The Hindu : The Sangh and Swadeshi

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Saturday, Oct 19, 2002

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The Sangh and Swadeshi

By V. Krishna Ananth

The debate (on economic policy) is a conscious attempt by the RSS to enlarge its own base and occupy the political space that has remained, predominantly, with the Left.

TAKING STOCK of the economic reality that prevailed after 25 years of Independence, Atal Behari Vajpayee noted with concern the need to evolve a technology to suit Indian conditions by which the majority of the people could be freed from scarcity, ignorance and disease. He made it clear that such a technology should ensure "not only mass production but also production by the masses". Mr. Vajpayee's formulation (in 1973), when his party was still outside the mainstream of the political discourse, is certainly not the same as the BJP's position as was stated (by Jaswant Singh) on the floor of the Lok Sabha in July 1991 when the party emerged as the main Opposition force. Mr. Singh endorsed the New Economic Policy resolution moved by the then Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh, and went on to stress that the Congress had only adopted what the BJP had been standing up for. An explanation for the about-turn could be based on the premise that "times" have changed.

The BJP too has changed since the days of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Mr. Vajpayee no longer claims to lead a "party with a difference" as it was in the case of the Jana Sangh. The Jana Sangh cadre, after all, were not known to have allotted to themselves petrol pumps or appointed themselves into Government committees and corporations as reward for their political "service".

The Jana Sangh could, hence, afford to adopt Gandhian Socialism — an idea the Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru and his friends in the Bombay Club had rejected as early as in 1944 — as its economic philosophy. The Jana Sangh did not feel the compulsions, hence, to defy the economic philosophy the RSS had adopted. It was Deen Dayal Upadhyaya who put in place the Sangh's economic policy sometime in the 1960s. He did not formulate anything new. He simply appropriated the economic thinking among the socialists (splintered by then into as many groups as there were leaders) and this was how the Jana Sangh too signed up for Gandhian Socialism.

In other words, an economic principle that considered as appropriate only that technology that would ensure "not only mass production but also production by the masses". The most important aspect is that the Jana Sangh was as much opposed to Nehruvian Socialism as it was to the pluralist foundations on which Jawaharlal Nehru built the Congress' political strategy. The RSS (and along with it the Jana Sangh) had opposed, with a certain amount of consistency, the concept of public sector and planning as it crystallised during the Nehruvian era and described by its votaries as Nehruvian Socialism.

While the fundamental premise that guided the Nehruvian socialist model was that growth was possible only by building huge industrial enterprises (an idea borrowed from the Soviet model), the opposition to the Congress then — the Socialists — held that any development had to take into account the large population, predominantly in rural India, and hence be guided by the concept of "appropriate technology". In other words, not just mass production but production by the masses.

The setting up of industrial undertakings under the public sector, the most significant aspect of the Nehruvian socialist model, in this sense, was the logical fallout of the thinking based on a belief that economic growth was possible only through achieving mass production and hence the need to set up huge production centres.

The Congress, whether it was during the Nehruvian era or later during the Indira Gandhi era, found the communists too among its supporters for such a project. The communists, after all, considered huge industrial units as the cornerstone of development and had contempt for all those who stood by the Gandhian Socialist model. This was the setting in which the RSS formulated its economic policy. And Gandhian socialism would fall in place so perfectly with the Sangh's political project — to negate the pluralist traditions on which the Indian nation was built, to stall any radical alternative of the Marxist kind emerging and finally (and more important) to occupy the popular space both in the establishment and the Opposition.

The Sangh had succeeded in this project insofar as the political space was concerned and the non-Marxist socialist platforms have either been marginalised (as with such Gandhian socialists as Madhu Dandavate or Surendra Mohan) or have been co-opted into the Sangh-dominated combine (as is the case with George Fernandes in the NDA).

The recent debate involving the RSS chief, V. Sudarshan, some important members of the political establishment and Mr. Vajpayee over the disinvestment process will have to be seen in this larger context. It then emerges that the debate (on economic policy) is a conscious attempt by the RSS to enlarge its own base and occupy the political space that has remained, predominantly, with the Left (of the Marxist kind). In other words, a repeat of what the Sangh did with the socialists (of the non-Marxist kind) since the 1960s.

To look at the RSS chief's opposition to disinvestment in the public sector as an expression against the liberalisation agenda and as reflecting the Sangh's commitment to the public sector (and hence to Nehruvian Socialism) will indeed be as serious a blunder as was committed by the Lohiaite Socialists (since the 1960s) who were attracted by (or trapped into) the Sangh's project of expanding itself into the secular democratic space. The outcome of that was they played a significant role in legitimising the Sangh and its affiliates in the democratic space.

In this larger context, the imperative for the Left (the Marxist platform in particular) would be to seriously consider the relevance of Gandhian Socialism. True, the Marxists, brought up on a staple of a particular interpretation of Marx and his writings handed over to them by R. P. Dutt and Ben Bradley (whom the Communist Party of Great Britain had deputed to guide the Indian communists during the years when the party was founded) that described Gandhi and his economic thinking as backward looking, will find it difficult to recognise any radical shade in the idea that technology, insofar as India is concerned, shall not only be mass production but also production by the masses.

But then, the region where the communists could establish themselves into a force — the tracks of Malabar, the rural countryside in West Bengal, the Telengana region and such other parts — are also where the communist movement was led by such leaders as A. K. Gopalan, P. Sundarayya, Benoy Choudhury and others who did not find the idea of "production by the masses" as an anti-thesis to the Marxist theory. In other words, they were involved in setting up cooperatives even while organising the workers and the peasants into unions.

A rethink has become all the more necessary now with the Sangh and its Parivar beginning to make assiduous moves to position themselves in that space. History, after all, is replete with examples of the fascists capturing power (wherever they did) only because they could succeed in positioning themselves not just in the Government but also (and perhaps more important) in the opposition's political space. The Sangh and its associates are now engaged in this very exercise. Any strategy to prevent them from achieving their objective will have to begin with an ideological initiative that establishes that the legacy of Gandhi and his economic thinking belongs to the Left and not the Right.

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