A plan, which outlines a strategy of development, the measures to carry it through, may be so designed as to contribute to the interests of the exploiting classes or to bring about the all-round development of the vast masses of the people — economic, social, political and cultural. The plan is not natural: it is stamped with the brand of a class.
Engels said:
"Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for mankind in the specifically biological aspect. Historical evolution makes such an organization daily more indispensable, but also every day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all branches of its activity, and particularly natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade."[1]
Since Engels wrote the above, vast scientific and technological revolutions have taken place. The immense achievements of science and technology assure man that he may be the master of his fate, that want and scarcity can be banished from his life, that there can be regeneration of society — economic, moral and cultural — if "conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way" takes place, if the present irrational political and economic system, which today squanders away vast human resources as well as gifts of science and technology, is replaced by a more rational system, a system based on genuine economic and political democracy, which puts public good above private greed and provides the soil for the full flowering of culture.
To a former colony or semi-colony there is a choice between two strategies of development. One is a strategy that perpetuates dependence on imperialist capital and hungers for more of it, preserves the domestic social structure — the legacy of colonial or semi-colonial rule — with or without some cosmetic changes and aims at concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of the vast masses. The other is a strategy that ensures independence and self-reliance in a country where a social revolution has swept clean the legacies of colonial or semi-colonial rule and has as its goal the all-round development of the people.
Two strategies of development, two kinds of planning, were being implemented at the same time — one in China (from the beginning of the fifties to about the mid-seventies) and the other in India. In liberated China during the days of Mao Tsetung, a "conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way" to lift the vast Chinese masses from a chronic state of poverty, backwardness and degradation was being attempted. China adopted five year plans and pursued a strategy of development which ensured freedom, work, food, education, health, democratic rights and dignity for all working people, raised their material and cultural standards and promoted rapid self-reliant advance.
Without destruction there can be no construction. When China was politically liberated after a victorious revolution, she destroyed the economic and social structure that had been responsible for China's backwardness and underdevelopment. Imperialist and comprador capital that constituted about 90 per cent of the capital then invested in China was confiscated and came to be owned by the whole people. A policy of gradual restriction and control and ultimate nationalization was adopted towards the rest of the capital — the capital of the national bourgeoisie. Land reforms were carried out from below — by the peasants themselves. The land owned by the landlords and the excess land of the rich peasants were distributed among the landless and poor peasants. Landlords received an equitable share of the land. Land reforms led to the formation of cooperatives and then of communes. This agrarian revolution formed the basis of a vast industrial regeneration. Industries — big and small — owned by the State, provinces and communes, sprouted up everywhere — in urban areas as well as in the countryside.
The Maoist strategy put man, not things or profits, in the forefront; conceived of development as a mass movement and attached greater importance to the voluntary participation of the entire people than to capital goods and technology; rejected bureaucratic centralization and insisted on a policy of decentralization to unleash the initiative, creativity and enthusiasm of the people at all levels; held that it is the people who are the makers of their destiny — not the leaders or planners; put politics — not material incentives — in command, that is, sought to rouse the people's political and social consciousness and to subordinate self to the spirit of service. Its aim was the all-round development of men and women — the emergence of active, politically conscious, truly free socialist men and women. In respect of technology, the Maoist strategy put stress on self-reliance or 'do-it-yourself' programme. Mao Tsetung was sure that the technological backwardness of ages, the legacy of colonial or semi-colonial rule, could be overcome, if scientists, managers and workers put their heads together, if theory were wedded to practice. Mao held that technology must not remain the monopoly of a few but that it must be widely diffused and belong to the masses. The Maoist strategy refused to lean on foreign transnational corporations or Soviet agencies for technology, for dependence on them would mean opening the door wide to imperialist penetration and domination. But it was not averse to learning from foreign countries, while, as Mao Tsetung said, "maintaining independence and keeping the initiative in our own hands and relying on our own efforts." The Maoist strategy insisted on practising self-reliance from the very beginning.
