people’), and so on. ‘Socialism’, which had once been declared foreign
by Gandhi, could, indigenised by the introduction of Gandhism and
stylistically revamped, also lend to Gandhism the aura of ‘socialism’ and
shift the pressure of foreignness onto the communists, cast as agents of
a foreign power.
In 1953, Narayan had proposed a Gandhian–socialist alliance, while
advocating Congress–Praja Socialist Party cooperation in some spheres;
this was opposed by other PSP leaders. The ‘democratic socialist’ camp,
as it was called to distinguish it from the communists, began to split.
Ram Manohar Lohia, who himself had engaged creatively with Gandhi
in his political thinking, was not, however, content to be mystical;
on December 28, 1955, he formed the ‘Socialist Party of India’. Lohia was
acutely conscious of the continued polyvalence of Gandhi and the
possibility of appropriating him for a variety of causes. As he saw it,
slightly retrospectively (in 1963), Gandhism after the death of Gandhi
had ‘branched off into the “priestly” and “governmental”, and priestly
Gandhism got so well integrated with the governmental that it has
not struggled against any kind of injustice’. A third variant, ‘heretic
Gandhism’ had found its home in the Socialist Party, but had been
disowned by ‘priestly Gandhism’; nevertheless, it was this variant that had
some progressive potential, for ‘[b]y its very nature, heresy should be more
responsible than orthodoxy’.^33 Among Lohia’s followers, as among other
non-dogmatic left-wing political thinkers in India, there was also a muted
but very present admiration for China; Nehru certainly shared this
admiration. China, like India, was an agrarian country that had, unlike
India, moved along a revolutionary path of its own choosing, prioritising
the needs of the peasantry – or so it was then believed. The knowledge that
urban standards of living improved faster, and that despite the rhetoric,
the countryside lost out once the Chinese Communist Party had come to
power, was not widely available at the time.
Meanwhile, the central aspect of Gandhians’ disagreement with the rest
of the nationalist movement – that of a centralised and industrialisation-
oriented economic policy – remained unresolved in political rhetoric.
Congress policy, armed with Community Development, now played both
the Gandhian and the industrialising card: the village would look after
its own needs, especially in much-need consumer goods sectors, while the
larger business of industrialisation, requiring the production of capital
goods, was dealt with elsewhere. In January 1955, Nehru was able to take
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