PROFITABILITY v.

WELFARE: THE LEGAL PRESPECTIVE

DR SHAKUNTLA MISRA NATIONAL REHABILITATION UNIVERSITY,LUCKNOW

PROFITABILITY v. WELFARE: THE LEGAL PRESPECTIVE

TOPIC- NEHRUVIAN SOCIALISM

SUBMITTED TO SUBMITTED BY
DR.VIJETA DUA TANDON KIRTIVAAN MISHRA
FACULTY OF LAW B.COMLL.B(H) 8 TH SEM
DSMNRU DSMNRU

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Acknowledgement

Thanks to the Almighty who gave me the strength to accomplish the project with sheer hardwork
and honesty. This research venture has been made possible due to the generous co- operations of
various persons. To list them all is not practicable ,even to repay them in words is beyond the
domain of my lexicon.

May I observe the protocol to show my gratitude to the venerated Faculty-in-charge Mrs.Vijeta
Dua for her kind gesture in allotting me such a wonderful and elucidating research topic. Apart
from that I would like to thank my friends for their support and suggestions during the process of
making this project.

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Table of Content

1. Introduction…………………………………………………1
2. Base of Nehruvian Socialism: The Soviet Economy……….2
3. Drafting of Five year Plan…………………………………..3
4. Nehruvian Socialism: Rise and Fall………………………...5
5. The last of Nehruvians……………………………………….7
6. Crytical view of Indian Historians on Nehruvianism…………11
• Tryst with Debt and Destitutions- V.P. Bhatia
• Secularism sacrificed the idea of Hindustan and refused to accord it
legitimacy- Shiva Naipul
• Nehru: The Saints’s Tactician- Shashi Tharoor

7. Conclusion………………………………………………..16
8. Bibliography………………………………………………17

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INTRODUCTION
Bharat Ratna Jawaharlal Nehru (November 14, 1889 - May 27, 1964) was a leader of the
(moderately) socialist wing of the Indian National Congress during and after India's struggle for
independence from the British Empire. He became the first Prime Minister of India at
independence on August 15, 1947, holding the office until his death.

Nehruvianism
Nehru was fascinated by Soviet Union's Piatiletka or 5-year plan and tried implementing the
same for Indian Economy. He wanted India to have best of both Socialism and Capitalism and
hence went on to create Democratic Socialism of India. He wanted the state to be the
enterprenuer and all its citizens to be equal share holders. He strengthened the democratic
pillars of nation immensely by creating proper wealth distribution systems at all levels. But this
kind of system, where in the state is the enterprenuer, failed to generate wealth for the giant
nation. It resulted in corruption and stagnation. Gurucharan Das in his book India Unbound
captures the essence of Nehruvian Era by the sentence –
“The cake is distributed even before it was baked.”
The foundation of Nehru's social philosophy was the evolution of a secular socialist democracy
that was the antithesis of a totally privatised market-grab economy. He was averse to the
consumerist craze of the middle class, which has led to the bankruptcy of capitalist mores. He
said:
``On the one side there is this great and overpowering progress in science and technology
and their manifold consequences; on the other, a certain mental exhaustion of civilisation
itself."
Nehru's socialism was humanism-in-action for all people, high and low, party or no party. In the
Constituent Assembly, moving the Objectives Resolution, he made an eloquent appeal to think
of India as a whole and in a planet-wide perspective:
``A time comes when we have to rise above party and think of the nation, think sometimes
of even the world at large of which our nation is a great part.''
Base of Nehruvian Socialism: The Soviet Economy
The economy of the Soviet Union was based on a system of state ownership and administrative
planning. Like other Communist states in the former Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union forged a
centrally planned economy. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991), all but a handful of
the 15 former Soviet republics have dismantled their Soviet-style economies.