The Maoist model sought not only the independent, self-reliant development of the productive forces and the transformation of the world around man, but the transformation of man himself from a man interested in himself to a man to whom service to society would get precedence over service to self.
Mass enthusiasm was awakened, mass participation in decision-making and in the execution of plans was ensured.
In China where machinery was far from adequate, particularly in the fifties, the manual labour of aroused millions of men and women accomplished miracles of construction. It tamed wild rivers and built vast irrigation systems.
Only in the fifties China accepted some Soviet loan (insignificant compared with India's external debt). However, in 1960, the Soviet revisionists withdrew experts and blue-prints of Soviet-aided projects under construction, with disastrous effects. Nevertheless, all Soviet loans were repaid by the beginning of 1965. China became free also from all internal debts by 1968. Inflation was unknown in China. Prices were not only stable, they were also brought down at times.
The Maoist strategy transformed China within a brief period from a weak, backward country, teeming with starving people, ravaged by civil war and hyperinflation and despised by all, into a strong, self-reliant, sovereign state that was the hope and inspiration of the progressive people all over the world and the fear of the all imperialists and reactionaries. We may quote here a few brief extracts from a World Bank study dealing with the development in China until about the end of the seventies. It states:
"China's agricultural sector accounts for less than eight percent of the world's arable land but provides enough food for about 22 percent of the world's population."
It says:
"Industrialization has been very rapid, largely as the result of an unusually high rate of investment, virtually all of which has been financed by domestic savings. Its net output of [industry including mining and energy] grew in real terms at around 10 per cent per annum in 1957-79..."
It further states:
"Despite this strong bias towards heavy industry, per capita availability of manufactured consumer goods has also expanded rapidly — at seven per cent per annum in 1952-77."
It goes on to say:
"Much effort has been devoted to attaining new technical capabilities. Almost the entire range of modern industries has been set up, with much emphasis on those making capital equipment.... In practically every significant industry major plants have been built in several parts of the country and special efforts have been made to spread manufacturing into backward regions and rural areas."
Citing some instances, it affirms:
"In a few areas, however, China has developed a technological lead."
It observes:
".... income statistics give an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of poverty. What is more relevant is the distribution of real consumption, especially of fundamentally necessary or desirable goods such as food, clothing, housing, medical care, and schooling."
It notes: The Chinese, even "the very poor",
"all have work; their food supply is guaranteed through a mixture of state rationing and collective self-insurance; most of their children are not only at school, but being comparatively well taught; and the great majority have access to basic health care and family planning services."[2]
Led by Mao Tsetung, the Chinese people, though surrounded by hostile forces, both foreign and domestic, attempted to build a society — the dream of Engels and other visionaries. Great success was achieved in all spheres — economic, social, moral and cultural — but those hostile political forces have proved stronger and set the clock back. Yet this experiment will live to inspire and guide the people all over the world until they reach the cherished goal.
The manner in which the Indian State emerged in 1947 restricted its choice of a strategy of development. Some social scientists such as Partha Chatterjee contend, when speaking of India, that "it was in planning above all that the post-colonial state would claim its legitimacy as a single will and consciousness — the will of the nation — pursuing a task that was both universal and rational — the well-being of the people as a whole." Further:
"It was in the universal function of `development' of national society as a whole that the post-colonial State would find its distinctive content. This was to be concretised by embodying within itself a new mechanism of developmental administration, something which the colonial State, because of its alien and extractive character, never possessed. It was in the administration of development that the bureaucracy of the post-colonial State was to assert itself as the universal class, satisfying in the service of the State its private interests by working for the universal goals of the nation."[3]
First, the above contention that the colonial State did not set up a 'developmental' administration, as noted before, is not correct. During the War itself it established Reconstruction Committees and, towards the end of it, a Department of Planning and Development. Sir Ardeshir Dalal, one of the architects of the Bombay Plan, was member in charge of the department. And, as already noted again, the colonial masters drew up outlines of 'development' plans which, in essential respects, were not dissimilar to the Bombay Plan or the plans drawn up by the post-colonial State during Nehru's regime.
