The Atlantic Report on the World Today: India

FOR India, the attainment of nationhood was at best only three quarters of a triumph. The splitting away of Pakistan disrupted the railway system and the balance between water flow in the rivers, irrigation, and the hydroelectric power net. It also upset the balance between exports and imports and the internal distribution of raw materials that were produced in Pakistan and were needed by the industries of India. Most disastrous of all, the partition of India and Pakistan was a successful defiance of the Gandhi-Nehru creed that the whole subcontinent of India could and should function as a federal state of people of diverse creeds languages, and cultures.

For Pakistan, on the other hand, the assertion of nationhood was a double triumph, combining the principles of national independence and religious separatism. The elation of Pakistan leaders is bolstered by their conviction that partition had not merely the consent but the blessing of Britain, and that consequently Pakistan has a mortgage on the continuing support of Britain. They are sure that friction with Russia will guarantee an Anglo-American policy of building a strong Moslem alliance in the Middle East, in which Pakistan will have an important place.

Like every other Moslem or predominantly Moslem state (except Indonesia), Pakistan in stressing religion as the main principle of political unity is in fact fighting a rear-guard action. In spite of community of religion, acute political differences already divide the Moslem states from one another. Even within individual states political differences are making it more and more difficult to maintain religious one-party structures as the framework of polities. The use o “Islam in danger" as a rallying cry for political unity is making inevitable the appearance of new political parties which will challenge the political authority of religion.

Idle men and old machine

Though talk of industrialization fills all the Indian newspapers, men returning from America with degrees in chemistry, engineering, and other industrial skills cannot even find employment, and drift into the ranks of the dissatisfied intelligentsia. Indians who have studied the sociological lessons of China are made especially uneasy by this phenomenon of the disillusioned men of modern training. In China just such men, when not employed or only futilely employed under the government of Chiang Kai-shek, were the cause of a critical weakness in the leadership of the would-be elite over the masses. When put to work and given the incentive of serving a nationalist cause, they became a great source of strength to the Chinese Communists.

At the out break of World War II, Indian industry was growing rapidly, but its rapid growth concealed an inner weakness. Modern capitalist investment was still a now thing to the Indian with savings; he had to be persuaded to invest in industry instead of in trade or usury. Industrialists, in order to attract new capital, had paid out their earnings in high dividends and did not set aside large enough reserves for replacement and modernization of machinery. On the heels of this bad managerial practice, the war years, during which replacement and proper maintenance were impossible, left India with nominally the most advanced industry in Asia outside of Japan and Manchuria, but with worn-out equipment.

The strongest Indian capital does not feel strong enough to face world competition unaided, but it thinks that if it can influence the government enough, it will it able to survive and advance. It therefore demands tariff protection and such safeguards as legal limits on the percentage of capital that foreigners may hold in an Indian enterprise.

Safeguarding American investment

American capital, on the other hand, sustained by comfortable profits at home, warns the Indians that they will not get the American investment they need on anything like the scale they want unless they offer such inducements as freedom to declare profits at rates regulated by private competition rather than by government policy, freedom to repatriate both profits and principal to the United States, and freedom for Americans to hold majority control in enterprises which, in American opinion, might not operate at maximum profit without the safeguard of majority control.

In this atmosphere, the prospects for a Point IV program are poor. Neither Americans nor Indians have done enough thinking about the kind of planning involved. On the American side, President Truman’s “bold new program” still gives economic priority to the idea of encouraging American capital to go abroad, rather than political priority to the need of having, as allies, states which are carrying out, with American aid but not under American control, the programs that they themselves want to carry out.

In the long run, a state that regards foreigners as profiteers who ought to be expropriated will not quarrel with Russia. A state whose principal political stake is a program of development desired by its own people and made possible in large part by American aid will, even without formal alliance, look to America as its chief ally.

On the Indian side, a grave weakness is the failure to coördinate adequately problems of rural rehabilitation and problems of industrialization. Too much cheap labor is part of the bad “climate" of Indian industry. It deprives the employer both of an incentive for investing in more efficient machinery and of an incentive for using at maximum man-hour efficiency the machinery he does have. The weakness will never be remedied without planning, which in the nature of things will have to be politically conceived planning, carried through with the support of public opinion.

An attempt to tackle the problem on anything like the scale necessary would startle India’s friends in America: but if the attempt is not made, there are two alternatives. Either India—and Pakistan too — will have to turn to aggression abroad, in order to cover up problems evaded at home, or the Communists, who are not afraid of the agrarian crisis, will take over as they did in China.

The Right and Left in lndia

Weltering in all these difficulties, it is not surprising that India is already being goaded by spearheads of both the Right and Left. The most spectacular spearhead of the Right is the RSSS, or Organization for National Service, from which sprang Gandhi’s assassin.

Militantly Hindu, it is a challenge to Nehru’s creed that political aims and religious affiliation should be kept separate. Recently allowed to operate in the open again, it drills its members in military formation, and its emphasis on obedience and the leadership principle has brought it support from important rightists who believe that it can be made a valuable instrument of social discipline. Its membership, however, is mainly urban, and it probably could not impose its power over all India.

