freedom to ‘practise and propagate’ their religion, but the State and its
organs would neither recognise nor support particular religions or
religious organisations. The ‘Directive Principles’ were the box placed
in a corner of the Constitution to which were banished principles that were
undesirable to reject altogether given the demands of political legitimacy,
but were impossible or undesirable to make a part of the actual legal
framework of the state. These included proposals to abolish poverty,
commitments to redistribute wealth and establish social equality, to
establish a total ban on alcohol consumption (among the so-called
‘Gandhian principles’), as well as the more sectarian demand to ban cow
slaughter; but the possibility of opening that box to justify diverse
political agenda was always present.
ECONOMIC VISIONS: RETREAT ON ‘SOCIALISM’;
THE ‘TRANSITION PERIOD’; THE COMMUNISTS
The vision of India to which Nehru remained publicly committed
depended upon the disarming of sectarian tendencies through the delivery
of economic progress for everyone, ‘irrespective of caste, creed, religion or
sex’, as the phrase went; it remained committed to state intervention in
economic matters through economic planning. This involved, therefore,
both a productive and – perhaps more importantly – a redistributive
imperative. However, Nehru had more or less conceded, by the time of
his days as chairman of the Congress’s National Planning Committee,
that socialism was to be deferred to some time in the future. He continued
to distinguish his own commitment to socialism from the political goals
of the ‘nation’ as a whole. He had accepted ‘the fundamentals of socialist
theory’ – ‘the Marxian thesis’ ‘successfully adapted’ by Lenin – although
he ‘had little patience with leftist groups in India, spending much of
their energy in mutual conflict and recriminations over fine points of
doctrine’.^13 The ‘nation’, on the other hand, had not altogether accepted
socialism. Thus, the link between economic planning and socialism
(identified with Nehru since the exit of Subhas Bose from the Congress)
had to be loosened.
Consequently, there was much talk of a ‘transitional period’ of
indefinite length before socialism could be considered. Nehru was
certainly not the only person on the left involved in this deferral. The
Socialist Party’s 1947 programme, before it seceded from the Congress,
INTERLUDE – ENVISIONING THE NEW INDIA 151