If you were puzzled about the Hari Seldon reference in my previous post but were too embarrassed to ask, here is the answer. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you know who Seldon was, but were still puzzled by the reference.)

Hari Seldon was the protagonist in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy. (Yes, I know that technically it wasn’t a trilogy. He started to write a series of books, but abandoned the project after three books because the thing was getting too complicated. He restarted the project three decades later, but the books written then were, in my humble arrogant opinion, completely out of sync with the original spirit of the series. So I prefer to think of it as a trilogy) He sees that the galactic empire is decaying and chaos would ensue from its inevitable collapse. He has developed a science called “psychohistory”, which makes use of psychology, sociology and statistics to predict the future. So he sets up a “Foundation” – a new society at the edge of the galaxy – whose course he has charted out using psychohistory. The job of the Foundation is essentially to expand the circle of order and reduce the period of chaos to a thousand years from the predicted thirty thousand.

To keep the path of the Foundation narrow and hence predictable, Hari Seldon had orchestrated a set of “Seldon crises”. These crises created problems for the society of course, but they reduced the freedom of choice for society to such an extent that the only choice left for the Foundation would be the “right one”, i.e. the one predicted by Seldon. After every crisis, the image of Seldon would appear explaining exactly why he set up the crisis and what it was supposed to achieve.

The reference to Hari Seldon is basically a suggestion to supporters of Nehru as to how to salvage his reputation without ignoring inconvenient facts. You can claim that the crises we faced as a result of Nehru’s policies were actually Seldon crises, i.e. situations designed by Nehru to ensure that India followed the path he charted out. The crisis of 1991 was certainly a situation in the Seldon-crisis mould. So you can claim that it is what Nehru had intended all along; his policies would push us into a situation where we would be forced to adopt capitalism at the “right time”