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Planning
Based on a system of state ownership, the Soviet economy was controlled through the State
Planning Commission and the State Bank. The economy was directed by a series of five-year
plans. For every enterprise planning ministries (also known as the "fund holders" or
fondoderzhateli) defined the mix of economic inputs (e.g., labor and raw materials), a schedule
for completion, and wholesale and almost all retail prices.
Drafting the five-year plans
Soviet planners under the ægis of Joseph Stalin set up the series of Five-Year Plans or Piatiletkas
(пятилетка) as nation-wide centralized exercises in rapid economic development. Fulfilling the
plan became the watchword of Soviet bureaucracy. Putative five-year cycles became
foreshortened with successes or abandoned in crisis. However, many achievements of rapid
development, particularly in heavy industry, persisted despite economic upheaval. Altogether,
there were 13 five-year plans. The first one was accepted in 1928, for the five year period from
1929 to 1933 and completed one year early. The last, thirteenth Five-Year Plan was for the
period from 1991 to 1995 and was not completed, as the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991.
Other developing countries have emulated the concept of central planning setting integrated
goals for a finite period of time: thus we may find "Seven-year Plans" and "Twelve-Year Plans".
The People's Republic of China has also used Five-Year Plans, and still nominally does so,
though their relevance to the rapidly-developing parts of China where "socialism withChinese
characteristics" (to all intents and purposes, market capitalism) has taken off are doubtful.
Jawaharlal Nehru, impressed with Soviet Union's Industrial progress, implemented the same for
Republic of India. India has an extensive network setup to formulate 5-year plans under the
supervision of the Planning Commission. India is currently in its 12th 5- year plan or Panch-
Varsh Pranalika.

Nehruvian Socialism: Rise And Fall

In 1997, when India celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence, the world paid
homage to its most populous democracy. Other countries had grown richer in those
postcolonial years. Many had escaped the political and religious convulsions that had so often
shaken the region. But almost alone in the non-Western world -- barring a short interruption in
1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency -- India had clung doggedly to its
democratic convictions. A slew of books commemorated the achievement. One of the finest,
Sunil Khilnani's ''Idea of India,'' described India's polity as ''the third moment in the great
democratic experiment launched by the American and French Revolutions.''

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Cherishing the revolution that began with independence in 1947, one does not find full cause
for jubilation until 1991, when India unleashed a series of economic reforms, the start of an
''economic revolution'' that he believes ''may well be more important than the political
revolution.''
A newly installed government surprised everyone by easing foreign exchange restrictions,
devaluing the rupee, lowering import tariffs and undoing the Byzantine controls that had stifled
Indian industry. Many feel the reforms should have gone further, but the results nonetheless
have been dramatic: after decades of chugging along at the so- called Hindu rate of growth (a
dismal 3.5 percent per year), the economy grew by an average of 7.5 percent in the mid-1990's.
The growth in disposable incomes, and the opening up of the country to world markets, has
altered the face of Indian society, creating a new consumer middle class.
Those reforms were forced upon India, adopted less than enthusiastically when the nation
found itself with foreign exchange reserves worth only two weeks of imports.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of Indian independence, a young man for the handsome leader
whose lofty ideals inspired a nation. But, echoing an increasingly common attitude in modern
India, Nehru's faith in Soviet-style central planning cheated the nation of the prosperity enjoyed
by some of its Southeast Asian neighbors. Nehru's revolution was incomplete, delivering
political liberty but failing to unshackle the nation economically.
By way of background, for 44 years India pursued an economic strategy from which it is now
seeking to extricate itself. The goals of this plan were primarily social: to provide all citizens
with basic human necessities, to ensure that India remained economically as well as politically
independent of foreign control, to narrow the gap between rich and poor, and to solidify the
foundations of democracy in the sprawling, newborn state. These goals were remarkably
ambitious, and (even more remarkably) they were essentially met.
Critics of Nehruvian socialism point to the lack of rapid economic growth during the years when
other Asian states were chalking up impressive trade figures. But this was never part of the
plan. Das (together with many economists) argues that it should have been. Maybe so. Such
arguments are easiest to make with 20-20 hindsight, and at the time Nehru was instituting his
program the consensus among Western economists advising developing nations favored state-
sponsored central planning rather than a free-market approach.
He remained a starry-eyed admirer of Soviet brand of centralised Planning which he introduced
in India soon after the death of Patel to concentrate all economic strings in his hand to control
the polity. While the First Plan was on right course formulated on Patel's lines by its emphasis
on agriculture, the second one put India's economic train on the wrong track of State Capitalism
and priority for Heavy Industries, leaving the tertiary and consumer sector to monopoly capital:
Introduction of Quota-Licence-Raj led to large scale generation of black money and corruption,
aggravation of poverty so that by continuing his policies further under leftist tutelage, the
country was brought to the brink of bankruptcy by 1991 by his dynastic successors as the
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original tilt was never corrected,leading to perforce toeing of the IMF/WB line, aggravated by
the West-oriented globalisation. The story of this horrific downhill course in almost every
economic sector has been brought out in a highly interesting and enlightening account with full
facts and figures in this book Golden Age to Globalisation.
Gandhi even admitted in a speech at Rajkot in May 1939 that "Jawahar is quite convinced that I
have put the clock of progress back by a century" for his emphasis on rural development first.
But still Gandhi continued to back Nehru for prime leadership because Nehru was "wise and
ambitious enough to realise that without Bapu's support he could never win supreme power".
So unlike rebel Subhas who never professed fake loyalty to Gandhi's ideals and was hounded
out of the Congress and forced to leave the country, fake socialist Nehru continued to be the
spoilt heir as he was built up as darling of the youth to counter Subhas's superior charisma,
superseding even Gandhi in mass mind. The tragic results of Nehru's Marxist obsession on top
of Islamic and British ravages are tellingly brought out by our friend Shri Daya Krishna, formerly
of the Indian Economic Service and a regular contributor to Organiser. The book is a compulsive
reading for those who want to understand the roots of the present economic crisis and its
horrendous consequences. Besides a review of 50 years of Planning, it meticulously examines
every aspect of the 9th plan to give a graphic picture of the alarming situation turning the
growth process into that of sheer battle for survival. The Rs. 1700 crore sterling balance assets
of 1947 have been turned into a per capita debt of Rs. 11820 by 2000-2001.

