Passage to India
Passage to India
It pays homage to the fact that this ancient culture once was among the most robust adherents of the free market - well before Adam Smith invented its modern form. That it veered sharply from homespun capitalism was because of one man, Jawaharlal Nehru, the scion of an aristocratic family who studied at Cambridge University and who eventually came under the influence of Britain's Fabian socialists and injected an alien ideology into India's struggle for independence.
Nehru managed, through charisma and oratory, to mesmerize the Indian National Congress, which led the fight against the occupiers of a land that novelist Paul Scott memorably called the "Jewel in the Crown." And because Nehru was the favored politician of Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, his prescription for a post-independent India's economic path - socialism - was generally accepted as dogma. But Nehru had a rival, both politically and for the Mahatma's affections, named Vallabhbhai Patel, the man who, more than anyone, was responsible for lining up India's 535 maharajahs in support of aligning their territories with secular India, and not theocratic Pakistan, after the Subcontinent was partitioned capriciously by the departing British.
It was Patel who said that India needed to fully open the floodgates of free enterprise in order to sustain economic growth. Under Nehru's stewardship, and later that of his daughter, the haughty Indira Gandhi - no relation to the Mahatma - India became a case study in bad governance and, even while ostensibly in the non-aligned camp, a fellow traveler of the Soviet Union. The federal bureaucracy mushroomed to more than 10 million (at any given time, no more than 2,500 Britons had administered the vast Subcontinent, which is geographically half the size of continental America). An India that should have become one of the world's most dynamic economies was instead transformed into a basket case. Vallabhbhai Patel died a broken man, convinced that India would implode on account of Nehru's errors.
It pays homage to the fact that this ancient culture once was among the most robust adherents of the free market - well before Adam Smith invented its modern form. That it veered sharply from homespun capitalism was because of one man, Jawaharlal Nehru, the scion of an aristocratic family who studied at Cambridge University and who eventually came under the influence of Britain's Fabian socialists and injected an alien ideology into India's struggle for independence.
Nehru managed, through charisma and oratory, to mesmerize the Indian National Congress, which led the fight against the occupiers of a land that novelist Paul Scott memorably called the "Jewel in the Crown." And because Nehru was the favored politician of Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, his prescription for a post-independent India's economic path - socialism - was generally accepted as dogma. But Nehru had a rival, both politically and for the Mahatma's affections, named Vallabhbhai Patel, the man who, more than anyone, was responsible for lining up India's 535 maharajahs in support of aligning their territories with secular India, and not theocratic Pakistan, after the Subcontinent was partitioned capriciously by the departing British.
It was Patel who said that India needed to fully open the floodgates of free enterprise in order to sustain economic growth. Under Nehru's stewardship, and later that of his daughter, the haughty Indira Gandhi - no relation to the Mahatma - India became a case study in bad governance and, even while ostensibly in the non-aligned camp, a fellow traveler of the Soviet Union. The federal bureaucracy mushroomed to more than 10 million (at any given time, no more than 2,500 Britons had administered the vast Subcontinent, which is geographically half the size of continental America). An India that should have become one of the world's most dynamic economies was instead transformed into a basket case. Vallabhbhai Patel died a broken man, convinced that India would implode on account of Nehru's errors.
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12:12 AM
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