Communists Woo the farmer

The Communists are active not only in great cities like Calcutta but in the villages. Following the current trend all over Asia, they encourage the farmer to believe that he can do something about his age-old miseries, and offer to show him how to organize, in order that they may win the objectives that are, in the first instance, the farmer’s own objectives.

The Indian Communists, however, are hampered by the fact that after Germany invaded Russia they urged Indian support of the British war effort. They thus became, for a time, the “favorite party" of the British, and have therefore been rated ever since, by most Indians, as less nationalistic than the Indian Congress of Gandhi and Nehru.

Later the Communists not only accepted the partition of India and Pakistan, but many of them accepted jobs in Pakistan, where, as good organizers, they helped to get the new state going; and this also weakened their popular appeal in India. All in all the Communists, though potentially formidable, will emerge as a real challenge only if other Indians make enough mistakes.

By far the most important deterrent to the spread of Communism, however, and also to the success of the rightist groups like the RSSS, is the fact that the freedom of India was won by Gandhi and his followers.

Patel and the middle class

It is significant that there is still a “revolutionary” momentum on the right in India, as well as on the left. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who is in charge of the crackdown on Communists and is responsible for easing the restraints on the rightist RSSS, is also the man who has clipped the social prerogatives, political powers, and economic revenues of the maharajas.

Patel’s dualism reveals the middle-class center of gravity of the Indian Right. The moneylenders, bankers, and industrialists whom he represents are willing, at times and for specific purposes, to ally themselves with the feudal power of the landholders; but they are not afraid of devouring their allies. They are determined to defend themselves against the Left, but they are also intent on expanding their wealth and power by taking over the revenues that once flowed to the princely rulers. This characteristic sets them apart from the Kuomintang in China and from the landholders who control Pakistan.

Nchru in control

Because there is still this continuing momentum on the right, India is not yet caught in a deadly squeeze between Right and Left. Though Nehru does not control as tightly organized a machine as Patel, he still holds the commanding heights of Indian politics. Outside the Congress, Nehru has a magical appeal to the people as a whole that deprives Patel, the Socialists, and the Communists alike of a decisive mass following. Inside the Congress, his most loyal followers are the Congress Left, broadly socialist in thinking, who, instead of joining the organized Socialists in open opposition, operate as a “New Deal” vanguard within the Congress.

Without Gandhi but with the support of the Congress Left in organized politics and the formidable loyalty of the unorganized masses, Nehru controls the balance of power.

Kashmir: the pivot

The fate of t his balance of power now depends on the Kashmir issue, which is not only an issue between India and Pakistan but a precipitant that will determine the character of domestic politics in India.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir, with a population over two-thirds Moslem, was ruled by a Dogra (Hindu) maharaja. The administration was a fantastically complicated feudalism, which drew off so much revenue that even businessmen were antifeudal in their outlook. In 1931 there appeared a political leader and organizer named Sheikh Abdullah. His lieutenants were businessmen, well educated and fairly wealthy. Being too few in numbers to have any future as an independent middle-class party, they went to the peasants with a program of abolition of feudal privilege, excessive rents, and usurious interest, and self-help through consumer and producer coöperatives.

First organized among Moslems, the movement later took in Hindus, and Sheikh Abdullah’s emphasis on politics without religion made him a noted man in India and in Kashmir.

Following partition Kashmir, bordering on both India and Pakistan, and having independent access to two foreign states, Afghanistan and China, had three alternatives: accession to India, accession to Pakistan, or complete independence. At this point Sheikh Abdullah made a declaration of principle: freedom first, from the rule of the maharaja, to be followed by a popular referendum to determine the future of the state.

However, Pakistan jumped the gun. Moslem extremists who had fled from Kashmir were armed and sent back. Since they could not count on mass risings for support, they were backed up by contingents of tribesmen from the Afghan frontier — men who in language and in social or economic contact had nothing in common with Kashmir. These raiders were transported across Pakistan territory in Pakistan army trucks, and were “salted” with Pakistan army officers. Finally, the Pakistan Army itself followed up the invasion.

The Maharaja of Kashmir, losing his nerve, declared his accession to India. His appeal for help was accepted on condition that the status of Kashmir should later be determined by the free vote of the people. The Indian Army then entered Kashmir. The situation is now frozen under a cease-fire agreement which leaves Pakistan with menacing footholds in Kashmir.

The UN will decide

The problem is before the United Nations. The Indian presentation of the case has been cloudy and legalistic. It has failed to stress the fact that India’s claim, even in legal formulation, is not a hard and fast claim to sovereignty but an assertion of the right to give help to people who have asked for it after being attacked.

The pressures in favor of an expedient settlement are enormous; but the ominous certainly is that an expedient settlement for the sake of “peace in our time” would strengthen, in Pakistan, the obscurantist religious state and weaken, in India, the position of Nehru as the heir of Gandhi. In both India and Pakistan the middle ground between extreme Right and extreme Left would be eaten away, and the chances would favor not democratic evolution but Communist revolution.