The ghost of Mahalanobhis

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

IndiaÕs minister of human developmentÕs denunciation of the UN Human Development Report reflects his countryÕs sophisticated eliteÕs continuing frustration. UN statisticians ranked India 124 among 173 countries, placing a billion humans near bottom on the road to progress. Nor is there much surcease that IndiaÕs huge neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, rank even lower.

The question has reached new prominence in New Delhi ø not, of course, obscuring the war and peace issue with Pakistan. But in a surprise, IndiaÕs legislators have elected an eccentric, controversial bureaucrat-scientist as president.

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam has led IndiaÕs scientists claque promoting nuclear and missiles weapons. He challenges conventional pacifist rhetoric of post-independence India, arguing the world will respect his country only if it is militarily strong. And he says his Òsecond visionÓ can transform India in 20 years into a ÒdevelopedÓ country.

This is not the first time Indian leaders have preached mercurial development. In the mid-1950s, India was recovering from the horrors of Partition: tens of thousands killed and 15 million refugees. Despite the British India bifurcation catastrophe, the country inaugurated independence with notable assets. It had by far the largest entrepreneurial sector in the colonial world. It was owed $50 billion [in current dollars] by Britain for aid extended during World War II. It had a relatively efficient civil service, a partially independent judiciary with entrenched law, even some rudiments of representative government, a veteran nonpolitical army. It had vast raw materials. Its manufacturing section, while small, had gems; e,g., its steel industry the worldÕs lowest cost producer.

But it had a huge poverty stricken population ø even occasional famine ø virtually unmatched elsewhere. For some in the Indian elite, the first few yearsÕ substantial progress after independence years was not enough. They wanted a short cut to modernity. Not for them their martyred leader Mohandas GandhiÕs modest goals: e.g., clean drinking water in 650,000 villages.

It was at this point that a brilliant, UK-educated, statistician, got the ear of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the charismatic all-powerful leader. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis told Nehru -- his student days in British socialist circles prepared him -- that India had raw materials and it had people and all that had to be done was to put them together with central planning. They brought up foreign experts, most of them Communist or leftwing, who laid out the Second Five Year Plan.

To be built on government Òcommanding heights of the economyÓ ø heavy industry and fuel ø The Plan inevitably borrowed heavily from the Soviet Union, godfather of ÒcommandÓ economies. And thus was born 35 years of Indian romance with Soviet economics and alliance with Moscow. IndiaÕs once relatively powerful private sector was twisted out of shape by the planners.

The geopolitical bent was intensified as Washington induced IndiaÕs Siamese twin neighbor into the anti-Communist alliance [or at least the anti-Soviet part of the Cold War although Pakistan early began its flirtation with Communist China under the principle my enemyÕs enemy is my friend.] Neither massive 1950s and 60s US aid, huge American grain shipments which fended off starvation, nor WashingtonÕs immediate unquestioning military assistance in the 1962 Indo-China war, weakened the New Delhi-Moscow tie or the infatuation with central planning.

Most of the decision makers who set India on this path are long since gone. But their heritage lives on. Billions of dollars of Indian savings, billions borrowed from the international lending agencies and bilateral aid were diverted, much of it to Òpublic sectorÓ projects that never produced. The Soviets ÒgraciouslyÓ sold overpriced capital goods and weapons for local currency, and then bought up Indian exportable surpluses for resale in rare dollars in the West. Colonial patterns of government intervention were reinforced: it became, as one leader of the fight for independence, C. Rajagopalacharia, labeled it, Òa permit license rajÓ.

In the decade since the Soviet UnionÕs collapse, New Delhi has had no choice but to try to move away from ÒPlanningÓ. It has been hard, for there has never been a public confession of just how costly the Nehru economic and foreign policy mistakes really were. ø and there is the continued dependence on Russian armaments.

NehruÕs old enemies at the other end of the political spectrum [and GandhiÕs murdererÕs inspiration], the Hindu revivalists ø are at least temporarily in command. Their halting economic program is liberalization. But they preach their own shortcut to modernity ø hegemony in South Asia with nuclear supremacy built on the ethos of ÒhindutuvaÓ [however obscurantist that may be in that vast philosophical realm of Hinduism]. Kalam, despite being Moslem was their opportunistic candidate for what is constitutionally and traditionally a ceremonial role, but which could in the contemporary fractured Indian political scene of constant crises, become decisive.

The ghost of Malananobis now haunts the Rastrapati Bevan, the RajÕ viceroys grandiose palace of a new odd-ball president.