As prime minister of India, then, Nehru embarked on a bold experiment — one whose incongruities would hold together only while he, with his unique aura, was around to ensure it. On the one hand, incredibly, he made this largely feudal country instantly and indiscriminately democratic. The constitution granted universal suffrage to adult citizens, despite the fact that only 12 per cent of them could read, and contrary to a widespread feeling that it was dangerous — and unnecessary — to give the country’s fate away to people so ignorant of democracy that it would never occur to them even to ask for it. Nehru and his colleagues in the Constituent Assembly, which drafted the constitution, were in this respect liberals of affecting conviction who unhesitatingly gave guarantees to the justice, equality and liberty of all citizens and to the freedom of the press. The fact that this gamble — of democracy and stable liberal institutions — paid off and endured is deservedly seen as an extraordinary legacy of India’s founding politicians, and it is has secured for Nehru himself a posthumous aura of quasi-divine rectitude and foresight.
On the other hand, Nehru felt, having studied the rapid industrial development of Japan and the Soviet Union, that only the state would be able to drive economic expansion fast enough to realise his fledgling nation’s epic dreams — and he instituted a centrally planned economy inspired by that of the USSR. India’s growth and modernisation would be achieved through a series of Five-year Plans which would harness the nation’s resources into coordinated forward thrusts. These Plans reached their height of intellectual rigour with the Second Plan, conceived by a man named Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, who had previously founded the Indian Statistical Institute and who combined just the attributes guaranteed to endear him to Nehru: a learned appreciation of big systems, a degree in physics from Cambridge, and a love of ancient Indian philosophy. On his appointment to the Planning Commission, Mahalanobis visited England, the USA, France and the USSR to discuss with the world’s leading statisticians and economists the question of how state investment could best reach the sectors that needed it, at the appropriate time and in the appropriate quantity, in order to ensure holistic long-term growth.
In Mahalanobis’ conception, the essential strategic industries — such as oil and gas, atomic energy, defence, aircraft, iron and steel, electricity generation and transmission, heavy electricals, telecommunications, coal and strategic minerals — were the exclusive preserve of the state, while both state and private enterprises could operate within a second category — which included chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertilisers, pulp and paper, and road transport. The remaining industries — such as consumer goods — were open to private companies. Private enterprise was subject to intense controls, however: businesses could not introduce new products, set up a new plant, fire workers or make major investments without acquiring specific government licenses. It was a highly restrictive regime but it turned out to be a rewarding one for established interests, and Indian big business was not generally opposed to it. Those big business houses that escaped nationalisation were kept under the watchful eye of the Congress Party; in return for their docility they were given cosy access to commercial licenses, which kept competition away and ensured high profits even when, as was often the case, their actual products were of terrible quality. (The defectiveness of Indian material life in those years, perversely, became over time a further justification for the system, since if markets were open then foreign companies would flood India with products of diabolical perfection and Indian companies would be annihilated in their own land.)
But Nehru was not greatly preoccupied by the quality of consumer products. He was drawn to the monumental. He loved to be photographed with large dams, which produced two other essential developmental forces — electricity and irrigation — and for which he entertained exalted feelings: at the dedication to the nation of the vast Bhakra dam, he called it — for he was not only a modern but a secularist — “the new temple of resurgent India”. The three great steel plants built during those years were also close to his heart, for they demonstrated India’s ability to harness its own mineral resources and produce a vital industrial asset without outside assistance. He was eager for India to boast great institutions of research and higher learning: he showered money on the Cambridge-educated theoretical physicist Homi Bhabha, who set up two high-level research institutes — the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay — and he established the lavish Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Management networks to cultivate home-grown leaders for a technocratic future.
These institutions, in fact, would continue to play a critical role into our own century, for they turned out many of the men and women responsible not only for India’s technology boom but indeed, since a large number of them ended up in Silicon Valley, for America’s. But in general Nehru’s vision of how the economy might flourish was less enduring than his vision of political life. As it turned out, the complexity of actual economic processes proved too great for even such gifted planners as his: the second Five-year Plan was abandoned because its theories broke down in the face of unexpected real-world developments such as foreign currency shortages and inflation. By the time of Nehru’s death in 1964, and the end of the third Five-year Plan, the promise of the early years was looking remote: many sectors of the economy had been choked by regulatory restrictions and lack of capital, and the country was suffering severe agricultural shortages. Nehru left behind a thwarted economy, whose resuscitation was the subject of furious debates for nearly three decades thereafter.
Part of the reason these debates were so drawn out, however, was that Nehru’s conception of India continued to enjoy an almost theological prestige, even as the economic system withered on which it was, to a great extent, based. It was a lofty, brahminical conception, which disdained money-making and worldly vanity; private enterprise, and the buying and selling of consumer products — especially luxury goods — were seen as vulgar and granted little freedom or respect within the nation’s life. The nation itself was the proper object of aspiration, and the closed economy was a sort of injunction, too, against too much dwelling on the outside world. As Nehru’s own cosmopolitanism ebbed away in the years following his death, there entered into Indian life a particular, self-involved texture as the wider world gradually became, even for the educated and affluent, more remote and prohibited. During the 1970s and much of the 1980s, for instance, foreign travel by private citizens, while technically allowed, was difficult even for the few who could afford an air ticket, because of the severe restrictions placed on currency exchange. An international phone call had to be booked a day in advance. Very few foreign companies could invest in Indian firms or set up Indian operations of their own, and imports of foreign products were largely banned.
Over time, such repression gave rise to strange fantasies about the outside, which, like prisoners’ dreams, were enervating and ambiguous. On the one hand, there was a great frisson about everything internationaclass="underline" those who did travel abroad during that period, for instance, were a tribe apart, and whole towns turned up at airports to welcome them home with garlands, and to glimpse the radios and perfumes they brought back from other lands. But, at the same time, there were genuine fears of the evil that foreign countries could do, and the barriers that protected India’s innocence could seem powerfully reassuring. Thinking back on long periods of insidious foreign rule, India maintained a paranoia about the possibilities of foreign infiltration and corruption — Pakistan and the CIA, for instance, were supernaturally present as agents of ill-luck in Indian life.