Can effective alleviation of these two root material problems of India, poverty and overpopulation, which Nehru wished to give, be given, without totalitarian methods?
I am omitting any discussion of the case for industrialising India from the point of view of defence needs in a world of power politics for I think Nehru was not much concerned with them when launching the plans. It is probable that in latter years they did come to count. These needs indeed will confront India with terrible dilemmas, especially if the new nuclear weapons proliferate and the world does not acquire a stable balance of power.
What was wrong with Nehru’s plans is that on the one hand they were not big enough, not drastic enough, to produce a significant rise in the standard of living or a real dynamic of change; but, on the other, they were big and drastic enough to bring in disarrangement, and, in particular, to eat into India’s greatest wealth: the traditional spirit of contentment of the Indian people, the capacity to put up with life, the capacity to suffer, even hunger itself. So far the plans, together with Congress Party political promises over the years, have made Indians unwilling to accept hunger as they did over the past centuries; but they have not produced the wherewithal to alleviate hunger. The Marxist and the liberal strains in Nehru remained muddled and were not worked out into a functioning synthesis.
How much did Nehru go astray over the plans through his alienation from traditional India and more particularly through his love of machines? He loved machines as the expression of man’s mastering of Nature. He was too observant not to be aware of certain dangers going with mechanisation. I have heard him say that the machine way of life is likely to turn men more and more into robots; the vision of a world of steel and concrete and glass and the hygienic but bored millions carrying on their automated lives did not escape him. He was in two minds about TV for India. And latterly he did some speaking up for decentralisation. I have also heard him on some of the inevitable effects of government by parliaments elected by majority vote, about which he also had no illusions. Yet his enthusiasm for, getting close at times to a mystic adoration of, the machine remained. Hence his dithyrambic praise of the first Indian jet planes as ‘gazelles of the sky’, or of hydroelectric plants and factories as ‘the temples of our age’; or his enthusiasm for the architect Le Corbusier,59 who was the senior planner of the new Indian city of Chandigarh, that emblematic creature of modern noise and tension and ferro-concrete to whom a fitting memorial stands in the high court building until the discontented judges refuse to use it any more. The plans, the result of Nehru’s values and drive, were to a large degree wrongly conceived—too imitative of America on the one hand and of Russia on the other; not sufficiently indigenously Indian.
Gandhi knew that instead of machines enabling men to master Nature they are more likely to master men; what the motor car is now doing is a reminder for us; and he knew that Nehru took too little account of this. He once wrote to him:
Though I was beginning to detect some differences in viewpoint between you and me, I had no notion whatever of the terrible extent of these differences. I see quite clearly that you must carry on an open warfare against me and my views. The differences between you and me appear to be so vast and so radical that there seems to be no meeting ground. I suggest a dignified way of unfurling your flag.*
Gandhi had his fads, he could carry subtlety to the point to trickiness, and he accepted hospitality from Marwari plutocrats like the Birlas. But Gandhi knew that there are worse evils than poverty.
Nehru was right in wanting to plan; and the case for some industrialisation, as also for some socialism, was strong. But he cannot be acquitted of at least some superficiality; and this, as not infrequently happens in political decisions, led to pseudo solutions rather than to solutions. The ultimate practical question confronting the rulers of India was not industrialisation versus non-industrialisation but how much could be spared out of India’s scarce resources for industrialisation after providing for proper food supplies or a proper basis. The superficiality had been made the worse by the intellectual arrogance which marked his first (and most powerful) decade as prime minister. He ridiculed criticism of the plans; for instance when Sucheta Kripalani60 criticised his vague scheme for cooperative farming in 1958. And so he swung from one enthusiasm to another, such as big hydroelectric dams, land ceilings, Grow More Food campaigns, cooperative farming, steel plants, the 30,000 acre farm at Suratgarh (‘the biggest farm in Asia’), and from one magician to another who promised to produce quick answers. Nehru was superficial mostly because he was in too much of a hurry; in a tempestuous hurry to set India irrevocably on the road to industrialisation and socialism before he left the scene.
But if all the facts were known a major responsibility for the failures in the plans would, after the population explosion, lie on the sycophants who surrounded him. The Planning Commission, or certain influential members (for there were others who were both disinterested and able), took up his ideas, or enthusiasms, or prejudices, with the servility of lackeys. Throughout the 1950s neither the Congress Party nor Parliament nor cabinet had the courage to controvert Nehru, not even on his enthusiasm (shortlived) for cooperative farming, which, if it meant anything, meant Russian-type collective farms. Such was the sycophancy that a senior departmental official of my acquaintance, whose minister had announced again and again that India was about to become self-sufficient in food, but who himself believed that it would take fifteen years at the earliest for the plans to achieve this self-sufficiency, when chided about his minister’s misleading optimism, replied, ‘How can I tell my minister that we will not be self-sufficient next year? It is politically impossible.’ A long series of eminent or allegedly expert foreign visitors, most of them in India at the cost of the Indian or other taxpayers, added to Nehru’s myopia by assuring him that the plans were good and realistic. Almost any visitor, with or without any relevant competence, just above the tourist level could be sure to be written up in the Indian press if he praised the plans; rather in the same way as any visitor to Australia can be written up in the Australian press if he announces that the future of wool is secure. Month after month over the years some foreign visitor would be praising the plans. I remember after a visit of some international banking magnates, in India for only a few days, the gleeful satisfaction with which Nehru told me that they had praised the plans and said that they were not at all too ambitious. That was two or three years before his death. As late as December 1963 he told Parliament that the plans were without parallel anywhere.
