Without intending to do so, PM Manmohan Singh appears to have stirred another hornet?s nest within the intrigue-ridden Congress party with his observation that there was much more debate and dissent in Jawaharlal Nehru?s Cabinet over critical policy issues than what we see in the government today. Manmohan Singh said this last week at a meeting with some editors who were keen to understand why the government and Congress party, of late, were speaking in different voices on major development related issues.
Manmohan?s remark that India?s first Cabinet had witnessed more dissent and that Sardar Patel had openly disagreed with Nehru seems to have given ammunition to some partymen, typically the more-loyal-than-the-king variety, to launch another broadside against the PM. As is their wont, the loyalists are currently discussing this only in hushed tones. How can you say something like this about Nehru, who was like a demigod for all Congressmen.
However, a cursory reading of history might tell you that Nehru indeed faced immense opposition from within his own party, especially from powerful rural aristocracy that was stoutly opposed to his modernist project. Nehru?s unabashed admirers among historians have recorded this in great detail.
Sunil Khilnani in his celebrated work, The Idea of India, clearly points out how at the time of Independence the direction of India?s economic future remained undetermined. ?Nehru found himself leader of a party divided in its views about economic development, with no single group weighty enough to impose its vision? In the Constituent Assembly the interests of the rural rich were secured by removing land reforms and agriculture taxation from the control of the central government and putting them in the hands of the provincial legislatures, more closely subject to the imprecations of the landlords. Within the Congress, Sardar Patel, who spoke for the landed classes and for the industrialists, orchestrated the departure of the socialists in 1948. This left Nehru isolated, and with Gandhi gone, it made Patel the most powerful figure within the party.?
Sardar Patel never favoured economic planning. It was only after Patel?s death in 1950 that Nehru came in full command of the state. Even after that, Nehru could not fully implement his top down state-led reforms as the party?s leadership among the rural rich came in the way of implementing any radical measure like land reforms. An objective reading of history does show that the Congress party has always been, and remains today, a broad coalition of interest groups in society and these groups are also in opposition to each other from time to time. The only difference is that during the 1950s and 1960s it was the Congress party alone that managed the contradictions between various interest groups, and today many regional political formations led by the Mayawati, Karunanidhi, Nitish Kumar, etc, are also catering to a coalition of interest groups in their own regional context.
Khilnani rightly points out that the Congress had never really been a strongly ideological party. ?It was a broad political coalition, itself dependent on what some have described as India?s ruling social coalition of commercial and industrial capitalists, rural land lords, and bureaucratic and managerial elite. In the later decades, the newly enriched farmers and the unionised public sector workers would also clamber aboard this coalition raft.?
In recent years, the last two of Khilnani?s categories?newly enriched farmers and unionised public sector workers?have had a strong influence on some big policy questions relating to land acquisition for industrial use, key economic reforms relating to public sector, pensions and financial sector.
However, the pressures of globalisation and a greater sense of competitiveness with the other emerging nations appear to have given India?s rapidly rising industrial class a bigger role in national life. Compared to the 1950s, and 1960s, the capitalist class today has a far greater say in national politics precisely because the political and intellectual elite sees their role as critical to the new nationalist project, especially against the backdrop of globalisation. No wonder, the middle classes swell with pride when they see Indian business groups like Tatas, Ambanis and Mittals acquiring companies around the world, buttressing the India rising story.
However, the same capitalist class triggers new faultlines within the domestic polity. Their hunger for resources creates tension with the other groups in the Congress?s broad social coalition such as farmers and tribals whose lands are being acquired to drive the industrialisation programme.
The Congress, in its current avatar, is dealing with these contradictions in its own unique way. PM Manmohan Singh publicly asserts that India cannot perpetuate poverty in the name of environment. Two days later the Congress president says due sensitivity must be shown to India?s traditional rivers and forests. A section of the media sees Sonia?s statement as contradictory to Manmohan Singh?s. Perhaps each is articulating the aspirations of some segment of a broader social coalition. Like Patel and Nehru did in their own time. In some respects, things don?t change.
mk.venu@expressindia.com