[T]he fact-respecting, secular historian in India can bring his or her reasoning to the public, but there is no guarantee that public will bring their attention. Given their expertise, it is only understandable that historians in India should seek a role in adjudicating disputes about the past in India. But what prevents them from realizing this aspiration?

– Dipesh Chakrabarty¹

 

[In a letter to Nehru in July 1963] I suggested that in our schools and colleges there should be a regular course on the freedom struggle so that the new generation would learn what it had all been about in a connected and coherent fashion. I wondered why it was that so many of the great events, themes and debates of those days remained more or less terra incognita to those who were born post-1947… His reply came promptly. He agreed that not enough had been done…

– Mohit Sen²

 

SOON after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Bush sought supremacy for the United States in the Middle East, and implicitly in the rest of the world too, with war on Iraq. Interestingly, this development registered with most people outside the Middle East not as American hegemony per se but first of all, as more freely available information. In India, as in many neighbouring countries, the Cold War’s end came with proliferating private satellite dishes, granted de facto permission despite the official state monopoly on broadcasting, because of the emergency situation created by the Gulf War, and the amassing of refugees from Kuwait. Satellite television, about ten years old in the region, suddenly had a booming international market for news.

The launching of Middle Eastern conflict ensued with the American sense that victory in the Cold War was theirs. Ironically it was through a Soviet satellite that CNN’s Middle East transmissions conveyed the breaking news of the Gulf War.³ In fact as late as 1989, Soviet satellites were important enough for the Head of Strategic Planning in the United States-led Intelsat to suggest cooperation with Intersputnik, the Soviet satellite system.⁴

 

It should be no surprise that infrastructure produced during the Cold War remained relevant thereafter. The issue is rather how we perceive it. If history is a tale told by the victor, it follows that the Soviet presence that arguably shaped much of the twentieth century history, is an uncomfortable one in retrospect. For countries of the Global South the Soviet help they received by way of soft loans, barter agreements, and aid for heavy industry, is like a guilty secret or an explanation for their problems: they should have embraced the market right away! This ignores at least two facts. First, that without aid, domestic capital was insufficient for development, and second, that without superpower competition, little or no aid would have been forthcoming.

The ideological opposition between capitalism and communism may have been unyielding, but East and West Blocs both relied on infrastructures and institutions that bore similarities. This is clearest in Western Europe, where socialism became influential. There, progressive tax regimes funded social welfare programmes to reduce inequality sharply. Today, amidst a steep global rise in inequality since 1980, when the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions began, Europe still has the least increase in inequality by far.⁵

However, it was not Europe but the United States that set the dominant narrative of the Cold War, hailing capitalism’s evolution as reflecting inherent virtues that were the inverse of communism. Close reflection might have compelled the acknowledgment that competition with communism shaped the post-war trajectory of capitalism, but victory was the goal. Wisdom would follow, but it could wait. We are still waiting, one might say.

 

It is only recently that revisionist accounts have begun to transcend the parochial focus of Cold War historiography on Europe and the United States, and drawn attention to the global scope of the Cold War. The most important aspects of the Cold War, one historian has influentially argued, ‘were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centred, but connected to political and social developments in the Third World.’⁶

However, for the majority of the world’s population, the Cold War would have appeared at best as an affair for their leaders or their foreign ministry, and as secondary to the main concern, of national development. This was a view reinforced by historians, whose interest was either absorbed by the conflict between superpower alliances and their rival systems, or by questions centred on individual nations. In this sense cosmopolitanism of the post-war era was perceptible mainly from an elite perspective, for example via the formation of international NGOs such as the IMF, the World Bank and the U.N. For most of the world it was the dawn of nationalism.

In this context of unresolved rivalry between alternative forms of modernity, if superpowers chose to publicize the power they wielded, they could only diminish their allies. As such, to advertise would be counterproductive; tact was of the essence. In other words, while nations claimed to be sovereign, they glossed over the flows of foreign aid and expertise enabling postcolonial development, and donor countries were not aggressive in demanding credit before foreign nationals. This was a lesson Americans had learned when implementing the Marshall Plan in post-war Europe.

 

The U.S. experience with the Marshall Plan had shown that aid identifying the donor could generate resentment and fuel hostile propaganda. In any case Americans were unsure what their intellectual response to Communism, their principal enemy, could be. Hence their decision to focus on tangible outcomes and to avoid argument. ‘Ours in a new sense must be a propaganda of the deed, of visible accomplishments’, argued Paul Hoffman, head of the Economic Cooperation Administration implementing the Marshall Plan.⁷ At the same time, Americans travelling abroad were reassured that the $13b aid package to Western Europe was not a gift, but a way to safeguard national interests: ‘It’s expensive and burdensome but fire insurance in a high-risk area is never cheap.’⁸

Different arguments for different constituencies, within a single planet whose fate was suddenly in question due to superpower rivalry. Alongside polarization and compartmentalized arguments, then, a new vocabulary emerged, reflecting processes of homogenization and unification, and the spread of dispositifs and epistemes that were similar across East and West. Nation-centred perspectives began to transform an older language of civilizational uplift and imperial rule. Circumstances demanded an overtly unbiased and egalitarian vocabulary of international alliance and of global governance. The need for neutral terms was not immediately obvious to all; for example, those who feared Soviet influence most vocally held that partisanship was a must, and denounced neutralism. The following observation by the social scientist Daniel Lerner is an example:

