment in farming and to improve its techniques.) Further, the professional and middle class, already
ground down by taxation and by premature social legislation and trade union restrictiveness as well as by inflation, sink lower in the economic scale. The classes which have benefited most have been the speculators, the urban developers, and, above all, the Baniya and Marwari magnates,55 perhaps the vilest money-making group on earth. The outcastes in the urban areas have also benefited. Government, if the parliamentary regime holds, will, it must be remembered, depend upon the votes of the majority cast in secret ballot boxes. The majority are the very needy; besides being ignorant they are not likely to take the forward-looking public-spirited view. Once they discover their power, the discovery being made for them by politicians seeking their votes, the damaging process will be accelerated.

  State intervention, too, grew apace under Nehru’s plans. Permits, licences, controls, foreign exchange prohibitions, were always increasing. With them corruption increased too. A good deal of state regulation is no doubt unavoidable under the circumstances of the time; but as regulations and the bureaucracy multiply so too does the freedom of the individual diminish. In the end, with ‘the revolution of rising expectations’ amongst the urban proletariat well under way, the frail structure of democracy will risk being crushed by a dictatorship or an oligarchy.

  As for what the plans will achieve, they will no doubt achieve—they already are achieving—some industrialisation, and some increase in irrigation. This fact remains though some of the industrialisation will be expensive for what it returns, and inefficient as well as jerry-built. Industry in India is high cost; reports have recently been published showing average factory costs at 40 percent above British and still more above American costs. What the plans will assuredly achieve is to bring about still bigger cities, and with bigger slums; Calcutta, for instance, conceivably growing from 6 million to 15 million. Planners never seem to think about planning cities. In some places or sectors the plans might even raise the standard of living a little. And they have had the effect of increasing the power of the Centre over the states and to that extent they have been a factor for cementing India together—assuming, what is not certain, that it is a good thing for India to be a union instead of a federation.

  But agriculture, and the whole process of producing food for the millions, showed little advance. Before long there will be no escape from giving them the overriding priority which the plans in Nehru’s time failed to give. The parlous food position in India, including the low, and still falling, yield per acre, was concealed, purposely but dangerously concealed for years by some of the ministers concerned, through the millions of tons of free or dumped food from the United States; for which reason the long-term effects of PL 48056 could be bad for India both as regards inflation and as regards the agricultural output. The latter remained about stationary for the last four or five years of Nehru’s life. Though an urgent need, and obvious from the time of the Bengal famine in the 1940s, there was still no proper granary or storage system in Nehru’s time. Famine thus followed glut, and the grain speculators and hoarders flourished.

  For the five-year plans reflect the urban mind. Nehru, like most Indian politicians, was urban. Outside of their towns the politicians are like fish out of water. This is why agriculture, though given thousands of pages, millions of words, and various huge schemes, such as community development or the Grow More Food campaigns, was not given enough effective action; and while thought and money could be spent instead on plans for a people’s car, India-made jet planes, and so on. Since 80 percent of Indians live in villages and depend, directly or indirectly, on agriculture, the case for basing the whole planning effort on the villages, and for building up from that base, instead of on heavy industry and the like, was overwhelming. This is what Gandhi would have done. But of no country is it so true as of India that the nearer one gets to the capital the further one gets from the realities. The majority of villagers after more than a decade of the plans, and of the publicity for them, knew little about them. And it is certain that over most of India the low standard of living in the villages has not risen; over much of India it has fallen, in the last ten years.* Socialist governments, notoriously, run into difficulties over food production; as Communist China did in recent years, and as Soviet Russia has been doing even forty-odd years after the Revolution.

  Mechanisation, moreover, will not lessen unemployment. It is bound to increase it, at least for a generation or so. Already there are probably more than 20 million fully unemployed, and perhaps as many as another 80 million partially unemployed, in India.

  Finally, can Indians with their genius for verbal fluency as contrasted with executive ability, and with their penchant for dilatory lolling, organise or carry through huge economic changes under an easygoing parliamentary system at this stage in their development? Have they trained up enough managers—in the way the British trained up enough Indian administrators for the needs of their time? Is there enough of the executive’s temperament or art yet?

  As for the Nehru plans considered specifically, and apart from the general strategy, they run into hundreds of different projects, ranging from small technical schools to big hydroelectric schemes, but they have tended to be too imprecise in priorities or aims; too lacking in a groundwork of solid intellectual and then solid technical preparation; too much slanted towards big schemes as well as too much slanted towards industrialisation and non-agricultural development; too much intruding of politicians’ interests (a road or bridge or school in this constituency, a railway in that, harbour works here, this or that factory there); too much defectiveness in execution so that there has been a shortfall as regards many, perhaps most, targets, and virtual failure as regards some like the huge Damodar Valley Scheme;57 and too much propaganda of the extravagant kind while at the same time too many of the country people were either ignorant of the plans or felt no personal involvement in them. Amongst other things it should have been explained to the people why controls were unavoidable—as some undoubtedly are—and why consumer goods must be sacrificed in the interests of future well-being.

