Thinking about India

Hari and Anirvan popped round this evening after dinner. Anirvan and I were trying to remember a charming Urdu couplet, which I learned a couple of weeks ago:

Baat agar sakht bhi kahani hai to narmi se kaho.
Labz katon ki tarah dil me khatak sakate hain.

Loosely, Even if you have harsh things to tell someone, say them with tenderness. For words may strike in the heart like thorns.

A laudable principle to abide by, I think.

We ended the chit-chat with a disagreement about the relative historical worthiness of Nehru versus Sardar Patel - representatives of the defining ideological poles of modern India. Nehru, as is well known, was India's first prime minister. He was a Fabian socialist by temperament and upbringing, and sought to construct in India an economy whose growth was driven by state planning, while affording a good amount of space for private enterprise (on this, check out Chibber's info-packed book). From the Fabians Nehru adopted a cosmopolitan, internationalist outlook, and became the central mover in the Non-Aligned Movement in the mid-1950s.

Vallabhai Patel (commonly known as "Sardar", or Chief in Gujurati) was Nehru's doppelganger: a harder, realist personality, and a committed patriot, the Iron Man of India. With VP Menon, Patel was responsible as Home Minister for binging about the accession of hundreds of principalities into the new Republic. On Partition and Kashmir, he was a hawk. He pressed for the immediate use of military force to bring J&K (and also Goa) into the union, vehemently opposed recourse to United Nations arbitration, and was frequently accused of anti-Muslim prejudice - resulting from his less than conciliatory language around the traumas of 1947. Economically, too, he favored a freer-market model than his boss. Altogether, a right-winger - yet a man who sacrificed ambition and non-mainstream policy positions time and again to the greater cause of independence and Congress unity.

Critics accuse Nehru of weakness, stuffy intellectualism, excessive eagerness to play the big statesman abroad while neglecting brewing troubles at home. To adduce the most damning evidence, they point to the China-India border war of 1962. India's humiliation in this brief but miserable spat, they contend, was the direct result of India's military unpreparedness, which they blame on Nehru's lily-liveredness and naivete. It's said that Patel would never have allowed such a state of vulnerability to emerge. In a similar vein, many attribute the pathologies of corruption and the impossibly-slow-moving juggernaut of the Indian state to Nehru's grand designs - replete with five-year plans, an over-weening bureaucracy, and the like. Patel would have gone with something leaner and meaner.

We'll never know. Patel died in 1950, Nehru not till 1964 (in office). The counterfactuals involved in making the mighty case for Patel are so speculative as to be totally unverifiable. But given the attacks on Nehru's reputation - quite a voguish pastime now - his achievements bear restating. The consolidation of a peaceful, unified India was a signal political feat of the twentieth century. I don't think this would have been possible without a tolerant, thoroughly democratic philosophy such as Nehru possessed (and Sardar probably did not). For this inclusiveness, he was loved dearly at the time. Second, Nehru's strategy of fast industrialization is vindicated by India's current development woes. Of course growth is rapid right now. But the lion's chunk of that comes from the labor-unintensive sectors like software, call-centers and (increasingly) quality services. Manufacturing, factories, construction - what should usually be the fruit-bearing concomitants of modernity and urbanization - are under-advanced. Too many people still work in the fields or informally. This sorry situation, as it's turned out, was not for want of Nehru's trying.

Yes, Nehru could have be more aggressive with defense. The circumstances though were extraordinary. China's attack was unprovoked and unpredictable. In any case, it seems unlikely that even gigantic military investment in the 50's - which India could ill-afford - could have averted an attack from the Tiger to the north. Money was better spent on lifting the poor out of misery.

Nehru wasn't oblivious to the dangers confronting the state he did so much to establish - and which he hoped might become a gleaming city on the hill, an example to the world. In a depressingly prophetic jeremiad delivered on the floor of the Lok Sabha in September 1956 he ruminated, surely in sad tones:

"It is a difficult world, not a very gentle world; it does not care too much for the weak. And you have to be strong, in mind, in heart, in character and in technique, and in the modern ways of life. Otherwise you go down. I have no doubt about it."