Democracy In The New Nations

...Enlivening spir it by itself has not been able to evoke the needed structure...

...The Gandhians emphasize the primacy of the peasant in India and arraign his neglect in Western socialism...

...Often these countries face erosion of the key organization built up...

...A free society is free to the extent the infrastructure of associative life-trade unions, co-operatives, craft associations, com munes, folk schools-has been built inside the State...

...Is it equality to treat them alike or is the desired objective served by treating them unequally...

...A coordinated production program, set in the framework of development, requires training of the flow of technique for which the necessary guidance is not available...

...In a democratic framework this pressure gets aggravated...

...It is impossible for us to say which particular color band is the ideal, nor is it possible to say that a particular country will find itself in a particular color band in all matters...

...Maybe it is so in some of the new States, but certainly not in my part of the world...

...but between two indus· trial revolutions, between two centuries...

...Kone of the essays reflects awareness of the problems socialists face in the underdeveloped countries...

...In India the growth has to be accelerated, and stability has to be distinguished from the traditional stagnation...

...Surpluses emerge as profits-it is the essence of development that the share of profit in the economy expands...

...In the Second (Five-Year) Plan, the Government accepted socialist objectives and began to expand the public sector, nationalized some banks and all life insurance com panies, introduced an integrated tax system, including wealth tax and ex penditure tax (over and above the usual income-tax, super tax, corpora tion tax, inheritance and gift tax...

...They have failed because, however important democracy may be, unless democracy can serve the people, can vitalize them, can release their energies, these institutions remain lifeless...

...But while releasing this enthusiasm, care has to be taken that some kind of commonly accepted framework grows up around the formal constitutional government that is created...

...But such action cannot beat a simultaneous rhythm with develop ment...

...The logic of development implies that the rich tend to become richer and the poor poorer, whether the rich are individuals, classes, regions or sectors of economy...

...390 million...

...It is in the very same individual that the conflict between the traditional orientation and modern orientation often takes place...

...This necessitates attention on not just increased production in the villages but a marked increase in the marketed surplus...

...Sometimes popular allegiance settles down around religion...

...It was a journey too between two sorts of politics...

...There is another difficulty...

...The need for articulating communities, of building up a web of associative life, is further cherished because that is deemed to be the secret of the free society in many countries the socialists admire, such as Scandinavia...

...Economic development is oriented to the requirements of military power...

...After independence, different groups and sections among the people begin to seek self-identification and its stresses and strains affect the big party...

...547.3 million while the cottage industry's production is 3.15 million tons, providing employment to 2.26 million workers and involving a capital outlay of Rs...

...In the West, socialists have been concerned mainly with juster distribution to the neglect of the processes of production...

...Peter Shore in his essay, "In the Room at the Top," writes: In November 1956 I was chosen by the Halifax Labour Party as their prospective candidate...

...Should the State-ways be utilized to evolve the folk-ways...

...He has joined Vinoba Bhave in the Bhoodan or the land-gifts movement that seeks to evoke humanity in men and community solidarity in work...

...In the West, the web grew up over years...

...For instance, take the concept of "participation...

...Socialists everywhere have feared and fought ag-ainst concentration of wealth-often by creating massive concentration in the hands of the state...

...Though all of us seem to be using the same words, behind these words there are different meanings and connotations which we put on them because of the different experiences that we of the underdeveloped countries have...

...Will unequal treatment be accepted as dynamic equality by the farm laborers...

...We in India live in the midst of a cavalcade of centuries...

...All over the new States today, the focus of allegiance seems to be shifting-there is a mercurial movement...

...It may be that in the new states, it may be best to have "a democracy without the possibility of an alternative government...

...If the army had not stepped in, democracy would have died...

...1958...

...Sir Dennis Roberston has said that "the sacrifices necessary to achieve growth consist not merely in passive abstinence from consumption, but in consent to be disturbed in established routines of life and work...

...but in India, the key job is to induce the 60 million peasant households and 12 million small artisans to produce more with traditional tools and techniques, because the wherewithals of improving them have first to be fabricated in more involved industrial sectors...

...But practical experience compels the need for adaptation and absorption of traditional values and sources of strength...

...The marketed surplus depends on what the peasant gets in return from the urban people: goods and services...

...Such disturbance is easier to evoke where new techniques are introduced, which induce new rhythms of work...

...That is why "other-directedness" (as Riesman has called it) wins in welfare communi~ies and Communists make gains in Asia...