‘Neutralism indicates a failure of shared purpose in the America-centred Free World coalition, which today stands opposed to the Soviet-centred Comintern coalition in the struggle for world power. The failure is this: the people who were counted as members of the Free World coalition, in fact decline to identify themselves with it, and to share its purposes. Neutralists are those who refuse to join either coalition. Since there may be no other place to go, in a bipolarizing world, there are elements of political fantasy in this attitude. But that does not make its political consequences less potent.’⁹

 

The demand for neutralism was due to a growing desire to affirm national sovereignty at every turn, and a refusal of any hint of foreign control, Lerner later wrote: ‘The hatred sown by anti-colonialism is harvested in the rejection of every appearance of foreign tutelage. Wanted are modern institutions but not modern ideologies, modern power but not modern purposes, modern wealth but not modern wisdom, modern commodities but not modern cant. It is not so clear, however, that modern ways and words can be so easily and so totally sundered.’¹⁰

 

At least two points are worth noting here. First, at the height of the Cold War, the majority of the world’s population had little interest in the ideologies or pedagogies of the time. In other words, ideas emerging from Europe or the United States had to appear as if they were products of a spontaneous process arising more or less everywhere simultaneously. Second, a suitable terminology had to be devised to reflect a widespread distrust of ideas and of hierarchical influence, preferring instead what seemed like relatively tangible products, institutions and capacities that anyone could own. Modernization and development are the most familiar of these terms, but in addition, the circulation of words such as technology, public sector and private sector grew exponentially in the post WWII period.¹¹

The new prominence of these words indicate the adaptation and domestication of Cold War tensions to a national scale in postcolonial countries such that no direct acknowledgement of the ideological battle was necessary, even while super-powers pursued their campaigns. Here we have a Cold War heteroglossia, where the force of authoritative discourse was diffused and transformed across multiple national languages and dialects.¹²

In this sense the Cold War’s global influence was largely indirect. The battle between capitalism and communism could seem distant to societies dominated by practical concerns of survival. What former colonies wanted was ‘modern power but not modern purposes, …modern commodities but not modern cant’, Lerner remarks, doubting if these were in fact separable. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can ask whether perhaps the world’s majority knew more than Lerner suspected, and if the East-West battle over political economic systems missed something more fundamental. Disinterest over this conflict was not due to unfocused anti-colonialism, but to a sense that the former colonies could only lose if they joined the battle between superpowers. Thus when Jawaharlal Nehru announced at the Bandung Conference in 1955 that the world wanted peace, not war, and that India was neither Communist nor anti-Communist, that was postcolonial politics at work.¹³

 

In the years after WWII, both superpowers were concerned whether India would be a showcase for capitalism or for its opponent. India was not only poor, it had intellectuals who were attracted to communism, which was powerfully represented in two neighbouring countries, the Soviet Union and China. It was for such reasons that the Cold War was fought, namely to decide the fate of revolution in countries like India. The principal warring sides were not equal however, in economic and military power, or for that matter in their hostility to the other side. The Soviet Union had long ago settled on the idea of ‘socialism in one country’, and bracketed the idea of international revolution in preference to providing a counter to capitalist growth.¹⁴ It was the United States that believed that ‘capitalism could not flourish in one country’, fearing that a free market economy at home would be restricted by autarky abroad.¹⁵

 

It is only recently, however, that scholars are considering what the Cold War meant for countries outside the East and West Bloc. The conventional view has been that the ideological conflicts of the Cold War were distant from a non-aligned country like India. Awareness of the conflict’s existence was not absent; the issue was rather how it was understood, as noted by an American anthropologist: ‘My arrival [in the village] was viewed in Cold War terms. It took a lot of living in the village to push this into the background. One month after we arrived, a man arose in the bus we were travelling in and said, "This man has come to [our] country to see whether we love America more or Russia more so they can decide whether to give us money".’¹⁶

As this story suggests, in a North Indian village the Cold War could seem like prospecting for a marriage alliance, where the performance of sentiment was an issue, and not the profession of ideology. If East and West Blocs saw India as a prize worth fighting for, in this anecdote, India reversed roles with superpowers, viewing the latter’s competition as a means of increasing the prize accruing to Indians; otherwise the contest seemed to leave Indians unchanged.

 

The self-absorption indicated here was not limited to the village. As Ashis Nandy has noted, the concerns in a newly independent country were mostly native – destitution, communal riots, entry of politics into more and more areas of life …and so on.¹⁷

Analysis of these issues relied on modern categories imported from abroad, Nandy notes. Imports tended to be of categories that reproduced this self-absorption, on the whole. Thus ‘cold war’ rarely figures except in discussions of foreign policy. One of the few occasions on which I have noticed the term ‘cold war’ in domestic comment, is in an essay on the Indian documentary film, of all things. The author describes the period he was writing, in the early 1960s, as ‘…a time in our national history when there is a "cold war" between the Public and Private Sectors in all industries and when the terms "Free Enterprise" and "State Ownership" have acquired peculiar connotations…’¹⁸

Placed between private and public sectors, documentary film makers had a vantage point on national development. Collaborating with artists who operated internationally, such cultural producers negotiated constraints that limited their persuasiveness too. National development might appear like a sovereign activity in the government’s own claims, while in fact reflecting prevailing geopolitics.

The scarcity of the Cold War in post-independence historical analysis signals not the irrelevance of the Cold War so much as the domestic focus of nation-building in its initial phase, on the view of most commentators. The issue today, with globalization’s advance, would be to disentangle the dynamics of superpower conflict that occurred behind the façade of nation-building, that might shed light on our historical present.

