It is difficult to make a general statement on the Indian political situation without being aware that it needs to be qualified. Last Monday, for example, we published an article in these columns expressing the view that the second generation leadership had failed the country. But the writer had only to take a second look at his presentation to recognise that it needed to be qualified.
Mr Morarji Desai, Mr Charan Singh and Mr Jagjivan Ram, who must be held principally responsible for the disintegration of the Janata party, cannot, for instance, be said to belong to the second generation leadership. They participated in the freedom struggle under Gandhiji’s stewardship. It is commonsense that while in a period of rapid politicisation a strong and skilful leader like Mrs Gandhi can impose his or her will on the country for a time, he or she cannot produce a so-called national consensus a la Mr Nehru. That calls for acquiescence on the part of the opponents, which is precisely what politicisation destroys.
Similarly, it is common knowledge that the JP movement had come to rely heavily on the RSS and failed to throw up a new leadership capable of shouldering the responsibility of managing the country’s affairs. Indeed, but for the Allahabad High Court judgment unseating Mrs. Gandhi from Parliament in June 1975, the movement was beginning to peter out. It was almost exhausted and Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan himself was beginning to lose heart. Above all, why has the second generation failed, assuming it has? Surely not just because Mr. Nehru did not care to raise and train possible successors.
Unhealthy
But while all attempts to find a master explanation for the present rather unhealthy state of our political life are bound to prove inadequate, the search must go on. Otherwise even the better educated among us are bound to lapse into easy, moralistic judgments as if moral values are immutable, eternal and sui generis and as if moral ‘decline’ is some kind of epidemic which suddenly descends on a land.
Two consequences of colonial rule have attracted widespread attention in almost all discussions on developments in independent India – the destruction of cottage and rural industry in the 18th and 19th centuries and the consequent de-industrialisation and impoverishment of the country, and the rise of an English-educated intelligentsia. Though the interaction between these two developments has naturally attracted the attention of serious scholars, it does not figure in popular discussions. These, therefore, get distorted.
In his seminal work “The Indian Middle Class,” Prof BB Misra has pointed out that the English-educated Indians in British India came to regard themselves as members of the middle class, though in a majority of cases they did not possess the financial resources to justify the claim. Unlike their counterparts in Europe and the United States, they did not possess income-yielding properties and investments. They had nothing to fall back upon. A vast majority of them did not and could not even get jobs which could assure them a reasonable standard of living. In the absence of expanding commercial and industrial activity and in the context of a largely stagnant agriculture, they had little choice but to seek employment with the government, mostly as clerks.
It has become fashionable to describe these people as the intelligentsia. In fact a majority of them could only be described as forming a semi-intelligentsia. They were only literates. They were not educated in a proper sense of the term. They had no passion for knowledge. They were by and large as indifferent to Europe’s cultural legacy as to their own. In a recent seminar, Prof Niharranjan Ray recalled that the problem of unemployment among educated Indians came to the fore in 1924. But he must know that the problem regarding the quality of education began to concern serious-minded Britishers and Indians much earlier – in the time of Lord Curzon in the first decade of this century. The system produced some outstanding men who masked the weaknesses of this class. But they were there for anyone to see.
New Class
In the absence of another group with even this amount of intellectual energy, ability to understand and cope with problems of modern administration and capacity for articulation, this intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia came to dominate the affairs of the country.
Independence opened new avenues for it. Governmental activities expanded manifold and with it employment opportunities. Trade and industry got a new fillip. This opened new prospects for this class to get jobs and to make quick money on the strength of the incentives the government provided by way of cheap land and subsidised loans for small and cottage industries. And since controls of a Byzantine nature grew in the name of planned- development and prevention of monopoly, there arose a whole new class of PR men and brokers whose main task was to corrupt the bureaucrats and the politicians. Mr. Nehru’s commitment to planned growth and socialism was easily perverted. In reality, the first came to mean little more than a protected market and the second a proliferation of controls and the government machinery. No honest man could possibly cope with these unless he was extremely well-connected.
In plain terms, independence created conditions whereby the semi-intelligentsia could bridge and in millions of cases abolish the gap between the reality and its aspirations to middle class status. The abolition of absentee landlords and the enormous investment in agriculture by way of easy and cheap loans, irrigation facilities and provision of inputs like fertiliser, insecticide, power, pump-sets and diesel at subsidised rates produced a similar phenomenon in the countryside – a rural middle-class with brokers and all.
These developments in the economy were bound to influence politics and they began to do so pretty soon after independence. Immediately in the wake of the first general election in 1952 it became evident that the men who came to influence considerably, if not to dominate, the state governments thought in very different terms from those of Mr. Nehru who, by the sheer strength of his personality, managed to give the Union government at least an apparently progressive orientation. They were conservative in their social outlook.
They spoke for the upcoming middle peasantry. They were lukewarm towards further land reforms in the form of ceilings and fixed rent and security of tenure for tenants. They wanted more funds to be diverted to agricultural development. If Mr Nehru had not been popular among the weaker sections of society whose support alone kept the Congress party in power, they might well have got rid of him as Prime Minister. But even he could not weaken the growing hold of the rising middle class on political and economic power.
Corruption was not a big issue in the Nehru era. Several factors accounted for this happy state of affairs. Many of the leading politicians had grown up under Gandhiji’s moral influence which was buttressed by an awareness of the high standards of probity among British politicians. They had austere family backgrounds. They had not known much money and their needs were limited. Prices were stable. The black-money, parallel economy was still in a nascent state. But it could easily be anticipated that this state of affairs would not last long. After all, politics cannot be insulated from the rest of society.
It is natural that many of us should be nostalgic about the Nehru era. In a superficial sense it represented our values. He was our spokesman even if we criticised him more often than praised him. But in a serious discussion it is not permissible to ignore the fact that the moral and intellectual qualities of new entrants into the Congress and the health of the party organisation caused considerable concern to him and others, or to slur over the developments outlined earlier. By the time he departed from the scene, the Congress was on the way to becoming the party of the semi-intelligentsia. This cannot be seriously disputed even by those who question Mr. Nirad Chaudhuri’s long-held view that the rot started with Gandhiji’s leadership of the freedom movement.
Hucksters
The steady deterioration in the Congress notwithstanding, however, the semi-intelligentsia found its fullest expression in the RSS. In the 54 years of its existence it has not produced a single leader who is capable of formulating a coherent ideology and articulating it in intellectual terms. It is in fact deeply suspicious of intellectuals. Appropriately, it values brawn more than brain and shapes its training programme accordingly. Naxalism is another expression of the same social force, and so was the JP movement in spite of his own genuine, even if confused, idealism and the veneer of concern for moral values that he was able to give it. In the Youth Congress (I), we see the same social force at work.
The genuinely westernised intelligentsia with its liberal and socialist values and the relatively honest businessman and bureaucrat not used to the rough and-tumble of a free-for-all feel lost in the new atmosphere. There is precious little they can do to stop the avalanche that is threatening to overwhelm them. Mrs. Gandhi can perhaps buy them a certain amount of respite if she tries because the moral sense in the Indian community as a whole is strong enough to help her check the drift. Even otherwise, one need not despair. The hucksters of yesterday are the honourable men of today and tomorrow. Societies do not grow up in strait jackets. But in course of time, they acquire new frameworks and norms.
The Times of India, 18 June 1980