One of the many stories regarding Mr Gromyko’s recent visit to New Delhi has it that when the Soviet foreign minister expressed the fear that under the new dispensation this country may move away from socialism, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee said to him: “But how can that be? In a country where 70 per cent of the people live at, or below the poverty line, how can any government deviate from a left-of-centre policy?”
The story may be apocryphal. But it has a moral: to maintain a democratic polity, this country will have to pursue a left-of-centre economic policy; indeed it cannot deviate from the other two key concepts on which Mr Nehru built a fairly durable national consensus – secularism and non-alignment.
After wavering for three long years which saw a drastic devaluation of the rupee at the instance of the World Bank (1966) and defeat of the Congress in the elections to state legislatures in north India (1967), Mrs Gandhi grasped this central fact of Indian political life at the time of the party split in 1969. By nationalising the leading commercial banks, she placed her opponents on the defensive and despite the excellent credentials of some of them – Mr Kamaraj was, for example, more a man of the people than Mrs Gandhi and Mr Morarji Desai, had always loyally carried out party and cabinet decisions with little regard for the consequences in terms of his personal popularity – they could not seize the initiative from her.
Mrs Gandhi, it is now widely recognised, was a poor planner – debates on economic issues are said to bore her – and a poor administrator. She did not have the élan either to inspire a body of able economists to prepare a plan for rapid development or to reshape the administration to make it a reasonably effective instrument for implementing such plans as were prepared and sanctioned. Indeed, the set-up under her found it fairly difficult even to find competent men to head and run the nationalised banks and to give them firm guidelines. What she thought was socialism, therefore, quickly degenerated into populism.
Undermine
The former prime minister was also highly suspicious of her senior colleagues and spent a good deal of her time and energy in cutting them to less than their size. She not only concentrated too much power in her hands by placing revenue intelligence and one wing of general intelligence directly under her charge through the cabinet secretariat which itself was subordinated to her personal secretariat, but also did all she could to undermine the position of other leaders in their home states, Mr YB Chavan’s in Maharashtra, Mr Brahmananda Reddy’s in Andhra and in the later stage Mr Bahuguna’s in UP and Mr Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s in West Bengal. As such she could not possibly build a strong team which is an essential prerequisite for the proper working of a government under a democratic system.
The Janata party is singularly free from this risk. Its very composition is a guarantee that no individual or caucus in it can acquire the kind of predominance which Mrs Gandhi and subsequently even Mr Sanjay Gandhi were able to establish in the Congress. Despite the merger it will remain essentially a coalition of the constituent parties. What is more it contains a large number of men who are rebels by temperament including the party’s president, Mr Chandrasekhar, himself, Mr George Fernandes, Mr Madhu Limaye, Mr Raj Narain and Mr Krishna Kant, to name only a few of them. They are too different from each other to form a caucus. And in any case they will be operating in an environment which is hostile to the rise of a new caucus. Leave aside old war-horses like Mr Morarji Desai, Mr Charan Singh and Mr Jagjivan Ram, few can imagine Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani subordinating themselves to an individual or a caucus in the Janata party.
But the other problems which plagued Mrs Gandhi’s government since 1969 remain. At least one of these can easily assume even more menacing proportions. Unless the cabinet discusses the economic and other urgent issues in depth and gets down to the task of governing the country, the bureaucracy will quickly assume even larger powers than it came to enjoy during Mrs Gandhi’s tenure long before the emergency. The danger is specially great because it so happens that men either without administrative experience or without political weight have come to head most of the ministries concerned with economic affairs.
Emphasise
It is not for a commentator to say whether this imbalance can be rectified. All that he can do is to emphasise the need for rectification and to point out that in a rational arrangement the talents of a man like Mr Jagjivan Ram should be used in a bigger way than they can be in the defence ministry in the present situation when the country is assured of peace on all its borders. In a sense this is true of Mr Charan Singh as well, though there is much more to be done in the home ministry than in the defence.
Be that as it may, the central issue is whether once again the desire for a more just society will be allowed to degenerate into a free for all in which the strong and the well organised will run away with such larger slices of the national cake as to leave precious little for the poorer sections of the community. The working class admittedly got a raw deal during the emergency and the revival of the democratic political process must involve restoring to it the right of collective bargaining and strike. But if in the process relatively privileged groups like bank and LIC employees and engineers in power plants resort to old tactics and are able to hold the community to ransom, once again a dangerous situation will have arisen. The emergency, it is necessary to emphasise again and again, was not merely the product of the Allahabad High Court judgement and Mrs Gandhi’s grim determination to hold on to office by whatever means.
In view of the experience of most of Latin America, including that of extremely resource-rich countries like Brazil and Argentina, Africa and Asia, only fools can believe that authoritarianism spurs economic development. In all the three continents petty tyrants have used the coercive apparatus of the state to achieve nothing nobler than to keep themselves and their coteries in power and to enrich themselves and a small corrupt and irresponsible elite whose greed and ostentatious consumption know no bounds. They have not cared if in the process they have mortgaged either countries’ resources to powerful multinationals. India itself might have gone that way if the emergency had continued. But a democracy must successfully tackle the problem of capital accumulation if it is to survive. It cannot allow the demands of distributive justice to have priority over the need for savings and investment.
Exhausted
The Nehru model for combining social justice with growth has exhausted its potentialities not so much because it laid too much emphasis on heavy industry involving enormous investment and long gestation periods and not enough emphasis on agriculture as because it spawned controls of byzantine complexity and a bureaucracy of byzantine rapacity and venality. The spread of corruption among politicians and malpractices among the business community are to no small extent the products of the complicated system of controls which the bureaucracy diligently built under Mr Nehru’s and subsequently under Mrs Gandhi’s umbrella. Though it will be ridiculous for anyone to deny the progress made by the country in the last three decades, the Janata party cannot return to the old system unless it, too, wants to sink in a cesspool of corruption and take the nation down with it. Indeed, it is necessary to push the dismantling process that began during the emergency.
But the more important and also the more unpleasant point is that the so-called Gandhian approach and the proposed priority for cottage and small-scale industry, too, do not offer a way out. It is far easier to swear by Gandhism than to work out a practical blueprint of economic development based on it. At least no one has done it so far and, in the light of the Chinese admission, albeit an indirect one, that the Maoist model has failed to meet the twin needs for mass employment and modernisation of the economy through the development and use of modern technology, it is open to question whether it can be done. To say so is not to suggest that the government should not promote and even subsidise innovations like the gobar gas plants but to emphasise that the country cannot do without modern science and technology on a vast and expanding scale. And so poor has been the record of small industrialists that the less said about them the better. A majority of the small scale units in UP for instance, were found to exist only on paper when a survey, perhaps the first, was conducted during the emergency.
There are no easy options and no neat options either. The Janata party leaders will have to be hard-headed in taking decisions and hard-hearted in enforcing them if they are to steer the country out of the difficult times ahead.
The Times of India, 3 May 1977