The Discovery of India

by Jawaharlal Nehru

Every vested interest came in the way of progressive change. A committee appointed by the United Provinces Government to inquire into labour conditions in the Cawnpore textile industry was treated by the employers (chiefly Europeans but including some Indians) with the greatest discourtesy, and many of the facts and figures demanded were refused.

‘Apart from personal animosities, officials in India with rare exceptions have been obsessed with the fear that trade unions, if allowed to develop, would foster mass consciousness; and with the political struggle in India periodically flaring up into movements like non-co-operation and civil disobedience, they have felt presumably that no risks should be taken in regard to the organization of the masses.’5

Governments lay down policy, legislatures pass laws; but the actual working out of this policy and the application of these laws depend ultimately on the services and the administrative personnel.

Among the higher members of the civil service, long accustomed to authoritarian methods and unchecked rule, there was a feeling that these ministers and legislators were intruders in a domain reserved for them. The old conception that they, the permanent services and especially the British element in them, were India and all others were unimportant appendages, died hard.

The Chinese are said to be great believers in ‘face’, and yet I doubt if any among them are so passionately attached to ‘face’ as the British in India. For the latter it is not only individual, racial, and national prestige; it is also intimately connected with their rule and vested interests.

Many of the communal (religious) riots that took place were due to a variety of causes, but the magistrates and the police were certainly not always free from guilt. Experience showed that a quick and efficient handling of the situation put an end to the trouble. What we saw repeatedly was an astonishing slackness and a deliberate evasion of duty. It became obvious that the objective was to discredit the Congress governments.

The civil service had a reputation, chiefly self-propagated, for efficiency. But it became evident that outside the narrow sphere of work to which they had been accustomed, they were helpless and incompetent. They had no training to function democratically and could not gain the goodwill and co-operation of the people, whom they both feared and despised; they had no conception of big and fast-moving schemes of social progress and could only hamper them by their red-tape and lack of imagination. Apart from certain individuals, this applied to both British and Indian members of the higher services. It was extraordinary how unfitted they were for the new tasks that faced them.

India, the land of tradition, thus offered a strange picture of reversal of roles. The British, who had come here as representatives of a dynamic society, were now the chief upholders of a static, unchanging tradition; among the Indians there were many who represented the new dynamic order and were eager for change, change not only political but also social and economic.

But whatever our failings might be, it seemed obvious to us that the permanent services here were totally incapable of leading India in any progressive direction. The very qualities they possessed made them unhelpful, for the qualities necessary in a police state are utterly different from those required in a progressive democratic community.

During the last quarter of a century or more I have not written a single letter, which has been posted in India, either to an Indian or a foreign address, without realizing that it would be seen, and possibly copied, by some secret service censor. Nor have I spoken on the telephone without remembering that my conversation was likely to be tapped.

The Frontier Province, under Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s leadership, stood firmly by the side of the National Congress, so also did a large number of the politically conscious middle-class Muslims elsewhere.

But on two fundamental questions the Congress stood firm: national unity and democracy. These were the foundations on which it had been founded and its very growth for half a century had emphasized these.

The British Government had also stood in the past, in theory at least, for Indian unity and democracy. It took pride in the fact that its rule had brought about the political unity of India, even though that unity was one of common subjection. It told us further that it was training us in the methods and processes of democracy. But curiously enough its policy has directly led to the denial of both unity and democracy.

I had made a close study of nazi methods of propaganda since Hitler’s rise to power and I was astonished to find something very similar taking place in India.

But it was not a question of a particular grievance which could be remedied, or a reasonable consideration of any matter. There was a regular campaign on the part of members or sympathisers of the Muslim League to make the Muslim masses believe that something terrible was happening and that the Congress was to blame. What that terrible thing was nobody seemed to know. But surely there must be something behind all this shouting and cursing, if not here then elsewhere. During by-elections the cry raised was ‘Islam in danger’ and voters were asked to take their oaths on the holy book to vote for the Muslim League candidate.

The real difficulty thus far had been the extreme political and social backwardness of the Muslims which made them liable to exploitation by reactionary leaders.

Since British rule came to India, Muslims have produced few outstanding figures of the modern type. They have produced some remarkable men but, as a rule, these represented the continuation of the old culture and tradition and did not easily fit in with modern developments.

Mr Jinnah was a different type. He was able, tenacious, and not open to the lure of office, which had been such a failing of so many others. His position in the Muslim League, therefore, became unique and he was able to command the respect which was denied to many others prominent in the League. Unfortunately his tenacity prevented him from opening his mind to any new ideas, and his unquestioned hold on his own organization made him intolerant both of his own dissidents and of other organizations. He became the Muslim League.

