Describe the basic features of Nehruvian approach to nation building
Answers
Explanation:
India at independence was in the top rung among the poor countries. It had experienced industrialisation for a century since the mid-1850s. It had cotton and jute textile mills, railroads, a steel mill, and glass and cement factories. It was the seventh largest industrial country in terms of total output. But it was, even so, a predominantly rural, agricultural economy where poverty was the daily experience of the overwhelming majority of the population. Gandhi understood this well but his solutions were to avoid mechanisation, stick to handicrafts and share rather than eradicate poverty. The modernisers, such as Nehru and Ambedkar, were for urbanisation and modernisation, mechanisation and rapid growth.
The perception of the nationalists was not that India was high up on the list of industrialised countries but that it had been de-industrialised by the colonial power.
With the collapse in agricultural prices during the Depression, India’s trade balance shrank. But India had amassed sterling balances by supplying the British war effort. This was the latest version of the drain. The entire £1.17 billion sterling balances (£100 billion in today’s money) were spent within ten years of independence, in the words of Finance Minister CD Deshmukh, “like there was no tomorrow”. Much of this was spent on Indian businessmen buying out outgoing British business. There was also some hurried buying of foreign goods on the government’s account. The “Jeep scandal” which haunted the career of Krishna Menon was one such expense.
Indian economic thinking was also influenced by a desire to break free of the colonial arrangements. Instead of continuing trading relations with Britain and the Western countries, the desire was for self-sufficiency or autarky which had been a feature of the Soviet development model. Information available about the USSR was systematically falsified but the world at large was not to know that till much later. It was also thought that India should not depend on foreign loans but be self-reliant.
The key was to industrialise as rapidly as possible. Private business, despite its contribution to the nationalist cause, was not trusted. Business itself lacked the confidence to be its own master. The major business houses in the Bombay Plan looked forward to State initiative to quicken development. If India had, in the then popular Marxist parlance, a national bourgeoisie, it was pretty tame. In any case, Nehru had an aversion to the profit system.
India had to re-industrialise and eschew the imperialist/capitalist policies which had led to its backwardness. The British, they believed, had drained India of its surplus. Now was the time to use that surplus for India’s development. In reality, that was just the trade surplus (exports minus imports). Large as it was (up to 5 per cent of GDP) in the late nineteenth century, it had dwindled by the 1940s because India got locked in a low-growth trajectory during the interwar period just as Great Britain did.
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