Aid for India
Hart, Henry C.
Aid for India INDIA AND THE WEST, by Barbara Ward. W. W. Norton. 256 pp. $4.50. INDIA AND THE UNITED STATES, edited by Selig S. Harrison. Macmillan. 244 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Henry C....
...The central point Harrison makes leaves one dangling over a precipice...
...This is rather another question posed, but not run to ground, in an exhilarating and exasperating book of what is in effect informed, pointed, inconclusive conversation...
...My quarrel is not with that speculation...
...And if we are to test future possibly undemocratic regimes as to whether we should continue aid, the United States deserves a wider test than is suggested here: "The case for aid, meaningfully stated, lies in the fact that only a sense of development taking place gives men hope for a better future, and that only this hope holds men together in political and social unity...
...It comes home in the case of India most of all, because India will need more than we can provide casually, and yet India is equipped, precisely because of her favorable encounter with the West, with the prerequisites to use our help to transform her society in the direction of the ideals we share...
...It is more as a document than as a book, though, that India and the United States impressed me...
...the populationfood ratio is one, and adequate taxes on agriculture another...
...He rates the chance at 50-50...
...This book is drawn from the statements of eighty-eight able Indians and Americans assembled two years ago in Washington to give a lead to the future relations of the two nations, particularly as to Indian economic development and American aid...
...It was on the economic side that the British impact fell short...
...Barbara Ward is severely just in her assessment of the British impact on India...
...She applies the criterion of preparation for takeoff into sustained economic growth, and by that measure she finds colonialism upset a static subsistence equilibrium without opening the way to any other...
...But she gives quite different verdicts on the political and the economic effect...
...In India and the West, Barbara Ward has employed her lucid style to write what is surely the definitive argument for a flat commitment by the West to raise the billion dollars a year India will need to finance its current, and crucial, plan...
...It is to make a decision respecting Indian economic development as boldly adequate to the need as was the Marshall Plan— "one of the greatest, most unsordid acts of statesmanship in the annals of man...
...For though we have proved that the poor do not get poorer relative to the rich inside our Western nations, they are still getting relatively poorer in the southern, colored, ex-colonial half of the world...
...This is the element that is wholly lacking in Western reactions for the Indian Plans . . . You cannot half-launch a plane or half-launch an economy...
...That book, not this one, contains his superbly documented warning that centrifugal linguistic states may bring the nation to a deadlock before it can develop...
...How should that help be extended...
...But the similarity goes little further...
...The culmination was a takeover of political power without destruction of the institutions or the ideals which could support the later advance to modernity...
...Certainly India has not yet solved some problems that could wreck the constitution...
...The real reason for his emphasis on the test of solidarity to the neglect of the test of freedom of opportunity and of opposition is, I would guess, that he wrote this introduction fresh from writing one of the most incisive books on independent India: India: The Most Dangerous Decades...
...Lenin, who saw the poor had not got poorer in Western Europe and America, advanced a new explanation—imperialism had shifted the exploitation to the backward nations of Asia and Africa...
...Adequacy of scale and concerted effort by the Western nations (welcoming Russia, too, if Russia will take the challenge) are key recommendations in Selig Harrison's India and the United States as well...
...In his introduction Harrison provides some of the book's most penetrating explanations...
...To avoid being too little and too late, all Western nations with a per capita income over $500 should join in an aid commitment of $1 billion a year for India, or one per cent of their national incomes...
...I am not convinced that Selig Harrison has given us here his final word on the aims of aid...
...Here are two books directed to those questions, published almost simultaneously— and utterly unlike...
...My question is whether we know enough, or can know enough about the alternatives to constitutional democracy—Harrison's "combination of political, bureaucratic, and military leadership" is certainly not the only, nor the worst possibility—to make such considerations meaningful now...
...United States' policy should be shaped now, he warns, upon the possibility that constitutional democracy may fail in India...
...There is still enough truth in Lenin's analysis of the encounter of the industrialized with the backward peoples so that the Communists can deride this ideology as a hoax...
...Indeed, the question comes home to us whether we still mean it...
...There is another sense—the ideological— in which the responsibility is even more America's...
...The Marshall Plan "was not a minimum sum for a bailing out operation, but a considered estimate of the full resources needed to finish the job...
...Or is political and social unity our sole final objective...
...He tells us, for instance, why sympathetic Indian intellectuals criticize our concentration of aid to Indian industry in private firms...
...Marx, who missed the significance of manhood suffrage and did not, as some wealthy Americans allege, foresee the progressive income tax, thought the poor would get poorer until the big explosion...
...Politically, careers finally opened to Indians in civil service, and the education provided to a new Indian elite in Englishlanguage schools created a modernminded leadership—but only because, as she points out, India had the capacity, in its traditional culture, to honor learning, even to indulge new ideas...
...Are we interested in aid also as a means of opening u p individual initiative, political and economic, and keeping open that freedom to criticize the nation which seems so sturdy a check on aggression...
...Even in England, possessing the advantage of industrializing first, the era of capitalizing a basic industrial plant was an era of misery for the masses, of mildly explosive tensions for the nation as a whole...
...Its pieces have the freshness, but also the inadvertencies, of oral statements...
...In that sense, clearly, Britain has a responsibility for seeing that the j o b is finished...
...It is definitive not because it exhorts or presents hitherto unknown information, but because it justly marshals all of the diverse considerations—historical and ideological even more than economic— on which the thoughtful citizen, or Congressman, ought to make up his mind...
...Reviewed by Henry C. Hart WHY SHOULD America and her wealthy allies prjovide the foreign exchange for India's current (1961-1966) five year plan...
...Most of those we aid are still controlled by a few Marwari families...
...Barbara Ward's prescription is fairly specific...
...Barbara Ward carries the interpretation a step beyond the attacks by Indian historians on the "drain" of wealth from India to England...
...America once proclaimed an ideology for all men: freedom and equality of opportunity...
...Harrison, associate editor of The New Republic and one-time Associated Press correspondent in India, has drastically pruned and rearranged the transcript to make an orderly book...
Vol. 25 • August 1961 • No. 8