  It is hard to escape the fear that the main achievement of Nehru’s economic and social policy will turn out to be social disruption; and that this will break out into violence, thanks on the one hand to the legacy of violence from the days of nationalist agitation, and, on the other, to the vast mass of detribalised neo-literates being turned out in the post-independence schools. For in the haste to modernise, universities and university students have been multiplied, with the result that there is an inflation in educational standards, which have become as diluted as the money. Moreover, there are not enough jobs for the graduates. The same is true of the schools and the school matriculates. India has thus acquired some of the essential ingredients of the classical prescription for communism.

  It is certain that Nehru had no wish to pave the way for communism. But it is equally certain that he, like many Indians in authority at the time, shared the illusions which flourished in the West from the time of President Truman’s famous Point Four speech58 in the late 1940s about the relative ease of developing undeveloped or underdeveloped economies, and about the potential role of foreign aid in this transformation. It was not seen that the gap in economic productivity is a gap in total or general historical development, and that a gap of centuries cannot be bridged in a few years, however beguiling the phrases about ‘the take-off’, ‘know-how’, landlords, or reactionaries. A great part of foreign aid in most recipient countries has so far been a waste; and inevitably.

  Two defences could be pleaded on behalf of Nehru’s plans.

  The first defence would be the poverty of India. This is so great that something must be attempted to alleviate it.* If the European visitor looks over Calcutta and the poverty there he will feel that Europe’s problems of poverty or shortages are so trifling in comparison that they no longer rate as problems. For all but a fraction of Indians the food is vegetarian, and for a very large proportion it consists of the cheap coarse grains. The sanitation and comfort we take for g
ranted for our poorest is for only a minority in India. And with an absence of sufficiency goes a level of health below par. According to recent FAO publications, the annual per capita income of the United States is $2,164, of the United Kingdom $960, of Japan $250, of India only $60; the daily consumption of animal protein is 66 grams in the United States, 51 in the United Kingdom, 15 in Japan, and 6 in India. Statistics of this sort must be taken with a grain of salt,* but other indications of the poverty could be multiplied. In Calcutta, for instance, according to a semi-official survey made in 1961, 17 percent of the population have no living accommodation of any kind; they live on the street pavements; 30 percent live three families to a room, 33 percent live one family to one room, only 4 percent live one family to three rooms; or, to take lavatory facilities, 15 percent have none at all, 4 percent have one lavatory to 100 families, only 9 percent have one lavatory per family; 70 percent share one lavatory for 10 to 100 families. Poverty in India is so great that millions are reduced to an animal level.

  The second defence which could be pleaded on Nehru’s behalf is the population problem. This is the first problem in India, and the gravest by far. Since I went to India early in 1952 the population has increased by about 100 million. These are figures of doom. The population problem, like some other real and concrete problems, was lost sight of for three decades during the euphoric agitation against the British raj. The urgency of the need for increasing food production cannot be much longer evaded; still less can the urgency of the need for slowing down the rate of population growth. The birth rate is high, but the new and explosive factor is the fall in the death rate. As a result life expectancy has risen from twenty six years in 1940 to forty one years now. Although there are few religious or social inhibitions against family planning, the efforts, organised by the government itself, to spread it have so far won few adherents. Indifference is the cause. The difference is due in part to lack of education, but only in part. Indians amount to a seventh of the human race. Their numbers are swollen each year by 12–15 million. About 20 percent of the population in most villages is already surplus—no work for them to do as well as too little food for them. At current rates of growth the population will have grown to about 1,000 million by the end of the century. Apart from the wastage of human life and spirit involved in this pullulation, it makes the plans, whatever their merits or demerits, futile. The increase of wealth cannot catch up with the increase of mouths. The statistics collected by the Central Statistical Institute leave little doubt that population has grown faster than the net economic growth achieved by the plans. The disparity may be as great as 2–5 percent for population growth to 1–6 percent for net economic growth. Indeed there will soon be a problem not only to feed the millions but to get enough water for them. Much of the wildlife in India will disappear under the rising tide of human beings. And the immense social disarray caused by the population explosion, and exacerbated by well-meaning economic and social legislation of the Nehru years, predisposes to the shortcut of dictatorship.