 

To this end my paper offers three main points. First, there is the paradox that national development was in part a product of international rivalry, such that commitment to the former entailed denying the influence of the latter. Second, experts were crucial in mediating and insulating transnational influence while supervising national development. Such expertise was politically shielded from the pressures of a wider public in a way that has increasingly become difficult after the Cold War. It is worth noting that the period of the Cold War was also the period when national communication systems began to be developed in much of the Global South. Hence, awareness of international context depended on access to education and information that were usually not so widely available during this time.

Last but not least, the end of the Cold War has brought on, not the end of history as Francis Fukuyama argued, but its beginning. At least for non-aligned countries like India, the end of a relatively uncontested rule of experts and the greater awareness of a world market of goods and ideas, has led to a popular demand for history, as one way of accounting for the place of the nation in relation to the rest of the world. Here polemic and myth-building have had the advantage over academic historiography, which has dwelt mainly on the colonial era and the triumph of anti-colonialism, and has been relatively late in turning its attention to the postcolonial period. Here my argument is specific to India. The rush to globalize Indian history has occurred in the public sphere but without much scholarly analysis.¹⁹ It has been accomplished by identifying with the victors of the Cold War, and by rejoicing in the defeat of socialism, although India was not in fact a combatant in that war; rather it benefited from both sides.

 

Following George Blaustein, we can call this Albtraumneid or Nachtmareifersucht, coinages that translate as nightmare envy or nightmare jealousy.²⁰ Unlike schadenfreude, which is the pleasure in another’s misfortune, Albtraumneid or Nachtmareifersucht express envy for misfortune. What it refers to in this case is the socialist oppression that the East Bloc was supposed to have endured, and that India never experienced. In fact, there seems to be a widespread conviction in India that there was an absolutely real historical predicament that the country had to endure for decades and only managed to emerge from due to the worldwide triumph of market forces, and incidentally (or not, depending on one’s views), thanks to the assertion of Hindu identity.

An official posted to New Delhi with the United States Information Agency in 1950, a Yale-trained architect, was told when hired, ‘India is the most important country in the world.’²¹ This was a view from the United States, which saw Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as a reliable opponent of communism within India, and as a potential ally who had to be supported.²² India also became a key for Moscow to gain a foothold in the Global South.²³ The Soviet Politburo thus proceeded to give Nehru and his ambassador K.P.S. Menon abundant proof of their commitment to Indian development.²⁴

 

A recent historical account observes: ‘Events in India had worldwide impact. The country stood at the centre of a global contest over the economic future of the Third World by virtue of its early independence, its size and the outsize presence of founding Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The case of India drove the practices, and later the theories, of both American and Soviet economic assistance; both superpowers learnt development assistance by reckoning with Indian conditions.’²⁵

In fact, the superpowers learned not only techniques of development, but ways of managing their ideological conflict within the Global South. They were aided by indigenous expert classes, who built on old literate cultures to fashion ingenious mechanisms of rationalization and legitimation, that subordinated incommensurable systems with adroit equivocations across warring sides. Indian experts demonstrated to the superpowers that despite the relatively limited quantum of resources the USSR provided, probably a quarter or less than the US in the case of India, mere quantity was less important than the kind of aid and where it went. Not only did the United States learn lessons from this experience, but devised new strategies in response to it, that it would be a mistake to enfold into an argument about the triumph of capitalism.

 

The United States preferred aid centred on commodities, with a heavy emphasis on inputs to agriculture, where a little prosperity could go a long way to reducing the chances of peasant militancy. The U.S. was reluctant to aid state institutions, since on the reading of their experts, that would empower socialism, and history showed the error of such a choice. There was one major exception, namely communications infrastructure, for which the United States accepted the inevitability of state ownership and control, and provided material aid and a great deal of advice. This was an exception that confirmed the American preference, as things turned out. Crucial here was the U.S. assurance that a commercial revenue model would ensure adequate funding while posing no threat to the state’s monopoly over the airwaves and over the polity itself.²⁶

‘A rule of experts’ has overseen economic growth across the globe, it has been influentially argued, helping to bridge the gap between abstract reason and facts on the ground.²⁷ The realm of reason was hardly pristine however; it could involve seemingly incompatible claims, e.g. of capitalism versus socialism, such as experts in non-aligned nations confronted. Technocrats had to navigate political cross-currents at global, national and local levels, as they confronted divergent hierarchies of valuation that required political imagination as well as scientific reason. Hence the practices of economic planning could yield different results given otherwise similar circumstances. For example, P.C. Mahanalobis who oversaw the Second Five-Year Plan, was heavily influenced by the Soviet model, whereas subsequent planners such as D.R. Gadgil, who directed the Fourth Plan, moved away from it.

 

The Cold War period was thus a time when not only models of the nation but modes of affiliating with it, namely nationalism, could be subject to different interpretations, without wider repercussions. That is to say, nationalism too was ruled by experts during this period. Expert nationalism can be distinguished from official nationalism, such as the Czarist imposition of Russian identity on the people under Alexander III’s rule, through, e.g. compulsory primary education, militarism and the rewriting of history.²⁸ By comparison, in the first decades after independence in India, the absence of any significant attempt at mass indoctrination is striking. Mass mobilization had fostered a variety of popular sentiments united mainly through anti-colonialism, and thereafter, the state did not require nationalism to be cultivated as a mass ideology. Instead, it became a domain of experts for at least three reasons.

