technique solve all problems,” rightly said Comrade Stalin.’^28 The
Nehruvians would not altogether have disagreed; it is certainly true that
this was the route they attempted to use towards development, as more
radical routes were considered impassable or unviable. The Nehruvians
hoped to use state power, via the justificatory potential of the ‘national’
idea, to arrogate to themselves several roles: of administering social justice,
producing wealth and refereeing social conflict – which at best implied
a rather naive view of the manipulability of society, politically and
otherwise. Nehru presided over this, finding, in his inimitable style, the
language to justify and glorify it.
From the point of view of this intellectual elite, the First Five-Year
Plan (1951–6) was most unglamorous. The First Plan (although it began
a longer-term commitment to capital goods production) aimed at
achieving self-sufficiency in food, and consequently spent most of its
outlay on the agricultural sector, notwithstanding the widespread desire
for industrialisation among the planning classes. The First Plan also
put into operation the projects for big river valley dams that are now
the bane of environmentalists but were then the starting adventures of
underdeveloped countries in building large projects. These schemes for
dams had been put on the books by the late colonial government – largely
as an exercise in economic public relations, because it was frankly admitted
by colonial officials that they neither wished to spend nor had the resources
to get these projects off the ground. Made concrete – literally – by the
government of independent India, these became truly nationalprojects:
Nehru promised that the Damodar Valley Corporation scheme for
damming the river Damodar would be ‘bigger than’ the Tennessee
Valley Authority, that great achievement of the New Deal. For all the
tentativeness of the First Plan, it was a relative success: the plan had
envisaged an increase in national income of 11% but had achieved 18%;
foodgrains production increased from 52 million tonnes to 66 million
tonnes; of the envisaged total investment of 35 billion rupees, only 31
billion had been spent. But this success was deceptive, and would create
longer-term over-optimism among planners who at any event sought to
create greater things. ‘The first five-year plan is an anthology,’ P.C.
Mahalanobis believed, ‘a plan has to be a drama.’^29
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 193