GANDHIAN REVOLT AGAINST INDIRA GANDHI

...What mattered in the Gandhian outlook, however, was whether the needs of the lowliest had the first priority in the planning...

...Investments intended for community welfare facilities in rural areas were either diverted to other sectors or accorded a low priority...

...Narayan, charge the Communists, is out to impose a "fascist" system in collusion with "American imperialists" and indigenous "reactionary elements...

...Narayan has declared that for the time being the movement will not aim at bringing about fundamental institutional changes along Gandhian lines...

...It is here in Bihar that, on conservative estimates, 20,000 smallpox deaths have occurred during the past year, largely because, at the outbreak of an epidemic, the state government failed to push through preventive programs...

...In this situation, the credibility of the Left parties has steadily eroded...

...And in Bihar, for the last eight months a civil disobedience movement has virtually paralyzed the administration...

...The Marxist Communist party, which is sympathetic to China, is divided over its attitude to the movement and has taken a rather COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 115 ambivalent stand, both approving it and finding troublesome the support lent to it by the "Right" opposition parties...

...The Sangh members refrained from joining any political party or from contesting elections and demanded a strict adherence to the principles of nonviolence...

...It is now generally acknowledged that more land has been distributed through voluntary action than by the government, which, with all its political sanctions, has not been able to implement land reform measures providing for ceilings on holdings and to distribute surplus land among the landless...

...The planners' original design was for the benefits of growth in the gross national product—a growth that has occurred—to percolate down to the masses...

...Though it refused to accept the state as final arbiter of the people's destiny, the Sangh did not ignore the advantages of having friendly elements running the state...

...He insisted that science and technology should be geared to refine traditional rural industries so as to minimize unit labor inputs and maximize output rather than apply them to sophisticated capital intensive techniques that, willy-nilly, would have to be financed by exploiting a large mass of the population or with a huge import of foreign capital...

...Twenty-six years after his assassination, Gandhi's foreboding seems to have become a reality...

...Indeed, a large number of Congress party MPs met Narayan and openly expressed their support for him at a time when Indira Gandhi had publicly said that Narayan and his movement had to be resolutely fought...

...It is easy to identify the causes of this widespread disillusionment with conventional Left approaches and the turn to Gandhian guidelines...

...With the near-breakdown of the established institutions and no alternative in sight, this is a classical "revolutionary situation" a Marxist might envy...

...Even so, the setting up of "People's Committees" for choosing candidates in the general elections due in 1976, to which several opposition parties have agreed, will pose an agonizing choice for these parties...

...But it is possible now to report, without exaggeration, that new and vital popular energies are being stirred into action, energies that might yet save Indian democracy...

...What mattered to the government was whether or not plan outlays served to boost the GNP, regardless of distributive injustices that might follow...

...Those who tried, "constructively," to identify themselves as part of the system became trapped in its failures...

...A student agitation in early 1973 against high mess costs in Gandhi's home state of Gujarat was soon transformed into a wider movement, articulating protest against soaring prices, corruption in high places, and the general unresponsiveness of parliamentary institutions to public grievances...

...With the students at its vanguard, this movement has withstood one of the fiercest repressions of peaceful agitation in India since independence...

...What seriously worries Indira Gandhi and the party leaders is that the bulk of congressmen are known to be sympathetic to the aims of the movement...

...With it, also, went the credibility of centralized planning along perspectives sanctified by virtually the entire Indian Left and occasionally appropriated by the ruling Congress party...

...As an element of industrial planning, for instance, he repeatedly insisted that industrialization on the Western model would not work in India and he projected instead a model that emphasized "production by the masses" of the goods they needed...

...Precisely who would run the newly independent state and what the relation would be between the LSS and the political institutions—these matters were not spelled out by Gandhi, for he was assassinated the day after he had submitted a brief note on this proposal to the Congress party leadership...

...His blue-print provided for a decentralized structure with the capital-intensive core industries, such as machine-tool manufacturing, and geared to the needs of the labor-intensive cottage industries that served essential consumer wants...

...Mobilization of savings in a poor economy and an iniquitous society, as is now clear, imposes a burden which is heaviest on the poor unorganized segments of the population that is least involved in the productive process...

...Those who thought to capture state power also were stymied—the "functioning anarchy" that has characterized Indian society did not lead to the kind of total breakdown that would have facilitated an elitist seizure of power...

...With 40 percent of the population below the poverty line, in COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 113 terms of a consumption level of Rs...

...It is too early to see what shape the movement will take but there is hardly any doubt that it is the most broad-based and effective challenge the Congress party has faced in its 27 years of rule...

...He insisted that the masses would have "real" freedom only in a nonexploitative society wherein India's 500,000 villages would be self-governing units, economically viable as far as possible, so that they could enjoy a measure of equality with the towns and cities...

...Unable to comprehend the implications of his advice, the Party leadership just let it lapse...

...I know," wrote Mahatma Gandhi way back in 1930 when Indian independence was still a dream, "that if I survive the struggle for freedom, I might have to do nonviolent battles with my own countrymen— battles that may be as stubborn as any in which I am now engaged...

...Soon after independence his advice was that the Congress party, now that it had served the purpose of securing independence, should give up its political orientation and convert into what he called "the Lok Sewak Sangh," an organization committed to work among the masses for creating a society on his model...

...Beginning as an individual land-gift movement soon after a violent insurrectionary attempt by the Communists in the state of Andhra had failed in the early 1950s, the drive for land distribution among the landless evolved into a campaign for the communal ownership of land...

...The password "Back to Gandhi" no longer expresses the nostalgic sentiment of a handful of romantics but has begun to attract a wide spectrum of radical opinion, including the segment that prides itself on "realism...