...When we talk about international aid flowing to dependent areas, [when we are told] that it would be the responsibility of the developed powers to provide the wherewithal for heavy industry in the new States, we forget that this kind of international association can come about only if the need for building up armies becomes obsolete...

...Profits emerge in either the private sector or public sector, and in either case profits have a bad odor with popular socialism...

...On the other hand, the West African States very often are merely geographical expressions in quest of a personality for themselves...

...Peter Shore bemoans the fact that he "could not detect any significant shift in the values of our society-no decline in acquisitiveness, no increase in the awareness that we are involved in and must help each other...

...In Asian countries, where development claims sacrifices, equality has a functional role also...

...We talk often and a lot about "democracy...

...one after another, the very groundwork we are discussing [representative government and public liberties] is in danger of being destroyed...

...The Government's success with the Third Plan, where the main hurdle is lack of internal resources, depends upon their ability to energize the people, to impart to the forms of socialism an evocative ethos...

...that this is part of the proc ess of democracy...

...The difference lies in the fact that for the former these problems are more parts of the means of social change, while they form the core of the ends for the latter...

...In the dissimilar rhythm how much is inescapable, and how much induced by the self·interest of the power elites...

...As Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi's noblest disciple, has put it, "Every heap causes a hollow nearby...

...The influence of Mahatma Gandhi has made Indians conscious of the dangers inherent in any concentration...

...Verily, among equals, some are more equal than othersI The Asian countries have low per capita income and unappeased hunger presses heavily on any surplus that emerges in the economy...

...I wish it were that simple every where...

...Production at higher levels of technique can grow at the expense of the lower level of technique...

...It was a strange journey...

...Institutional changes are undoubtedly necessary for development, as I shall show later, but the point that I want to make here is that such changes without the needed shift in values may fail to evoke the vital elan...

...that it is not so much in the realm of political institutions, or of economic development, nor even in the realm of ideas alone, but rather in the deep, dark regions of the spirit that we shall have to fight and go to find our regeneration and our salvation, seems to be an inarticulate major premise of all discussions on democracy in the new States...

...The new "system" has to be assimilated to traditional conditions, requirements, and opportunities of those countries...

...We are all agreed that participation is the very essence of democracy, but to make participation meaningful it is necessary to build up an "infrastructure," that is, the web of associative life, little cooperatives, trade unions, etc...

...I think that in discussing international economic development, we forget that we are living in a society of nation-States...

...Many Western educated persons start with a bias for modernism...

...For us, the infrastructure is not just the expression of freedom but the means of sustaining the yet fragile fabric of democracy...

...We therefore find ourselves moving back and forth on the spectrum...

...Many of them have abundance of labor...

...Now, the movement is engaged in encouraging gramdan or villagization of agricultural life, where all property gets donated to the village community...

...The movement however has not been able to organize distribution of lands donated, to assist the landless settled on such lands, and even less in giving shape to gramdan...

...It is said that in the Moslem countries, there is the problem of self-identification...

...MacGibbon &: Kee, London...

...In the shrinking area of democratic socialism in Asia, economic development demands careful orchestration as a necessary condition of development while elsewhere the emerging disharmonies get resolved during and as a consequence of development...

...Development of the sugar industry is likely to mean the growth of the factory sector at the expense of the cottage industry...

...Again, consumption patterns of those who run a steel mill, even in the public sector, or who work in National Science Laboratories or in atomic plants, is likely to be closer to Western standards and very different from that of farm laborers...

...I view the new States as set in some kind of spectrum, where different countries may be in different color bands...

...that this is not the end of democracy but rather a manifestation of it...

...Some weeks back I picked up in a London bookshop a book, Conviction,· wherein twelve young socialists have outlined a new socialist policy relevant to Britain today...

...I was therefore surprised to discover a community of outlook between the "older" socialists of Asia and the younger socialists of Britain...

...This constant craving, this feeling that in the last analysis it is the resurgence of the spirit that will make our politics, our economics meaningful...

...THE FORMS MULTIPLY and tend to become oppressive...

...DEVELOPMENT BRINGS about sectoral imbalance in the economy...

...SOCIALIST IDEAS have achieved elemental power because of their profound involvement with social justice...

...Growth through stability is the pursuit of all democrats...

...I do not think this problem is peculiar to the Moslem countries...

...It seems similar problems confront socialists in early stages of development and after economic growth has been achieved...

