Nehru

by Shashi Tharoor

  Self-sufficiency and self-reliance thus became the twin mantras: the prospect of allowing a Western corporation into India to “exploit” its resources immediately revived memories of British oppression. (It is ironic that in the West, freedom is associated axiomatically with capitalism, whereas in the postcolonial world freedom was seen as freedom from the depredations of foreign capital.) “Self-reliance” thus became a slogan and a watchword: it guaranteed both political freedom and freedom from economic exploitation. The result was a state that ensured political freedom but presided over; economic stagnation; that regulated entrepreneurial activity through a system of licenses, permits, and quotas that promoted both corruption and inefficiency but did little to promote growth; that enshrined bureaucratic power at the expense of individual enterprise. For most of the first five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and distributing poverty. Nehru called this socialism.

  The logic behind this approach, and for the dominance of the public sector, was a compound of nationalism and idealism: the conviction that items vital for the economic well-being of Indians must remain in Indian hands — not the hands of Indians seeking to profit from such activity, but the disinterested hands of the state, the father-and-mother to all Indians. It was sustained by the assumption that the public sector was a good in itself; that, even if it was not efficient or productive or competitive, it employed large numbers of Indians, gave them a stake in worshipping at Nehru’s “new temples of modern India,” and kept the country free from the depredations of profit-oriented capitalists who would enslave the country in the process of selling it what it needed. In this kind of thinking, performance was not a relevant criterion for judging the utility of the public sector: its inefficiencies were masked by generous subsidies from the national exchequer, and a combination of vested interests — socialist ideologues, bureaucratic management, self-protective trade unions, and captive markets — kept it beyond political criticism.

  But since the public sector was involved in economic activity, it was difficult for it to be entirely exempt from economic yardsticks. Yet most of Nehru’s public-sector companies made losses, draining away the Indian taxpayers’ money. Several of the state-owned companies even today are kept running merely to provide jobs — or, less positively, to prevent the “social costs” (job losses, poverty, political fallout) that would result from closing them down. All this we owe to Nehru. Since economic self-sufficiency was seen by the Nehruvians as the only possible guarantee of political independence, extreme protectionism was imposed: high tariff barriers (import duties of 350 percent were not uncommon, and the top rate as recently as 1991 was 300 percent), severe restrictions on the entry of foreign goods, capital, and technology, and great pride in the manufacture within India of goods that were obsolete, inefficient, and shoddy but recognizably Indian (like the clunky Ambassador car, a revamped 1948 Morris Oxford produced by a Birla quasi monopoly, which had a steering mechanism with the subtlety of an oxcart, which guzzled gasoline like a sheikh and would shake like a guzzler, and yet enjoyed waiting lists of several years at all the dealers).

  The mantra of self-sufficiency might have made some sense if, behind these protectionist walls, Indian business had been encouraged to thrive. Despite the difficulties placed in their way by the British Raj, Indian corporate houses like those of the Birlas, Tatas, and Kirloskars had built impressive business establishments by the time of independence, and could conceivably have taken on the world. Instead they found themselves being hobbled by regulations and restrictions, inspired by Nehru’s socialist

  mistrust of the profit motive, on every conceivable aspect of economic activity: whether they could invest in a new product or a new capacity, where they could invest, how many people they could hire, whether they could fire them, what sort of expansion or diversification they could undertake, where they could sell and for how much. Initiative was stifled, government permission was mandatory before any expansion or diversification, and a mind-boggling array of permits and licenses were required before the slightest new undertaking. It is sadly impossible to quantify the economic losses inflicted on India over decades of entrepreneurs frittering away their energies in queuing for licenses rather than manufacturing products, paying bribes instead of hiring workers, wooing politicians instead of understanding consumers, “getting things done” through bureaucrats rather than doing things for themselves. This, too, is Nehru’s legacy.

  The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods of too low a quality at too high a price. Exports of manufactured goods grew at an annual rate of 0.1 percent until 1985; India’s share of world trade fell by fourfifths. Per capita income, with a burgeoning population and a modest increase in GDP, anchored India firmly to the bottom third of the world rankings. The public sector, however, grew in size though not in production, to become the largest in the world outside the Communist bloc. Meanwhile, income disparities persisted, the poor remained mired in a poverty all the more wretched for the lack of means of escape from it in a controlled economy, the public sector sat entrenched on the “commanding heights” and looked down upon the toiling, overtaxed middle class, and only bureaucrats, politicians, and a small elite of protected businessmen flourished from the management of scarcity.

