West-educated intellectuals foolishly kept commerce out of the pre-independence nationalist discourse
There was much debate in Britain during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s on what kind of independence India would have. Given the fact that many of the Indian political elite like Subhash Chandra Bose, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and others had been educated in the UK, they had their British intellectual moorings.
The Independent liberal Party of the UK, the left-oriented, independent thinkers like Fenner Brockway and George lansbury wondered whether it would be true independence. Put simply, the enquiry was whether independence would mean only handing over of governance from the white rulers to brown rulers. The idea was to question the meaning of this kind of independence and whether it was worth it.
Interestingly, the business and industry component, which is such a critical part of a nation’s life, did not figure in the dialogue. There was no business leader in any of the political parties working for the independence of India. There were certainly no thought leaders with this kind of orientation. The houses of the Birlas and the Dalmias, while providing some support to the Mahatma, were not in the main stream of agitation for independence. The Tatas were a major source of national pride, with their iron and steel company, but they were largely apolitical.
During the Round Table Conferences of the 1930s, the Cripps Mission and even the Cabinet Mission, only political devolution and the possible structure of governance was discussed. How and what form would be best suited for agriculture, industry or commerce were not deemed to be subjects worthy of thought. The Mahatma was the only thinker — whether we like his thoughts or not is a separate issue — who had something to say on these issues.
The domination of Western intellectual thoughts were so overwhelming on some of the key personalities of the independence movement that they did not even talk of developmental issues of any indigenous variety.
Amazingly, the Mahatma’s return to India and his political turning point, the satyagraha campiagn in Champaran, was rooted in the business and economy of the region: Namely, the indigo plantation. It is another matter that a few years down the line, it lost its sheen. Cotton production — a basic input to the efforts in the Indian textile sector — in an era when the emphasis was on khadi, received no concerted attention at all.
Predictably, in the post-independence period, business and industry took considerable time to occupy their legitimate place. Even when they did, it was a strangely in a Western mould, and of a Soviet variety. The indigenous cottage, small and medium-scale industry, for a large part of the Nehruvian era, were not even considered fit subjects of national discourse.
The Congress cult had a point in talking about the core industries but there were clearly large gaps. The purpose of creating massive industrial complexes of steel, heavy electrical /engineering did not have an upstream-downstream connectivity. Punctuated as this investment was with wars of 1948-1949, 1962, 1965, 1971-1972 and 1999, expenditure on defense sapped the funding for industry and commerce. Small-scale industries continued to be understood even less.
S Radhakrishnan was among the first leaders to talk of the employment potential of small scale industries but his understanding of economic theory did not go far enough. Nehru understood better, to a limited extent, about developing some cottages industries around Naini. Intellectually rooted in Harrow and Cambridge, emotionally linked to Kashmir and brought up partly in Allahabad, this well projected all India personality understood very little of the bamboo-based livelihoods of the North-East or the horticulture based livelihoods of the Nilgiri Hills. Perhaps to expect this of a person who was more interested in making friends in China, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the US, than visiting Bhatinda or Kraikudi, was perhaps a bit much.
The long and short of it is that gradually thinkers and activists began to understand and feel this aberration of Indian development. The last two to three decades have seen some significant transition. There is now a need to root Indian developmental patterns, truly, in the soil. Understanding production traditions and heritage is critical in that direction.