...Accumulate, accumulate, that is their Moses and their prophets," that is how Marx had thundered against concentration of wealth...

...We must be willing to look at those problems as capable of expressing themselves in more than one form...

...But, while this may be an ideal solution, our friend from Burma warns us that the one big lesson to be drawn from the Burmese experience is that this immediate post-independence unity will not survive very long...

...Because the army has taken over, democracy has a chance of surviving, growing, and flourishing in Burma...

...Here again, the ends socialists seek in the West emerge as means (without losing their validity as ends) in Asia...

...In a democratic society, a sector tends to become a lobby, and correction of imbalances confronts resistance and demands concessions...

...The intensive campaign for land gifts for the landless, carried to almost all of India's 500,000 villages, has brought in gifts of over 5,000,000 acres of land...

...It has just declared in favor of so cialization of wholesale trade in food grains and co-operation of agri culture...

...But Mr...

...For an Indian, if the military forces were to take over the Gov ernment of his country, that would automatically mean the end of democracy...

...Every concentration leads to a focus of power...

...Socialists ex hypothesi are egality-oriented...

...Given his fragmentary holdings, he can never make the two ends meet without other avenues of employment being provided to him...

...sometimes it seeks out language as the common emotional center around which to crystallize itself...

...Not only lifeless, but what is worse, oppressive...

...As against this, the Government suffers from a proliferation of so cialist forms and misses the enlivening spirit...

...Thus the quest for democracy seems to move back and forth in a manner that cannot be understood in terms of purely formal, twodimensional logic...

...In India such journeys are stranger still: one travels not only between two industrial revolutions, but to the pre-industrial world...

...In the twentieth century, Indians have thus to challenge successfully its cardinal generalization...

...It is bad for the army to come in, but when it does, perhaps the prospects of saving democracy are improved...

...We have to think of a process, or of a spectrum of continuous gradations...

...As against that, over 70 million urban people, whose numbers grow at the rate of 3 to 4 million a year largely through people migrating from rural areas, demand increasing supplies of foodgrains and agricultural raw materials...

...A very important fact is that many of these countries are primarily interested in building up their military power...

...In India, living under the double pressure of growing population (nearly 2 per cent a year) and expanding urbanization (3.5 million a year) the available time span is too short for evolutionary growth...

...it is bound to break up...

...Underdeveloped countries by definition suffer from paucity of capital...

...The Gandhians view the peasants in their own "milieu" and offer solutions which in the context of the modern world, with all its pressures and compulsions, act as mere palliatives...

...Maung-Maung of Burma, whom I respect and whose intelligence and integrity I admire, says the people of Burma are "happy" that the army has taken over...

...In Pakistan the decay of the Moslem League has led to the death of democracy...

...Some people were a nation before they got hold of a territory, as in Israel...

...So a vacuum threatens to emerge, and where it does, as in Pakistan or Burma, the armed forces move in...

...In Asia too socialism tends to get a similar emphasis, while the needs of development-of augmenting savings and investments-demand treatment of distribution as a function of production...

...Recently it has sought the help of the Community Development Administration of the State...

...That requires diversification and multiplication of wants of the peasant...

...Not only is there the breakdown of the traditional order, but in most of the newly liberated countries the rallying of people behind the banner of one great party-the Congress in India, the Moslem League in Pakistan, the AFPFL in Burma, the Neo Destour in Tunisia-achieved during the freedom struggle does not survive long...

...Likewise, in a country struggling for development, involvement of the people in the process of growth is the inescapable precondition of development...

...Now, the infrastructure cannot be built up in a new State unless the State itself takes the initiative...

...Jayaprakash Narayan, the doyen of Indian socialists, broke away from his colleagues on this point...

...It is only when nations stop thinking of their strength in terms of armed potential-as long as that is so international aid is bound to be distorted and pitiful-that there can be plentiful aid, and the whole character of international society can get radically changed...

...not just two centuries but many centuries co-exist here...

...Such a shift in values is evidently necessary in Britain to make socialism meaningful...

...The "government of the people" in Abraham Lincoln's famous definition of democracy is not something we can take for granted...

...In India, the supreme task is to accelerate the organizational effort, to wed the spirit and forms...

...There are inevitably many sorts of politics and they have to be harmonized for normal democratic functioning...

...PETER SHORE in his essay in Conviction says, "the only g-eneralization that one could safely make is that large-scale org-anization, public or private, is, under twentieth century conditions, likely to be more efficient than small-scale enterprises...

