a 9 month old post<\/a> on Charukesi’s blog. Don’t ask how I got there. It was a mix-up), but the lamentation is standard and could have been written any time in the past 13 years. It is about how the neo-liberal economic policies and the forces have globalisation are unfortunately leaving the poor behind, unlike before, when India used to “look at the poor as the yardstick for policy making”<\/p>\nI find those arguments really, really, weird coming from hardcore leftists. Because during the supposed Golden Age of Nehruvian Socialism, they used to say the same things about Nehru’s policies.<\/i>
\n
\nWe like to call Nehru’s policies “Socialist” – with good reason – but the truth is that the poor fellow got a lot of grief from those to his<\/i> left for following, not insufficiently <\/i> socialist policies, but for following capitalism.<\/i> A guy like Bidwai may weep buckets of tears about how we have abandoned the principles that were leading us on the right path till May 1991 when, suddenly and inexplicably, we were possessed by a deathwish, but during Nehru’s time<\/i> an “intellectual” of his ideological persuasion would have claimed that because of Nehru’s faux<\/i> socialist policies, the rich were getting richer, the poor were getting screwed, agriculture was being neglected, etc. Basically the same things you are hearing now from him about the current policies.<\/p>\n
In fact, immediately after independence, the communists raised the the battle cry of “Yeh azadi jhooti hai!”<\/i> and went off to organise a revolt in the countryside. Swatantrya party notwithstanding, the real choices at that time were between Nehru’s socialist policies and communism. Nehru believed that by keeping India a democracy, we would avoid the excesses of communism and also achieve development. On the other hand, communists believed that Nehru’s socialism was fraudulent and was just capitalism in disguise.<\/p>\n
By Indira Gandhi’s time, it had become clear to everyone<\/i> that those policies had flopped badly. Communists and harder-core leftists essentially cried “I told you so!” They claimed that the mess the country was falling into was because we hadn’t gone fully down the path of socialism and because we had allowed private business to exist and take advantage of the regulations. They pointed out to the “successful” economies of Soviet Russia and other East European countries to illustrate the dangers of following a mixed economy. Even supporters of the Indira-Nehru policies speculated about what was going wrong. Usually the speculation consisted of 1) wondering if the commies might be right after all, 2) blaming population growth, 3) blaming the people of India for being too lazy, 4) blaming rich business, the foreign hand and other assorted demons for not letting India develop, among other things.<\/p>\n
You’d be hard put to find anyone<\/i> who thought that we were a success, or even a partial success, or, for that matter, that we were going on the right path. <\/p>\n
So I am frankly amazed that an entire tribe of such people has emerged out of nowhere. I mean, I can understand that a socialist would think that the current policies are wrong. But praising Nehru’s policies?<\/i> How shameless can you get?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is something strange about articles that start like this: There was a time when India looked at the poor as the yardstick for policy making. Today she looks at the middle class and the rich, the poor having disappeared from the map of progress and development. (The two faces of India) Go on and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}