End of Nehruvian consensus?
Rahul Gandhi uttered probably the profoundest political statement of his career, when he said that if India is a computer then Congress is its default operating system. India has come to be governed, by and large, through a Nehruvian consensus (NC for short). During the last decade of UPA rule, NC solidified into the dominant orthodoxy.
Paradoxically, even when UPA tried to move the needle and take a few tentative steps outside NC (by, for example, permitting FDI in retail or signing a nuclear deal with the US), it is BJP that protested the loudest. Even parties on the Left have largely abandoned Marxism and embraced NC.
However, it may not be possible to accommodate Narendra Modi within NC. His social origins are as far removed from Nehru’s as possible. He isn’t a Brahmin but comes from the lowly Ghanchi caste. He wasn’t schooled in the freedom struggle or in the genteel traditions of parliamentary debate which followed thereafter (as Atal Bihari Vajpayee was). He is a stranger to Delhi’s political circles.
Economic crises coupled with the rise of a new aspirational class that is urban, mobile, well informed and often young have brought India to a political inflection point. If Modi is elected PM and heads a reasonably stable coalition, then one or a couple of terms in power for him could well see the unravelling of NC. This would also mean the end of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s influence. It’s precisely this aspect of Modi that the Gandhis have been targeting lately, by saying Modi will destroy the ‘idea of India’. We don’t know this as yet, but the Nehruvian idea of India could indeed take some hard knocks.
What would this mean in practice? Nehru was a democrat and a socialist. He championed universal franchise when this was by no means a foregone conclusion among newly independent nations. This turned India into the world’s first largely illiterate democracy.
That, in a way, is a measure of the man. Historically, for most democracies, universal education came before universal franchise. But when the first Indian election took place in 1952, 85% of eligible voters could not read or write. Thus we have Nehru and his act of historical daring to thank for many of our freedoms today.
At the same time, this also illustrates the dark side of Nehru’s legacy. Democracies do not function well without education. But India’s strides in education have been very slow. It’s not something that Gandhi or Nehru stressed very much and to this day India remains one of the most poorly educated nations in the world.
Nehru was also a Fabian socialist, which propounded government by an anti-business spiritual elite. Hence the Nehruvian belief that the state should control the commanding heights of the economy, combined with faith in autarky. These choices have been fateful in shaping the Indian economy and civil services. Nehru may have been a proponent of political liberty but not of economic freedom.
Post-Nehru there have been upgrades to the NC software, incorporating elements from Indira Gandhi (dynasty) through V P Singh (identity politics through reservations). Dynasty, for example, is now a common template for political parties across the board, with power concentrated in one family no matter what the party is.
Economic policy swung left under Indira Gandhi then right again under Narasimha Rao. While liberalisation might seem a break with NC, it was seen by large sections of the political class as a tactical response to crises rather than a strategic necessity requiring a fundamental change in outlook. And it was accompanied by countermeasures that flew in the teeth of what reformists would advocate — such as spiralling subsidies, more bloated government, populist schemes that empowered the Fabian bureaucracy more than the poor.
Some of Modi’s pronouncements, however, signal a break with NC. His oft-repeated mantra ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ is incompatible with Fabian formulas of maximal government. His frequent references to Sardar Patel invoke a nationalist legacy alternative to Nehru’s. It was only Patel’s death in 1950 that gave Nehru a free hand in crafting NC.
The critical question about a Modi government is whether it will break with the positive or negative aspects of NC. If it dispenses with the positive aspects of NC (political freedom, decent treatment of minorities) then, taking the computer analogy forward, it will trigger a system crash. A majoritarian or dictatorial Centre will be unable to hold together a vast and diverse country like India.
However, if a Modi government could break with the statist, Fabian socialist, clientelist aspects of NC India would be well placed to undertake the kind of labour-intensive industrialisation that powered Asia’s miracle economies. India would then have outgrown the povertarianism and self-inflicted marginalisation that made it, for long, the ‘sick man of Asia’.
If millions of well-paying jobs could be created for India’s youth and the country’s entrepreneurial energy unleashed, that would tackle at the root two of its biggest problems. It would eliminate not only mass poverty but also the ground conditions for large-scale left-wing and right-wing violence (including communal violence).
So, how might a Modi government actually be? To tweak only slightly how a Charles Dickens novel famously began — it could be the best of times, it could be the worst of times.
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