Reconsidering Nehruvian way by Sankar Ray
Even 44 years after his death , India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's relevance to political scientists – especially new cohorts of research scholars – has not withered away. But his party, Indian National Congress, sent Nehru's ideas for nation-building into the recycle bin in 1991 by walking into the Fund-Bank 'neo-liberal' trap . Yet the debate on Nehruvian model is alive, especially with manifest failure of reform or globalization.
While going through the interview of George Soros, arguable world's foremost fund management-guru, to the New York Times on 15 May last, Nehruvian concepts of nation-building deserve reconsideration. Soros candidly pointed out that the system which we are in "is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it's generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three.".
One of the most successful market-players, Soros warned against the craze of liberalization-privalisation-globalisation in the late 1990s and predicted its collapse in his controversial treatise , The Crisis of Global Capitalism, prefacing which he wrote, "Financial markets are inherently unstable and there are social needs that cannot be met by giving market forces free rein. Unfortunately these defects are not recognized. Instead there is a widespread belief that markets are self-correcting and a global economy can flourish without any need for a global society" .
In the name of demolishing command-economy , LPG was structurally super-imposed on the peripheral economies. Today it needs to be admitted that as long as capitalism remains triumphant, the pursuit of money will override "all other social considerations. Economic and political arrangements are out of kilter. The development of a global economy has not been matched by the development of a global society. The basic unit for political and social life remains the nation-state", observed Pulapre Balakrishnan, senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi in a recently published paper in EPW as part of his research project 'Understanding Economic Growth in India' . He took up cudgels for Nehruvian path but pointed out its mini-black holes too.
Soros's dressing-down of neo-liberal model - essentially a global scheme for re-colonisation helps us to weave a new rationale for a critical appreciation of economic philosophy of Nehruvian era that endeavoured to transform Indian economy "from a colonial enclave to one with at least some of the prerequisites for sustained long-term growth while at the same time maintaining an autonomy from the superpowers vying for influence on a newly independent subcontinent".
It would be naïve to say that Nehru was committed to scientific socialism. His mission was to set out rules for mixed economy. When most of the industrial tycoons were unnerved following adoption of the Industrial Policy Resolution in 1956, scion of them, G D Birla, assured the World Bank President Eugene Black that it gave a great 'fillip' to the private sector. After all, Birla read Nehru's Autobiography intently and didn't miss Nehru's words that his ideological commitment was to the 'bourgeoisie'. But Sripad Amrit Dange, one of the founders of undivided CPI and its first and last chairman, had illusions about Nehru. In a letter to Nehru on his 74th birthday (14 November 1962), he wrote, " May you live long to realize your ideals of building a prosperous and socialist India.". Interestingly, the same leader, addressing a massive rally of CPI in November 1969, ridiculed Nehruvian coinage, "socialistic pattern" of future India. " We say socialist, Congress says 'socialistic'. Why the suffix 'istic' ?. It means upkeep of the Tatas, The Birlas alongside socialism".
Nehru experimented with the idea of 'independent capitalism' , based on a strong public sector with exclusive rights in production and management of core sectors , mainly heavy and capital goods, and restricted rights to direct foreign investment. This was in contrast to development of capitalism under the MNCs , as happened in almost all the Latin American countries. This is a dependent capitalist path. However, a section of Soviet scholars argued that capitalist path in any peripheral economy ultimately leads to dependent development. The hint was at the Indian communists who overestimated transformative potentials of Nehru-Indira policies. The Soviet prediction was proved prophetic in 1991 when the Congress-led government with P V Narasimha Rao as the PM and Dr Manmohan Singh as the Finance Minister introduced IMF-prescribed reform with hidden conditionalilties that are no beneficial for the economy. That was the beginning of compradorisation.
Blasting 'Manmohanomics', wellknown Marxian scholar, Samir Amin , director, Dakar-based Third World Forum, wrote in Monthly Review, "The 1991 turn toward liberalism originated in the compradore leadership of the Congress Party, but its political beneficiaries, as elsewhere, have been culturalists who found a ready audience for their irrational illusions in the social tensions and misery always attendant to liberal reforms" . The NDA, he described as more rightist, ran "a Hindu-compradore government, which wholly subscribed to the dictates of imperialism on the offensive (accelerating economic liberalization), failed. In the 2004 elections the premises of Hindu culturalism and liberalism promoted by the compradore bourgeoisie and its imperialist masters were jointly held responsible for the social catastrophe by the majority of the Indian electorate", he added.
However, Amin did not spare the Nehru-Indira era for "lopsided capitalist approach to agricultural development and "incredibly poverty-stricken conditions" of the vast majority of Indians. But he rubbished the Maoist-Naxalite characterization of ruling government prior to 1991 as 'comprador bourgeoisie'. On the contrary , he believes that "the Congress Party governments of independent India implemented a national plan that, typical of its time, was influenced by the victories of the national liberation movements of Asia and Africa after the Second World War."
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