It is a matter of some satisfaction that the Janata party’s national executive has not endorsed the proposal for the nationalisation of “certain key sectors of industry”, a euphemism for steel (TISCO), aluminium (HINDALCO and INDALCO) automobiles. For this shows that responsible elements in the party leadership are strong enough to resist such demagogic suggestions and assertive enough to see to it that these do not go through. This demonstration of their strength by the same elements in the top echelons of the ruling party should help reassure the business community that a Biju Patnaik or a George Fernandes out to strike a populist posture will not easily have his way so long as the present balance in the Janata leadership is not radically altered to the detriment of men and groups who are more concerned with the future of the country’s economy than their own, that is, at least so long as Mr. Morarji Desai is the Prime Minister and enjoys the support of the majority in the Janata parliamentary party and the national executive. This may not suffice for the timid-hearted among the industrial magnates who want foolproof guarantees that the government’s policy will not change to their detriment at the whim of some ministers or Janata party leaders. But it should for others who recognise that we live in a rapidly changing and, therefore, uncertain world and that we cannot seek and secure foolproof guarantees. In fact the main problem is not so much the threat of a takeover by the government of professionally and competently run plants in the private sector as the unrealistic philosophy of development which the Janata leadership has accepted without much thought and continues to reaffirm in disregard of the facts of life. The resolution adopted by the party’s national executive after prolonged discussions is an essay in that kind of exercise – the exercise in rural utopianism which in economic, as distinct from political, terms is not very different from the Maoist model which the Chinese leaders have now virtually discarded because they are convinced that it has led to the country’s stagnation in the vital fields of science and technology for 20 long years.
This unthinking commitment to rural utopianism cannot cause as great havoc in an open and pluralistic society like ours as it can in a closed one like China’s for the good and obvious reason that in the first case the government can neither cover up the consequences of its actions nor evade responsibility for them. Unlike Peking during, for example, the “great leap forward” in the late ’fifties, New Delhi under the present dispensation cannot arbitrarily inflate figures of production. Nor can New Delhi withhold all information as Peking did all these years. But an open society, which confuses the desirable (full employment) with the possible (steadily increasing employment) and turns its back on modern industry and technology in the erroneous belief that this can help bridge the gap between the desirable and the possible, can also stagnate. It will clearly be unfair to say yet that India faces this dangerous prospect. For it is far from certain that the Janata government will not modify its economic philosophy to make it accord with the need for a steady growth of modern industry and agriculture, whatever its alleged social costs – alleged because stagnation has its own costs which are, if anything, worse – or that it will be able to implement its vague ideals in disregard of the economic costs. On the contrary, it can be said that despite its protestations that it adheres to the party’s hastily drafted election manifesto, it has by and large followed economic policies which make good sense and have shown results by way of increased industrial and agricultural production, absence of inflationary pressure and a remarkably small rise in prices in the past 20 months. Even so it is notable that certain Janata leaders continue to talk of “non-performance” by the government, that the party’s national executive has met for four days to discuss its performance and lay down a programme of action in however general terms for it and that it should in all seriousness ask the government to report to it from time to time. The national executive’s resolution, too, has, however, a saving grace. It contains as many as seven references to the scheduled castes and tribes against a couple to the peasantry. This may not amount to anything more than lip-service to the cause of these depressed sections of the community. But it does show that some individuals in the leadership have woken up to the need for such a gesture. It does not tally with the recognition that the middle peasant castes, the so-called backward castes, constitute the main base of the Janata party and the deliberate moves to promote their interests at the cost of others, as in the case of the reservation of jobs for them in Bihar and UP. Indeed, the Janata leadership cannot gloss over this contradiction.
The Times of India, 20 January 1979