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THE ENDS OF LIBERALISM AND THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF NEHRU'S INDIA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

C. A. BAYLY
C. A. BAYLY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Cambridge E-mail: cab1002@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

The period immediately following Independence when Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister of India (1947–64) has been described conventionally as an era dominated by “socialist” developmentalism. This article contends that an examination of the ideas of Nehru and his closest colleagues reveals a much more complex amalgam of political ideologies and sentiments. Ideas of small-scale development through local bodies and cooperative societies, typical of earlier “communitarian” liberals such as G. K. Gokhale, were blended, and sometimes contended, with visions of rapid industrialization more obviously based on the Soviet model. Nehru himself remained distinctly liberal in his political stance, musing that he could not impose further socialist measures “because most Indians were not socialists.” The article considers the importance of the events of India's partition for this ideological amalgam and the examines the ideas of key figures in Nehru's circle, notably G. B. Pant, D. R. Gadgil, P. C. Mahalanobis and S. Radhakrishnan.

Type
Forum: Global Liberalisms
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 605 - 626
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

This article was originally given as the first Sarvepalli Gopal Memorial Lecture at King's College, University of London, in 2012; a version was also given in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, later that year. I am grateful to Sunli Khilnani and the King's audience; the staff and students of JNU; and, more recently, Shruti Kapila, Faridah Zaman, Sunil Purushotham, Tim Rowse and Glenda Sluga for helping me with this project. Harshan Kumarasingham and Ranu Roychoudhuri helped to prepare the article for publication. None of them are responsible for its remaining defects.

References

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52 Khilnani, Idea of India, 84.

53 Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 64–6.

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73 Gopal, Nehru, 3: 301.

74 Message from Nehru on anniversary of establishment of Panchayati Raj, 20 Oct. 1960, cited in Gopal, Nehru, 3: 168.