The last of the Nehruvians

PARAMESHWAR NARAIN HAKSAR, who died at age 85 on November 27, was perhaps the last
survivor of the cadre of policy-planners, diplomatic strate- gists and administrators ass-ociated
with Jawaharlal Nehru's early nation-building project. He died a disillusioned man, pained at the
questioning of the main premises - democracy, secularism, socialism and non-alignment - of
that project. Haksar was not just an individual, nor a powerful ex-bureaucrat. He was an
institution. His life and career hold many lessons about India and the world, and about the
strengths and weaknesses of the Nehruvian legacy.
Haksar was among an elite crop of well-educated youth who were personally inspired and
influenced by Nehru. He switched from a promising career as a barrister at the Allahabad High
Court to the foreign service, at Nehru's instance. Those were the heady days of non-alignment.
Haksar played no mean role in crafting some of the details of India's foreign policy. Non-
alignment was not an easy posture to adopt for a country then subject to the intense pressure
of bloc rivalry, in particular pressure from the West under whose domination India's entire
administration had been shaped for over a century. Non-alignment became viable only because
of Nehru's distrust of free-market capitalism, a certain commitment to equality, an admiration
for state planning, and, globally, the existence of the Soviet Union as a countervailing force to
the Western bloc.

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Non-alignment had a dual aspect: at the doctrinal level, it advocated autonomy from both East
and West; at another level, it connoted the independent foreign policy of a newly liberated
state in the vanguard of the decolonisation process, which sought to reform an unequal global
order. India's foreign policy complemented the Nehruvian attempt to pursue a relatively
autonomous path of development: "socialism" or a "mixed economy", combining private
property and regulated capitalism, with a measure of distributive justice. This coherence was
unique.
Haksar was schooled in policy-planning derived from this coherence within a milieu of
institution-building based on the Nehruvian vision. In the first quarter-century following
Indepen-dence, India gave birth to myriad institutions - in administration, science and
technology, the arts, academics, trade, industry and agriculture. These institutions, some of the
world's best, and most unmatched in the Third World, formed the powerhouse of nation-
building. If India was to have state planning, it had to create not only its own Planning
Commission, but also other institutions such as the Indian Statistical Institute (P.C.
Mahalanobis' alma mater) and the Delhi School of Economics (V.K.R.V. Rao's creation, at one
time truly outstanding), to service it. To achieve food self-sufficiency, India would build not only
the Sindri fertilizer plant; it would also create the wherewithal to design, build and equip such
factories.
It was not enough to allocate funds to new public sector companies; it was necessary to create
a cadre of managers too. Industry promotion had to be accompanied by term- lending credit
institutions, for example, the Industrial Development Bank of India, the Industrial Credit and
Investment Corpo-ration of India (now ICICI), and so on. The planning was meticulously detailed
to the point of creating windows to handle foreign currency loans to industry which, it was
recognised, would need to import capital goods. In this institutional flowering figured the
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the
Indian Council of Medical Research; the five Indian Institutes of Technology; the Indian
Institutes of Management; the chain of Councils of Social Science, Historical and Philosophical
Research; the Sahitya, Lalit Kala and Sangeet Natak Akademis; and companies in fields as
diverse as electronics, earth-moving equipment, railway construction, silicon chips and machine
tools.
Associated with them were pioneers and institution-builders, from Visvesvaraya to Lovraj
Kumar, from S.S. Bhatnagar to H.T. Parekh, from D.S. Kothari to K.D. Malaviya.
These were people with foresight. For instance, without Malaviya - and his remarkable
understanding of the importance of hydrocarbons - the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (now
Corporation) could not have come into being, Bombay High would not have happened, and
India would have been devastated by the oil shocks of the 1970s.
FORESIGHT was crucial to Haksar's understanding of power, foreign policy and nation- building.
He was acutely aware that a good section of the Indian establishment refused to acknowledge

