interpret its work any way its director saw fit. Apart from the obvious
work implied by its title, it invited scientists and economists from
around the world to spend time in India and work on various projects.
Mahalanobis, resolutely patrician, was no socialist except in a distant and
paternalistic sense, although he came to be associated with many socialists;
but there were others who worked with him or under him who were.
Indeed, many ideologues of the left thought working with Nehru’s
planning team was important: they were building an independent and
self-sufficient nation-state that would be able to withstand the pressures
of foreign interests seeking markets or spaces to invest excess capital – a
phenomenon that was soon to be given a proper name – neo-colonialism.
Even the CPI’s official opposition to Nehru was tempered by a sense that
the technocrats were doing important work; communists or their
sympathisers were able, in these circumstances, to offer their services to
the state in that role.
In building the new ‘nation’, ‘expertise’ and the ‘scientific tem-
perament’ were given privileged positions (‘scientific research’ was one of
the ministerial portfolios that Nehru retained for himself in the first
government of independent India). India was a country that had to
be made modern, its people dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming,
into modernity. ‘Backwardness’ of all kinds had to be fought. In the new
India the glorious potential achievements, and the universality, of science
and technology were universally praised. ‘Science and technology know no
frontiers,’ Nehru declared. ‘Nobody ought to talk about English science,
French science, American science, Chinese science. Science is something
bigger than the countries. There ought to be no such thing as Indian
science. So also with technology.’^27 ‘Science’, however, was easily confused
with the pervasive importance given to technology, which was well short
of ‘science’ as its professional practitioners might have understood it. This
tendency was soon to be reflected in the educational and career aspirations
of several generations of post-independence Indians: engineering was
among the most important professions of the post-independence gener-
ation, to which might have been added that of economists.
The stress on technology and technical expertise could be seen to be
borrowed from the influential Soviet model of planning – in which,
especially in its borrowed version, ‘socialism’ was not a necessary
component. A member of the National Planning Committee, formerly one
of the USSR’s ‘technical experts’ himself, summed it up: ‘“Industry and192 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55