investment and low returns, both unattractive to private investors. The
building of infrastructure was a government duty that most industrialists
were rather willing to see in its hands. Buying power was generated by
government spending – there were fears that this could lead to inflation,
but here the private sector could be the corrective, providing consumption
goods which yielded quick returns – or, perversely, not providing them,
as the case often was. In a situation of protected oligopoly, industrialists
could decide to keep capacity idle and maintain artificial shortages to
make artificial profits, even from selling sub-standard goods – there was
no competition. This was to remain an anomaly of the so-called ‘mixed
economy’, a term that was applied to the Indian economy at the same time
as that of the ‘socialistic pattern’. Some industrialists, at least – notably
the Birla group – decided that the Congress umbrella was worth their
while; others, notably the Tata group, at the time the larger of the two
giants that dominated the Indian economy, chose to oppose the Congress.
With time, the former overtook the latter, without surrendering its
traditional commitment to the Congress. And though the Planning
Commission agonised at various stages over inequality of income, they had
little ability to change things.
In a system born out of compromise, negotiation and suppression or
deferral of conflictual situations such as that of post-independence India,
such contradictory trends might have been expected. An influential
account of the emerging class coalition that governed India in and after
the Nehruvian period has offered this picture: the class base of the new
state was a three-fold coalition – of capitalists, of landowners, and of
bureaucrats, intellectuals and technocrats – the last-named category
including the Nehruvians, but also others not specifically sympathetic to
the Nehruvian project.^6 This may be a good starting point – one may
wonder whether ‘class’ here might be a misnomer, and ‘status group’, at
least for the last-named, might be a better category to use – although it
may also be too schematic. The last category of bureaucrats, intellectuals
and technocrats would lump together a group of people whose political
allegiances were extremely difficult to predict; they were those from
whose numbers the ‘political class’ was drawn; they occupied positions
right across the political spectrum. It is therefore easier to identify the
beneficiaries than the supporters of the Nehruvian project: in the towns
businessmen and the professional classes gained visibly, as did to a lesser
extent small-town middle- and upper-middle-class groups from the new228 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63