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the need for holistic thinking and institutionalisation. Twenty years ago, he wrote: "There is...
insufficient... coordination between the political elements of our foreign policy and the
economic, commercial and security aspects... Our (Foreign) Ministry is particularly weak in
institutionalising forward thinking... And, from time to time, one discerns display of egotism...
which is not only fatal in diplomacy but is destructive of institutional arrangements. I have
always felt that a group of earnest men working together are preferable to a genius... Lack of
teamwork is our weakness. Our diplomacy, therefore, falls short of optimal results." ("India's
Foreign Policy and its Problems", Patriot, 1989). Similar views are to be found in his
Premonitions and his autobiographical One More Life.
Haksar won laurels not so much in the Foreign Office as in strategising the abolition of privy
purses, the nationalisation of banks, insurance and foreign oil companies, the liberation of
Bangladesh, the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty, and the Shimla accord with Pakistan. In the period
1967-73, he was Indira Gandhi's most important adviser. He understood, better than perhaps
any of her other advisers, that a Left-leaning pro-poor orientation would be critical to her
success. He also actively promoted a foreign policy stance critical of Western hegemonism.

Haksar never claimed credit for India's policy of supporting the Bangladesh liberation
movement to the point of waging war with Pakistan. But he was its real architect. As he was of
the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of the Cabinet Secretariat, the Shimla accord, and many
administrative arrangements and procedures. It is easy to understand the rationale of the
Haksar strategy vis-a-vis Bangladesh: the West Pakistan establishment was incapable of
accommodating East Pakistan's legitimate demand for equality and autonomy; the country had
to split. It is not so easy to appreciate the logic of Haksar's advocacy of the Shimla accord after
India had decisively trounced Pakistan in 1971. Haksar himself explained the rationale pithily:
"The most painful and difficult moment in our mutual relationship was reached in December
1971. Pakistan lay shattered. Several of its tehsils were under occupation of our army, resulting
in displacement of nearly a million people; 93,000 prisoners of war were in our custody
affecting several lakhs of families in Pakistan...'Negotiating from strength' has been made part
of diplomatic coinage. But to negotiate with someone who is manifestly weak is even more
difficult... The Simla negotiations were thus full of difficulties... If these... were successfully
concluded it was due, in large measure, to the correctness of our approach to Pakistan as it
emerged out of the trauma of its partition and to the overwhelming support which the country
gave to that approach.
"What were the essential elements of that approach? First, a recognition that Pakistan
continued to have an unresolved crisis of its national identity... Only a resumption of the
interplay of political processes could possibly resolve the crisis and lead to Pakistan's normal
political, economic, social and cultural evolution. India must not do anything which would
impede this process... Secondly, the common people of Pakistan must know of India's interest
in maintaining the integrity of Pakistan.
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"Thirdly, India must not, under any circumstances, add to the stock of political capital of diverse
elements in Pakistan's military, civilian establishments and among the motley combination of
political adventurers who play upon Indophobia-mixed Islamic atavism. And finally, the moment
of defeat must never be converted into a moment of humiliation."
It is rare to see this kind of insight among our present policymakers. (Indeed, the BJP's
ideologues malign the Shimla agreement as a "betrayal".) Haksar had a refined understanding
of foreign relations. He repudiated the thesis that strength derives from military force - an idea
that is bandied about today as obvious wisdom in defence of Pokhran-II. In a lucid passage,
Haksar debunks this: "The very concept of force as the basis of state policy has become a kind
of fetish.... The West cannot think of dialogue unless it is based on force. President Reagan, for
one, says: 'The only way to negotiate for peace is from a position of strength'..." But "it should
be clear to anybody that negotiations 'from a position of strength' cannot by their very nature
be constructive, since they are intended to impose one's will... on one's partner. They rule out
the possibility of achieving mutually acceptable, balanced results." Such mature understanding
and refined thinking is rare today.
Haksar was badly humiliated by Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency and shunted off to the
Planning Commission from his powerful position as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister.
Later he bowed out of office altogether. One may or may not approve of his reluctance to
