to back UN observers in elections – it would set a bad precedent, Nehru
claimed, to have foreigners overseeing elections; this would damage
Hungarian sovereignty (since the Russians were there anyway, this did not
sound very convincing). A concern for Kashmir appears to have been
behind this. Nehru and Menon felt that the implications would eventually
be that the same conditions of foreign intervention might be applied there.
But Nehru made a strong informal protest through the Indian ambas-
sador in Moscow. Nehru’s later vocal condemnation of Soviet aggression
in Hungary before the Indian Parliament and before a world awaiting his
words – he referred to the Hungarian revolt as a ‘nationalist uprising’ –
brought from the Russians a gentle reminder of Kashmir, on which issue
they hinted they might withdraw their support.
‘DEVELOPMENT’ AND ITS FATE
Two basic commitments were constantly reiterated by Nehru – to
economic independence as the necessary corollary to political indepen-
dence, and to economic democracy as the necessary corollary to political
democracy. The fate of ‘development’ was thus at the heart of the self-
definition of the Indian state, and at the heart of the legitimacy of Nehru’s
government. But the two commitments addressed two different units
of relevance: the first – the ‘nation’ (that is, the state); and the second, the
‘masses’. The first was far more consensual – after all, Indian capitalists,
whether or not or to whatever degree they had been ‘collaborators’ with
British rule in India, had always complained bitterly about the dependent
nature of their opportunities to do business, the various forms of unfair
competition from foreign goods, and discriminatory legislation they were
subjected to. So the economic independence of the ‘nation’, amounting to
a protected national economy, was something to be desired.
Conflicts inevitably arose on the social goals. Land reforms, economic
controls on the activities of private capital, and redistributive or collec-
tivisation measures, however gently put forward within the framework of
democracy and free will, would come into conflict with powerful interests.
Philosophers of capitalist freedoms have always tended to point to the
incompatibility of centralised planning and freedom; socialists argued
similarly that the autonomy of private capitalists had the potential to
wreck the assumptions and predictions of the planners. More importantly,
the question of the amount of social control that planners had to exercise
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 223