 

First, concerns other than nationalism, e.g. development, took precedence due to the weakness of challengers to the Congress party’s rule, during the years when its dominance seemed assured. Such challenges as did arise were typically accommodated within the party framework, while the Congress maintained its claim of ruling over a unified, secular nation. If the ruling party was difficult to dislodge, it was due not so much to the extent of its power but to a consensus favouring one party that could represent the country as a whole. The quality of rule was a secondary consideration; the practical need was for a common ground that could only be provided by a party with a national scope. This meant that debates on different ways of defining the nation were confined to the margins.

Second, the limited infrastructure and the relatively small size of the educated population also helped to contain contests based on divergent models of the nation. Alternative models could not achieve much traction given the limited scope for their politicization. Last but not least, while a significant nationalist historiography arose, influenced by Nehru too among others, that scholarship focused mainly on the colonial period. This meant that the reigning political model in the post-independence period did not necessarily have to be questioned. Other social sciences, e.g. political science and sociology, focused on the post-independence period, generating concepts such as ‘Sanskritization’ (M.N. Srinivas) and ‘the Congress system’ (Rajni Kothari) that operated within the given national framework. This tacit division of labour meant that post-independence history was not rewritten so much as it was neglected, and hence the prevailing model of nationalism was harder to question. I will return to this point below.

 

A few aspects of this rule of experts can be briefly outlined to clarify the character of the Cold War’s impact on India. First, economic aid. The U.S. had a head start over the Soviet Union, which commenced its aid programme only after Stalin’s death in 1953. But Soviet aid reached nearly a hundred public sector projects, and provided an economic foundation for national independence, one that was lacking in many other nations of the Global South, as one observer noted in 1987:

‘The non-aligned state of India can be maintained only by building upon the bedrock of heavy and defence industries – steel, oil, power generation, engineering goods, aircraft manufacture, ordnance and space ventures. In all these ventures, the USSR has extended a helping hand... A time span of thirty years is not a long period in the life of nations. But during this period, the close association with the Soviet Union had helped India to erect strong national edifices in the public sector which in turn have enabled the country to escape the sort of captivity under MNCs or neo-colonials that is the sorry state of affairs in many Latin American and African countries.’²⁹

As for the U.S., the economist V.K.R.V. Rao, who was the inaugural director of several institutes of higher education, and also served as cabinet minister for several years, argued that the Soviet Union had taken the lead in defining how aid could be most helpful in overcoming underdevelopment:

‘...Indian opinion was disturbed by the hesitancy with which the United States approached the question of aid for economic development in this part of the world in contrast to its total commitment to the recovery of Europe. And it attributed this lukewarm attitude on the part of the U.S. to the failure of India to qualify on the political front within the larger context of the cold war… [I]t was only with the entry of the Soviet Union and other communist countries into the field that western countries also began displaying some enthusiasm for offering aid to the underdeveloped countries at the governmental level.’³⁰

 

Now, a detailed account of aid to the Indian government is beyond the scope of this paper.³¹ My aim here is rather to indicate how behind the façade of domestic debates on development, there was Cold War competition that did not necessarily manifest to the common person.

Nehru once remarked to the U.S. ambassador in India, J.K. Galbraith, ‘The Americans help the Tatas and Birlas who are already rich. By contrast the Soviets or British build plants that belong to the people.’³² Galbraith did not contradict Nehru but strove to prove him wrong, by securing President Kennedy’s support for a steel plant in Bokaro, India’s largest till that time. Congressional opposition scuttled the effort, however. It was Soviet aid that came to the rescue.³³

 

In all likelihood, neither superpower would have been motivated to engage in such aid without competition from its rival. Nor did aid arrive unmarked; it carried the seeds of Cold War politics, which grew into battles between the private and the public sector. In Arne Westad’s term, the Soviet Union stood for an empire of justice, whereas the United States championed an empire of liberty.³⁴ But these battles had a different colour on the ground, and could appear as dispassionate views on sectoral performance rather than as ideologically driven or as principled stances. Nation-building and nationalism as they were understood at the time of independence, offered little room for disagreement. For example, leading industrialists had joined to recommend public investment in infrastructure, in a statement known as the Bombay Plan, that anticipated the country’s Five-Year Plans.³⁵ Within a few decades India’s planned economy would be denounced as a Stalinist imposition, while Nehru became akin to Stalin and even to Hitler.³⁶

Now, the challenge for India’s planners had not only been to manage the economy efficiently, but also to discipline Indian capitalists, many of whom were conservative caste Hindus who had avoided engagement with social reform, and shunned Indian nationalism itself. Here is Jawaharlal Nehru on the subject in the Lok Sabha:

JN: Unfortunately this is our misfortune that even private enterprise which shows some intelligence in other countries, even capitalism which has become to some extent, a modernized form of the old type of capitalists (sic), even in countries like America or England or France or elsewhere, even that degree of modernity has not come to our capitalists.

M.R. Masani: Nor to your socialism.

