Gandhi once wrote, “Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen and ask yourself if the step you are contemplating is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain by it?” (28) In the following chapters there will be further elaboration of the idea of a paradigm shift which shifts not only in favor of willingness to evaluate one’s actions by the criterion Gandhi suggests in the lines just quoted, and shifts not only in favor of right means following Gandhi’s precept that means become ends, but also shifts the framework of scientific thinking about social problems. I have suggested that in principle Gandhi’s outsider’s critique of modernity opens the way to thinking that is more rational because it conceives of more alternatives to choose among. I plan to discuss several ways to make this general idea specific and practical.

 

Jawaharlal Nehru served for 17 years (1947-1964) as prime minister of India. His top priority objective was to end the poverty of India’s masses. He did not succeed. There was modest industrial growth. There were many plans and programs designed to end poverty that failed to do so. Agricultural production fell from 63.3 million metric tons of rice, wheat, and other food grains in 1954 to 60.9 million metric tons in 1956 to 58.3 million tons in 1958, while population increased. After 1958 there was a temporary improvement, but by the mid 1960s per capita availability of foodgrains had fallen back to the levels of the mid 1950s. In 1964, the year Nehru died, government programs to stave off famine depended on importing 7.5 million metric tons of grain made available to India by the United States under Public Law 480, a figure that went up to 10.5 million metric tons the following year. (29)

Some say (I) that Nehru failed because he was too capitalist. His economic plans amounted to subsidies for the rich by giving them protection from foreign competition, exclusive permits, and cushy jobs in the public sector. Labor remained as oppressed as ever. His attempts to empower the rural poor and to redistribute land achieved little and left most of the poor and landless worse off than they had been before. (II) Others say that Nehru was too socialist. The smuggler, the blackmarketeer and the tax-evader were produced by statist policies contrary to human nature and to the laws of economics. Useful work was not rewarded, while spending time and money currying favor with politicians was. (III) Some say he was too Gandhian. He threw money at community development, village uplift, and cottage industry schemes that should have gone to progressive industrialists and farmers who took full advantage of modern technology. Many other hypotheses concerning Nehru’s failure have been mooted, some of which will be mentioned in later chapters, where, also, the tension between Gandhi as saint and Gandhi as lawyer, which is now rumbling ominously in the depths of the subtext, will appear on the surface as an explicit theme. The next chapter will consider the relationship of Gandhi’s ideas to those of Jayaprakash Narayan, who in the first days of Nehru’s tenure as Prime Minister held the first of the three hypotheses mentioned here.