It is impossible to understand independent India’s economic journey without taking a deep dive into Five-Year Plans. Planning and the Planning Commission may be history now, but for close to six-and-a-half decades, Five-Year Plans played a major part in India’s economic policy-making though their heft declined markedly after the 1991 reforms.
Nikhil Menon’s Planning Democracy – How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India, is an absorbing account of how independent India, under the rubric of a democracy based on universal franchise, chose an ostensibly socialist project like centralised planning for economic advancement.
But Menon’s book is not just a dry history of five-year planning in India. The author’s skill lies in weaving a compelling story around the main personalities and institutions involved in the planning process – their challenges, travails, successes and failures. The politics, the tussles, the rivalry between the various personalities and institutions, all form an intriguing sub-story to the main narrative.
In Menon’s words, “What follows is a history of the Nehruvian-State told through the prism of planning, rather than an economic history of planning or an account of Five-Year Plans per se.”
The Professor emerges
The chief protagonist in this story is PC Mahalanobis, who was simply known as the Professor, the polymath who started his career as a physics professor in Kolkata’s prestigious Presidency College, and went on to found the Indian Statistical Institute.
The book is divided into two sections – Data and Democracy. But Mahalanobis is the protagonist only in the first section where Menon describes how the Professor positioned himself into the corridors of power in Delhi and became at least for a time the most important personality in India’s economic policy making elite.
Menon at the outset debunks the view that Mahalanobis’ ascent was solely due to his closeness to Nehru. It was more a result of “the rise of statistics to the status of a scientific discipline in India in the mid-century”. This led to the need for data and an infrastructure for churning out this data, and here’s where Mahalanobis’ Indian Statistical Institute emerged as the prime player in India’s Plan journey.
Also, that planning in some form or the other was needed to make India a modern industrialised nation was an idea that had taken root even in the 1930s when the Congress formed the National Planning Committee in 1938. It was here that the lack of credible data was brought to the fore.
The national sample surveys
Menon gives a brief history of the Central Statistics Office and how Mahalanobis pioneered the national sample surveys – at a time when even the world hadn’t quite warmed to the idea. Whether planning was a success or not, what did succeed was the creation of a massive statistical infrastructure in India, which was unparalleled then, and rivaled the statistical systems of the Western world.
The most interesting part of the first section is where Menon describes the backdrop of the seminal Second Five-Year plan, that for good or for bad, laid the foundation of the State-led, heavy industrialisation strategy, where the public sector played the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy – the “socialist” pattern of society.
Menon describes how ‘The Professor’ jockeyed for power in Delhi, adding that “The Planning Commission did not roll out the red carpet. It was a coup whose swiftness took Delhi by surprise”.
That Malahanobis was a consummate player in the power game was evident from how he invited a galaxy of foreign economists, intellectuals and experts to the Indian Statistical Institute campus in Kolkata. To burnish his reputation as an economic expert at home, Mahalanobis, who had a deep suspicion of professional economists, travelled frequently, both to the Western world and Soviet Union.
As Menon says, “The Professor left India in order to be relevant in India.” India’s craving for Western endorsement indeed has long and deep roots.
But the seminal Second Five-Year Plan’s journey was by no means smooth as it had critics both within and outside the government. In fact, the Plan’s ambitious targets had to be whittled down given the forex crunch.
The simmering tensions between the TT Krishnamachari-headed Finance Ministry and Mahalanobis’ Planning Commission came to the fore. This crisis in the second Plan was, according to Menon, the beginning of the Planning Commission’s diminishing powers.
But Mahalanobis’ lasting legacy was putting in place an elaborate statistical infrastructure and the role the Indian Statistical Institute played in it.
Legitimising planning
The second part of the book, the more interesting part, engages with the more crucial question — How did Nehru’s government reconcile or legitimise a technocratic, top-down economic exercise of planning with India’s democratic impulses?
Menon weaves a fascinating story of how the Indian State worked hard to bring about public participation in India’s planning process and the wide array of actors and institutions that were engaged in this process of legitimisation.
The role played by the Planning Commission magazine Yojana, which for some time was headed by Khushwant Singh, the Films Division, Bollywood, school and college students and even Hindu sadhus under the rubric of Bharat Sadhu Samaj, in taking planning to the people is brought out in fascinating detail by Menon.
The Films Division played a big part here, with 40 per cent of films made between 1949 and 1972 related to planning and development. Some of the documentaries were not shy of fusing Hindu mythology with the development agenda, where images ranging from Raja Harishchandra to Krishna, Arjuna, Buddha and historical figures like Ashoka, Akbar and Shivaji were freely invoked to popularise planning.
An animated film called Shadow and Substance made in 1967, where aliens land on India to observe its development journey under planning, seems straight out of Spielberg or Satyajit Ray script book.
Not to be left behind, Bollywood too played its part with films like Naya Daur and Hum Hindustani promoting the planning agenda. Many songs composed in that era were suffused with planning discourse. The magazine Yojana too rather helpfully carried advertisements of many of these Hindi films. These films also promoted the technocratic vision of development where the technocrat “was the future leader”.
Interestingly, Mahalanobis and other grandees of the planning elite were conspicuous by their absence in these publicity campaigns.
The most intriguing role in democratising planning was, however, played by Hindu Sadhus and an organisation called Bharat Sadhu Samaj. This marriage of religion and planning had the enthusiastic backing of some top Congress leaders including Rajendra Prasad and Gulzarilal Nanda. Though Nehru was deeply ambivalent about this, he still addressed a gathering of sadhus in Delhi. Menon brings out the contradictions and compromises that the Congress had to make in engaging the Sadhus in publicising planning.
Gulzarilal Nanda as Planning Commission Deputy Chairman, was the central figure in this exercise, for whom, “the material could not be separated from the spiritual”.
But this exercise’s success is open to question, especially how some of these ‘Congress’ sadhus later drifted towards VHP and BJP.
This fusing of technocracy and tradition was bound to tell on India’s secular polity. As Menon correctly concludes, “The story of the Sadhu Samaj’s swing from the Congress Party to the BJP is in some ways the history of the Congress Party’s changing electoral fortunes and the fate of secularism in India.”
This book written in engaging prose and a humour that is rare among Indian academicians lays bare the “dissonance” between planning in its “technocratic and democratic realms” and the contradictions of “planned modernity in a democracy”. This is indeed a valuable book for both lay readers and students of Indian planning and modern history.