JN: And so I find with an ever-increasing amazement the type of stuff that is doled out here in the name of capitalism and private enterprise, and the type of stuff that is doled out against planning etc. which nobody in the wide world, except some persons with hardly any intelligence, can accept in any way.³⁷

 

This glancing encounter of Nehruvian ‘socialism’ with Indian conservatism offers the sense of an unequal exchange, between Nehru’s state-backed reform and a critic with a grouse rather than a game plan. Masani, a founder of the conservative Swatantra Party, actually accepted the need for a mixed economy, and distanced himself from religion as well as from nationalism. He upheld instead a combination of liberalism and Gandhism.³⁸ Whereas Nehru’s objection was to unregenerate indigenous capitalism, that only grudgingly began supporting the Congress party, mostly from 1944 onwards, that is, when independence seemed all but inevitable.³⁹

Once independence was achieved, Indian business came forward to claim the benefits, likening itself to its foreign counterparts. Advocates for Indian business countered Nehru’s complaints with an obbligato of accusations of socialism. But such criticisms were in a minor key during the heyday of economic planning. In contrast, a wide consensus supported state intervention not only to channel and direct capital but also to restrain it out of democratic concerns. By the time of liberalization, this history would prove to be too nuanced for recollection; evidence that today’s adversaries who were often in the same camp not long ago, would probably be rejected by many critics of the Congress.

 

Historical research, far from promoting comparative understanding during the Cold War, tended instead to elaborate national mythologies, or at any rate to avoid challenging them. The Cold War generated dream-worlds amongst the superpowers, Susan Buck-Morss has argued, different forms of mass utopia that could only be experienced in highly scripted and mediated ways, e.g. as empires of ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ respectively.⁴⁰ The unexpected emergence of closed and self-reproducing worlds, precisely while greeting the arrival of a communication revolution and when many nations seemed poised for ‘take-off’ to modernization, requires explanation.⁴¹

Unlike previous wars, the Cold War was distinct in seeking to prevent, not prosecute conflict. The goals of the war were abstract, as was the space in which it was conducted – the fate of the whole world was at stake after all. But since it did not correspond to any discernible events for most ordinary people, it was largely through expert knowledge that one could know the war was on, and that one was in it, if one knew anything about it at all. Cold War scholars were prepared for a conflict that could last indefinitely, and were completely taken by surprise when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union voted to dissolve itself. As such the expert knowledge guiding Cold War strategy had its own reality, and that it might bear little correspondence to ground realities could remain unnoticed.

 

We might ask whether a dream-world did not characterize India too during this period, albeit of a different kind. Here, as I have indicated, the battle was not a direct transposition of the battle between capitalism and communism. Rather, the poverty and backwardness of the country required urgent remedy, to catch up with the more advanced nations. For various reasons, economic growth and social mobility, already low, failed to increase as expected. To the extent there was a visibly shared culture in this secular period, it was perhaps created by the cinema, which was not allowed to engage with politics and proceeded to devise a commercially successful formula. ‘Formula’ films showed a self-regulating Indian culture to which the state was somehow external; thus the policeman always arrived not only after the crime had been committed, but after the culprit had been caught.⁴² This dream-world of Indian cinema was in its own way a product of Cold War deterrence.

 

Cold War deterrence pertained not simply to the arms race. It slowed down the pace of political change by deterring challenges to prevailing forms of nationalism. Large flows of aid to the Congress-led government strengthened the party’s hands against its opponents. Jawaharlal Nehru’s importance in this context was in negotiating between reform and reaction at home, and between superpowers abroad. For his admirers he may have been exemplary, but in fact the ideological impasse of the time was most easily transcended through the figure of a leader, whose personal qualities compensated for the ad hoc and at times inconsistent approach that constraints dictated. This is the second aspect of the rule of experts, namely that it had to be defended and overseen by a charismatic leader whose personal appeal could better withstand ideological challenges.

A third aspect, closely related to the above, is a partitioning between domestic and foreign affairs. National politics concerned itself almost exclusively with domestic matters, while foreign policy was left to the leader and his aides, and to episodic parliamentary debates. The onset of independence and of nation-building not surprisingly necessitated an absorption with the trials of development while retaining electoral consensus. A glance at the front pages of newspapers after 1947 shows a steep decline in foreign news coverage, and its replacement by local stories, with political news always having the greatest prominence.

This paradox of the Global Cold War is worth emphasizing, namely that it could be most present where it was least noticed. What made nation-building possible was a set of background transactions with global powers whose details the public at large was spared, and whose management was delegated to experts. The greater sense of national sovereignty this afforded, often amounting to chauvinism, meant a trade-off with cosmopolitanism, with the latter becoming mainly the provenance of educated classes.

 

The same was not necessarily true of the socialist bloc, which usually recognized multiple nationalities within each country, and which exposed their citizens to international culture. Socialist party rule was the point of unification, and extended across cultures; foreign culture was in principle welcome, therefore. For example, during the 1970s, Indian films imported into the Soviet Union were shown, on an average, 2.5 times more extensively than their Soviet competitors.⁴³ By contrast, foreign films had relatively minuscule audiences in India.

The fourth aspect of the rule of experts during the Cold War was an overt insulation and separation between the precincts of politics, economics and culture, that, it was expected, would continue into the foreseeable future. The domain knowledge for each precinct was distinct, and reposed in distinct communities of experts. That such an arrangement obtained across much of the world indicated a convergent process of secularization at work. Values based on religion and ritual, and on biological and cultural difference, were nominally and usually legally subordinate to more neutral systems of order. Where this obtained, it reflected secular nation-building, for which the Cold War was a key enabling condition, insulating politics within the nation from the Cold War itself. It is worth pointing out that the net result of superpower competition in this sense was that more people moved out of poverty than at any other time in recorded history, notwithstanding the conflicts that also occurred during this period.