Mr Jinnah’s demand was based on a new theory he had recently propounded—that India consisted of two nations, Hindu and Muslim. Why only two I do not know, for if nationality was based on religion, then there were many nations in India. Of two brothers one may be a Hindu, another a Muslim; they would belong to two different nations. These two nations existed in varying proportions in most of the villages of India. They were nations which had no boundaries; they overlapped. A Bengali Muslim and a Bengali Hindu living together, speaking the same language, and having much the same traditions and customs, belonged to different nations.

What a nation is it is difficult to define. Possibly the essential characteristic of national consciousness is a sense of belonging together and of together facing the rest of mankind.

From Mr Jinnah’s two-nation theory developed the conception of Pakistan, or splitting up of India. That, of course, did not solve the problem of the ‘two nations’ for they were all over the place. But that gave body to a metaphysical conception. This again gave rise to a passionate reaction among many in favour of the unity of India. Ordinarily national unity is taken for granted. Only when it is challenged or attacked, or attempts are made to disrupt it, is unity really appreciated, and a positive reaction to maintain it takes place. Thus sometimes attempts at disruption actually help to weld that unity.

The real conflict had, therefore, nothing to do with religion, though religion often masked the issue, but was essentially between those who stood for a nationalist—democratic—socially revolutionary policy and those who were concerned with preserving the relics of a feudal regime.

Constituted as we were, not only in our Committee but in the larger field of India, we could not then plan for socialism as such. Yet it became clear to me that our plan, as it developed, was inevitably leading us towards establishing some of the fundamentals of the socialist structure. It was limiting the acquisitive factor in society, removing many of the barriers to growth, and thus leading to a rapidly expanding social structure. It was based on planning for the benefit of the common man, raising his standards greatly, giving him opportunities of growth, and releasing an enormous amount of latent talent and capacity.

Planning, though inevitably bringing about a great deal of control and co-ordination and interfering in some measure with individual freedom, would, as a matter of fact, in the context of India today, lead to a vast increase of freedom. We have very little freedom to lose. We have only to gain freedom. If we adhered to the democratic state structure and encouraged co-operative enterprises, many of the dangers of regimentation and concentration of power might be avoided.

The kind of medium-scale industries that were being started in India, under the prevailing economic system, resulted not in absorbing labour, but in creating more unemployment. While capital accumulated at one end, poverty and unemployment increased at the other. Under a different system, with a stress on big-scale industries absorbing labour, and with planned development this might well have been avoided.

If immediate relief was to be given to the vast numbers of the unemployed and partially employed, if the rot that was spreading throughout India and paralysing the masses was to be stopped, if the villagers’ standards were to be raised, however little en masse, if they were to be taught self-reliance instead of waiting helplessly like derelicts for relief from others, if all this was to be done without much capital, then there seemed no other way.

Foolish comparisons are made between manpower and machine-power; of course a big machine can do the work of a thousand or ten thousand persons. But if those ten thousand sit idly by or starve, the introduction of the machine is not a social gain, except in the long perspective which envisages a change in social conditions.

I am all for tractors and big machinery, and I am convinced that the rapid industrialization of India is essential to relieve the pressure on land, to combat poverty and raise standards of living, for defence and a variety of other purposes. But I am equally convinced that the most careful planning and adjustment are necessary if we are to reap the full benefit of industrialization and avoid many of its dangers. This planning is necessary today in all countries of arrested growth, like China and India, which have strong traditions of their own.

The British had created a new caste or class in India, the English-educated class, which lived in a world of its own, cut off from the mass of the population, and looked always, even when protesting, towards its rulers. Gandhi bridged that gap to some extent and forced it to turn its head and look towards its own people.

‘The whole of this programme will be a structure on sand if it is not built on the solid foundation of economic equality.’

Is it possible to have two entirely different kinds of economy in a country—one based on the big machine and industrialization, and the other mainly on cottage industries? This is hardly conceivable, for one must overcome the other, and there can be little doubt that the big machine will triumph unless it is forcibly prevented from doing so. Thus it is not a mere question of adjustment of the two forms of production and economy.

The evils of unrestricted and unplanned industrialization are well recognized today. Whether these evils are necessary concomitants of big industry, or derived from the social and economic structure behind it, is another matter. If the economic structure is primarily responsible for them, then surely we should set about changing that structure, instead of blaming the inevitable and desirable development in technique.

There is something very wonderful about the high achievements of science and modern technology (which no doubt will be bettered in the near future), in the superb ingenuity of scientific instruments, in the amazingly delicate and yet powerful machines, in all that has flowed from the adventurous inquiries of science and its applications, in the glimpses into the fascinating workshop and processes of nature, in the fine sweep of science, through its myriad workers, in the realms of thought and practice, and, above all, in the fact that all this has come out of the mind of man.

