INDIAN SHIPPING

Summary

M. A. Master’s 1959 lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Forum of Free Enterprise in Bombay on 23 July 1959 and published as a booklet, is a polemical history of Indian shipping mounted in direct response to Jawaharlal Nehru’s pronouncements that the public sector would be the ‘basic, strategic, important and advancing sector’ of the economy. Master argues that the expansion of the State Trading Corporation and the proposed decentralisation of private enterprise are a betrayal of Mahatma Gandhi’s teaching that economic and political power must not concentrate in the hands of the State, and an injustice to an industry that had been built, sustained and brought to its present strength almost entirely by private Indian initiative under extraordinarily hostile conditions.

The bulk of the booklet retells the struggle of Indian shipowners against organised British shipping interests during the colonial period. Master traces the destruction of the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company under Chidambaram Pillai, the freight wars waged by the P & O Group against the Scindia Steam Navigation Company under Narottam Morarjee and Walchand Hirachand, and the techniques by which British lines used cargo boycotts, predatory pricing and political pressure to keep Indian ships from carrying any cargo at all. He recounts how Lord Inchcape tried to buy up Scindia outright, the rate-wars of 1933 forced by the renewal of the National Shipping Industry Agreement, and the legislative battles — Haji’s Bill for coastal reservation, the Mercantile Marine Committee, the training ship Dufferin, the Bengal Pilot Service — through which Indian legislators and shipowners painstakingly built a national merchant navy from nothing.

Master then carries the story into the early independence period: the failure of the 1947 London negotiations with British shipowners, the inauguration of the India/U.K.-Continental Line and the India–America route in 1947–48, the founding of new lines (Bharat Line, India Steamship Line) and the acquisition of 73 ships by private enterprise between 1946 and 1948. He notes that of Rs. 63.25 crores invested in shipping by the end of the First Plan period, private enterprise raised Rs. 40.72 crores from its own resources while the public-sector Shipping Corporation contributed Rs. 5.14 crores raised from no internal resources at all.

The rhetorical purpose is consistent: to convince readers that private enterprise has already ‘achieved’ what State capitalism is now claiming to deliver, and that any further encroachment on the field will, in Nehru’s own commerce minister C. H. Bhabha’s earlier words, make ‘the growth and development of our mercantile marine disappointingly slow.’ The booklet closes with an explicit appeal that private enterprise ‘deserves better appreciation, greater recognition and is entitled to all possible encouragement’ in building up a merchant navy for a great maritime country.

Key points

• Frames the lecture as a response to Nehru’s 1959 statements that the public sector will be ‘the basic, strategic, important and advancing sector,’ arguing this contradicts Gandhi’s view that State power must not be concentrated.

• Retells the destruction of the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company under Chidambaram Pillai and quotes Gandhi: ‘Indian shipping had to perish so that British shipping might flourish.’

• Documents British shipping techniques — denial of cargo, freight-wars, political pressure — used to drive Indian lines out of even their own coastal waters, citing the testimony of Sir Alfred Watson before the Joint Select Committee of Parliament.

• Centres the narrative on the Scindia Steam Navigation Company, Narottam Morarjee and Walchand Hirachand, including Lord Inchcape’s failed 1923 attempt to buy out the line and the rate-war following the 1933 National Shipping Industry Agreement.

• Treats the Mercantile Marine Committee, the training ship Dufferin, and the Indianisation of the Bengal Pilot Service and wireless operator cadre as achievements of Indian legislators and private enterprise, not the colonial government.

• Records the foundation of the Visakhapatnam Shipbuilding Yard by Walchand in 1941 (foundation-stone laid by Rajendra Prasad) and its withering once ‘private enterprise even on its own initiative’ had no effective Government support.

• Surveys post-independence developments — the failed 1947 London negotiations, the inauguration of the India/U.K.-Continental Line on 3 February 1948, the India–America Line, and the acquisition of 73 ships by private enterprise between 1946 and 1948.

• Marshals fiscal data to argue that of Rs. 63.25 crores invested in shipping by the end of the First Plan period private enterprise raised Rs. 40.72 crores from its own resources, while public-sector Shipping Corporation contributed Rs. 5.14 crores from no internal resources.

• Argues that the new 1956 policy of reserving ‘a sufficiently large number of these ships’ for the public sector is unjust given private enterprise’s record, echoing C. H. Bhabha’s 1947 warning that ignoring private enterprise would make mercantile-marine development ‘disappointingly slow.’