Within the political sphere, where nationalism was dominated by a single party, the choice was between affiliation and alienation, or between identification and critique. For example, what it meant to be a nationalist in culture might be secularism, or for that matter some variety of religious communalism, and nationalism in economics could mean socialism or capitalism, or simply more production.

 

Today in India, Nehru stands for socialism, which critics assume to be inseparable from arbitrary rule and political corruption; he is like a human smoking gun whose mention allows the opposition to rest its case against the Congress.⁴⁴ Ironically, it was Nehru’s reliability as an anti-communist at home that was most reassuring to his American supporters.⁴⁵ Although the Congress oversaw the low growth period and also ushered in economic reforms, the party is viewed by many opponents as socialist or even Marxist. However, while the Cold War lasted, Congress ideology was not the object of complaint because, then as now, the party was not defined by ideology; rather it was the party of national consensus. Opposition parties did not offer an alternative so much as constitute lobbies for specific constituencies and interests. Disagreements were negotiated within the framework of the national party.

Today the BJP occupies a similar position but unlike before, there is another party that at least until recently, proved capable of building a national coalition to challenge it. This may explain the scale of the invective against the Congress, but not, I suggest, either its form or content.

 

The BJP’s denunciation of the Congress imputes to it corruption, nepotism and ideological rigidity too for good measure. All of these faults are allegedly symbolized best by Nehru, who in fact seldom unilaterally imposed his will and was conscientious about institution-building. Arguably it was Indira Gandhi who took authoritarian measures across a decade beginning in 1967, when she outmanoeuvred her opponents through a series of pro-poor measures, culminating in the National Emergency of 1975-77.⁴⁶

But the Congress was in power for more than two decades thereafter, during which time it instituted a series of economic reforms, most significantly in 1991. Only in 1998 did the BJP come to power, leading a coalition of more than two dozen parties. By this time however, affluent middle class and upper caste support for reforms had taken on a saffron colour. And the BJP had declared itself as the party of reform in contrast to the Congress, which on the former’s account was the party of reaction.

Political polemic is the very opposite of Occam’s razor: in it, logical entities multiply relentlessly. Critiques accumulate until it is hard to determine whether the objection is to a principle or to the party, and whether there is a rank ordering of objections. There is safety in numbers: there’s no telling which criticism will matter for whom, when wedge issues are used to attract uncommitted voters, many of whom lack education. But it is worth noting that a key opposition from an earlier time, namely secular versus communal, has lately given way to a more capacious opposition of national and anti-national, where anti-national can signal Communism, Naxalism, Congressism, or anti-Modi-ism. Little unites the terms but they can be treated as equivalent in contemporary political abuse, a prominent news anchor notes.⁴⁷ Mention of Hindutva and the BJP here give way to Cold War-era totems, to the Congress itself as a stand-in, and to the figure of the leader as the point where contradictions resolve and enmities clarify.

 

It is interesting that the Cold War-era hostility towards communism exhibited in the United States reappears in the Indian context with the Congress party as the culprit, and Nehru as the arch villain of the story, although by no stretch of imagination was Nehru equivalent to Stalin or Mao, nor did the Congress make more than token gestures towards socialism.⁴⁸ Low economic growth was not accompanied by mass annihilation, or by destruction of productive capacity. There were no Soviet-style Gulags in India, nor famines with a Great Leap Forward as in China.

This is a view that has taken shape after the end of the Cold War, and at a time when overt state socialism had little support in India (state welfare and a mixed economy do not constitute socialism). Narendra Modi’s demand for a Congress-mukt Bharat exhibits something similar to the indignant righteousness of American anti-Communism in the Cold War. The sentiment is directed, however, against a party that represented a broad consensus when it was in power and, far from resisting market liberalization, was its indispensable enabler.

 

The post-Cold War period in India is obviously recent and its history remains to be written. The BJP fought to replace the Congress but the battlefield was not defined by the latter’s socialism or by the pace of economic reforms for that matter. These were subjects on which there was no difference between the leading parties. Instead the most contentious issues were Mandal and Masjid, that is, campaigns against reservations for intermediate castes, and the campaign to demolish Babri Masjid and build a temple to Lord Ram in Ayodhya. Economists and political scientists who discuss the reforms however, tend not to dwell on the caste and religious struggles dominant at the time. Other scholars note the contiguity of the two streams of events, but without asking how it was that opposing parties figured in both and yet one set of events was harmonious and the other conflictual.

All indications are of a conflict stage-managed by a formally secular party ceding ground to assertive Hindu nationalism.⁴⁹ The Congress was reluctant to claim credit for the reforms, since to do so would ensure its electoral defeat, or so the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao feared. Margaret Thatcher might exhort British voters to sacrifice while she undertook reforms. But in a country where poverty was tracked by calorie intake because income data was unreliable, sacrifice was already long-standing. What is striking is that opposition parties allowed the reforms to proceed without debate. Presenting itself as the last hope against the tide of Hindu communalism, the Congress party pacified the left, whose support was vital for economic reforms. The timing was crucial. Rajiv Gandhi’s attempt at reforms failed in 1985, but by 1991, East European regimes were failing, and that there was the sense of a worldwide move away from socialism.

 

There is a convention of viewing India’s reforms as enacted by ‘stealth’, but in fact liberalization was loudly praised as part of a worldwide story of the market economy’s triumph over socialism. Pundits began to envision a ‘golden age of capitalism’ not long after Mikhail Gorbachev applied for full membership in the IMF and the World Bank in mid-1991.⁵⁰ At about the same time, India’s reforms were detailed in its budget of 24 July 1991, decisively shifting away from the license-permit raj.⁵¹ Within a few months the Soviet Union voted to dissolve itself, and in this environment, pro-market arguments discarded all restraints.

