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Soon after chairman Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping became the paramount leader of China and focus shifted from class struggle to reconstructing the economy. Seeking truth from facts, rather than ideological dogmas, he steered towards neither communism of the Soviet style nor democracy, but socialist economics, politics and culture with Chinese characteristics. There are critics galore of the euphemistic "socialism with Chinese characteristics", but its success speaks for itself. In purchasing power parity terms, China surpassed the United States to become the world's largest economy in 2014!

What was India doing when China under Deng was shifting gears? India was more steadfast in its ideological commitment. Eight days before Mao passed away, the 42nd amendment to the Constitution was introduced in Parliament, and before the Great Helmsman's embalmed body could be placed in Tiananmen Square's new mausoleum, India's tribute to the chairman was a new Indian republic that was also "socialist secular" rather than just "sovereign democratic".

To contest an Indian election as a "recognised" political party, the party's fundamental document has to contain a specific provision that it shall bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution. In other words, from 1977, all recognised political parties in India are sworn to socialism. Former chief justice K G Balakrishnan had observed that socialism in a broader sense "means welfare measures for the citizens. It is a facet of democracy. It hasn't got any definite meaning. It gets different meanings in different times". Yet socialism conjures up images of some not-so-market-friendly statist policies. It often is a cover for populist policies that pit the toiling masses against a set of elites and dangerous "others" who deprive the masses of their prosperity and livelihoods.

In the Constituent Assembly debate on November 15, 1948, Babasaheb Ambedkar, while rejecting Professor K T Shah's proposed amendment to include "socialist" in the Preamble to describe the Indian state, had looked at socialism as a way of organising society and wanted to leave the people of sovereign India free to choose their ideology.

So what explains the steadfast commitment to "socialism" in Indian politics, even if it is purely for appearances in some cases? Why does Indian political discourse always have socialism as a given? First, there is a long history. Initially, the Indian freedom movement had little explicit economic content, with confusion about what was to be achieved in independent India. There was the nostalgic vision of an idyllic, simple and unchanging rural life with its roots in Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj. Gandhi wrote about the dangers of indulging our passions and substituting our hands and feet by machines. These views had a large following and even C Rajagopalachari, the late founder of the Swatantra Party (the first major political party with an openly pro-market and anti-statist ideology), supported the view that civilisation consisted not in the multiplication but the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants.

Second, in the heady 1920s, the Soviet Union was making great strides in the erstwhile feudalistic tsarist Russia. Prior to independence, the colonial power in India had followed a broadly laissez-faire policy at least as a public stance, and the result of such a hands-off policy was chronic underdevelopment. It had to be an activist state, and there was near unanimity that policy had to be socialist with pronounced emphasis on a centrally planned strategy. At the 1928 Congress session in Lucknow, presided over by his father Motilal Nehru, the young Jawaharlal Nehru had announced his belief that "the only solution of the world's problems and of India's problems lies in socialism". There was some opposition to such an ideological position, but it was at best muted. For example, Vallabhbhai Patel expressed his ideological differences on the nature of capitalism. He withdrew his threat to contest Jawaharlal Nehru for the post of Congress president next year in Faizpur when Nehru clarified that socialism was not his plank for the presidency.

According to the first economic and social programme of the Congress, adopted at Karachi in 1931, the state would own or control key industries and services, mineral resources, railways, waterways, shipping and other means of public transport. By 1933, Jawaharlal Nehru had become convinced about the need for planning, which he said was a word into which "the Soviets have put magic". In 1934, the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) was formed within the Congress. Gandhi resigned from the Congress, citing it as one of the reasons. But practically everyone else who mattered in the freedom movement was a socialist! Minoo Masani, later a leading light and ideologue of the Swatantra Party, was a founding member of the CSP and became its joint secretary. Thus, after independence, India followed a "socialist" path.

Third, after independence, the abiding commitment to full-throttled democracy helped to shape "socialism with Indian characteristics" and make it a potent vote-catcher. For example, the Chinese experiment of forming farmers' cooperatives and benefiting from land consolidation and pooling agricultural machinery inspired the Indian leadership. In January 1959, at its 64th Plenary Session at Nagpur, the Congress declared that India's future agrarian pattern should be "cooperative joint farming", with a transition period of three years when "service cooperatives" would be organised on a large scale. However, farmers, including those newly enfranchised by the land reforms - under the guidance of new farmers' leaders, most notably Chaudhary Charan Singh from Uttar Pradesh - opposed such a move. The Nagpur resolution triggered the formation of the Swatantra Party in 1959. For once, enthusiasm for "socialism" was restrained by the electoral compulsion of winning elections, and cooperative farming was dropped from the agenda.

Over time, "socialism" in Indian politics became synonymous with sarvodaya or the welfare state. But again, the compulsions of electoral politics navigated towards promising a welfare state far in advance of the state's actual capacity. The promise of eradicating poverty now and here by, for example, free water, cheap power, more government employment and higher salaries has been far too potent to eschew. "Roti, kapda, makan" (food, clothing, shelter), rather than "bijli, sadak, pani" (electricity, roads, water), became the catchphrase. Like socialism with Chinese characteristics, India has evolved its own brand of "socialism with Indian characteristics". Elections witnessed a race to the bottom, with parties competing with each other in promising more immediate goodies for the same or even less taxes and pain.

Does the government advertisement on the occasion of the 66th Republic Day using an image of the Preamble of the Indian constitution without the word "socialist" indicate a likely change in the political discourse in India? Time will tell.

Continue reading here:
Ashok Lahiri: Socialism with Indian characteristics