Rajagopalachari’s attacks61 on Nehru’s economic and social philosophy annoyed Nehru considerably. To a foreign observer valuing both men, and loving India, much of what Rajagopalachari was saying was more than telling. It was the truth. Yet, such is the intractability of Indian poverty and overpopulation that Rajagopalachari failed to establish convincing solutions for the problem as a whole. And for how long could India withdraw into Indian-ness? Whatever his mistakes it can be said for Nehru that he did try to find solutions in terms of the modern world.
Parliamentary Democracy
After planning for industrialisation and socialism Nehru’s next great concern was to set India off securely on the road to parliamentary democracy.
Is India after Nehru’s disappearance likely to retain such degree of parliamentary democracy as she achieved under him? It is enough to say here that although India is the only parliamentary democracy functioning in the whole area lying between the Far East and Western Europe, its future is not assured. There might be a Hindu raj, Fascist in shape; as would be the case if the Hindu revivalist movement triumphed, a prospect which haunted Nehru like a recurrent nightmare. There might be a communist type of dictatorship. There might be a military dictatorship. There might be a characteristically Indian amalgam of all three. India’s genius for survival would make it possible for her to combine what we would regard as incompatibles. This amalgam could prevail over India as a whole; or there could be a confederation wi
th a Fascist type of dictatorship in some regions, communist-type dictatorships in other regions, and military dictatorships in others, and perhaps even parliamentary democracy in others. Much variety is possible among 500 to 1,000 million Indians. All one can be certain of is unsettlement—the unsettlement caused by the millions of children now at school and college who when they leave will see themselves as too good for the work and station of their illiterate parents and whose vision of the life they want will be coloured by the cinema, but who will be unable to get jobs. Here is the readymade market for mass-circulation papers or for subversive tracts; politicians buying votes with the promise of plenty and a good time; essentials outstripped by ever-rising population; millions of unemployed; continual inflation; the popular press buying circulation through playing on hatreds and irrationality; and the outcastes and the low castes—the majority—discovering their power in the secret ballot box.
Two factors working for dictatorship, and for the discipline which goes with dictatorship, be it Fascist, or communist, or military, have to be borne in mind. They have a bearing on the shortfalls in Nehru’s plans, too. One is the slap-dash inefficiency universal in India: engine drivers and railway employees who incur serious accidents by not bothering to carry out the elementary precautions, doctors and nurses who don’t bother with elementary hygiene or the right medicines, and so on endlessly. The other is the corruption, equally universal in India; as endemic as dysentery or malaria. The British raj held it in hand but could never eradicate it. It has swollen to vast proportions since independence, and especially, as has been said, since the plans introduced a network of licences, permits, and protectionism.
And what hurts the average man more than the corruption, which in any case is in most Asian countries accepted as unavoidable, like bad weather, is the law and order situation. Banditry, crime, and personal violence are, to say the least, not on the decrease.
But there is another side to the picture—and this is the case for optimism—devoted officials; much ability; a temperamental preference for what is moderate and sane; and that remarkable capacity for surviving already noted. Those who know India well mostly feel that somehow, and in the end, and despite all the signs to the contrary, and all the strains on stability, she will come through and will remain more or less what she is now, namely, the parliamentary democracy which Nehru left behind him. The Indians share with the British a long-term preference for the middle of the road.
An incidental point is worth touching on here, and that is that friends as well as enemies used to complain that government in India was bad or deteriorating because, amongst other reasons, Nehru was no administrator. Only a senior official inside the cabinet secretariat or the external affairs ministry could speak with authority on this. What is true is that Nehru did not husband his time well, being too generous with it, for instance in receiving foreign visitors who would not be received by their mayor, let alone their prime minister, in their own countries;* and perhaps, too, in making too many speeches and too many public appearances, though this seems to be an unavoidable part of the process of leadership in a parliamentary democracy. But there is no cabinet minister known to me in any country I have served in who was more orderly, and more insistent on seeing a process through from the talking stage to the practical stage, than Nehru. The leader of the Socialist Party once commended to his party the example set by Nehru in dealing with correspondence promptly. ‘You will always get a reply from him within 48 hours.’* This was common knowledge in Delhi. Nehru was not one of those ministers who have a safe full of awkward ‘pending papers’.
