avatarwere disappointed by the prime minister’s now infinitely more
cautious, even conservative, behaviour. But the Nehruvians were also
divided along lines defined by those who had been drawn to the socialist
in Nehru and those who had been drawn to the moderniser in Nehru.
At any event, in a gradualist system, they could well afford to co-exist in
the same spaces: the interim goal of socialists, and a desired goal of mod-
ernisers, would have to be a viable national capitalism first, state-led and
capitalist-assisted, or perhaps vice versa, but necessarily different from the
poorly-industrialised and famine-prone country left behind by British
rule.
Intellectuals’ allegiance to Nehru can be traced to the consequences
of Nehru’s interventions into the political arena from the late 1920s
onwards. The space opened out by him provided scope for the reinstate-
ment of intellectuals in the Indian nationalist movement; they had been
displaced since the moderates had been eclipsed by extremists and their
populism. After Gandhi’s insistence on an anti-intellectual position and
the privileging of peasants, this reinstatement was more than welcome.
It was not possible, after Gandhi, to go back to an avowedly elitist politics
(although Gandhi’s own reliance on a moral elite was in its own way
resolutely elitist as well). The commitment to enlightenment, modernity
and social change that Nehru represented seemed to avoid that pitfall,
while providing a central role for intellectuals in the life of their nation.
What this amounted to was a vulgar Leninism without Leninist goals: the
intellectuals, collectively, would be the vanguard party that would bring
‘progress’, only they were not a party either in discipline or in coherent
ideology. The ‘people’, they agreed, would be served, but by those who
knew better; in return, they would be expected to produce the required
efforts for the ‘nation’.
Among the cluster of people who gathered around Nehru was P.C.
Mahalanobis, the physics teacher turned statistician who was the author
of the Second Five-Year Plan and the eponymous model associated with it
(he was responsible for the First Plan as well, but did not set much store
by it). Mahalanobis had spent his early years as a statistician dabbling
in eugenics-related work, and had switched to economic surveys at first
under the British government’s patronage. In 1939, he had offered his
services to the Congress’s National Planning Committee. Mahalanobis’s
institution, the Indian Statistical Institute, was to become one of the
showcase institutions in India; it had no precise brief and could therefore
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 191