Just What Is This Socialism?

I ended an article in SWARAJYA in 1963 with these words: “We must rebuild our lost aristocracy, not of birth or of wealth or even of intellect, but of character. And here I must stop, saying somewhat like what John Bunyan wrote nearly three hundred years ago- ‘I can better conceive of it with my mind than speak of it with my tongue’.” We shall be truly great if we rebuild this aristocracy of character; not all the furnaces and factories we dream of can make us so great.

     Can we bring into being sadaachaar replacing the almost universal prevalence of duraachaar, while all the time the permit-licence-quota regime is watering and fertilizing duraachaar at its concealed roots? Obviously, this is not possible and we cannot believe we can do it unless we shut our eyes to reality and resolve to be content with forms and formalities and hypocrisies.

     We cannot cure any disease by the most powerful drugs if the patient persists in taking the diet that brought on the illness. To convert men to right conduct, to take them away from seeking selfish gain through wrong means, is always a hard task. But the regime—the regime of permits and licences which I am untiringly engaged in opposing—makes the task not merely harder; it makes every effort mere sisyphean labour. If we are serious about sadaachaar, we must do all we can to do away with this fertilizer at the root of duraachaar. Either we must make the ruling party give up its policy and allow free economy to prevail again or we must dismiss the Government that is wedded to this wrong policy. The Congress is wedded to this policy and shakes to it as to a married wife, not because of any positive value the party men see in it for increased production or for better distribution, but because it has been found to be a powerful instrument for collecting funds for the party and to invest congressmen with authority in the countryside. They have only to secure a ticket from the party High Command and election success is certain. So much for the hope of bringing into being an aristocracy of character.

Let me re-state what I wrote for SWARAJYA in May 1963:

Let us hope we can secure a dedicated set of young people to join the service ranks in all departments through whom we can get a revolution of character accomplished. In order to hope for this, we should make sure of a few things besides appealing to intelligent youth to dedicate themselves to a holy war against corruption.

We must elevate the simple life to the status it had enjoyed in Gandhian and pre-Independence days. It is the ‘standard of life’ that has corrupted and is corrupting our souls.

We should make administration less expensive by reducing the number of people engaged in that unproductive but important work, while at the same time paying adequate salaries to those employed.

The development of productive industries should be unhampered by controls and bureaucratic hurdles, so that private enterprise economy may expand and absorb more and more intelligent young men instead of their being driven by necessity to government service.

Less taxation and less inflation, abandonment of the wholly wrong plan of finding industrial capital by oppressive taxation, and release of private capital and private initiative from the entanglements of central planning—these will help to a large extent in clearing the air of the poisonous fog of corruption.

There is hope, if the young men and women of our country vow to live inexpensive lives, and to be honest under any circumstances and in any employment. Education is of no use if this dedicated spirit does not crown the acquisition of useful knowledge. Rectitude and rectitude alone can save us. Hope thus rests on the restoration of faith in God, and even this must be given by Him. May He give us that faith in His grace and enable us to save our dear motherland, which does not deserve the fate that otherwise overhangs it.

     Going down from character to the material human body, the actual outlay under the first, second and third Five-Year Plans in the public sector is more than Rs 14,000 crores. Including the fourth Plan, the total outlay in the public sector would be above Rs 27,000 crores. Have we supplied or provided for the elementary wants of the people? I shall not raise any question about food, for that is a matter of removal of impediments in the way of the citizen’s efforts to make more out of the land which he owns. But what about drinking water tolerably pure and fit for human consumption? Have we made this basic requirement for life available to the families living in the rural parts? Have we arranged for fairly decent drainage in the villages so that there may be health instead of fevers and diseases of all kinds? Have we provided decent sanitary arrangements for the village folk? Without satisfying these three desiderata which are fundamental for life in the villages, where more than 80 per cent of our people spend all their lives, and which demand State attention and form a proper field for public expenditure, what is the socialism that the ruling party talks about? Have they not had the money required? Including the Fourth Plan the outlay in the public sector may be nearly Rs 30,000 crores. Can the political party that has spent and will spend all this money plead that it has no money for providing the drinking water, the drainage and the elementary sanitary amenities required for tolerable life in the villages where helpless humans, who should be the first object of socialist concern, live and die? Can the rulers say they had not sufficient time when from 1954, when they declared for their socialism, they have had 12 years of uninterrupted control over the entire governance of the country and almost unlimited aid and goodwill from prosperous nations abroad? Can steel or a protected automobile industry make up for not paying attention to basic biological wants of the people? Not that the people are uncivilized and therefore they are dirty in their habits. They have a very high sense of cleanliness and would love to have public assistance in these respects.

     What are these Plans for, and what is this socialism which has failed to supply these elementary wants of more than eighty per cent of the population, but have on the other hand firmly implanted duraachaar in the country? Arguments about Central and State responsibilities cannot be drawn across the track because all power has been effectively sucked up by the Centre and twelve years have passed since socialism was declared as the objective and fifteen years since five-year plans began to be drawn up. The same political party rules both at the Centre and in the States. It is only in India that a party can escape condemnation and punishment for such a fault and such a failure. Perhaps if we had avoided the term socialism and other words of dogmatic denotation but had put down concretely that the welfare of the poorer people should be the direct concern of Government, this neglect running over two decades of opportunity might not have gone unremarked and uncorrected.