nationalist movement, to the extent that a businessman’s demand was
a demand for national industry, it was a national demand that the left
wing of the movement could also support. This was again able to provide
a coalitional space in the post-independence period: industrialists were
nervous about the details of Nehruvian policy, but most could live with
the whole. An Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948 stressed that heavy
industry and industries of national importance would be established under
state control: in effect, the long-term investments in infrastructure were
to be taken care of by the state, while existing industries under private
capital would remain in private hands.
In effect, then, the post-independence political economy was set up
as a protected national economy, run on capitalist lines with a strong state
sector. And with socialists committed to a ‘transition period’, it could be
all but admitted that the shared goal was one of achieving a relatively
successful capitalism rather than anything that could be recognised as
‘socialism’ – but the obligatory language of political legitimacy dictated
that this was a step too far.
Planning was therefore constructed as a ‘technical’ process in which
‘experts’ with ‘scientific’ knowledge would take decisions on the basis
of technical, and therefore apolitical, criteria. Nehru himself, as is evident
from a number of his public statements, did not believe that there were
such things as purely apolitical criteria; but he found this to be an enabling
myth: an appeal to purely technical criteria depoliticised an area of activity
that could therefore run parallel to the political arena of elected repre-
sentatives, giving Nehru and a team of carefully selected ‘technical experts’
more or less loyal to him greater capacity for autonomous political
action.
Even for the minimalist programme of Nehruvian economic and social
engineering to work, the first steps would have had to be abolishing vested
interests – some would have said ‘feudal’ remnants – in the countryside;
in effect dismantling the ‘feudal–imperialist alliance’: zamindars, talukdars
and various other intermediaries who exacted various kinds of payments
from the actual producers. Land reforms were the basic minimum for this.
Potentially, this could lead to agrarian capitalism, but social justice was
to be administered through land ceilings: an upper limit on the amount
of land that could be owned by an individual. Cooperative farming was
envisaged among policy-makers, especially in areas where land holdings
were too small to be productive.
INTERLUDE – ENVISIONING THE NEW INDIA 153