Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR INDIA AND THE CLAY REPORT The Clay Committee's recommendation that "the U.S. should not aid a foreign government in projects establishing governmentowned industrial and...
...The circumstances of his whole sortie into forbidden territory prevented the kind of study that Sale seems to want...
...In the context of India's mixed economy approach to development, he observed, there was no possibility of the public sector engaging in unhealthy competition with private enterprise...
...During the period of the First and Second Five Year Plans (1951-61), the Government loaned $21 million to TISCO and $45.5 million to nsco, without any fixed maturity and free of interest charges in the initial period...
...Shanor states: "Postwar records demonstrate . . . that more German Communists fell victim to the Moscow and Spanish purges than to the Gestapo...
...Of the party's last Central Committee...
...Apparently the committee felt, as I do, that Lowenstein's trip was not, in Norman Thomas' words, "a very gallant and useful adventure...
...While establishing sleel mills on its own, the Government has also issued industrial licenses to a large number of private enterprises with respect to tool and alloy steels, stainless steel and other special steels, steel pipes and tubes, steel wires, billets from scrap, and tin plate...
...Actually, it is estimated that about 14.000 German Communists were murdered by the Gestapo...
...The aim has been to make the public and private sectors complementary...
...I was judging Brutal Mandate in contrast both to what Lowenstein said he would write ("the gathering and reporting of facts") and to what I knew the UN wanted and needed...
...But in the course of describing his visit to the Union of South Africa and his adventure into South West Africa...
...Indeed, as part of its Third Plan program for the iron and steel industry, the Government is extending additional support to them...
...It is presently seeking foreign aid of some $86 million to assist the private sector steel plants during the current fiscal year, 1963-64...
...The tone, even more than the substance of the review, is rather harshly critical of a young man's description of a very gallant and useful adventure he made with two companions into what is indeed morally darkest Africa...
...The 150 people who gathered in Moscow in the spring of that year to be prepared for their tasks in Germany were all German Communist emigres, most of whom had, it is true, worked within the National Committee...
...It has also raised the more specific question whether the United States should assist the establishment of a governmentowned steel plant at Bokaro in India...
...It was Leonhard, not Harich, who had been taken to the Soviet Union by his mother in 1935...
...It also guaranteed a loan of $75 million extended by the World Bank to TISCO and two loans in the amount of $51.5 million extended by the same institution to nsco...
...It should also be noted that New Delhi has so far adhered to its policy of not discriminating between the public sector and private sector steel plants with respect to raw materials, transportation facilities or pricing...
...The State-owned plants, operated by the autonomous Hindustan Steel Corporation on a profit-and-Ioss basis, are at Bhilai, Durgapur and Rourkela...
...who is one of his sources for the Harich story...
...the establishment of the Bokaro steel plant...
...Of the party's last Politburo, Hitler murdered two members and two more from the pre-1929 Politburo...
...Sale describes in rather dim outline the book he wishes Lowenstein had written and is critical of him for not writing that particular book, even though he applauds the author's "undoubted zeal and good will...
...The point is that the programming of the Indian steel industry has sought to avoid a situation in which the public and the private sector plants have to compete for the same market...
...Both Ttsco and nsco have not only continued to exist as profitable enterprises, but have progressively expanded despite the Government's entrance into the field of steel production...
...Stalin murdered four...
...In his letter...
...Historically, Prime Minister Nehru's Government has not only not attempted to eliminate the private steel enterprises, but has in fact consistently given substantial support for their modernization and expansion...
...Shanor also writes that the National Committee "Free Germany" became Stalin's tool in postwar Germany...
...Even after the steel plant at Bokaro is established, demand would considerably outpace domestic production...
...Perhaps the most significant element in this picture is the fact that private steel producers in India have no quarrel with the Government's policy...
...Horst Duhnke...
...I confess, however, to some surprise that a reviewer, formerly an associate editor of The New Leader, would write, in the pages of The New Leader, the kind of review that J. Kirk Sale wrote of Allard Lowenstein's Brutal Mandale (NL, February 4...
...The completion of the three public sector plants within the last two years has not in any way affected the Government's policy of encouraging the private sector plants in their expansion...
...While I should agree with Sale that we need some of the things that Lowenstein does not do, I think your readers should be told what Lowenstein in fact did and that what he described is very good reading on a very important subject...
...others are in the process of being established...
...The Bokaro plant will produce fiat products and will not compete directly with TISCO or nsco...
...This issue has emotional overtones, but in judging the applicability of the rule-of-thumb prescribed by the Clay Committee, whatever its merit, it is necessary to place the Bokaro project in perspective...