The way in which news of the one event reflected the other could have led an external observer to believe Indians too had been held hostage by communism, and that the end of the Cold War presaged their victory too. The experience of evolving a mixed economy had had mixed results, to be sure, but it suddenly transformed into a story of overcoming political tyranny, as if capitalists had been victims rather than participants and beneficiaries.

 

One columnist hailed reforms as the ‘opening of the Indian mind.’⁵² J.R.D. Tata wrote that in India, ‘Berlin walls should fall.’⁵³ Another industrialist, Ramakrishna Bajaj, called for Indian consumers to become assertive to ensure socialism’s defeat.⁵⁴ A prominent Bombay businessman, Ashok Chowgule, responding to a newspaper columnist, noted, ‘greed is a product of the political theory called socialism’, and liberalization was its remedy.⁵⁵

The Cold War-era stalemate between superpowers allowed an alliance between political liberalism and big business, an alliance that in India has come to be misrecognized, or perhaps wilfully misrepresented, as statist and denounced as Nehruvianism, and as low-growth, elitist and dynastic as well. That alliance, where the state played the leading role, helped create an industrial and communications infrastructure for the country, as well as a sizeable middle class. Infrastructural expansion, notably that of communications, had at least three outcomes that changed the conditions enabling their emergence.

First, the dreamworld of the Cold War era, where experts ruled and the nation could be variously imagined by the multitudes, if it was imagined at all, with little fear of being challenged, depended on a sociotechnical combination that was already being transformed from at least the 1980s onwards.⁵⁶ Dismissing this era as delusion and domination, rather than as history, a new understanding took shape, as if economic liberalization had actually inaugurated the subject of post-independence history, one that happened to be Hindu.

 

Second, big business no longer found its liberalism to be convenient, and welcomed the onset of a higher growth regime with fewer limits on accumulation. That this was an overwhelmingly Hindu upper caste dominated business class is no doubt relevant. Thus the argument that secularism was alien to Indian society, and that nationalism would have to embrace the majority religion, was persuasive to most of this class. Apart from whatever cultural analysis this view contained, this was a specifically political calculation, rather than one merely premised on economic rationality.

And third, the masses who had only episodically been consulted as far as most political parties were concerned, in what had been a broadly consensual developmental process, became more easily available for mobilization. Here in the absence of directed political transformation where the majority was actively involved, it was counter-revolution that was likely to come to the fore. Neither the language of liberal proceduralism nor that of economic opportunity alone was equal to the task of mass engagement.

 

Footnotes:

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Public Life of History’, Public Culture 20(1), 2008, pp. 143-168, at 144.

2. Mohit Sen, An Autobiography (abridged by Anand Kishore Sahay). National Book Trust, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 189-190.

3. ‘Two years ago, [CNN] … in an agreement that allowed CNN to use Stationsionar 12, a Soviet government-owned satellite, could also be seen in the Soviet Union, the Middle East and Africa.’ Roxanne Roberts, ‘CNN, On Top of the World: Keeping Abreast Abroad Through Cable News Network’, Washington Post, 21 August 1990, p. C1. ‘It was only ten months ago that CNN have started beaming their programmes over Asia after they hired a Russian satellite….’ Satyajit Chattopadhyay, ‘Where the Action is’, The Times of India, 17 September 1990, p. 11.

4. Burton I. Edelson and Joseph N. Pelton, ‘Can Intelsat and Intersputnik Cooperate?’ Space Policy, February 1989, pp. 7-11. Joseph Pelton was Head, Strategic Planning, for Intelsat. My thanks to Asif Siddiqi for the citation.

5. Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, ‘The Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth’, WID World Working Papers Series No. 2017/20, December 2017. https://wid.world/document/elephant-curve-global-inequality-growth-wid-world-working-paper-2017-20/

6. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005, p. 396.

7. Paul Hoffman, Peace Can Be Won. Doubleday & Co, New York, 1951, p. 143.

8. The Marshall Plan: Information For Americans Going Abroad. US Economic Cooperation Administration, 1949, p. 6.

9. Daniel Lerner, ‘International Coalitions and Communications Content: The Case of Neutralism’, Public Opinion Quarterly 16(4), Winter 1952, pp. 681-688, at 682-683.

10. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1958, p. 47.

11. This can be seen on Google’s NGram Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=technology%2C+public+sector %2 C+private+sector&year_start=1900& year_end =2000& corpus=15 &smoothing =3& share=&direct_ url=t1%3B%2Ctechnology%3B %2Cc0% 3B.t1%3B%2Cpublic%2 0sector%3B% 2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C private%20sector% 3B%2Cc0

12. M.M. Bakhtin, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p. 324 and passim.

13. Press Trust of India, ‘World Faces Grave Danger of War Warns Mr. Nehru: Asian-African Nations Must Work For Peace’, The Times of India, 23 April 1955, p. 8.

14. The topic is discussed in extenso in E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926. Vols V and VI of A History of Soviet Russia. Macmillian and Co., New York, 1958 and 1960.

15. This felicitous formulation is from Srinath Raghavan, The Most Dangerous Place: A. History of the United States in South Asia. Penguin Random House, New Delhi, 2018, p. 120.

16. Yole G. Sills, ‘USA and USSR English Language Publications Distributed in India.’ Prepared for the United States Information Agency by the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University, January 1962, pp. 11-13.