It may be pointed out that, as John Matthai (an author of the Bombay Plan and Nehru's colleague in the 1946-7 'Interim Government' and in the Union cabinet after the transfer of power) wrote in Times of India, 16 May 1956, "With the exception perhaps of the Community Projects, every project included in the First Plan had been designed and partially erected before the National Government came into power", that is, in the days of direct colonial rule.[4] As in other spheres, so in 'development' planning, there was a continuity between colonial and post-colonial regimes.
Second, the bureaucracy of the colonial State continued as the bureaucracy of the post-colonial State. Sir V.T. Krishnamachari, a senior member of the Indian Civil Service, was vice-chairman of the Planning Commission from 1953 to 1960; Sir N.R. Pillai, another senior member of the ICS, was its secretary and Tarlok Singh, also a member of the ICS, additional secretary. It was this bureaucracy, which had been the 'steel frame' of the British Indian empire, that, according to Chatterjee, asserted "itself as the universal class [whatever that may mean]" and worked "for the universal goals of the nation."
Third, is the nation a homogenous entity with "universal goals"? What are those "universal goals"? Is not a nation divided into classes, some of which are exploiting classes and some exploited ones? Do they have the same goals? Is not "the well-being of the people as a whole" (if the people include both the exploiting and exploited classes) something mythical? In a society, riven by classes, a seemingly non-class approach is intended to promote the well-being not of the people as a whole but of the exploiting classes.
Then, the question is: Is India the home of a single nation or of several nations and nationalities? This question has been discussed by me separately in India's Nationality Problem and Ruling Classes (Calcutta, 1996).
Which classes became the ruling classes of post-colonial India? During the colonial rule, British imperialism fostered certain classes — the Indian big bourgeoisie and the feudals — for preserving and promoting its own interests. By serving imperialism faithfully these classes became the dominant classes in Indian society. What is called the freedom of India came not on the crest of a political revolution but as the outcome of an agreement between the British colonialists, the Congress and the League leaders, known as the 'Mountbatten settlement'. When, in the changed international and Indian context after World War II, British imperialism found it impossible to continue its direct rule, it handed over the reins of direct administration to the "friendly and reliable hands" of those domestic classes that had prospered by serving it, that had been long tested and found that they could be trusted to preserve imperialism's vital interests. The Mountbatten settlement led to the artificial partition of the sub-continent on religious lines into two new states and attainment of dominion status by both. The comprador big bourgeoisie and the feudals, the classes which were the social props of British colonial rule, became the ruling classes of the post-colonial states — the Indian Union and Pakistan.[5]
So, unlike in China, feudalism was not abolished in India and the dominance of imperialist capital on Indian economy was not liquidated; rather new shackles have been forged over these years since 1947. The causes of India's backwardness and underdevelopment during long colonial rule, the causes that had retarded and distorted India's development, were not eliminated. The Indian planners have constantly indulged in high-flown rhetoric about the objectives of their planning — eliminating poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and inequality, building an advanced, self-reliant, socialist society, and so on. All these they have proposed to achieve without carrying out effective land reforms and without breaking the imperialist stranglehold on Indian economy, that is, without attacking the roots of India's backwardness and underdevelopment. As K.S. Shelvankar put it, "the real cause of India's poverty must be sought not in disease or illiteracy, which are but symptoms, nor yet in Indian customs and beliefs, nor again in the population figures, but in the economic organization on which the whole life of the country is based."[6] Instead of breaking up this economic organization which has been breeding backwardness and underdevelopment and building a new one in its place, the Indian planners and policy-makers have sought to industrialize and modernise India with the help of more capital and newer technology. True to their character, the ruling classes of India and their men have been guided by the development theory which serves their interests as well as those of imperialist capital — the theory that sustained inflows of foreign capital are a necessary condition for raising poor, underdeveloped countries from the state of 'stagnant backwardness'.
