entitled to possess by the nominal redistribution of his land within his
own family.
From Nehru’s point of view, these blockages required him to seek
the power to act effectively outside the structures of party and legislature- even as, paradoxically, Nehru remained the most committed and
scintillating of parliamentarians, addressing the House in impassioned
words and defending his policies in frank and logical terms. For the greater
goal of national development, the Planning Commission existed from
1950 onwards, almost a parallel Cabinet, with Nehru himself as its chair-
man, in which ‘experts’ would be able to pronounce on issues of national
importance, allegedly from a non-political perspective, thereby disarming
and bypassing opposition to its measures. Governing by Planning
Commission rather than by Cabinet lost Nehru his Finance minister in
June 1950 when John Matthai, formerly and thereafter of Tata Sons, then
the largest business house in India, resigned in protest against what he
thought were the excessive powers of the Planning Commission.
The Planning Commission was far from the ultra-socialist or quasi-
communist body that it was depicted as in the propaganda of the emergent
Indian right. And if Nehru’s governments acquired a reputation for Fabian
socialism, the Planning Commission was to a large extent responsible for
the impression. ‘Fabianism’ was less a philosophical choice than a tendency
retrospectively named: here was a system that worked by gradualism, by
permeation, by compromise, and by advice from think tanks, academics
and technocrats. It was these clusters of learned men who were Nehru’s
best support base: the ‘Nehruvians’.
This was the goodliest fellowship of knights ever to be assembled
in the service of a new state: intellectuals, men of distinguished education
and good breeding, whose commitment to socialism or to social change
in less grandiose terms hinged on their sense of being the harbingers
of modernity and the custodians of the future of the nation. Their alle-
giance to Nehru was in some cases based on a throwback to Nehru at his
romantic best: the fiery revolutionary and the self-reflexive progressive and
fellow intellectual of the 1930s, whose urbane sophistication combined
with radical social comment and international renown was an inspiring
example of the possibilities of a Cambridge-New Delhi axis (which several
of the Nehruvians had in common), at a time when an education in the
metropolis was still a large helping of social capital, ensuring high social
status and employability. Many of those committed to Nehru’s 1930s
190 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55