...This necessitates the mating of humanist ethics (which has been the essence of the appeal of socialism) with the social engineering that planned and purposeful efforts at economic development demand...

...There is another point from the book that I want to underscore...

...Over 5,000 villages have responded to the call...

...And Moshe Sharett tells us that, even in a stable country like Israel, one in which there are many parties, no real alternative to the Government in power exists...

...In India, in the sugar industry for instance, factory production is 2.04 million tons, providing employment to 150,000 workers and involving a capital outlay of Rs...

...Therefore, the basic thing is not "democracy," conceived as a set of institutions, but the ability to stir the people, to move them to release their energies, their elan, their enthusiasm...

...Abdel Rahman from Egypt and Prince Kukrit Pramoj from Thailand think that though for 25 years or more in their countries efforts were made to build up democratic institutions, they have failed signally...

...Will equal treatment be understood as such by the technicians and scientists...

...Thereafter every third week-end I travelled from my home in Harlow to my new constituency...

...That gives to socialists an almost Promethean responsibility...

...The peasant is under-em ployed...

...The old party begins to decay-and often nothing else, nothing vital and expanding, comes up...

...OGUNSHEYE of Nigeria thinks that when the imperial power withdraws, battle for succession starts between the traditional elite and the western educated elite...

...But often, growth of production depends on provision of incentives...

...The anguished cry of Peter Townsend, "The more privileges you have the fewer there are for others," may reflect the need for providing an adequate coping-stone to the edifice of the welfare state, but in India it is the cornerstone-without it the edifice cannot rise...

...Such appears to be the dialectics of socialist development...

...It is not that there is a battle for succession between two well-defined elites...

...in India it is necessary to make development possible...

...In the resulting efficiency lies the hope of political stability and the provision of the surplus needed for the capitalconsuming sectors of the economy...

...The existence of government, "government of the people" becomes the central fact of all our consideration, and only then can we turn to government by the people and for the people...

...The two together determine the texture of social change...

...In traditional capitalist societies, as also under communism, sectoral imbalances get corrected over a period of time, through the mute misery of its victims...

...As recent developments in Nigeria and Ghana testify, modernism cannot reach the grass roots unless it adapts itself to the traditional ways, at least in some measure...

...It would be best for opposition parties to operate as pressure groups...

...And often in different senses...

...The core of a nation keeps shifting and changing...

...It may be religion, it may be language, it may be territory, and one does not know when the mercurial movement will start again...

...Finally, I would like to point out that many of the new States are in fact very old countries, and that in the old countries there is a great hankering for something transcendental to unite us and to link us together...

...The lack of capital has to be overcome by larger doses of organizational effort...

...As Peter Townsend says, "A society for the people" has to be brought into being where in Raymond Williams' words it is recognized that "culture is ordinary...

...I was interested to find that our friend from Thailand ended on a truly anguished note-that in Thailand there is need for the kind of religious values that Gandhi represented in India...

...The socialists thus view the rural sector in the wider framework of economic development and tend to get lost in forms and lose the spirit...

...Mr...

...If the combination of forces that the governments have represented so far breaks up, the State of Israel itself might break up...

...Add to it the usual decline in prestige of any party that shoulders the burdens of government too long...

...Beyond the welfare state is the need for involvement of the people in activities of society...

...I was • Conviction, edited by Norman MacKenzie...

...But in India ~owth of larg-e-scale enterprises depends on the success achieved in making-smallscale production efficient...

...travelling, not just between Essex and West Riding...

...This leads to the demand for diversification of occupations in villages and to the plea to reconcile the villager's needs with the productive powers of the village (or a cluster of villages), i.e., to village self-sufficiency...

...Gandhi has taught that the evil resides not in capital, but in concentration...

...MR...

...He feels that the primacy belongs to janashakti, or the people's power, over raj shakti, or the State power...

...IT IS BAD to have one big party, but if the party decays, there is danger that the State will disintegrate...

...The elite itself is not able to make up its mind or decide where to go...

...If economic development is not to become distorted, we must try more and more to make "international society" a reality...

...Countervailing action has to be a nec essary part of informed social action...

...That is the reason why it is difficult to define a "nation" today in our part of the world...

...Many of us find that we have to fall back on our own national experiences, to present case histories of our countries, because without them it would be difficult for others to comprehend the meaning we give to certain words which we so freely use here...

...Significant shifts in values are not easy to achieve in a world that is so much institution-oriented...