Businessmen have never been popular in India. They remain a very vulnerable group despite their wealth which has, of course, increased enormously since independence. This is so not only, or even mainly, because the vast majority of the Indians are poor and, therefore, envious of those who have done well for themselves. The problem is much more complicated.
Businessmen, with agriculturists, figured third in ancient India’s hierarchy of castes and values, Brahmin and kshatriyas (warriors) occupying the first two places. Ironically, the British rule helped restore the old order with some modifications. While Western-educated Indians, described as neo-Brahmins by leading sociologists, came to occupy the top place as administrators and professionals and subsequently as leaders of the freedom movement, businessmen sank even lower in the popular esteem because straitened circumstances made them take to practices which were often not beyond reproach.
No Easy Task
British administrators had little respect even for British businessmen whom they contemptuously called “boxwallas” (those who carry their wares in boxes from place to place)! Whatever Nehru’s own sources of inspiration, his socialism was moulded by ancient Brahminism and British paternalism in a new garb; it allowed businessmen some scope to make money but no scope to wield power and to win respect. The same situation continued under Indira Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi cannot easily and quickly change it.
And, judging by the experience so far, it is not going to be easy to change policies significantly. For, while there has been a lot of talk of liberalising the economy in the past four years and some moves have indeed been made in that direction, the results by way of either genuine freedom of action or reduction in corruption have not been notable. Whatever her own prejudices and priorities, Indira Gandhi was also constrained by the compulsions of electoral politics as she saw them. Let us look at some of these compulsions.
Key Element
Populism has not been the only basis of success in Indian politics. Nehru and Indira Gandhi could have been easily outbid by the left and overtaken by it if that was so. Other factors have been at work; charisma flowing from a religious style of living, for example, in Mahatma Gandhi’s case, nomination by the Mahatma and supposed aristocratic background in Nehru’s, and kinship as Nehru’s daughter in Indira Gandhi’s.
But populism has been an important element in Indian politics and it is bound to remain so for the good and obvious reason that the number of poor people in the country is extremely large. Experts might quibble about the percentage of people below the poverty line, the figures ranging between 25 per cent on the low side and over 40 per cent on the high. But there can be no dispute that the total number of the wretched is dangerously high.
There is, however, another aspect to this Indian reality. Since the poor and the depressed in the countryside face injustice at the hands of the dominant castes there, they look to the far away state capital and even the more distant national capital for security and support. That is why they, and to a large extent the Muslim minority, have supported the Congress under Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
This in a sense conforms to the age-old patron-client relationship in India, the change being that the client delivers his vote in place of his services. But the appeal to him has to have an ideological component, not so much for the sake of the client as for the sake of the patron himself; or he cannot possibly formulate his appeal in caste or communal terms. For one thing, more often than not, he himself is an upper-caste individual. For another, he cannot afford to alienate upper caste Hindus. Since a majority of caste Hindus, too, are poor, it is possible to devise a political language which is non-communal and non-casteist. By and large, populism serves as that language.
Nehru prospered on the strength of that language, so did Indira Gandhi and, ironically enough, so did her arch-opponent, Jayaprakash Narayan, from 1974, when he took up the fight against her, to 1977 when she was thrown out of office. His appeal was not to the lowest sections of society, but the lower middle class in urban centres who have been uprooted from their traditional moorings in varying degrees and herded together in ugly towns and cities in very bad conditions. But the appeal was populist, indeed Messianic. It promised a much cleaner and much better tomorrow which in India’s conditions was tantamount to promising Utopia.
Populism has not been productive of results in the economic field. Instead of anything like a socialist order, Nehru left his successors an inefficient public sector which accounts for almost 50 per cent of the country’s total capital investment but produces no profits, and a system of permits, licences and quotas which has spawned the parallel economy which, it is said, has come to constitute 40 net cent of the total economy, with smuggling as one of its major components
Growth Stifled
Indira Gandhi did not dismantle this structure, though she should have known it was stifling growth. Instead, she added to it by bringing banking and coal-mining under the government’s control. But it would be useful to recall that she won her first big battle against the organisational bosses in the Congress party in 1969 when in a sudden change of approach she decided to nationalise 14 leading commercial banks and to remove Morarji Desai from the finance ministry on the specious plea that he would not have his heart in implementing this move. This gave her the dual image of being a radical and a warrior, a saint-warrior as it were, and this image made her virtually invulnerable.
If populism was Indira Gandhi’s great armour, so it was Jayaprakash Narayan’s. He was a failure in politics. But that does not concern us in the present context. What is relevant for our purpose is the fact that though he had no significant and lasting achievement to his credit in his 20-year-long career as a social worker which he could quote to his advantage, he came to be respected as a saint-politician, indeed the Mahatma’s successor. In view of all this, it is difficult to believe that the populist appeal will die with Rajiv Gandhi’s dramatic arrival on the scene.
Raid Publicity
In fact, through his well-publicised raids on business houses for tax evasion, Rajiv Gandhi, too, appears to be making an appeal to the same sectors of society as Jayaprakash Narayan did. These sections have been feeling left out of the race for economic advancement, their earnings as salaried employees not having kept pace with inflation as millions of self-employed have marched ahead and done much better for themselves. They also feel sandwiched between the successful (and to them the unscrupulous) on top of them and the increasingly assertive lower castes and groups below them; so they welcome the attack on the first just as they resent and oppose concessions to the latter. But, being head of government, Rajiv Gandhi cannot go on catering to this constituency.
(To Be Concluded)
This is the third of four parts of the text of an address to the Asia Society, New York, on March 13
The Times of India, 21 March 1985