Author: Chandra, Bipan
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Indian unity, it was realized, was not to be taken for granted. It had to be strengthened by recognizing and accepting India’s immense regional, linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity. Indianness was to be further developed by acknowledging and accommodating the Indians’ multiple identities and by giving different parts of the country and various sections of the people adequate space in the Indian Union.
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Moreover, the Indian economy, even while being an integral part of the world economy, was to be based on self-reliance, free of subordination to the metropolitan interests or domination by foreign capital. This could not be accomplished through the unhampered working of market forces and private enterprise. It would require planning and a large public sector. India, therefore, set out to achieve, especially after 1955, an integrated/national economy based on an indigenous industry,
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Polygamy prevailed among both Hindus and Muslims. Women had no right of inheritance, nor the right of divorce, and were still by and large denied access to education. For Indians, illiteracy and ignorance were the norm in 1951; only 25 per cent of males and 7.9 per cent of females were literate.
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Hitherto, in all societies in which an economic take-off or an early industrial and agricultural breakthrough had occurred, effective democracy, especially for the working people, had been extremely limited. On the other hand, from the beginning, India was committed to a democratic and civil libertarian political order and a representative system of government based on free and fair elections to be conducted on the basis of universal adult franchise.
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The leadership completely rejected the different versions of the ‘rice-bowl theory’, that the poor in an underdeveloped country were more interested in a bowl of rice than in democracy, and that, in any case, democracy was useless to them if it could not guarantee them adequate food, clothing and shelter.
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The structure of Indian society was to be rapidly transformed in a broadly socialist direction, but not necessarily to resemble Soviet-style communism.
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From the beginning there have existed vocal prophets of doom and gloom who have been predicting that neither freedom, nor democracy, nor socialism would survive in India for long,
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Ever since regional parties started emerging in the 1960s and much more during the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators have been speculating—some with enthusiasm—as to when the disintegration of India would take place.
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At every instance of turmoil or perceived political crisis, as for example the wars with China and Pakistan, the death of the towering Nehru, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, communal, linguistic or caste violence, Naxalite uprisings, secessionist movements in Kashmir, the Northeast, Punjab and earlier in Tamil Nadu, these critics articulated and renewed their foreboding.
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Then there were left-wing sceptics who held that no social, economic or political development was possible without a violent revolution and that nation-building, political democracy, economic development, national unity and nationalism were mere shams meant to delude the oppressed and the exploited.
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Then there were left-wing sceptics who held that no social, economic or political development was possible without a violent revolution and that nation-building, political democracy, economic development, national unity and nationalism were mere shams meant to delude the oppressed and the exploited. They, therefore, argued for or anticipated a peasant-based revolution as in China during 1925–49 or a worker-peasant-based revolution as in Russia in 1917. According
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Then there were left-wing sceptics who held that no social, economic or political development was possible without a violent revolution and that nation-building, political democracy, economic development, national unity and nationalism were mere shams meant to delude the oppressed and the exploited. They, therefore, argued for or anticipated a peasant-based revolution as in China during 1925–49 or a worker-peasant-based revolution as in Russia in 1917.
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In the early 1970s, many observers, including the writer of a note prepared by the Home Ministry, predicted that the Green Revolution would turn Red since it would benefit only rich farmers and displace small peasants from the land and create further unemployment among agricultural labourers.
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Another set of observers of the Indian scene, who were less pessimistic about the democratic political system, were puzzled by India’s success in sustaining itself in the face of its failure on so many fronts—inadequacy of land reforms and the existence of large-scale landlessness in the rural areas, the slow rate of growth in industry and the national income, the failure to check the high rate of population growth, persistence of gross inequalities, caste oppression, discrimination against women, a dysfunctional education system, environmental degradation, growing pollution in the cities, human rights abuses, factionalism in politics, chaotic party situation, growing political unrest, seccessionist demands and movements, administrative decline and even chaos, police inefficiency, high levels of corruption and brutality, and criminalization of politics.
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But what they failed to appreciate is that democracy had already been indigenized and rooted in the Indian soil by the freedom struggle and the modern Indian intelligentsia during the previous hundred years or so.
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It is true that Nehru and the generation that witnessed the coming of independence had hoped for far more progress than the country was able to make. Still, the people and the intelligentsia remained optimistic, not only during the Nehru era but even under Indira Gandhi, at least till 1973–1974. But gradually the euphoria and the self-confidence, the enthusiasm and the pride in achievement began to disappear and give way to frustration, cynicism and a sense of despair.
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India’s colonial past has weighed heavily on her development since 1947.
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British rule drastically transformed India. But the changes that took place led only to what has been aptly described by A. Gunder Frank as the ‘development of underdevelopment’.
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These changes—in agriculture, industry, transport and communication, finance, administration, education, and so on—were in themselves often positive, as for example the development of the railways. But operating within and as part of the colonial framework, they became inseparable from the process of underdevelopment.
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There were four basic features of the colonial structure in India.
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First, colonialism led to the complete but complex integration of India’s economy with the world capitalist system but in a subservient position.
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Second, to suit British industry, a peculiar structure of production and international division of labour was forced upon India.
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This was because of the existing peculiar pattern of international division of labour by which Britain produced high technology, high productivity and capital-intensive goods while India did the opposite.
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As late as 1935–39, food, drink, tobacco and raw materials constituted 68.5 per cent of India’s exports while manufactured goods were 64.4 per cent of her imports.
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Third, basic to the process of economic development is the size and utilization of the economic surplus or savings generated in the economy for investment and therefore expansion of the economy.
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Furthermore, a large part of India’s social surplus or savings was appropriated by the colonial state and misspent. Another large part was appropriated by the indigenous landlords and moneylenders.
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Then there was the ‘Drain’, that is, the unilateral transfer to Britain of social surplus and potential investable capital by the colonial state and its officials and foreign merchants through excess of exports over imports.
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The fourth feature of colonialism in India was the crucial role played by the state in constructing, determining and maintaining other aspects of the colonial structure.
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India’s policies were determined in Britain and in the interests of the British economy and the British capitalist class.
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The colonial state imposed free trade in India and refused to give tariff protection to Indian industries as Britain, western Europe and the United States had done.
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Moreover, since the 1880s, the currency policy was manipulated by the government to favour British industry and which was to the detriment of Indian industry.
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After 1890, military expenditure absorbed nearly 50 per cent of the central government’s income. In 1947–48, this figure stood at nearly 47 per cent.
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While the peasants were burdened with paying a heavy land revenue for most of the colonial period and the poor with the salt tax etc., the upper-income groups—highly paid bureaucrats, landlords, merchants and traders—paid hardly any taxes.
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Subinfeudation, tenancy and sharecropping increasingly dominated both the zamindari and ryotwari areas.
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The colonial state’s interest in agriculture was primarily confined to collecting land revenue and it spent very little on improving agriculture. Similarly, landlords and moneylenders found rack-renting of tenants and sharecroppers and usury far more profitable and safe than making productive investment in the land they owned or controlled.