After the transfer of power, Nehru strongly favoured the adoption of economic plans but Patel was indifferent. "At the end of 1949", writes Francine Frankel, "Nehru once again revived the question of establishing a planning commission, this time fortified by a recommendation from an American adviser."[7]
It was Dr Solomon Trone, an American engineer, who served as Nehru's personal adviser from the autumn of 1949 to the summer of 1950. Trone had been loaned by the General Electric Corporation to the Czarist Government during World War I. He also acted as an industrial adviser to the governments of Japan and Chiang Kai-Shek's China. "Arriving in India as the Communists swept to power in China", to quote Nehru's biographer, Michael Brecher, "he conducted an investigation into various aspects of the Indian economy and concluded that conditions were alarmingly similar to those of China at the end of the second world war. Drastic action was required without delay, he argued, the first step being the formation of a central agency to evolve a unified national plan.... Trone emphasized the need to create capital-goods industries, in particular, additional steel plants, a machine-tool industry and electric-generating equipment on which to build secondary industries. He also urged strong encouragement to agricultural cooperatives of various kinds. Economic development would be financed partly by foreign loans, but would require sacrifices by all sections of the Indian people.... Although Trone's proposals were not accepted immediately, they were to reappear in subsequent deliberations over the First and, more particularly, the Second Five-Year Plans."[8] In the conditions in which the Indian ruling classes found themselves after the transfer of power in 1947 — a stagnant market, absence of an infrastructure for industrial development, absence of capital goods industries — they felt that economic planning was the need of the hour. The Soviet Five Year Plans, which transformed the economy of a backward country into that of a leading industrial nation, had a profound influence on the political and business elite of India. The revolutionary changes in China added urgency to the issue. In 1951 Chester Bowles, then U.S. ambassador to India, suggested to Nehru that "One of the most crucial questions was whether Asian democracy could compete with Asian communism unless it, too, organized its village efforts on a massive scale.... Nehru said that history had selected India as one of the democracy's chief testing grounds. This was a contest which he and India welcomed, a challenge which must be met head on ..... For nearly two hours we talked about the exciting possibilities."[9]
India's ruling classes felt that their minimum infrastructural needs could not be left purely at the mercy of the market forces in this stagnant semi-colonial, semi-feudal country. Even the tycoons and British colonialists, who best represented the market forces, demanded State intervention as the Bombay Plan and the post-war plans drafted by the British Indian government had pleaded for. It would be the task of the State to build the infrastructure — transport and communications, mining, the power industry, etc. — besides the long-gestation machine-building industries. They would provide the base on which the Indian big bourgeoisie and the branches, subsidiaries or other companies controlled by transnational would erect their private empires. Without State intervention, help and patronage neither Indian big capital nor imperialist capital would have the opportunity they were seeking so keenly. Thorough-going land reforms were abhorred, for any such radical measure would rouse the sleeping giant and destroy the status quo. Moreover, for the skewed pattern of development envisioned by foreign finance capital and the Indian comprador class, land reforms and the generation of a vast market for cheap wage goods were not necessary. (Indeed, such reforms would have generated social forces that would pose a potential threat to imperialist hold.) They hoped that their kind of planning, "democratic planning" as Nehru called it, would fulfil their aspirations, contribute to their rapid growth and expansion. They hoped that some benefit would trickle down to the masses, contain their discontent, maintain social stability and lay the spectre of communism. The plans, as we shall see, have promoted their fabulous growth and expansion, but hardly any benefit has trickled down to the masses, except to a small upper stratum of the urban petty bourgeoisie and of the peasantry.