17. Ashis Nandy, ‘The After-Life of the Raj in Indian Academe’, in Vinay Lal (ed.), Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000, p. 105.

18. Jag Mohan, ‘Panorama of the Private Sector of the Indian Short Film Industry’, Marg 2(4), 1962, pp. 9-15, at p. 9.

19. A noteworthy exception here is Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.

20 George Blaustein, Nightmare Envy and Other Stories. Oxford University Press, New York, 2018, p. 2.

21. Jack Masey, retired Director of Exhibitions, United States Information Agency, personal interview, New York City, 15 October 2014.

22. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘India’s Nehru is Viewed as Western Counterpoise of China’s Mao’, Washington Post, 16 October 1949.

23. Andreas Hilger, ‘Building a Socialist Elite? Khruschev’s Soviet Union and Elite Formation in India’, in Jost Dulffer and Marc Frey (eds.), Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Basing-stoke, 2011, pp. 262-86 at p. 264.

24. See e.g., K.P.S. Menon, The Flying Troika. Extracts From a Diary. Oxford, London, 1963. Also K. Krishna Moorthy, ubi infra, footnote 29.

25. David Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2018, p. 4.

26. Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Television in India: Ideas, Institutions and Practices’, in Manuel Alvarado, Herman Bennett, Milly Buonanno and Toby Miller (eds.), Sage Handbook on Television Studies. Sage Press, Beverly Hills, CA, 2014, pp. 83-104.

27. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002.

28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983, London and New York, pp. 88-89; 101.

29. K. Krishna Moorthy, The Road Begins at Bhilai. Technology Books, Madras, 1987, pp. 29-30.

30. V.K.R.V. Rao and Dharm Narain, Foreign Aid and India’s Economic Development. Asia Publishing House, New York, 1963, p. 71.

31. See Engerman, op. cit., footnote 25.

32. John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1969, p. 215.

33. Galbraith, ibid., pp. 81-82. Thomas F. Brady, ‘Soviet Offers Aid for Mill in India; Would Help Build Bokaro Steel Plant – U.S. Denied Request for Assistance’, New York Times, 2 May 1964, p. 1, 4.

34. Westad describes the Cold War as a battle between the United States’ ‘empire of liberty’ and the Soviet Union’s ‘empire of justice.’ See Westad, ibid., pp. 8-72, e.g.

35. The signatories were: J.R.D. Tata, G.D. Birla, Ardeshir Dalal, Lala Shri Ram, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Ardeshir Darabshaw Shroff, Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas and John Mathai. See Purushottamdas Thakurdas (ed.), A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India (2 vols.). Penguin, London, 1945. For a recent account see Medha Kudaisya, Tryst with Prosperity: Indian Business and the Bombay Plan of 1944. Penguin, New Delhi, 2018.

36. Jay Dubashi, ‘From "Shilanyas" to Berlin Wall’, Organiser, 26 November 1989, rpt. in Jay Dubashi, The Road to Ayodhya. Voice of India Press, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 18-20, at p. 19.

37. Lok Sabha Debates, Vol XLIV, cols. 1665-1682, 9 August 1960.

38. See e.g., M.R. Masani, ‘Liberalism’, Freedom First, April 1985, pp. 33-41.

39. Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931-1939: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, p. 183.

40. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000. On the empire of liberty versus the empire of justice see footnote 6 ubi sipra on Westad.

41. See in this context Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1997.

42. M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998.

43. See Masha Salazkina, ‘Soviet-Indian Coproductions: Alibaba as Political Allegory’, Cinema Journal 49(4), Summer 2010, pp. 71-89, at 74.

44. For a satirical response to contemporary criticisms of Nehru as original sinner incarnate, see https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/nehru-did-it/cid/1686874

45. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘India’s Nehru is Viewed as Western Counterpoise of China’s Mao’, Washington Post, 16 October 1949.

46. See Arvind Rajagopal, ‘The Emergency as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class’, Modern Asian Studies 45(5), 2011, pp. 1003-1049.

47. Remarks passim by Ravish Kumar, ‘Mein anti-Modi nahin hun, mein bas unse savaal poochtha hun’, [I am not anti-Modi, I am just asking him some questions], #The Wire Dialogues, published 27 February 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puf86Z kmAKE (accessed 8 March 2019).

48. However, see Jay Dubashi, ‘From Stalinism to Nehruism’, in Jay Dubashi, The Road to Ayodhya. Voice of India Publications, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 105-107.

49. I have written about this in Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. For a different point of view see Rob Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reforms in India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.

50. Alan Murray, ‘Gorbachev Applies for Full Membership for Soviets in IMF and the World Bank’, The Wall Street Journal, 24 July 1991, p. A12; David D. Hale, ‘The Coming Golden Age of Capitalism’, The Wall Street Journal, 7 November 1991, p. A14.

51. Jairam Ramesh, To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story. Rupa, New Delhi, 2015.

52. Subir Roy, ‘Opening of the Indian Mind’, The Times of India, 18 October 1992, p. 16.

53. J.R.D. Tata, ‘Berlin Walls Should Fall’, The Times of India, 1 August 1991, p. 1.

54. Ramkrishna Bajaj, ‘Socialism’s Anti-consumer-bias’, The Times of India, 16 May 1991, p. 15.

55. Ashok V. Chowgule, ‘Answer to Greed’, The Times of India, 23 February 1992, p. 12.

56. See my ‘Emergency as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class’, Modern Asian Studies, ibid.