condemn Indira Gandhi: "I will not comment on (her)... She's no more. She's part of history.
Historians will judge her by what she's done." But Haksar was extraordinarily dignified in the
way he dealt with the dilemmas in whose creation he had himself played a part: for example,
the overcentralisation of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), which led to its potential for
authoritarian misuse, reliance on intelligence, which was proving less and less trustworthy, the
failure of a number of institutions such as RAW to deliver. In his later years, Haksar often
acknowledged the limitations of his approach, indeed that of his generation of institution-
builders. The approach was a top-down one, to which administrative instruments are central. It
never took popular participation as necessary or vital to official programmes. It was gender-
blind, insensitive to environmental considerations, and often uncomprehending of micro-level
realities. Thus, its grand visions often ended up in unimplementable programmes. Haksar
bitterly complained 20 years ago: "Life demands constant renewal. And our country is crying for
renewal - political, economic, cultural and spiritual. Without such a renewal, our diplomats...
might be reduced to... seller(s) of anti-earthquake pills of Lisbon. This would be amusing but not
edifying... in recent years, both the institution of the Foreign Office as well as the foreign
service are being eroded. Wisdom would require halting and reversing the process." This never
happened.
In his later years, Haksar did try to rethink the top-down approach. For instance, he associated
himself with the Delhi Science Forum and initiatives on human rights,secularism, opposition to
mindless neo-liberal policies. He also produced an excellent report on the functioning of the
three cultural Akademis. This had an incisive analysis of their failu res, frailties, and patronage-

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driven character, and made many thoughtful recommendations for reform. (Needless to say,
these are yet to be implemented.)
Despite his limitations, Haksar remained a committed believer in democracy and the freedom
of expression. It is well known that he criticised the suspension of fundamental rights during
the Emergency. But few people know that he had to plead Satyajit Ray's case to Nehru. Ray's
classic, Pather Panchali, was initially banned from being screened abroad. "My wife and I
happened to see this film and we were both struck by its beauty. We felt it was the kind of film
which should be entered at one of the international film festivals... I was informed that as the
film showed India's poverty, it was not suitable for being entered in foreign film festivals. A
great battle ensued to have the order banning the film removed." Haksar approached Nehru,
who was furious: "What is wrong about showing India's poverty? Everyone knows that we are a
poor country. The question is: are we Indians sensitive to our poverty or insensitive to it?
Satyajit Ray has shown it with an extraordinary sense of beauty and sensitiveness."
Haksar's world was far from cheerful in the evening of his life. Indeed, it got dark after he lost
his eyesight more than 10 years ago. And it became even darker after Hindu communalism's
recrudescence, and increasing loss of the integrity and sense of purpose of the Indian state. It is
no poetic justice that Haksar should have passed away just as Hindutva's ascendancy is giving
way to decline after the comprehensive setback the Bharatiya Janata Party received in the
latest Assembly elections in three States.
Critical Views of Indian Historians on Nehruvianism
"Tryst with Debt and Destitution" - The Downhill Course of Nehruvian Socialism
V.P. Bhatia
ONE of the cruelest ironies of post-Independence India is that the three much vaunted
Nehruvian pillars of the State-Democracy, Socialism and Secularism have been reduced to ashes
by the one-man autocracy installed by Gandhi's blessings in the teeth of his Congress Party's
opposition.n For, while the one-legged Democracy turned into dynastic dictatorship, his phoney
Socialism turned Nehru's 'Tryst with Destiny' into 'Tryst with Debt and Destitution'. It became a
populist slogan to dupe the masses, while really adding the ravages of a new inner imperialism
to those of earlier one of Islamic and British Imperialisms so that survival is now the most
crucial problem before millions of Indians battling for meagre resources of land and water.
Above all, secularism has become blatant anti-Hinduism for virtual Islamisation of India by
Nehruvian bid to crush Hindu Nationalism, that bedrock and spinal chord of Indian Nationalism,
into communalism. He almost outlawed any mention of it. The half-baked un-Indian
generations reared up under Nehruvian shadows especially those lording over the media and
the academia because of a near monopoly situation of the pampered Marxist managers of the
Nehru-Gandhi dynastic establishment have raised Muslims to the status of super-class, inflating
their ego and even inciting them to perpetrate the gruesome incidents like that of Godhra and

