Forty-Three Years of Independence

Summary

Delivered as the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge on 7 November 1990 and published by the Forum of Free Enterprise, Nani A. Palkhivala’s lecture is a stocktaking of India at forty-three years of independence: an accounting that begins with what the republic inherited and ends with what it has squandered. He opens by celebrating the survival of Indian democracy as the central miracle of the post-war era, naming three inestimable advantages with which the republic began — a five-thousand-year civilisation, the unification effected by British rule, and a ‘sublime’ Constitution that embeds the substance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Constitution, he stresses, never enshrined socialism; on the contrary, its Directive Principles rule out state ownership, ‘the Monolithic State… which is the hallmark of communism, euphemistically called socialism.’

The second movement of the lecture is an indictment of what successive governments did with that inheritance. Palkhivala argues that India ‘respected the shells of socialism — state control and state ownership — while the kernel, the spirit of social justice, was left no chance of coming to life,’ building 231 Union and 636 State public-sector enterprises that became ‘black holes’ and ‘money guzzlers.’ Drawing on The Economist’s January 1987 verdict that Indian socialism is a fraud — transferring wealth not from the rich to the poor but from the honest rich to the dishonest rich — he traces the steel claws of the permit-licence-quota raj, the torrential bureaucracy that wastes millions of man-hours, and the failure to invest in education, family planning, nutrition, and public health. The Budget of 1985 was, in his telling, an epoch-making break with this ‘economic theology,’ but its liberalising philosophy was sabotaged by a top-heavy bureaucracy, socialist politicians, and rent-seeking businessmen.

The lecture’s later sections diagnose the consequences — India has 15 per cent of the world’s population but 1.5 per cent of its income; its share of world exports has fallen from 2.2 per cent in 1950 to 0.45 per cent; Hong Kong’s economy is twice India’s — and then enumerate the moral pathologies: corruption, indiscipline, mobocracy, the bandh as the country’s contribution to sociology, and divisiveness as ‘the AIDS of India.’ Palkhivala closes on a note of conditional hope: India’s vitality is real, foreign investment in India is investment in democracy, and the country has a record of producing leaders ‘in the darkest hour’ — invoking Mahatma Gandhi as the exemplar who ‘made us realize the profound truth that single-minded pursuit of money impoverishes the mind, shrivels the imagination, and desiccates the heart.‘

Key points

• Frames the lecture as Nehru Memorial Lecture (Cambridge, 7 Nov 1990) reviewing forty-three years of Indian independence — survival of democracy across 840 million people is the central achievement.

• Names three ‘inestimable advantages’ India started with: a 5000-year civilisation, British-era unification into a single political entity, and a ‘sublime’ Constitution that anticipated the UDHR’s Fundamental Rights.

• Argues that ‘socialism’ is alien to the original Constitution — the Directive Principles rule out the ‘Monolithic State’ of state ownership.

• Indicts the public sector (231 Union + 636 State enterprises) as ‘black holes’ and ‘money guzzlers’ and laments that the global wave of privatisation has ‘turned aside in its course and passed India by.’

• Coins the diagnostic that India suffers from ‘too much government and too little administration; too many laws and too little justice; too many public servants and too little public service’ under the permit-licence-quota raj.

• Identifies the 1985 Budget as ‘epoch-making’ — abolishing estate duty, slashing wealth-tax to 2% and personal income-tax to 50% — but argues its liberalising mood was sabotaged by bureaucracy, socialist politicians, and rent-seeking businessmen.

• Documents the human cost: per-capita income did not even double in four decades; India fell from sixteenth (1950) to forty-third in world export rankings; 30+ million on Employment Exchanges; two-thirds of Indians and four-fifths of women illiterate.

• Closes on conditional hope — divisiveness is ‘the AIDS of India’ and moral decay is severe, but India’s vitality, democratic credentials, and Gandhian capacity to produce leaders in dark hours justify long-term confidence.