simple, perhaps even sensible: the avowedproject was to be welcomed,
but at the same time the impossibility of its achievement under the
directorship of the Congress, with its own entanglement in the classes it
would need to dispossess or attack, would be stressed. In effect, the
opposition to the left of and outside the Congress accepted the Nehruvian
version of socialism, but claimed to be better Nehruvian socialists
themselves: better, even, than Nehru, as long as he operated from within
the Congress.
This space for ‘socialism’ also provoked into being an explicit right
wing in Indian political life. The now much more explicit rhetoric of
socialism gave them the space to claim once again – in a direct link to the
Cold War that was often more than simply ideological – that India was in
danger of communist takeover. In 1959, the Congress declared that
cooperative joint farming would be a desired goal – despite the fact that
several imperial officials had made similar suggestions in the 1920s, and
that cooperatives of various description had existed in India for some time,
this was now declared by some to be an attempt to foist Soviet-style
collectivisation on India by stealth. Meanwhile, the government was
accused of an unreasonable hostility to all private enterprise, and the
enforcement of land ceilings and the public distribution system for food-
grains that had been seen as necessary corollaries of cooperative farming
were resolutely attacked.
This would have seemed, to any reasonable observer, rather absurd.
Land reforms had been assiduously avoided by Congress governments in
the states; there was no agricultural income tax (there still isn’t), although
there were clearly rich farmers, thereby allowing everyone who worked the
land to claim ‘peasant’ status, with its accompanying implications of
struggle and poverty. Taxation as a whole was regressive: indirect taxes
were relied upon rather than progressive direct taxation – to the benefit
of higher income groups. Some planners, officials or politicians were, it
is true, not keen on a further strengthening of the private sector, or
an excessive space for a private sector in a planned economy; that could
only have meant distorting a planning process that relied on being able to
exert centralised control over the economy. But the Plans did not boil
down to a simple question of the private sector versus the public sector
- it was only strategic points of production that had to be in state hands.
And capitalists had less cause to complain than they made out. The
government looked after capital goods production –requiring longer-term
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 227