On the other hand, his administrative work did suffer from defective judgement of men, and sometimes of things; and also from a failure to delegate work and responsibility. He was, of course, far from being the only prime minister of whom these things, especially the former, could be said. He undoubtedly had too much to do, as well as wasting too much time in seeing too many people and in attending too many merely formal ceremonies. As a result, especially in his later years, he could not read essential papers, or master essential details, or get time for reflection.** This increased his superficiality and also his predisposition to be taken in by plausible talkers. But he was genuinely a practitioner as well as a believer in efficient administration no less than in democracy.
Democracy is a tender plant in the Indian soil and though the smooth change-over from Nehru to his successor was a good omen there should be no illusions about its fragility. He cherished democracy and nurtured it; yet he did one great disservice to it. This was that he held so many offices, and, especially, that he held on to the office of prime minister for so long.
There is a great deal of ability available in India, some courage, and a widespread desire amongst politically minded Indians, that is to say, largely the literate and largely the English-speaking minority, to carry on with the present parliamentary regime. India is no Indonesia.62 It is therefore strange that Nehru, who was given his chance by Gandhi while he was still in his thirties, and whose mistakes were covered up again and again by his elders—he ‘began at a high level on the ladder’, as he told one of his biographers*—did not consciously gather around him a band of younger men, including from that corps d’élite, the ICS, men already adept in the techniques of modern government, who could be counted on for carrying on the torch after he went. It was much more than a matter of his selecting or foreshadowing his successor; there was much (but not everything) to be said in excuse of his reluctance to have a dauphin. The case of Smuts63 is not irrelevant. For forty years Smuts was a name to reckon with outside South Africa as well as in it. But Smuts had trained up no band of assured potential successors of the quality required. Today most of the things Smuts stood for are in ruins. It is no less strange that Nehru clung to office for so long. It would have been of help to the cause of parliamentary democracy in India if he had stood down and let the confusion inevitable on his withdrawal from the scene take place in his own lifetime, and while he was still in good health, so that he was at hand to steady the ship of state if the weather became too rough. This is what Kemal Ataturk did. Further, his very domination had so many elements of dictatorship, unintended, or even disliked, by Nehru though they were, that it militated against the parliamentary democracy sending down as deep roots as it could have under his protection. He would never have truck with ideas of dictatorship in any form, but he did have a strong strain of the authoritarian in him. For one thing his long domination sapped the opposition; the opposition is an essential part of parliamentary democracy. For another, he kept too much power in his own hands, and so in effect he encouraged bad habits of dependence. Cabinet responsibility might have been collective in principle but in practice there was much more primus than primus inter pares; the position being made the worse by the circumambient mixture of sycophancy and flattery. And here is the main cause of Nehru’s domination—the gaping inequality in ability and character between himself and his ministers or his party or his fellow politicians. What one of his ministers once said is near the truth: Nehru was like the banyan tree, so big and so overshadowing that nothing could grow under it.
Foreign Affairs
We will now look at Nehru’s performance in foreign affairs. This was a subject in which he had always taken a lively interest. His special contribution to the nationalist movement had been his unflagging demand, firstly, that the nationalists think about the kind of India they wanted after they got independence, and, secondly, that they think about a foreign policy. He antagonised not a few on the first account; and bored most on the second. Nehru’s enthusiasm for discussing the international situation became a subject of joking. As prime minister he showed an interest in it not second even to his interest in the economic and social reconstruction of India. He was criticised for giving too much time to it.
He insisted on keeping the portfolio of external affairs for himself. It was a disadvantage to him that he did so, because, as head of the whole government of India, he h
ad to deal with a range of internal problems already too much for one mind. And it was a disadvantage to the Indian foreign office and the Indian diplomatic service. In effect he did damage to both, and at a formative and impressionable stage of their growth. Notwithstanding some able men in it, such as N.R. Pillai, M.J. Desai, and the Dayals,64 it was not a good service—nothing like good enough for a country of India’s importance. There was not enough training or professional competence, not enough esprit de corps, and too much eagerness to please the boss. It had been made the worse by an excessive habit of propaganda.* Nehru was too busy and too preoccupied to get to know the necessary detail, or to get to know the officers except for a handful of very senior ones or a few favourites. This encouraged sycophancy, personal ad hoc approaches, and a mixture of amateurishness and subjectivity. Indian embassies were too often sending back to Delhi the kind of reports which they thought would be congenial to their master. It was scarcely improved by the ambiguous position allowed to Krishna Menon, who in some fields was virtually second foreign minister for five years or so prior to his fall in 1962; whence resulted liveliness and initiative but also subjectivity and extra-office approaches and manoeuvres, not to mention short shrift to ‘American stooges’ ‘British dupes’ or ‘Fascists’. Another effect of Nehru’s monopolising foreign affairs was that members of his party were excluded from a training in the subtleties of the subject, or from a basic knowledge of international relations.
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