The three fundamental requirements of India, if she is to develop industrially and otherwise, are a heavy engineering and machine-making industry, scientific research institutes, and electric power. These must be the foundations of all planning, and the national planning committee laid the greatest emphasis on them.

But imperative as the needs of the war situation were, the future needs of British industry were always kept in view, and it was considered undesirable to develop any industries in India which might compete with British industries in the postwar years. This was no secret policy; public expression was given to it in British journals, and there was continuous reference to it and protests against it in India.

The burden of the war and of the official policy pursued in its connection fell on scores of millions in India who were least capable of shouldering it, and crushed out of existence vast numbers of people who died by the cruellest of deaths—slow starvation.

The world situation seemed to be drifting towards a major conflict, with England and France as heads of a European group of nations and Soviet Russia associated with some eastern nations. The United States of America held aloof from both these groups; their intense dislike of communism kept them away from Russia, and their distrust of British policy and competition with British finance and industry, preventing them from associating themselves with the British group. Over and above these considerations was the isolationist sentiment of America and the fear of being embroiled in European quarrels.

War between England and Germany became probable, and if this broke out what then would our policy be? How would we reconcile the two dominating trends of our policy—opposition to British imperialism and opposition to fascism and nazism? How would we bring in line our nationalism and our internationalism?

In a contest between nationalism and internationalism, nationalism was bound to win. That had happened in every country and in every crisis; in a country under foreign domination, with bitter memories of continuous struggle and suffering, that was an inevitable and unavoidable consequence.

A democracy cannot easily jump into war without preparing its people and gaining their co-operation. Even an authoritarian state has to prepare the ground. But whatever the reason or justification may be, it is clear that whenever a crisis has occurred, national considerations, or what were considered to be such, have been paramount and all others, which did not fit in with them, have been swept away.

Individuals and small groups may become internationally minded and may even be prepared to sacrifice personal and immediate national interests for a larger cause, but not so nations. It is only when international interests are believed to be in line with national interests that they arouse enthusiasm.

Internationalism can indeed only develop in a free country, for all the thought and energy of a subject country are directed towards the achievement of its own freedom. That subject condition is like a cancerous growth inside the body, which not only prevents any limb from becoming healthy but is a constant irritant to the mind and colours all thought and action. Conflict is inherent in it and such conflict leads to a concentration of thought on it and prevents a consideration of wider issues.

When we talked of the independence of India it was not in terms of isolation. We realized, perhaps more than many other countries, that the old type of complete national independence was doomed, and there must be a new era of world co-operation. We made it repeatedly clear, therefore, that we were perfectly agreeable to limit that independence, in common with other nations, within some international framework. That framework should preferably cover the world or as large a part of it as possible, or be regional.

It is surprising how internationally minded we grew in spite of our intense nationalism. No other nationalist movement of a subject country came anywhere near this, and the general tendency in such other countries was to keep clear of international commitments.

The position of these Congress provincial Governments was becoming increasingly difficult, and strong sections of public opinion were excited and apprehensive. They feared that the British Government would act as it had done a quarter of a century earlier in 1914, impose the war on India, ignoring the provincial Governments and public opinion and everything that had happened during this period, and make the war a cloak for suppressing such limited freedom as India had obtained and exploiting her resources without check.

War was declared in Europe and immediately the Viceroy of India announced that India was also at war. One man, and he a foreigner and a representative of a hated system, could plunge four hundred millions of human beings into war without the slightest reference to them. There was something fundamentally wrong and rotten in a system under which the fate of these millions could be decided in this way.

The crisis that has overtaken Europe is not of Europe only but of humanity, and will not pass like other crises or wars, leaving the essential structure of the present-day world intact. It is likely to re-fashion the world for good or ill, politically, socially, and economically. This crisis is the inevitable consequence of the social and political conflicts and contradictions which have grown alarmingly since the last Great War, and it will not be finally resolved till these conflicts and contradictions are removed and a new equilibrium established.

The change-over to autocratic and one-man rule in eight of the provinces was not a mere substitution of the people at the top, such as a change in ministries might indicate. It was a radical and organic change affecting the whole spirit, policy, and methods of the entire state organization.

The situation in the country as a whole, and especially in the many provinces where one-man rule now flourished, became progressively more tense. Individual Congressmen were sent to prison for their normal activities; the peasantry cried loudly for relief from the renewed oppression of petty officials and police, who sought favour from their superiors by making all manner of exactions in the name of the war.

India was the empire; it was her possession and exploitation that gave glory and strength to England and made her a great power. Mr Churchill could not conceive of England except as the head and possessor of a vast empire, and so he could not conceive of India being free.