Shaping India's political imagination

There was no escaping the Five-Year Plans in early independent India. They dominated the public discourse. It was even the language through which the government articulated its aspirations for democratic state building. In the official view, democracy fulfilled its meaning through the Plans. A fixture in the national conversation, they were ceaselessly invoked by politicians, extensively covered by the news media and debated in civil society. Calls by the government to work towards the Plan's goals became part of the everyday din in the public sphere. The Five-Year Plans represented an alternate national calendar.

An anonymous contribution to The Economic Weekly captures, with tongue in cheek, what the Plans might have meant to Indians in the 1950s.

If one were asked what the most common obsession of the common man in the sixth year of the Republic is, the answer would be: planning. Planning takes him away from the realities of the present situation; it gives him a sense of importance of being associated in some mysterious way with great undertakings, of being an estimable part of a burgeoning whole; and more than all, it provides food for compensatory reverie and scope for indulging in impressive facts and figures and mouthing learned phrases and abstruse theories . . . Planning has a touch of magic about it, and an element of weird ritual too; and what can appeal more to the average Indian mind than magic and ritual?

A satirical piece in Shankar's Weekly noted that visitors to the country may notice that 'India is very plan-minded'. Nehru reported reading in a foreign publication that in India 'you cannot get away from this planning business . . . Whatever you talk about somehow they [Indians] lead you to the question of planning as though everything depended on planning everywhere'. He was heartened to know that even an unsympathetic outsider 'felt enveloped by some kind of an atmosphere of planning'. To the Prime Minister, it simply reflected a rosy reality: 'India is very much planning-conscious and I think it is a great gain.'

While the Soviet Union was no doubt an important influence, the Indian planning project marked its distance and forged its own path. Planning in a democracy was meant to be distinct from communist planning. The Congress Party had committed to 'democratic planning' well before Independence: the phrase appears in Nehru's handwritten notes as early as the summer of 1939. After Independence, now constitutionally committed to representative politics and universal adult franchise, the Indian government sought to negotiate an unorthodox marriage between parliamentary democracy and centralized economic planning. It was an experiment whose timing drew global attention. This was, after all, precisely when Cold War discourse framed Western liberal democracy and the Soviet planned economy as fundamentally incompatible, both in terms of institutional arrangements and political values. Indeed, during the Cold War, India's combination of parliament and planning served as the domestic reflection of Nehru's foreign policy of resolute nonalignment with either bloc.

In the preceding pages of this book, I examined how planning raised state capacities and operated as a technocracy. Those that follow argue that it was also a political project to build a productive citizenry. They were both critical to the enterprise, even though they coexisted uneasily. This chapter and the next examine the many ways in which the state sought to inform citizens about Plans, enthuse participation and build what was called a 'Plan consciousness'. They emphasize how the idea of democratic planning operated as a political vision, a realist response to weak state capacity and a mode of state legitimation that deployed the rhetoric of democracy to mobilize citizens.

As our emphasis shifts from Calcutta and Yojana Bhavan to the more popular terrain of democratic planning, so does our cast of characters. While technocratic planning spotlighted experts like the Professor and Deshmukh, it was government officials and a range of private citizens who spearheaded democratic planning. The former were interested in democratic planning only so far as it counterbalanced poor state capacity. The latter, however, while sharing this concern, expressed broader ideas about what distinguished planning in a democracy and what citizens owed the Plan and, through it, their nation.

The widespread image of the Planning Commission has been that of aging upper-crust men dressed in starched khadi or tailored suits, discussing dams and steel plants in dull Lutyens Delhi offices— in short, technocratic planning. Planning has been described as using the cover of expertise to hover above the messiness of politics, designed to enable electorally unpalatable measures. While this does reflect the Planning Commission's status and its method of operation, it also blinds us to the ways in which the Commission sought to engage the populace. It draws a veil over the political ambitions of planning and masks the extent to which the Indian government reached out to citizens and the lengths to which it went to make the Plans popular. In fact, the government even went so far as to routinely refer to Indian planning as democratic—plainly an exaggeration, but a telling one. The Indian government was invested in the slogan of democratic planning. It formed the basis of the claim that India was engaged in an experiment that represented a different path in the Cold War, one combining democracy and centralized planning in a poor, recently decolonized country while remaining independent of the two superpowers.

India's Five-Year Plans were seen by the Nehru government as an expansive political project and a mass national undertaking— not just an elite instrument of economic policy and resource allocation. It was a pedagogical state tutoring its inhabitants on Plan-consciousness, Plan-participation and productivity as national duty. The goal was to build a society of informed and productive citizens who would enthusiastically throw their weight behind the nation's Five-Year Plans rather than remaining bystanders or ignorant participants. The idea of democratic planning beseeched citizens to help build a new kind of state through mass participation. As the contemporary Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal observed, in India the phrase democratic planning meant 'not only the support of the masses but also their active participation in plan preparation and implementation'. In addition, it conveyed 'that this popular participation and cooperation should emerge voluntarily'. In Myrdal's view, there was a 'sincere adherence to this ideal', despite its shortcomings in practice. The Plan's proponents would have approved of the spirit animating the popular Hindi song Mera Joota Hai Japani, in which a Charlie Chaplin-esque tramp played by Raj Kapoor sings, while astride a camel: 'Nadaan hai jo baithey kinarey, poochey raah vatan ki' (Foolish are those who sit by the wayside, asking for directions to their own country). Unearthing this facet of the history of planning—in which it spilled out of boardrooms and into the realm of the popular—yields a deeper understanding of the role it was designed to, but never quite successfully played, in Nehruvian India.

The new nation-state was drawing on a specific understanding of citizenship. In independent India, citizenship was based on the view that rights were not gifts—instead, they came attached with certain duties. The state had expectations of its citizens. These duties often reflected themes of sacrifice, self-help and an ethic of work. It could manifest, for example, in the government's call for citizens to change their diets and eating patterns during food crises or in official slogans such as 'Help the Plan—Help Yourself' or 'Yojana Ki Siddhi—Aap Ki Samriddhi' (The Plan's Accomplishment—Your Prosperity). In seeking Plan participation, the state was reminding Indians of their duties as citizens and underlining their obligation to development. As a Plan document put it, 'Development, thus conceived, is a process which calls for effort and sacrifice on the part of the entire body of citizens.'

(Excerpted with permission from Nikhil Menon's Planning Democracy; published by Penguin Viking)