- Political Communication-Part IV
By S.Narendra
Former Information Adviser to PM, Principal Information Officer
to Government and Spokesperson
The
socio-economic agenda of the political leadership from 1952, when the first
five-year plan was launched, until the economic reforms of 1991 was
articulated in the Plans. Planning and five-year plans were considered as
something like a magic wand for delivering the dreams of millions of Indians.
And, thus began the halcyon days for development communication, serving as
the oxygen of political communication…….and official propaganda. Read on the
4th Installment.
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| Nehru - the brain behind Five-Year Pans that shaped dearly days of Independent India's economic development |
It
began as an era of unimaginable scarcity and deprivation. Rationing of food,
fuel, firewood, cloth and other essential commodities continued for several
years after independence. As an eight-year-old boy, I remember, I had to stand
in a queue for collecting mere 6 to 8 pieces of firewood. That was the weekly
quota! My four older siblings were detailed at other queues for basic items
like rice, sugar, wheat (a rare commodity), and cloth. On many days, after
waiting for hours in the line, we would return empty handed, as the ration shop
was short of supplies. Poverty was something that was shared by the majority of
people. The advent of freedom and the promise of INC during the freedom
movement that it would address poverty issues on a priority had kindled a faint
hope among the people.
Agriculture,
though of subsistence kind, dominated the economy. Overcoming scarcities,
especially of food (the foodgrain output was less than 50 million tonnes) was a
political priority as well. Congress as a national movement had committed
itself to abolish Zamindari and now time had come for redeeming that commitment.
While public pronouncements on honouring this commitment were sweet music to
the landless and the farm tenants, the party had to contend with behind-the-scene
opposition from its leaders and legislators. According to studies, nearly 12%
of them were landlords. The new Constitution had included private property ownership
right as a Fundamental Right.
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| Bhakra-Nangal Dam |
A
British government report in the early part of 20th century had
famously said that India’s agriculture was a gamble in monsoons. And, the new government’s focus was on making
farming less dependent on rains by building big irrigation projects. The core
economic content of political communication in the initial days of Independence
was naturally was on growing more food. After the famine of 1940s, the
predecessor British government had launched a low key grow more food campaign and it ended up only
as posters exhorting farmers to grow
more food. The campaign got subsumed and
imbued with new energy in the first five-year Plan the focus of which was on
improving agriculture. A large share of the
first five-year Plan of over Rs 2000 crore went to fund the grow more
food campaign and multi-purpose irrigation projects.
Radio Rice Revolution:
The policy makers were greatly impressed by the American Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that had
harnessed the Colorado river for greening the arid western America. This model
was adopted lock, stock and barrel by India. The political communication went lyrical
while presenting this government initiative. Prime Minister Nehru, who opened
the sluice gates of 700-feet tall Bhakra dam in Punjab in 1954 called it ‘the
new temple (s) of India’. According to newspaper accounts of the time, people
lined up for miles along the canals branching out of the dam to witness the
Sutlej river water entering their area. Many more such projects such as the Tungabhandra,
Nagarjuna Sagar, Damodar, Hirakud laid the foundation for the in the ‘green revolution’, catapulting India
on to the way to food self–sufficiency. But it took more than a decade for this
‘green revolution’ to come on stream.
The
communication saga surrounding India’s farm revolution, especially the ‘green
revolution ‘has spawned thousands of Ph.Ds in the US and India. The political
leadership that spearheaded this movement showed an extraordinary vision that
resonated among the farming community. A notable feature of this political
communication was that it was sans party politics. This effort also created a
massive country-wide machinery including innovative communication channels
reaching out to the villages. One of the AIR initiatives in this field -RRF or
Radio Rural Forum - has donned the folk-lore of development communication. The
illiterate farmers who were taught by participatory radio programmes to grow a
high yielding rice (IR-8) associated it so much with the radio, they termed
it ‘Radio Rice’. I was a very, very
small part of this farm revolution machinery when I started my career. I had the privilege of writing a series of
feature articles on the green revolution that was taking place in the Kosi
river command area in Bihar.
Planning
as an instrument of national development was, however, embraced by the Indian
national Congress in as early as 1938, and Jawaharlal Nehru had headed the
party’s committee on Planning. And, the National Planning commission was set up
very soon after India became a Republic in 1950 and the first five-year plan
was rolled out in 1951. Its first chairman was PM Nehru himself, who was also
its foremost spokesman. The 1952 general elections was the first poll campaign
in which INC showcased many of the five-year plan programmes. The party
manifesto declared: “it is Not possible to pursue a policy of laissez –faire in
industry....it is incompatible with any planning. It has long been Congress
policy that basic industries should be owned or controlled by the State...State
trading should be undertaken...A large field is left for private enterprise... Thus,
the economy will have public sector as well as a private sector’.
