Unlike the spate of instant histories of the emergency, says reviewer GIRILAL JAIN, the book written by the Oxford don, David Selbourne, is clearly a work of painstaking research. But the author has spoiled his scholarship by trying to fit facts into an ideological straitjacket. The result has been a mixture of sense and nonsense which hardly conceals the author’s prejudice against this country.
DAVID Selbourne’s An Eye To India* is perhaps the first book so far on the emergency which does not bear the mark of having been written in a hurry to meet an arbitrarily fixed deadline.
The author was in India during the first phase of the emergency as an Aneurin Bevan memorial fellow and apparently began working on the manuscript long before Mrs. Gandhi ordered the election to the Lok Sabha on January 18 last. Indeed, the subsequent developments, including her personal defeat, hardly fit into his scheme, though he has, for the sake of being up-to-date, taken note of them. He has hardly any explanation to offer either for the decision to go to the polls or for the result and, of course, he will be at a loss to distinguish the Janata Party from the Congress which it has replaced.
That Mr Selbourne has taken pains to study the subject and collect and organise his material is evident enough. He has in fact produced a competent account of all that happened on the eve of and during the emergency. He has also written with deep feeling for the poor in India, the 40 per cent who live on or below the poverty line. But while this is understandable and even welcome, it was not at all necessary for him to ignore India’s achievements in the last 30 years – the rise in food production from around 50 million to 115 million tons, three times as many students in schools and so on.
The source of the trouble is that Mr. Selbourne has sought to fit not only the emergency but the history of India since independence into an ideological strait-jacket which is too narrow to be able to contain the complexities and contradictions of India. He has tried to make it out that since independence itself this country has been ruled in the interests of “landlords and the richer bourgeoisie” and that the emergency was a logical culmination of this process.
He has written: “Notwithstanding these substantial qualifications, from a historical scrutiny of the particular deformities of state power commonly termed ‘fascist’, we would need to have found in India a system of political gangsterism, a system of violence against the working class and its organisation, jingoism, demagogy, chauvinism, nationalism and aggression and the power of capital presiding over part or whole of the economy of the nation.
“We would also have to find … some or all of the following: acute economic crisis ‘driving the classes off their courses’; the establishment of an unrestricted political monopoly by the ruling bourgeoisie, ‘fearing an outbreak of revolution’; the ‘curtailment of the rights of parliament’; and the ‘repression of the revolutionary movement’. We would expect – guided by historical example – the substitution of one state form of class domination, such as that of liberal democracy, by another; that is, the dictatorship of unmediated class power, in the process of consolidation.”
This is, it is hardly necessary to say, so much nonsense. The Indian state has not been waging war against the poor people, specially in the countryside, as Mr. Selbourne would have us believe. On the contrary, it alone has given them certain rights, made them conscious of those rights and enabled them to exercise those rights to a certain extent.
He has not only completely ignored the caste system and its inequities but also confused a number of other issues for whatever reasons. While, for instance, it is true that the Congress party in power failed to implement land reforms effectively enough, it does not follow that the number of the landless could have been significantly reduced if it had enforced reasonable ceilings. For, even if it is accepted that sixty million acres of land could have been recovered as surplus, it could have been used at best to make the marginal farmers a little viable. Mr. Selbourne should have had no difficulty in recognising this reality because he is aware that half of the existing holdings are marginal.
Similarly, while it is true that the Indian rural economy has grown at a dangerously low rate for over a decade, the “fatal nexus” has not been solely between “inequality and backwardness”, as Mr. Selbourne insists. Slow progress of irrigation has been one difficulty. The inefficient use of existing irrigation facilities has been another. And there can be no question that peasants have been gravely handicapped for want of adequate credit facilities at reasonable rates of interest and other inputs. But above all, Indian agriculture has had to support too many people.
