5/6/2014 End Of Nehruvian Consensus?

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Publication: The Times Of India Mumbai;Date: May 6, 2014;Section: Editorial;Page: 14

End Of Nehruvian Consensus?

This election has the potential to trigger a paradigm shift inIndian politics

Swagato Ganguly

Rahul Gandhi uttered probably the profoundest political statement of his career, when he said that if India is a computerthen Congress is its default operating system. India has come to be governed, by and large, through a Nehruvianconsensus (NC for short). During the last decade of UPA rule, NC solidified into the dominant orthodoxy.

Paradoxically, even when UPA tried to move the needle and take a few tentative steps outside NC (by, for example,permitting FDI in retail or signing a nuclear deal with the US), it is BJP that protested the loudest. Even parties on theLeft have largely abandoned Marxism and embraced NC.

However, it may not be possible to accommodate Narendra Modi within NC. His social origins are as far removedfrom Nehru’s as possible. He isn’t a Brahmin but comes from the lowly Ghanchi caste. He wasn’t schooled in thefreedom struggle or in the genteel traditions of parliamentary debate which followed thereafter (as Atal Bihari Vajpayeewas). He is a stranger to Delhi’s political circles.

Economic crises coupled with the rise of a new aspirational class that is urban, mobile, well informed and oftenyoung have brought India to a political inflection point. If Modi is elected PM and heads a reasonably stable coalition,then one or a couple of terms in power for him could well see the unravelling of NC. This would also mean the end of theNehru-Gandhi dynasty’s influence. It’s precisely this aspect of Modi that the Gandhis have been targeting lately, bysaying Modi will destroy the ‘idea of India’. We don’t know this as yet, but the Nehruvian idea of India could indeed takesome hard knocks.

What would this mean in practice? Nehru was a democrat and a socialist. He championed universal franchise whenthis was by no means a foregone conclusion among newly independent nations. This turned India into the world’s firstlargely illiterate democracy.

That, in a way, is a measure of

the man. Historically, for most democracies, universal education came before universal franchise. But when the firstIndian election took place in 1952, 85% of eligible voters could not read or write. Thus we have Nehru and his act ofhistorical daring to thank for many of our freedoms today.

At the same time, this also illustrates the dark side of Nehru’s legacy. Democracies do not function well withouteducation. But India’s strides in education have been very slow. It’s not something that Gandhi or Nehru stressed verymuch and to this day India remains one of the most poorly educated nations in the world.

Nehru was also a Fabian socialist, which propounded government by an anti-business spiritual elite. Hence theNehruvian belief that the state should control the commanding heights of the economy, combined with faith in autarky.These choices have been fateful in shaping the Indian economy and civil services. Nehru may have been a proponent ofpolitical liberty but not of economic freedom.

Post-Nehru there have been upgrades to the NC software, incorporating elements from Indira Gandhi (dynasty)through V P Singh (identity politics through reservations). Dynasty, for example, is now a common template for politicalparties across the board, with power concentrated in one family no matter what the party is.

Economic policy swung left under Indira Gandhi then right again under Narasimha Rao. While liberalisation mightseem a break with NC, it was seen by large sections of the political class as a tactical response to crises rather than astrategic necessity requiring a fundamental change in outlook. And it was accompanied by countermeasures that flewin the teeth of what reformists would advocate – such as spiralling subsidies, more bloated government, populistschemes that empowered the Fabian bureaucracy more than the poor.

5/6/2014 End Of Nehruvian Consensus?

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Some of Modi’s pronouncements, however, signal a break with NC. His oft-repeated mantra ‘minimum government,maximum governance’ is incompatible with Fabian formulas of maximal government. His frequent references to SardarPatel invoke a nationalist legacy alternative to Nehru’s. It was only Patel’s death in 1950 that gave Nehru a free hand incrafting NC.

The critical question about a Modi government is whether it will break with the positive or negative aspects of NC. If itdispenses with the positive aspects of NC (political freedom, decent treatment of minorities) then, taking the computeranalogy forward, it will trigger a system crash. A majoritarian or dictatorial Centre will be unable to hold together a vastand diverse country like India.

However, if a Modi government could break with the statist, Fabian socialist, clientelist aspects of NC India would bewell placed to undertake the kind of labour-intensive industrialisation that powered Asia’s miracle economies. Indiawould then have outgrown the povertarianism and self-inflicted marginalisation that made it, for long, the ‘sick man ofAsia’.

If millions of well-paying jobs could be created for India’s youth and the country’s entrepreneurial energy unleashed,that would tackle at the root two of its biggest problems. It would eliminate not only mass poverty but also the groundconditions for large-scale left-wing and right-wing violence (including communal violence).

So, how might a Modi government actually be? To tweak only slightly how a Charles Dickens novel famously began –it could be the best of times, it could be the worst of times.

The times they are a changin’