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justifying their depredations in J&K the name of Kashmiri identity and autonomy to scarve out
an Islamic State.
"Secularism sacrificed the idea of 'Hindustan' and refused to accord it legitimacy."-
-Shiva Naipaul
As Shiva Naipaul, the talented brother of the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, says in one of his
essays "India and the Nehrus", describing Nehru as the "un-English Englishman", the secular
state is so afraid of its minorities, so wracked by the mischiefs of Pakistan that it has sacrificed
Hindustan as a notion, and refused to accord it legitimacy." (Vide The Unfinish Journey (p. 63)
Shiva Naipaul, it may be pointed out, was a most travelled writer and died suddenly in 1985 at
the age of 40 and was highly prized for his literary flair even at that young age. Like his elder
brother V.S. Naipaul, he too came to India to search for his ethnic Hindu roots. He was greatly
disgusted by the political obscenity of dynastic installation of Rajiv after the assassination of
Indira Gandhi.
Anyway, secularism having degenerated into the profession of inciting the minorities,giving a
political veto to the Muslim votebank and socialism converted into crony capitalism under a
tattered populist garb, it would be interesting to know how the inevitable tragic phenomenon
occurred. 'Inevitable' because Nehru's commitment to Socialism was superficial and populist
opiate to cover up his lack of understanding of the Indian realities. Jinnah rightly described him
as "superficial and vain busybody obsessed with international affairs who did not know the
ground under his feet". His charisma mainly consisted of his having been groomed as a
"glamour boy of Gandhi", as Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel described him. He was
deliberately cultivated as a mass mobiliser in the elections of 1937 while Patel was propped-up
as "organisation man" and the manager of the Parliamentary wing of the party by Gandhi. Thus
aristocratic, westernised Nehru's arrogance was further boosted by his role as a charismatic
campaigner when he claimed to have addressed at least one crore people and cheered by many
more on the roadside during his whirlwind tours of UP and Bihar. However, he skated on thin
ice, as he skimmed through mass meetings without knowledge of the Indian poor's plight. His
head was in the clouds, as Mountbatten said, and his profession of socialism mere skin deep,
because he had imbibed hybrid Marxist ideas from Soviet Russia during a three-week tour in
1927 and of Fabian Socialism from England. Unlike Gandhiji, he was a great imitator of Western
urban civilisation.

He remained a starry-eyed admirer of Soviet brand of centralised Planning which heintroduced

