{"id":135,"date":"2004-09-30T18:59:18","date_gmt":"2004-09-30T23:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=135"},"modified":"2004-09-30T18:59:18","modified_gmt":"2004-09-30T23:59:18","slug":"was-nehru-a-communist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200409\/was-nehru-a-communist\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Nehru a communist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had meant to link to Sandeep’s review<\/a> of a book claiming that Nehru was a communist at heart. But I had to hold off because I wanted to write in some amount of detail about this. I am rather surprised that the entry did not get any comments.
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\nI don’t want to get into arguments over semantics. But I do wish to point out that “socialist” means something very different from what it meant fifty or eighty years back. Now it has a much vaguer meaning, i.e. the government has some sort of heavy handed role in the economy. At that time, it meant that the government controls<\/i> the economy completely. The only difference between socialism and communism was that a socialist thought that the same ends<\/i> could be achieved without revolution, though not necessarily without violence. He would have prefered to achieve it through constitutional means if possible, or through a series of agitations and strikes if necessary. But the final result of both would have been the same, though a socialist would wish that the government be democratically elected. <\/p>\n

Of course, when compared with what he really wanted to “achieve”, India truly fell short. So naturally Nehru’s intellectuals defined down socialism to mean some nice-sounding ideals and this is what most people think of when they think of socialism. After all, who could be against equality, removal of oppression, uplift of the poorest etc.? They also defined “capitalism” as the opposite of all these. I once heard a debate where a person who described himself as “capitalist” was asked: “So you believe in exploitation?” It wasn’t the questioner’s fault. That was the only<\/i> definition of capitalism he had ever heard. <\/p>\n

So the argument over whether Nehru was “only” a socialist or a communist at heart is less important than it is to understand how close we were to disaster under Nehru.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had meant to link to Sandeep’s review of a book claiming that Nehru was a communist at heart. But I had to hold off because I wanted to write in some amount of detail about this. I am rather surprised that the entry did not get any comments.<\/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\/135"}],"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=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}