  India’s curse, the economist Jagdish Bhagwati once observed, was to be afflicted by brilliant economists. Nehru had a weakness for such men: people like P. C. Mahalanobis, who combined intellectual brilliance and ideological wrongheadedness in equal measure, but who was given free rein by Jawaharlal to drive India’s economy into a quicksand of regulatory red tape surrounding a mirage of planning. Nearly three decades after Nehru’s death and long after the rest of the developing world (led by China) had demonstrated the success of a different path, a new Congress prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, launched the country on economic reforms. In place of the Nehruvian mantra of self-sufficiency, India was to become more closely integrated into the world economic system. This repudiation of Nehruvianism has survived and become part of the new conventional wisdom. Though there is no doubt that economic reform faces serious political obstacles in democratic India, and change is often made with the hesitancy of governments looking over their electoral shoulders, there is now a definitive rupture of the Nehruvian link between democracy and socialism: one is no longer the corollary of the other. The bogey of the East India Company has finally been laid to rest.

  And yet there is no denying one vital legacy of Nehru’s economic planning — the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for the country today. Nehru was always fascinated by science and scientists; he made it a point to attend the annual Indian Science Congress every year, and he gave free rein (and taxpayers’ money) to scientists in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions. Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research; they and their successors have given the country a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world. Jawaharlal’s establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology (and the spur they provided to other lesser institutions) have produced many of the finest minds in Silicon Valley; today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the U.S. as one from MIT or Caltech, and India’s extraordinary leadership in the software industry is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru’s faith in scientific education.

  Of course this record also masks much mediocrity; overbureaucratized and underfunded scientific institutes that prompted gifted researchers like Har Gobind Khurana and Subramanyam Chandrasekhar to take their talents abroad and win Nobel Prizes for the U.S. rather than India. It is striking that post-independence India has not replicated, at any of Nehru’s much-vaunted scientific insti
tutions, the success of pre-independence scientists like C. V. Raman, Satyen Bose, or Meghnad Saha, who had left their marks on the world of physics in the first thirty years of the twentieth century with the Raman effect, the Bose-Einstein statistics, and the Saha equation. Still, Nehru left India with the world’s second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.

  Nehru was skeptical of Western claims to stand for freedom and democracy when India’s historical experience of colonial oppression and exploitation appeared to bear out the opposite. His conclusion was to see a moral equivalence between the two rival power blocs in the cold war, a position that led to nonalignment. Nehru saw this as the only possible stance compatible with the self-respect of a newly independent nation, and one which entitled India to take an independent position on each international issue. The limitations of his approach became apparent near the end of his own life, and today the end of the cold war has left India without a global conflict to be nonaligned against. Nonalignment, its defenders suggested, gave credibility to Indian nationalism by providing it with an overarching international purpose; without it, some questioned whether the idea of India could have stood its ground. But the point about the nationalist idea in India was that, for all the Nehruvian rhetoric, it was not dependent on an internationalist mission: its principal relevance was internal, in “creating Indians” out of the world’s most disparate collection of fellow citizens. Today one might argue that the changes in India’s external orientation necessitated by its economic reforms and by the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower have made nonalignment a rhetorical device at best, an irrelevance at worst. Be that as it may, the point remains that nonalignment is no longer a sufficient explanation for India’s interests on the world stage. Once again, Nehruvianism is passé.

  A retired Indian diplomat, Badruddin Tyabji, surveying the conduct of Nehru’s foreign policy after Nehru’s death, lamented sardonically:

  Subjectivity still rules the roost, though the great

  Subject himself died in 1964. His successors now

  quibble over the contents of his “system,” though

  he had no system. He had only behaved like himself,

  and no one can do that any more for him.

  The political ethos Nehru promoted was one of staunch anti-imperialism, a determination to safeguard India against foreign domination and internal division, and a commitment — at least in principle — to the uplift of the poorest sections of Indian society. These concerns fused together in the four pillars of Nehruvianism. If they were infused by what sometimes seemed excessively idealist rhetoric, Jawaharlal had a typical retort: “idealism,” he declared, “is the realism of tomorrow.” Tomorrow, however, has a habit of finding its own realisms. The last Congress Party government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao paid little but lip service to the traditional leitmotivs of the Nehru legacy. Instead, Rao tried to manage the contradictory pulls of India’s various particularist tendencies by seeking to accommodate them in a new consensus: economic reforms to invite foreign investment, to reduce the government’s power to command the economy, and to spur growth, coupled with politics that gave a little to each new group demand. The governments that have followed his have gone even further, even beginning to dismantle the public sector that was among Nehru’s proudest creations.