...Yet the responses that most seriously challenge the system are more intelligible in Gandhian than in Marxian terms...

...A campaign for ruthless state action against the movement is being carried on by the Moscowaccredited CPI, which is projecting itself as an uncompromising champion of parliamentary democracy...

...THE GROWING DIVERGENCE between the policies of the state and economic and social developments set in motion outside the state system by the Gandhian workers has led the latter to the conclusion that the time has come for tactics of Satyagraha or nonviolent civil disobedience, such as Gandhi successfully employed against the British...

...Gandhi knew that freedom for India did not begin and end with the overthrow of colonial rulers...

...Inherent in the economic development, fostered all those years, has been the growth of a new exploitative elite...

...His logic was that, by remaining outside the system, they would wield a moral authority among the masses, and this, in turn, would enable them to influence state policies...

...How all this will work out—whether it will initiate a fundamental reformation of Indian society or prove a mere ephemeral gesture of protest—remains to be seen...

...Comprising perhaps 20 percent of the population, it consists of entrepreneurial elements, large and small, the landowning and trading classes, and organized labor...

...The Sangh and its workers were to be apolitical but not antipolitical...

...40 (about $8) a month, and with a bare 10 percent of the population cornering as much as 30 percent of the income generated by the economy, all the "socialist" rhetoric with which planning had been varnished these 20 years has worn out...

...Going by this advice, the Gandhian workers have now constituted themselves into an organization known as the Sarva Seva Sangh, meaning an institution to work for the welfare of all...

...To Gandhi, village-based cottage industries constituted the hard core of the rural economy, and though an effort was made to incorporate such a program, it was far too tentative and was never worked out seriously as an integral part of planning...

...This largely explains why the land tenure system evolved during British rule continues with all its exploitative features, despite legislation ordaining reforms and an electoral mandate demanding that the ruling party implement these reforms...

...Meanwhile, the state was able to isolate these revolutionary elements and match their sporadic violence with a fuller, more structured violence...

...NARAYAN'S MOVEMENT IN BIHAR appears to be the pace-setter for similar movements elsewhere, questioning the moral legitimacy of the political institutions conceived by the elite that inherited power from the British colonial rulers...

...This elite controls vital leverages in the economy...

...Suspicious that the sole purpose of the parties was to marshal electoral support, the student leadership has kept aloof from all of them and has pledged itself to Jayaprakash Narayan and his colleagues as they carry forward the tradition of Gandhi...

...114 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Regarding ownership of industry, Gandhi sought to generate a moral climate in which the entrepreneur would be a deviant if he did not respect his social obligations as a "trustee" of the property he managed for the welfare of the country...

...Economically perhaps the most backward state in the country, Bihar has a government that has consistently been subservient to the dominant castes...

...Narayan's statement that the "People's Committees" would nominate only those who are known for their integrity and concern for the poor is intended to minimize the opportunist elements...

...It is not as though planners or the government were totally unaware of the hazards of a thoughtless pursuit of growth models appropriate either to capitalist economies of the West or a Soviet type of society...

...In respect to elections, for instance, the Sangh made its stand clear: it would use its weight with those parties and individuals who were closest to the principles laid down by Gandhi...

...But the newly emerging Indian elite had acquired such sway that it made sure the economy was oriented to serve their own purpose...

...Pampered for the contribution it was expected to make to the gross national product, it gained strong influence among the political groups that have been running the country since independence...

...This explains why the present, still inchoate revolt had its origins quite apart from the parties...

...It has been left to the hard core of Gandhians, the strict adherents to the principles of nonviolence, to work out a strategy...

...Perhaps -the most spectacular achievement of the Gandhian workers has been the change in the landownership pattern they have brought about through persuasion...

...As might be expected, the legislation has been a dead letter primarily because of the pressure of vested interests...

...To use a Marxian terminology: it is as if the bourgeois democratic state, created and operated by the leadership elite, is no longer capable of coping with the contradictions in ensuring distributive justice simultaneously with economic growth, or of coping with the pressures generated when a stratified social structure is exposed to the process of political "modernization...

...Consequently, the quest for an altogether new set of policy assumptions is designed so as to involve the masses in the productive process of the economy...

...Its leader, Jayaprakash Narayan, a Marxist turned Gandhian, has threatened to organize elections for a parallel "People's Assembly" with its own administrative organs at the grass-roots level, if the officially elected legislature is not dissolved by then...

...The state of Bihar followed suit...

...Land reform measures remained paper commitments and no earnest attempts were made to implement the legislation that had been put through...

...but in fact, too large a portion of it has stayed in the hands of the elite of the country, enabling it thereby to perpetuate its privileged status...

...And the immediate object of protest is corruption in public life, particularly in electoral practices...

...Gandhi did not expect that the society he envisioned would come about through state action...

...In this context, the economic ideas Gandhi envisaged for free India bear an immediate relevance...

...Socialists of all shades are active in the movement...

...On the eve of independence, Gandhi enjoined them not to get involved in the scramble for state power...

...To be sure, none of the parties that have extended their support accept the Gandhian outlook...

...What is being intensely debated is not so much the policies of the government as the viability of the state structure and the socioeconomic milieu that has evolved after 27 years of independence...

...In the early years of planning, efforts were made to incorporate some elements of the Gandhian program into the plans...

...In 100,000 villages, 75 percent of those owning 51 percent of land have vested ownership rights with the popularly elected village councils...

...A number of state governments have enacted legislation to legitimize this pattern of landownership...

...He advised the capitalist class that it could enjoy its property only to the extent to which it voluntarily would renounce its rights over it—which otherwise, he warned, would be expropriated...