...By the end of the Second Plan, TISCO had a capacity of 1.5 million tons of finished steel and nsco 800,000 tons...
...The UN found it so...
...Actually, by 1945 the National Committee had become a defunct organization...
...won over to the Communist cause...
...Minister for Steel and Heavy Industries, also emphasized that the public sector plants are not intended to compete, and in fact do not compete, with the private sector steel companies...
...The UN may possibly have found Brutal Mandate "good reading," but it certainly learned less from it than from any of the official Reports of the Committee on South West Africa (A/4464, A/4957, etc...
...Lowenstein gives some very vital pictures of men and things and sufficiently reveals how he and his comrades dodged the South African security machine—perhaps to encourage others—without giving too much information to the enemy...
...ULBRICHT AND HARICH There are some factual errors in Donald R. Shanor's article, "Ulbricht: Ten Years After Stalin" (NL, March 18), and in the subsequent letter to the editor by Konrad Kellen (NL, April 1), which deserve to be corrected...
...In his April 15 statement in the Parliament, Minister Subramaniam gave a "categorical assurance" that the policy of common prices for steel produced in the public and the private sectors would be "continued and sustained...
...Your reviewer does not say that, among other things, Lowenstein and his companions managed to help a very important spokesman for the South Africans escape to the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, from which he could have a chance of coming to New York and to the United Nations to tell the story of his people...
...Some of these units are already in production...
...Moreover, demand for steel in India has been increasing so rapidly that the problem has been to produce enough of the several types of steel products...
...They have, indeed, welcomed The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...And speaking in the Indian parliament on April 15, C. Subramaniam...
...What Shanor means to say, ? believe, is that more members of the top leadership of the German Communist party were killed by Stalin than by Hitler...
...New York City Norman Thomas J. Kirk Sale replies: When I described the kind of book I wish Allard Lowenstein had written I was being neither capricious nor arbitrary...
...Assisted by these financing arrangements, the two private sector plants modernized their production facilities, and TISCO more than doubled its capacity...
...In fact the committee itself spent very little time on Lowenstein in the three days he appeared before it in 1959 and did not even hear his tape recordings as part of its regular proceedings...
...Even more significant, in setting up steel plants in the public sector the Government has directed its effort primarily to developing products not produced by the private sector as well as to increasing production of items not manufactured in sufficient quantity by private enterprise...
...New York City N. Pattabhi Raman BRUTAL MANDATE Book reviewers should, of course, be encouraged to express honest and well-informed opinions on the books they review...
...Berkeley, Calif...
...Demand for steel, estimated at 5-6 million tons (ingot), is now expected to be 12 million tons in 1965, 19 million tons in 1970 and 28 million tons in 1975...
...The private enterprises are the pioneer Tata Iron & Steel Company (TISCO) and the Indian Iron & Steel Company (nsco...
...How many were killed in Stalin's purges is, of course, not known, but there were never that many German Communists in the Soviet Union to begin with...
...Hitler murdered seven, Stalin 10 (including Willi Münzenberg who was probably assassinated by NKVD agents in 1940 in France...
...Konrad Kellen confuses Wolfgang Harich's biography at one point with that of Wolfgang Leonhard...
...should not aid a foreign government in projects establishing governmentowned industrial and commercial enterprises which compete with existing endeavors" has precipitated a broad controversy on the subject ("The Battle of Clay's Cliches," NL, April 15...
...but simply a gallant one...
...This is illustrated by the rise in imports of steel, from 200,000 tons in 1951-52 to 1.1 million tons in 1961-62...
...In 1961, for example, it guaranteed a loan of $19.5 million given by the World Bank to TISCO for developing the company's coal-mining and transportation facilities...
...and it was that same Leonhard who "discovered" Harich in 1945 in Berlin as a young student with an anti-Nazi record who could be, and finally was...
...Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith has made the point that there is no real competition between the private and public sector steel plants...
...In a statement made in February of this year, Sir Jehangir Ghandy of TISCO said: "India undoubtedly needs a large and modern plant like the one proposed at Bokaro and the sooner we can start on it...
...Price regulation, in existence long before the public sector mills were established, applies equally to the products of both sectors and is generally based on the recommendations of the Tariff Commission...
...Here more precise figures are available...
...The Indian steel industry today consists of two major primary producers of steel in the private sector and three State-owned steel plants...
...These were built with the assistance of the Russians, the British and the Germans, respectively, and are all operating at more than full capacity today...
...A glance at the facts reveal that this is not sophistry—diplomatic or Socialistic...
...the better...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 9