  And yet there can be no greater measure of the extent to which Jawaharlal Nehru dominated the political, intellectual, and moral ethos of his day than the tribute paid to him by his great critic Atal Behari Vajpayee, the opposition leader who would one day succeed Nehru both as foreign minister (in 1977) and as prime minister (in 1996). Upon Jawaharlal’s death, Vajpayee declared in Parliament that “a dream has remained half-fulfilled, a song has become silent, and a flame has vanished into the Unknown. The dream was of a world free of fear and hunger; the song a great epic resonant with the spirit of the Gita and as fragrant as a rose; the flame a candle which burnt all night long, showing us the way.” He added that Nehru was “the orchestrator of the impossible and inconceivable,” one who “was not afraid of compromise but would never compromise under duress.” Vajpayee went on to mourn “that vibrancy and independence of mind, that quality of being able to befriend the opponent and enemy, that gentlemanliness, that greatness” that marked Nehru. When he took over as minister of external affairs in India’s first non-Congress government in 1977, Vajpayee noticed that a portrait of Nehru was missing from its usual spot in the ministerial chamber, removed in an excess of zeal by functionaries anxious to please the new rulers. The lifelong critic of the Congress demanded its return. As he had said in his elegy, “the sun has set, yet by the shadow of the stars we must find our way.”

  So one must never forget the man himself, and his stamp on the age. His most comprehensive biographer, the late Gopal, put it best:

  No one who lived in India during the enchantment of the Nehru years needs to be reminded of the positive, generous spirit, the quality of style, the fresh and impulsive curiosity, the brief flares of temper followed by gentle contrition and the engaging streak of playfulness, all of which went along with an unrelenting sense of duty, a response to large issues, an exercise of reason and unaffiliated intelligence in human affairs, an intense, but not exclusive, patriotism and, above all, complete and transparent personal integrity… . To a whole generation of Indians he was not so much a leader as a companion who expressed and made clearer a particular view of the present and a vision of the future. The combination of intellectual and moral authority was unique in his time.

  The Indian novelist Raja Rao once spoke of the “secret historicity” of Jawaharlal’s mere presence. The American statesman Adlai Stevenson, introducing Nehru to a Chicago audience in 1949, observed:

  We live in an age swept by tides of history so powerful they shatter human understanding. Only a tiny handful of men have influenced the implacable forces of our time. To this small company of the truly great, Pandit JawaharlalNehru belongs… . He belongs to the even smaller company of historic figures who wore a halo in their own lifetimes.

  Nehru, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew wrote, “had to stand the test of two judgments: first, how well he succeeded in overthrowing the old order and second, whether he has succeeded in establishing a new order which is better than the old.” Lee’s cautious verdict was that “nobody can say that his reputation has been tarnished as a result of attaining power.” Nehru’s idea of India has held, though his legacy to India remains a mixed one. Of the four major pillars of his system, two — democratic institution-building and staunch secularism — were indispensable to the country’s survival as a pluralist land; a third, nonalignment, preserved its self respect and enhanced its international standing without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people; the fourth, socialist economics, was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere. In some ways, Jawaharlal seems curiously dated, a relic of another era; in others, such as in the development of India’s technological, nuclear, and satellite programs, a vindicated visionary. He called the dams and factories he built the “new temples” of modern India, but failed to realize the hold the old temples would continue to have on the Indian imagination. He created the technological institutes that have positioned India for leadership in the computer age, but he did not understand that software and spirituality could go hand in hand, that India in the twenty-first century would be a land of both programming and prayers. Nearly four decades after Nehru’s death, the consensus he constructed has frayed: democracy endures, secularism is besieged, nonalignment is all but forgotten, and socialism barely clings on.

  “Progress,” Jawaharlal declared toward the end of his life, “ultimately has to be measured by the quality of human beings — how they are improving, how their lot is improving, and how they are adapting themselves t
o modern ways and yet keep their feet firmly planted on their soil.” By his own measure, India’s progress has been mixed. India’s challenge today is both to depart from his legacy and to build on it, to sustain an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the power or the products of the outside world, secure in a national identity that transcends its divisions, and determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of her people. If India succeeds, it must acknowledge that he laid the foundation for such a success; if India fails, it will find in Nehru many of the seeds of its failure.

  On his desk, Jawaharlal Nehru kept two totems — a gold statuette of Mahatma Gandhi and a bronze cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln, which he would occasionally touch for comfort. The two objects reflected the range of his sources of inspiration: he often spoke of his wish to confront problems with the heart of the Mahatma and the hand of Lincoln. Nehru’s time may indeed have passed; but it says something about the narrowing of the country’s intellectual heritage that both objects ended up in a museum — and his heirs just kept the desk.

  9 Prasad, literally a blessing, is food offered to an idol in a temple ritual and then distributed to the worshippers.