Brilliant essays

Patriots and Partisans by Ramachandra Guha; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.699; 334 pp Following India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2007) and the Makers of Modern India (2012), sociologist, historian and quintessential liberal intellectual Ramachandra Guha’s latest gift to the nation is Patriots and Partisans, a collection of 15 fluent, insightful essays on human and political conditions within the republic and their causes and effects. Confessing that he is “a person with moderate views sometimes expressed in extreme fashion” who has taken to heart the observation of his friend and teacher Dr. Dharma Kumar, former professor at the Delhi School of Economics, that liberals tend to be “a supine lot” who are “rolled over in the public discourse by the more committed (in all senses) extremists of the left and right,” in this compendium Guha argues the case for liberalism — particularly Nehruvian liberalism. Certainly one of the valuable takeaways for this reviewer from these perspicacious essays is that they have prompted a reassessment and course correction in the appraisal of Jawaharlal Nehru, of whom I have tended to be harshly critical these past years, for supposedly imposing the Soviet-inspired centrally planned, public sector-led heavy industry development model upon the economy. As editor of the country’s first two business magazines, I blamed Nehru for stifling India’s centuries-old tradition of private enterprise and trade. After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 and death of deputy prime minister Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, Nehru dominated Indian politics like a colossus. If only he had tapped the vast reservoir of entrepreneurship in the business houses of G.D. Birla, JRD Tata, the Shri Ram Group (of DCM), Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Walchand Hirachand, Mafatlals, Goenkas among others, who in the teeth of imperial policies of discrimination, had built rock-solid manufacturing enterprises, post-independence India would have emerged as a model for the development of the newly-liberated Afro-Asian countries of the third world. Instead, Nehru opted to experiment with democratic socialism in the vain hope that business-illiterate, risk-averse clerks would transform capital-intensive public sector enterprises (PSEs) into massive corporations which would “dominate the commanding heights of the Indian economy” and lead the nation into prosperity. Worse, by pouring national resources into under-performing PSEs, the Nehruvian development model under-invested in primary education, public health and adult literacy. The consequences of this ideological wrong-turn and skewed priorities have proved disastrous, wiping out the modest aspirations of an entire generation. But while this indictment is not wholly unwarranted, there are several mitigating circumstances which warrant a milder sentence for Nehru, who in Guha’s opinion was the brave and bold architect of the plural, secular and inclusive republic of India, a simultaneously unique and “exasperating” nation. In an eloquent essay titled ‘Verdicts of Nehru: the rise and fall of a reputation’, the author challenges the above assumptions. Offering an incisive analysis of the huge investments in PSEs to build the infrastructure for industry, Guha reveals that it was the outcome of a national consensus which had the full endorsement of Indian industry. He recounts…