The kind of planning that India's ruling classes have undertaken has been described by them as "democratic planning." On 15 September 1954, Nehru wrote to chief ministers of different constituent states of India:
"It is clear that we cannot proceed along authoritarian lines, such as in the Soviet Union or even as in China. The problem for us, therefore, is how far we can achieve our objective through democratic planning without too much compulsion.... We prefer the democratic approach because of certain values and standards we cherish."[10]
What were these values and standards? To the Nehrus it would be undemocratic to confiscate imperialist capital and the capital of the Indian big bourgeois who are in symbiotic relationship with the imperialist bourgeoisie: to them it would also be undemocratic to help the peasantry to liquidate feudalism root and branch. Instead, it would be quite democratic to protect and help those oppressive and exploitative forces to prosper though they stifled the lives of the people and blocked the path of India's development. And if some of the grosser forms of feudal exploitation were curtailed, it was democratic to pay adequate compensation to the former feudal lords at the expense of the famished people who had long been the victims of their ruthless plunder. To the Nehrus, China's planning or strategy of development was of an authoritarian character and smacked of coercion and force. But their 'democratic values' remained unsullied when they suppressed with fire and sword the people who stood up against exploiters and tyrants, as the Nehrus did in Telangana and elsewhere. Frank Moraes, editor of the Indian Express and later of the Hindustan Times wrote that "authority as represented by those in charge of law and order is more trigger happy in independent than in British-ruled India."[11]
'Democratic planning', said Gunnar Myrdal, "is thus rationalized, to defend the avoidance of radical reforms through changing the institutions — to which mostly those with an interest in the status quo would, of course, not voluntarily agree, even after so much persuasion.... And when they [the South Asian planners] do legislate radical institutional reforms — for instance in taxation or in regard to property rights in the villages — they permit the laws to contain loopholes of all sorts and even let them remain unenforced."[12]
'Democratic planning' in India is, in essence, planning in an exploiters' 'democracy'. The "certain values and standards" the Nehrus cherished ruled out any coercion to change the exploiters' 'democracy' into a democracy of the vast exploited masses. But the values Nehru swore by did not rule out coercion to protect the exploiters' 'democracy'. 'Democracy', 'freedom' and words like these have different connotations for different classes. For the Nehrus and the Birlas and the U.S. and other imperialists, the 'free and democratic world' is a world ruled by imperialist capital — a world where at least 75 per cent of the people are coerced to live lives of poverty, ignorance and squalor and where monopoly capital or capitalistic cannibalism preys on the lives of the people. So 'democratic planning' by India's ruling classes has rested on the foundations of semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism (that is, the indirect rule by imperialist capital).
'Democratic planning' has also come to mean a skewed concentration of fiscal powers with the Centre, with state governments serving as little more than glorified municipalities. This has afforded powerful coteries within the ruling classes greater sway over economic decision-making vis-a-vis rival sections. The various instruments of 'planning', including the Planning Commission, in the final analysis have served largely as tools of these coteries. Such a lopsided control by the Centre over Government finances finds its counterpart in despotism in the political arena. (Any democratic control by the various nationalities of India over their course of economic development is, of course, not even on the agenda.)
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Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Moscow, 1966, p.35. Emphasis added except on the words "animal kingdom" which is in the original.
World Bank, China: Socialist Economic Development, a World Bank Country Study, Vols. I-III, Washington D.C., 1983; the quotes are from Vol. I, pp.4, 10, 11, 12, 94, 104, 117, 127 and Vol. II, pp.7, 115 — emphasis added.
Chatterjee, "Development Planning and the Indian State," in T.J.Byres (ed.), The State and Development Planning in India, Delhi, 1994, p.57.
See Suniti Kumar Ghosh, India and the Raj 1919-1947: Glory, Shame and Bondage, Vol. II, Bombay, 1995, esp. Chap. 9.
Shelvankar, The Problem of India, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1940, p.70 — emphasis added.
Francine R. Frankel, India's Political Economy 1947-1977, Delhi, 1984, p.84 — emphasis added.
Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography, London, 1959, pp.515-6 — emphasis added.
Quoted in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Vol. II, Delhi, 1997, p. 221 — emphasis added.
Moraes, 'Gandhi Ten Years After," Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1958, pp.257-8, quoted in Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, Vol. I, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1968, p.97 fn.1.