Mr. Selbourne thinks China has successfully tackled a more difficult situation. But the differences in the two political systems apart, this is not an assumption which is likely to be widely shared today. China, too, faces serious economic problems. Indeed, its present rulers themselves do not seem to believe that easy solutions are available to them.
There has been something phoney about the Congress party’s socialist professions. A party which could not implement land reforms, prevent usury on an enormous scale both in the countryside and urban centres and provide potable water in as many as 80 per cent of the villages, has, indeed, no business to claim to be socialist. But if Mr Selbourne was not so ideologically committed, he should have had little difficulty in realising that the top Congress leadership has meant well by the weaker sections of the community, that it has extended special concessions to scheduled castes and tribes and that its power has rested above all on the support of these people.
Also, he should have known that the greatest beneficiary of the Congress dispensation has been the bureaucracy and not the so-called bourgeoisie. For while the latter have made money, they have been at the mercy of the former. If it has been a patron-client relationship, the bureaucrat has been the patron and the industrialist the client. Indeed, it may not be much of an exaggeration that the rapid expansion in the numerical strength and powers of the bureaucracy has been as big a factor in the stagnation of the Indian economy as the conflict with China in 1962 leading to a massive rise in the unproductive defence expenditure.
In view of Mr. Selbourne’s ideological preoccupation and general attitude to developments in India, it is hardly necessary to say that he would have expected something like the emergency to occur even if Mrs. Indira Gandhi had not run into personal difficulties as a result of the Allahabad high court’s adverse judgment. Indeed, he has written:
“… the Indian emergency was a specific political expression of economic dependency, ‘under-development’ and hegemonic crisis. It pointed, both when it was at its most brutally coherent and when it was apparently ‘muddling through with a series of ad hoc measures’, to the latency with or without an emergency – of a specific national socialism of ‘under-development’, which is not confined to India. Rooted in the fear of insurrection, grounded in violence and the miseries of the people, it was propelled in India by a profound economic and political crisis in the interests of arguably the most developed bourgeoisie of an ‘under-developed’ nation. Such a solution characteristically seeks, above all, the forced growth – macabre in relation to the poverty of the rural millions lost in the wilderness of India – of its capitalist industrial sector, at whatever cost in life, right, or the dignity of labour. And during its emergency phase it sought it by concentration of class-power, compulsion, assault on the labour movement and the rights of the people, and the Stakhanovite emulation of capitalist models of economic coercion.”
This again is a peculiar mixture of sense and nonsense. While it is incontestable that economic stagnation, specially the acute inflation in 1973 and 1974, aggravated the regimes political difficulties, it is absurd for anyone to suggest either that India has been unduly dependent on foreign powers or that the ruling elite has lived in “fear of insurrection.” On the contrary, India has achieved a remarkable level of self-reliance as a result of its import substitution programme so much so it is now finding it difficult to use its rapidly increasing foreign exchange balances for stepping up imports, and since the end of the Telengana affair in 1950, there has been no serious threat of insurrection, tribal rebellions in Nagaland and Mizoram being an altogether different affair.
During the emergency Mrs. Gandhi doubtless gave a right-wing turn to the economy. But even her worst detractors will not argue that she was an instrument of the “richer bourgeoisie.” Apparently she made the swing because she was convinced that there was no other way to break the country’s stagnation and push it into the 20th century. The method may have been brutal but not in comparison with China’s which Mr. Selbourne admires. And what does he or any other leftist know about that country?
There is a lot of other silly stuff in the book – “the 1972 mutiny in the Indian Navy”, “the reported house arrest of senior army commanders”, and both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. “have knowingly contributed to India’s nuclear programme” because they have a “common interest in preventing peasant revolt”, to give some examples. But despite all this, An Eye to India remains eminently readable.
*AN EYE TO INDIA: The Unmasking of a Tyranny – a Brutal and Ignominious Period in the History of the Nation: By David Selbourne (Pelican, £1.50)
The Times of India, 14 August 1977