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| Tungabhadra Project |
The
concept of this mixed economy progressed further for addressing the prevailing
wide income disparities. In 1955, the All India Congress
Committee session held at Avadi decisively moved for controlling the commanding
heights of the economy. Its resolution said: “In order to realise the object of
the Congress,...to further the objective of the Preamble (of the Constitution
of India), and Directive Principles of State Policy ...Planning should take place
with a view to establishing a socialist pattern of society, where the principal
means of production are under social ownership or control, production is
progressively speeded up and there is equitable distribution of national
wealth’.
The
IDRA or Industrial Development and Regulation Act (1951) had already
anticipated such a political stance.
On the
political front, the party Resolution not only reflected Prime Minister Nehru’s own economic thinking
but it was also a response to the criticism by stalwarts like Acharya
Kripalani, Narendra Dev and Jayaprakash Narayan that the Congress was not
sufficiently socialistic. These persons had left the Congress and formed new
political parties. In fact, there was some discussion within the party at this
stage whether farm land should be owned by communities but it did not go
further. The Avadi session was a watershed moment in India’s economic history
and decisively influenced the later official industrial policy.
A
year later, the II five year plan, known as the Mahalonabis Plan- was unveiled.
(Per Wikipedia, The Feldman–Mahalanobis
model is a Neo-Marxist model of economic development, created independently by
Soviet economist G. A. Feldman in 1928, and Indian statistician Prasanta
Chandra Mahalanobis in 1953. Mahalanobis became essentially the key economist
of India's Second Five Year Plan, becoming subject to much of India's most
dramatic economic debates.)
The
Plan fully embraced the Avadi philosophy, with the government getting into
running of big heavy industry enterprises such as steel. The political
communication that emanated was somewhat jingoistic in the sense that India would
build some of the world’s ‘biggest’, world’s ‘first’, ‘largest’ projects. While
the policy of import substitution, self-sufficiency, had not yet appeared in
political parlance, there was a definite
stress on ‘self-reliance’. This was also the period when Nehru had given
his famous call for inculcating ‘a scientific temper’ among the people and
had laid the ground for setting up
various institutions for scientific research and higher education like CSIR,
Atomic research, IITs and others. But India had not closed its doors to foreign
technology, expertise and enterprise. Media reports about projects were highly
appreciative accounts of government policies. There was a spirit of ‘we can do
it’ in the air and the impact of this spirit can be felt even to this day.
Foreign Media watch on India:
From the II Plan onwards, the Planning Commission became almost a supra-body
that overshadowed the cabinet. The Plan document itself with its grandiose schemes
was something like a post-dated cheque. It was an invaluable companion of
government publicists. The newspapers gave prominent coverage to announcements
of Plan schemes and the Plan document served as a great source for news stories
spun out by economic journalists, especially on days when the news fall was thin.
A largely illiterate population (85%)
adopting the democracy based on universal franchise had excited the western
developed countries and their media. No such example existed in political
history. A poverty-ridden India’s experiment to push planned development in a
federal democracy was another factor that came to be watched with keen
interest. The compulsions of World War II had made the western capitalist
countries also to accord a dominant role for the state in running the economy.
Leading captains of Indian industry had come out with their own Plan document
known as the Bombay Plan that had strongly argued for the state to take a lead
in economic development, and had visualised a supplementary role for the
private sector. And, therefore, the Indian
government declaring its intention through Planning to control and manage the
economy for the greatest good of the greatest numbers was not contested either
at home or abroad. The sheen of freedom movement had not left the Indian
national Congress and the credibility of the prime minister was unquestioned.
He spoke for the government and the nation on almost on all matters and
dissenters were seen as an aberration.
One had to wait until 1959 for major
political dissent on economic policy to surface in the form of the Swatantra
party founded by C.Rajagopalachari, a close associate of Gandhi and Nehru.
Minoo Masani had set up his Forum of Free Enterpise. The editor of Current
weekly, D.F.Karaka was a trenchant critic of Nehru and had begun his free
enterprise crusade. Around this time, there was also some disquiet on on
Nehru’s foreign policy, especially with regard to China and its actions in
Tibet. The first biggest scam of independent India -Mundhra Scandal- was coming
to light. But let me not jump into another period.
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| The author sunarendra@gmail.com |
Returning
to 1950s, a remarkable facet of political communication on economic development
in the early years of independence was that the political leaders who had
suffered incarceration at the hands of the colonial power, did not hark back to
the economic havoc brought upon India by the colonial masters. This was in
stark contrast to the content of political communication on the same theme that
took place in the recent past. Political parties at
the centre and the states come to power by blaming the predecessor regime.
When
several Afro-Asian countries gained independence from the colonial masters,
very soon after India became free, the leadership of those countries kept
blaming the predecessor regimes for their under-development and used this theme
as an excuse for them not making economic progress. But Indian leadership, in
contrast, was more far- sighted and kept focus on what it could do to remedy
the aborted economic development of India under foreign rule. (To be continued)
