Hemingway has a short story set in the Spanish Civil War context in which an old man leaving his town on the approach of rebel armies sits on the outskirts and shows concern, to a questioner (a foreign correspondent) with the fate of his old cat that he was obliged to leave behind than with the tragedy of the people involved in the horrors of the unusually savage civil war!
We know that all through the long national liberation movement in India the British could find quite a number of Indian collaborators at the expense of their own countrymen. They did not feel the passion for freedom to any marked extent. They could not imagine how the country could manage without the British to govern them!
To the large majority of people everywhere the status quo and the customary round seem to be as much part of nature as the stars, the sun and the moon. They cannot imagine a different state of affairs.
Marxist Gospel
In moral experience we are keenly aware that people have the greatest difficulty in realising in imagination the inward feelings and attitudes of their own neighbours. A great writer has a short story showing how the heads of husband and wife on adjacent pillows entertain widely different thoughts that seem to belong to separate worlds!
The great problem of human life is this one of increasing understanding of men of each other’s inward life by means of a more sensitive imagination.
Socialist (communist) propaganda takes full advantage of this failing of human beings. It depicts the ideal state of affairs under their Utopia in such a complete fashion that nothing is left to the imagination of those who are carried away by the promises of socialism regarding its new heaven and new earth, regarding its abolition of poverty, its reign of equality, its opportunity for self-realisation for all and so on. No schemes of logical criticism of the economics, psychology and philosophy of communism can have any effect on the believer and the fellow traveller. He comes to believe in the Marxist Gospel as in a new Bible or Koran as an infallible revelation for the scientific age of the present and future.
The picture presented by the propaganda of the communist-socialists occupies the imagination of the intelligentsia of the present age, by and large, by reiteration, emphasis and appeal to humanitarianism as the only way of redeeming the under-dog. It benumbs the critical faculties.
Moreover, criticism presupposes knowledge of alternatives. The greatest service that philosophy as a systematic science of reflection on ultimate reality and ultimate values renders to civilisation, as pointed out so impressively by Dr. A. N. Whitehead, is the suggestion of alternative vision of society and natural relations or structure.
Such alternative ideas release the mind from the stranglehold of custom or dogma, new or old and create an attitude of mind more open and hospitable to new ideas and rival hypotheses.
It is therefore necessary to break the spell of socialist dogma on the imagination of fellow travellers and those attracted by its dogma on travellers and those attracted by its Utopia as the only way of progress based on science. This can be done by showing alternatives.
Also read: State control blocks India’s progress and exploits its people: C Rajagopalachari
Failure of imagination
Professor Bauer (specialist in the economy of backward peoples in the University of London) has said after a study of Indian Plans and Policies that the Indian Government seems more interested in realising socialism than in economic development itself! He has recorded his deliberate opinion that in the absence of the elaborate structure of controls and regulations, cribbing, cabinning and confining Indian enterprise in the private field, a faster and more many-sided progress in development would result. That is to say, his special knowledge of economic facts and ideas enabled him to see other alternative possibilities in the Indian scene at present blocked by official programmes and policies and their acceptance as good and inevitable by the public. Even the opposition parties have failed to present sufficiently well-informed and comprehensive schemes of development making for better results without curbing individual initiative, repressing capital formation and freezing investment in the private sector.
Another reason for this state of affairs, that is, for the failure of imagination on the part of critics and the general public to visualise their own schemes of development inspired by their own principles, views of social ideals and economic well-being and to present them to the electorate in rivalry to the official policy is their inability to think of alternatives.
There was an opportunity before Indian leaders at the advent of independence in August 1947. But unfortunately India had a leader, sold body and soul to socialism at the moment of national self-government. Even before the first Five-Year Plan was launched under the auspices of the Planning Commission in perfect imitation of the Soviets, Parliament was enacting the Industrial Policy Resolution (1949) which laid down the outline of socialist policy reserving the commanding heights of the economy, as the phrase goes (in British Socialist parlance) meaning nationalisation or otherwise taking control of the key industries, transport, insurance, railways, communications, mines, steel and other heavy industries for government ownership and management. The imagination of Shri Jawaharlal Nehru was completely dominated by the socialist programme of centralised economy after the pattern of Soviet Russia.
Slave mentality of Indian leaders
The other members of Parliament had not the imagination to visualise the deleterious consequences for production and liberty, price levels, tax levels, misery depths and so on of such socialism as was realised through the years.
They did not think out the rationale of the policies of socialism afresh. They took the European programmes for granted. They betrayed slave mentality in the intellectual and temporal field to an astonishing extent, for which the country is suffering even today. For one thing, the policies have not been reviewed from a rationalist and experiential point of view in the light of Indian conditions. The results of the Plans in terms of actual effects on the economy—prices, taxes, production, redistribution, national income, prosperity all round etc. have not been assessed from an independent point of view even yet.
The founding of the Swatantra party is one sign of the awakening on the part of the intelligentsia that an alternative policy is possible and necessary.
The work of the Libertarian Social Institute of Mr. Lotvala has been earliest in the field with its own independent and critical rethinking of Marx and communist programme in general and criticism of Indian policies in particular in the light of free economy and free society. Research and publicity has gone hand in hand in this work with its library at Bombay and Bangalore and the journal Indian Libertarian published fortnightly.
Dictatorship, not democracy
In the field of agriculture, the very first plan contained the germ of the policy which blossomed fully into the communist pattern of co-operative farm, the imposition of ceilings on holdings with nominal compensation to lands acquired by the state for transfer to the tiller. The full communist tactics of salami division of the farming community into landless labourer, small farmer, middle farmer, large farmer and large landowner was adopted. The zamindar corresponded to the feudal large landowner and was removed with ridiculous compensation in 1948. This is proof that the governing leadership had their minds made up before the advent of independence and put their notions of imported land revolution into force at the earliest opportunity without taking the intelligentsia in confidence. They posed as omniscient rulers and disdained to consult the people. This is not democracy but dictatorship—doing good to the people without their knowledge and intelligent consent! It was the good intention of the socialists in Germany that ruined her in the Hitler regime’s policies.
The people did not read either the Industrial Policy Declaration of 1948 which is fully socialist in inspiration and aim nor the Five-Year Plan Reports on Land Reforms, which is modelled on the Russian and Chinese patterns, even to the minute details except for the killings and violence. The killings were unnecessary in India as the intelligentsia had not yet taken a measure of their responsibilities under democracy. The peasants and their leaders were too scattered to organise resistance. They held their first Federation in 1958 which precipitated the Nagpur Resolution of the Congress party and the founding of the Swatantra Party but the so-called ‘land reforms’ have only been slowed down a little. No alternative scheme modelled on the democratic, constructive, evolutionary reforms of the Dutch, German and Scandinavian countries have yet been presented to the country by Indian agricultural leaders. They lack constructive imagination and the necessary stamina, grit, devotion and unsleeping vigilance both in their own interests and in the interests of democracy, to build an alternative society bringing men freedom. Both facts and creative imagination are necessary.
The Seventeenth Amendment to be brought forward in August seeks to make ryotwari land also subject to the zamindari abolition reforms tactics. If passed, it makes an end of poverty as a fundamental right and so weakens democracy at a vital point.
This essay is part of a series from the Indian Liberals archive, a project of the Centre for Civil Society. This essay is an excerpt taken from ‘Indian Libertarian’ magazine with the original title “Social Imagination and Revolution” published on 15 August 1963. The original version can be accessed here.