Dr. Sneh Bhargava on Indira Gandhi's Final Hours
Now 95, Dr. Bhargava has released her memoir The Woman Who Ran AIIMS, revisiting the day India's history changed, and her role in leading India's top medical institution through its darkest hours.
Host: Soma Basu
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The Print
3 hours ago
- The Print
Socialism doesn't deliver prosperity or produce equality. Does it give freedom? Of course not
Now, Gandhi taught us two things, basically. One was that ends and means are interlinked, that you cannot produce a better society by methods that are not clean and decent, that the end does not justify the means. By the time your means, which are dubious, are practised, your end gets vitiated. In other words, to cite the Soviet Union, by liquidations and butchery, by distortion and lying, you cannot produce a more fraternal society. Our great leader, Mahatma Gandhi, used to say that consistency in political affairs is 'the virtue of an ass.' He was himself a very inconsistent person, who moved from position to position as he developed and the world developed. The point I am making is that it would be very stupid for anyone to hold on to a point of view or a dogma, disregarding what is happening around him. There is an idea afoot that liberalism came before socialism and therefore must fade out before socialism. I would like to examine that assumption and, looking fifty or a hundred years ahead, to consider which is more likely to survive, and which is getting outdated today. The other thing Gandhiji taught us was that the State in the 20th century is no longer a great friend of freedom and progress, that perhaps the biggest threat to human freedom comes from the State. This Gandhi repeated a hundred times in different ways, by saying that there is no violence as evil as the violence of the Government. All other violence can be forgiven, understood or controlled, but when the Government becomes violent and dominates and oppresses the people, that is the most foul kind of violence. Socialism does not deliver prosperity. It does not produce equality. Does it give freedom? Of course not. The loss of liberty is the most obvious thing in the socialist countries. Lenin was a great man. He was an idealist gone wrong. He imagined that, after a short period of dictatorship, liberty would be restored by the benign Communist Party to the people. The State would 'wither away.' Now, some of us have been waiting patiently for this process to start. There are no signs of it yet, either in the Soviet Union or in any other communist country. The State keeps its monopoly of power very securely in its hands. Now, all this had been foreseen by a very wise Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, who said that in any country where there were no 'autonomous social forces,' liberty was bound to disappear. By 'autonomous social force' he meant people who own their factories, people who own their shops, people who own their land, people who practise independent professions like lawyers, doctors, engineers and accountants. In other words, when everyone is an employee of the Government, you cannot have freedom or democracy because there is no one to oppose or criticize the Government. It is only when a peasant can say: 'This land is mine,' that he can stand up to the official. But when you have no peasant proprietors, no businessmen, no free professional people, it becomes a slave State. Also read: Socialism hinders India's industrial growth. We need free enterprise first Now, let us consider what has been happening in a semi socialist society like India. We have been practising, or trying to practise, socialist methods for the last 15 years. Is there more prosperity? Are we better off than we were in 1947? The answer is 'No.' Living standards have been stagnant since the British left in 1947. Some classes have benefited, some are worse off. The Government admits that the real income of the agricultural labourer, the landless labourer in the village, has gone down in the last fifteen years. He does not take home as much as he could in the old days under the British. The real income of the industrial labourer is more or less stagnant, thanks to dearness allowances. Anyone who knows anything about the middle class knows that its standards have gone down shockingly in the last fifteen years. In fact, the middle class is being ground out of existence today in India. The biggest victim of socialism is the lower middle class, the educated man with a small income, the clerk, the schoolmaster, the shopkeeper. Then, who has benefited? If the middle class, the working class and the landless labourer are all worse off, who has benefited? The answer is a small number of people have benefited. Because we have a mixed economy, we have a mixed 'New Class.' They are not all commissars. Some of them are commissars and some are businessmen. What they do is that by means of a controlled so-called socialist economy, where more or less sheltered conditions are created, they share the profit. If I am in power and I give a licence to somebody to produce something with a protected market, he gives me back 10 per cent or 20 per cent of what he makes. So political patronage, operated by dishonest politicians, officials and businessmen, creates a new ring of exploiters which replaces the old system. Equality? Even the advocates of socialism themselves complain that every time a Five Year Plan is put across, it creates more inequalities, for the reason I have just explained. Now I come to the alternative, the Liberal path. If socialism does not serve the purposes for which it was intended, that is, moving towards a freer and more equal society, is liberalism the alternative? What is liberalism? Liberalism, according to Hobhouse, the great British liberal, in his book on Liberalism, which is a classic, is 'a belief that society can safely be founded on the self-directing power of personality, that it is only on this foundation that the true community can be built. Liberty then becomes not so much a right of the individual, as a necessity of society.' Professor Parkinson said in an article recently published in England: 'The word Liberal means generous or open-handed. Be generous with what? With freedom and political responsibility.' Now, these are two quite good definitions of liberalism. How do we apply them to the problems of social welfare or social justice with which we are concerned? Their application to the economy means a free economy. What is a free economy? There are many variations of the free economy in different parts of the world, but one thing is common to all of them—the Government plays a limited and restricted part. Liberal economics are the economics of limited government. Social controls and regulations are necessary, but must be restricted to the minimum. That is one aspect. The other aspect of a free economy is that 'the consumer must be king.' What does this mean? Who is the consumer? All of us are consumers. We all buy something or other. Therefore, the whole country is made up of consumers. What does