whether they could simply produce less but continue to make abnormal
profits due to the oligopoly of a few industrialists, is a question that has
been raised.) Consumption, it has been said, was limited by a slow rise in
per capita incomes, and incomes rose mainly for the urban population
and rich peasants. Agriculture did worse, and eventually began to hold
back the developmental process. (After Nehru’s death, US President
Lyndon Johnson was able to threaten to withhold shipments of grain
to India unless a policy shift to ‘betting on the strong’ was inaugurated.
This was to become the basis of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ strategy,
where high-yielding seeds and increased fertiliser use by richer farmers
on larger plots of land led to increased production – only in wheat areas,
not elsewhere. Instead of cooperatives, there was an increased polarisation
of rich and poor farmers in the countryside.)
Thus, most importantly, as Nehru admitted at the time of the drafting
of the Third Plan, the redistributive agenda had largely failed; over half
the Indian population lived in poverty. India was still a capitalist
economy; socialism required more than just a large public sector. Nehru
frankly stated that the private sector was expanding with state help, that
a group of leading capitalists had taken over the economy, and with it
controlled politics and society. Not enough attention had been paid to
human development in the form of education, apart from at the higher end
of the spectrum – scientific and technological education, or higher
education in general, to the detriment of primary education. No proper
social security provisions were in place, despite the fact that, as far back as
1938, the Congress’s National Planning Committee under Nehru’s
chairmanship had put together a package of extremely radical provisions.
The social corollary to developmental planning, ‘modernisation’, was
also noticeably lagging behind. Many of Nehru’s failures in this regard
were due to a conservative opposition that he was unwilling or unable to
confront by strongly asserting his own views. In 1948, a senior civil
servant had protested against the appointment of women to the Indian
Foreign Service because they would ultimately need to get married;
Nehru had declined to make not appointing women a legal principle, but
he attempted to assuage the gentleman’s anxiety by suggesting that it
was highly unlikely that women would join the Foreign Service in large
numbers. The Hindu Code Bill had been opposed by conservatives, and
delayed for four years before Nehru was forced to compromise. On
‘Muslim law’, Nehru’s principle of not giving the impression that a Hindu
CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY 263