Development Planning: The Indian Experience(Clarendon Press, 1987);
Terence J. Byres (ed.), The State and Development Planning in India(Oxford
University Press, 1994); Terence J. Byres (ed.), The Indian Economy: Major
Debates since Independence(Oxford University Press, 1998), read together,
provide a good sense of the debates.
On opposition parties and non-Congress politics, the largest literature
relates to the main opposition party for most of the Nehruvian period,
the Communist Party of India. The early narrative histories of the CPI,
centrally concerned with its origins and development, were written in the
1950s at the height of Cold War paranoia and a lingering McCarthyism –
funded by the American establishment, whose need for ‘area studies’
brought several academic departments into being. G.D. Overstreet and
M. Windmiller’s Communism in India(University of California Press, 1959)
is a comprehensive account – but a serious left-winger reading this book
might well have developed an over-optimistic picture of the communists’
and the left’s strengths in India. A companion piece, by David M. Druhe,
Soviet Russia and Indian Communism 1917–1947, with an Epilogue Covering the
Situation Today(Bookman Associates, 1959), attributes too much to Soviet
conspiracy, but covers necessary ground for the pre-independence period.
Early members of the Party, foreign organisers and breast-beating recanters
have all written their memoirs. For the post-independence period, Party
resolutions were routinely published and publicised, as were changes of line
and reassessments. A history of the CPI in the Nehru years needs to be
written.
For other parties: the socialists (of various description) were often
their own publicists, most prominent among them being Jayaprakash
Narayan and Rammanohar Lohia. On the continued importance of Hindu
nationalism in the Nehruvian period, see B.D. Graham, Hindu Nationalism
and Indian Politics(Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also Christophe
Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India(Hurst, 1996); B.D. Basu
et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags(Orient Longman, 1993); and Peter van der
Veer, Religious Nationalism. The Swatantra Party is interesting in that it has
been arguably the only secular (that is, non-sectarian or non-religious
nationalist) right-wing party of any note in India. See H.L. Erdman, The
Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism(Cambridge University Press, 1967).
Minoo Masani’s Congress Misrule and the Swatantra Alternative(Manaktalas,
1966), a collection of his speeches and writings as a Swatantra member, is
useful to get a sense of their own arguments.
On the Congress for Cultural Freedom and CIA funding in India, see the
second volume of Minoo Masani’s memoirs, Against the Tide(Vikas, 1981),
in which he openly acknowledges receiving CIA funding, but denies it
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