in India soon after the death of Patel to concentrate all economic strings in his hand to control
the polity. While the First Plan was on right course formulated on Patel's lines by its emphasis
on agriculture, the second one put India's economic train on the wrong track of State Capitalism
and priority for Heavy Industries, leaving the tertiary and consumer sector to monopoly capital:
Introduction of Quota-Licence-Raj led to large scale generation of black money and corruption,
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aggravation of poverty so that by continuing his policies further under leftist tutelage, the
country was brought to the brink of bankruptcy by 1991 by his dynastic successors as the
original tilt was never corrected, leading to perforce toeing of the IMF/WB line, aggravated by
the West-oriented globalisation. The story of this horrific downhill course in almost every
economic sector has been brought out in a highly interesting and enlightening account with full
facts and figures in this book Golden Age to Globalisation. Gandhi even admitted in a speech at
Rajkot in May 1939 that "Jawahar is quite convinced that I have put the clock of progress back
by a century" for his emphasis on rural development first. But still Gandhi continued to back
Nehru for prime leadership because Nehru was "wise and ambitious enough to realise that
without Bapu's support he could never win supreme power". So unlike rebel Subhas who never
professed fake loyalty to Gandhi's ideals and was hounded out of the Congress and forced to
leave the country, fake socialist Nehru continued to be the spoilt heir as he was built up as
darling of the youth to counter Subhas's superior charisma, superseding even Gandhi in mass
mind. The tragic results of Nehru's Marxist obsession on top of Islamic and British ravages are
tellingly brought out by our friend Shri Daya Krishna, formerly of the Indian Economic Service
and a regular contributor to Organiser. The book is a compulsive reading for those who want to
understand the roots of the present economic crisis and its horrendous consequences. Besides
a review of 50 years of Planning, it meticulously examines every aspect of the 9th plan to give a
graphic picture of the alarming situation turning the growth process into that of sheer battle for
survival. The Rs. 1700 crore sterling balance assets of 1947 have been turned into a per capita
debt of Rs. 11820 by 2000-2001. To quote from the book to complete last week's picture of the
Islamic roots of India's woes, compounded by Nehru's subsequent Soviet style and Westernised
pro-urban planning bringing India to the near bottom of the under-developed economies, the
following may be noted:
"The trend for concentration of wealth among Muslim jagirdars, nawabs, military personnel
and the nobles gathered momentum during the last hundred years of Mughal rule. Around the
middle of eighteenth century, thus, about 8000 Muslim families out of a population of about
160 million, collected over one-third to one-half of the gross national product of India.

'Nehru': The Saint's Tactician

By Shashi Tharoor
North of New Delhi, in the foothills of the Himalayas, lies the extraordinary city of Chandigarh.
Built in the 1950's, it was an almost totally new creation, planned and designed by the French
modernist architect Le Corbusier, and strongly promoted by India's first prime minister after
independence, Jawaharlal Nehru. Everything about this new state capital had to be a model of
rationality: streets and avenues, geometrically laid out, were identified by numbers. Houses, in
various standard sizes, were allocated to government workers strictly according to rank. The
scale is huge, concrete the favored material. Chandigarh was to be the monument of modern

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India, free from ancient customs and superstitions, free from the colonial past, free to celebrate
a brave new age.
The flaws of Chandigarh are now plain to see. Empty concrete plazas crack in the Indian
summer heat. The main government buildings look stranded, like alien monsters plunked in the
wrong terrain. The idea of Chandigarh was astounding in its ambition and high hopes, but
bound to fail, like all the other modernist utopias that sought to design human life by numbers.
Chandigarh, built to express Nehru's vision of India, now stands as a reminder of its limitations.
Vision is at the heart of Shashi Tharoor's short biography, "Nehru: The Invention of India." For
Nehru, in this account, was generally stronger on the vision thing than on practicalities. The
best part of the book is the concluding chapter, a good summing up of Nehru's triumphs and
failures. Nehru's idea of India was very much a product of his own background as an English-
educated, upper-class, anti-imperialist, leftist, rationalist intellectual. He created a model of
development that was the exact opposite of today's China. Whereas China now has an
increasingly liberal economy run by an illiberal state, Nehru's staunchly liberal democratic state
was in charge of a closed economy.

As Tharoor rightly says, "Nehru's India put the political cart before the economic horse,
shackling it to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice above economic growth, and
discouraged free enterprise and foreign investment." Our contemporary partisans against
globalization would no doubt approve of this, but it explains why much of India is still stuck in
poverty.
Like many intellectuals, Nehru had, as Tharoor says, a "lifelong tendency to affirm principles
disconnected from practical consequences." Although born into a family of high-caste Hindus,
Nehru was a thoroughly secular man, who wished to keep religious passions far from politics.
This might seem farsighted and indeed sensible for a leader who contrived, with remarkable
success, to turn a huge continent, containing many languages, faiths and cultures, into a
modern democracy. But as happened in the former Soviet empire, which Nehru unwisely
admired, frozen-out passions, once the thaw sets in, gather heat with a vengeance.
Democratic politics have to find a way of accommodating communal feelings, and Nehru's lofty
disdain for all faiths, except "scientific socialism," helped to provoke the kind of religious
extremism that is now causing so much damage. A man who saw religion as nothing more than
"senseless and criminal bigotry" was not best placed to understand the concerns of Muslims
who feared the domination of Hindus in the struggle for independence. His advice to a Muslim
friend that he should read more Bertrand Russell was typical of his own background and taste,
but perhaps not the most useful counsel he could have given. And the aggressive secularism of
Nehru's Congress Party, though intellectually appealing, was unable to contain the religious
chauvinism of a rising Hindu middle class.

