The tragedy of the Congress is that the more Bharat changes with time, the more it remains stuck in a time warp. Worse, it fails to learn from the past, more so of its own. Its attitude, especially at a time when the party invariably commits one hara-kiri after another, is more on a “hua-to-hua” line, to use a(n) (in)famous one-liner from one of its own leaders, Sam Pitroda, chairperson of the Indian Overseas Congress.
So, as the Congress currently finds itself on the back foot on the issue of ‘wealth redistribution’, especially after Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made it an election issue, the party could have done well to recall the stand of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel on the issue.
As the story goes, narrated succinctly by Nani A Palkhivala in his book We the People, once an ardent socialist approached Sardar Patel with an appeal to abolish inequality of wealth and cited as an instance that one Mr X was the master of several millions. Sardar listened to him carefully, and as he finished his socialistic rant, Patel said: “I know the extent of Mr X’s wealth. If all of it were to be distributed equally among the people of India, your share would be four annas and three pies. I am willing to give you that from my own pocket if you undertake to talk no more about it.”
Patel continued, “Some people want us to nationalise all industries. How are we to run nationalised industries if we cannot run our ordinary administration? It is easy to take over any industry, but we don’t have the resources to run them, not enough experienced men of expertise and integrity.”
Patel was aware of the ugly face of capitalism that had the innate tendency to promote inequality, but he also understood very well that wealth had to be created first before it could be distributed. India saw no nationalisation drive till Sardar Patel was alive. But after his death in December 1950, the Congress—and resultantly the nation—was hijacked by those who saw socialism as a panacea for all the country’s ills, who obsessively looked Westward for ideas and inspirations, and who were apologetic about their own civilisational roots.
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Nehru’s India, in the 1950s, took “a train to nowhere”, as Gurcharan Das writes in his book India Unbound, pushing the country towards more than three growthless and jobless decades. “When I was young, we passionately believed in Jawaharlal Nehru’s dream of a modern and just India. But as the years went by, we discovered that Nehru’s economic path was taking us to a dead end, and the dream soured. Having set out to create socialism, we found that we had instead created statism,” Das writes.
Das, in another book The Elephant Paradigm, explains the ill impact of socialism on society. He writes, “Socialism tended to destroy social capital because it made us depend on the government for everything (a dependence that also suited our politicians). People forgot that they could rely on themselves.”
The Nehruvian ecosystem gave this stunted economic growth a Hindu name, calling it—quite mischievously—“the Hindu rate of growth”. Even though the economic policy pursued by the Nehru-Gandhis had nothing Hindu about it. If anything, it was an antithesis of the age-old Sanatana traditions which, historically and civilisationally, promoted and pushed entrepreneurship, both at the individual and societal level.
If one reads the Arthashastra, one realises that there was a separation of an individual’s property from the King’s property. The text speaks of four land arrangements: the king’s land, lands of private individuals, common land and unoccupied forest land. The Naradasmriti is also quite categorical when it says, “A householder’s house and his field are considered as the two fundamentals of his existence. Therefore, let not the king upset either of them.”
This notion is quite different from other societies where the king owned all properties. Also, what kept Bharatiya society strong was the near-autonomous nature of the Indic village system. This was possible because of the traditional temple system which ensured people were capable enough to handle their lives the way they wanted. Here it needs to be emphasised that temples in ancient times weren’t just places for worship; they also imparted education, patronised art and craft (some of the ancient dance forms, including Bharatanatyam, could survive today precisely because temples kept them alive), and made local roads, water tanks and river embankments. Temples also provided loans for trade, especially sea-based, for it alone had the resources to take the high risks of foreign trade.
Thus, in ancient Bharat, a strong State never came in the way of a strong society. The two lived and thrived simultaneously. Bharatiya king might have been strong and powerful, but he was not an absolute ruler. He was expected to act under the guidance of dharma. It is this dharma that ensured that both the State and the society remain strong. Today, we have a strong State but a feeble society. Just like a dharmic state of yore, we need a State which is strong enough to uphold law and order, build highways and roads, and provide overall security, but also let individuals/societies explore their own destinies, their personal and personalised entrepreneurial potential.
Isn’t it something we, in the era of economic reforms and liberalisation, have been trying to put in place when we say ‘minimum government, maximum governance’? Isn’t the notion of a dharmic state closer to the idea of the liberalised state we are so keen to put in place today? It was a manifestation of Nehruvian doublespeak to, first, put in place an alien, statist economic order and then, when it fails, give it a Hindu name!
Wealth redistribution, thus, is an alien phenomenon, absolutely non-Indic in nature. The closest one gets to this economic thought process is the Marxist/Maoist attempt at wealth redistribution through “collectivised farming”. As Mao Zedong would often say, “Without the socialisation of agriculture, there can be no complete, consolidated socialism.”
All it ensured in places where it was rigorously enforced, whether in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, was it impoverished the masses at large. People were discouraged from being well off and the very incentive to work hard and be rich was missing. Poverty became the norm and it was glorious to be poor.
Such was the ‘success’ of the collectivisation of farming that Mao had to ask the State to prevent peasants from “eating too much”. As Jung Chang and Jon Halliday write in the book Mao: The Unknown Story, “Mao’s answer to peasants’ plight was pitiless. They should eat sweet potato leaves, which were traditionally used only to feed pigs. ‘Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel,’ he instructed. ‘The State should try its hardest… to prevent peasants from eating too much.’”
With its wealth redistribution plan, Rahul Gandhi’s Congress seems to be treading the disastrous Stalinist/Maoist path. It also seems to be acting like a broken recorder stuck in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s when money was a dirty word. Today’s world, being a witness to the Marxist/socialist disastrous experiments of yore, has moved way beyond wealth redistribution to wealth creation. The Congress leadership also needs to realise that the party’s wealth redistribution plan is antithesis to the Indic worldview where the respect for private property and wealth creation is deeply rooted. After all, in the Sanatana ecosystem, dharma and moksha are incomplete without artha and kama.
But then there’s an electoral compulsion for Rahul’s Congress and many other political parties currently operating in India: Their subsidy-based economic policies have held pragmatic politico-economic thinking to ransom. Their lofty populism cannot be sustained without getting hold of the riches of those who have worked hard to earn them. The tyrannical regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot did the same in their respective States to unleash a man-made catastrophe of biblical proportions. The Congress must know it would be treading the same, disastrous path if it continues to harp on wealth redistribution without doing enough for wealth creation first. If no one else, the party leadership should at least listen to Sardar Patel’s sagacious advice.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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