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Tharoor, a high-ranking official at the United Nations, is sharp on Nehru's flaws. But he also
stresses his great achievements. Without Nehru there might not even be an Indian democracy,
which may be cracking like Chandigarh's concrete plazas, but is still functioning, despite all the
violence and corruption that goes with it. Most great anticolonial leaders in Asia and Africa,
though almost invariably given to fine democratic rhetoric, ended up betraying the liberties
they fought for, and became worse tyrants than the imperialists they had bravely dislodged.
Not Nehru.
He was well aware of the temptation, however. Tharoor quotes from a fascinating article,
written in 1937, warning that Nehru "has all the makings of a dictator in him – vast popularity, a
strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride. He must be checked. We want no
Caesars." The pseudonymous author was Nehru himself. He was unique among his postcolonial
peers in treating parliamentary politics and procedures seriously and never taking away
people's freedom to criticize him. The same cannot be said for Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi,
who did fall for the temptation of crushing dissent. That she was voted out of office
nonetheless showed the resilience of the institutions her father had built.

On the life of Nehru, Tharoor has far less of interest to say. There is nothing wrong with short
biographies as a genre. In fact, if done well, they can be both entertaining and illuminating. But
there has to be a special angle, a new insight, something to lift it above being just a potted
biography. Tharoor fails to add anything much to what we already knew about Nehru and his
times: the Amritsar massacre of 1919, Gandhi's march to the salt marshes of Gujarat,
Mohammed Ali Jinnah's quarrels with the Congress Party,Winston Churchill's blimpish
imperialism.
All these things are familiar to anyone who has seen Richard Attenborough's hagiographic
movie about Gandhi. And that is the problem. Tharoor calls his book a "reinterpretation" of his
hero's life. But it is not. Instead, like the movie, it is mostly a polished rehash of pious Nehruvian
interpretations of modern Indian history. In the conventional Congress Party view, for example,
Jinnah was to blame for the partition between India and Pakistan and the terrible bloodshed
that followed. Reality was more complicated. Jinnah had good reasons to be suspicious of the
Hindu leaders, no matter how secular they were in their views. He may have been maddening
at times, but it could be argued that Nehru and his Hindu colleagues did not do enough to
accommodate him.
On the independence struggle, Tharoor is equally conventional. To be sure, British governors
were often obtuse, and sometimes brutal. Brig. R. E. H. Dyer's order to shoot unarmed civilians
in Amritsar was a ghastly crime. But Tharoor describes it as an arbitrary act without
provocation. In fact, crowds had run amok in the area, and the civilian government felt it had
lost control. Moreover, the British did not whitewash Dyer's actions, as Tharoor would have us
believe, but relieved him of his command.

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Winston Churchill is rarely mentioned in Tharoor's account without being called "egregious" or
some such negative term. To say that Churchill fought tooth and nail against Indian
independence is true enough, but to ascribe this purely to Churchill's racist contempt for the
Indian people is to miss the point. Churchill, like many others, was convinced that Britain
without its empire would no longer be a world power, and he was right. He also realized that
the British Empire could not exist without India. One may call this egregious, but the issue is
political, not racial.
Conclusion
Nehru was fascinated by Soviet Union’s Piatileka or 5 years plan and tried implementing the
same for India economy. He wanted India to have best of both Socialism and Capitalism and
here went to create DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM of India. He wanted the state to be entrepreneur
and all citizens to be equal share holders. He strengthened the democratic pillars of nation
immensely by creating proper wealth distribution systems at all levels.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books and Articles

➢ The Discovery of India ,Jawaharlal Nehru, Oxford University Press ,1946

➢ Tryst with Debt and Destitution, V.P. Bhatia
➢ Secularism sacrificed the idea of Hindustan and refused to accord it legitimacy, Shiva
Naipaul
➢ Nehru: The Saint’s Tactician , Shashi Tharoor

Websites

➢ https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/a-new-
paradigm/article21948342.ece1

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