it mean that the consumer must be king? This means that what is produced in a country should be what the people want, should be something for which the people are prepared to pay a price in the market. The pattern of production must be dictated, not by Government, not by a Planning Commission, not by the dictates of anyone, but by the collective will of the people, as expressed in the market place. This has been well described as 'the ballot of the market place.' The ballot of the market place is superior to the ballot of the political election. You can shift your choice from hour to hour and day to day. You can buy one brand of soap one day, change over to another brand the next day, if you do not find it good. You can change your perfume, your shoes, your clothes—everything. How does this choice of the small man—it does not matter whether he has ten rupees in his pocket or a thousand rupees—affect the pattern of production? It affects it through the profit motive, through what is called the law of the market, which is the only sane economic law—the law of supply and demand. The industrialist or the businessman does not produce for fun or for love. He produces for a profit. He produces what will get him a profit in the market. A profit is made when the demand exceeds the supply because when the demand exceeds the supply, then prices go up. But where the supply exceeds the demand, prices drop. The biggest capitalist has thus to consider what the smallest man in the market wants. This is how the consumer is king and this is what is called a free market economy. This is the liberal economy, as opposed to the socialist. What are the results? One is prosperity. The buying power of the man in these countries is out of all proportion to what it is in the socialist countries. Even the Indian worker, under so-called capitalism is better off than Russia under socialism, since he does not have to work as long as a Russian worker, to get a pair of shoes or some cloth. Liberal methods, which are economic freedom or economic democracy, lead to social justice, equality, prosperity and freedom much quicker than the methods of State Capitalism or State-ism, which in France is called Etatisme. That is a much more accurate name than socialism, which may mean anything or nothing. It is interesting that most of the world is beginning to see this. The world trend is away from communism and socialism and towards liberal democracy. This is not surprising because, after all, human intelligence wins in the end. This essay is part of a series from the Indian Liberals archive, a project of the Centre for Civil Society. It is excerpted from Minoo Masani's essay in the book Congress Misrule and the Swatantra Alternative, published in November 1966. The original version can be accessed here.
New Indian Express
4 hours ago
- New Indian Express
Rahul visits slum demolition sites, vows legal, parliamentary fight for displaced families
NEW DELHI: Congress MP and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, visited the Jailerwala Bagh and Wazirpur slums in Ashok Vihar on Friday, where several houses were demolished last month during an anti-encroachment drive by the Delhi Development Authority. Gandhi met with the affected families, who expressed their distress over being rendered homeless. The Congress leader assured them of his support, vowing to take their fight to court and raise the issue in Parliament. 'Congress stands with you. We will not let this injustice continue,' Gandhi told the residents. The visit comes against the backdrop of repeated allegations by opposition parties accusing the newly formed BJP government of carrying out widespread slum demolitions across the capital. On June 16, the DDA carried out a demolition drive in the Jailerwala Bagh and Wazirpur slums, part of a larger initiative to clear illegal structures on government land. Around 200 dwellings were demolished, displacing many families in the process. Meanwhile, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has accused the BJP-led Delhi government of targeting other slum areas in the city. The party alleged that bulldozers are being sent to demolish slums in Shalimar Bagh and Rohtash Nagar. AAP claimed eviction notices have been issued for slums in Indira Camp, which lies within Chief Minister Rekha Gupta's constituency, and Lal Bagh in Rohtash Nagar. These homes are under threat of demolition by July 31, sparking panic among residents, it said.
The Print
4 hours ago
- The Print
Modi's Bharat vs Indira's India: 11-yr report card of politics, diplomacy, economy, nationalism
Mrs Gandhi and Modi took over in completely different circumstances. There was also the differential in political capital they began with. Mrs Gandhi had not won an election in 1966. She was a convenient compromise after Lal Bahadur Shastri's death. She didn't help her cause by looking overawed in Parliament early on, and socialist Ram Manohar Lohia dismissed her as a 'goongi gudiya' (a doll who didn't speak). She had also inherited a broken economy. The growth rate in 1965 was negative, -2.6 percent in fact. The triple blow of a war, droughts, food shortages and instability, and the deaths of two Prime Ministers in harness within 19 months had weakened India. First of all, we need to look at the larger political realities in which each took over power and the challenges to their authority. Then we will assess their record across four dimensions: politics, strategic and foreign affairs, the economy, and nationalism. On the day Narendra Modi won his third term in June, 2024, it was inevitable that this year, he would become India's second longest serving Prime Minister in consecutive terms, surpassing Indira Gandhi (24 January, 1966 to 24 March, 1977). It also became inevitable, therefore, that around this time in 2025, the season of Modi vs Indira comparisons will begin. Let me be the first, or among the first, off the block. The picture for Modi in 2014 was the exact opposite. He won a majority, the first in India after 30 years, and was his party's chosen candidate; the economy was averaging a robust 6.5 percent growth across the preceding 15 years. His was a peaceful, planned, predictable electoral transition. The degree of difficulty on his first day in power was way lower than Mrs Gandhi's, just as his political capital was enormously higher. It is also important to underline that Mrs Gandhi's 11th year wasn't electorally earned, but self-gifted by mauling the Constitution in a Parliament where she had a brute majority (Congress was 352 out of 518) and the Opposition in jail. In contrast, Modi's third term was earned through general elections, though he fell short of a majority this time. His 11 years have seen no challenge, either within his party or from the Opposition. The global situation has also mostly remained stable and favourable, until the arrival of Trump 2.0. Also Read: RSS chief Bhagwat draws the line at 75. India's politics stares at the Modi Exception Now, the comparisons across the four dimensions we listed. On domestic politics, the first question is: who's been the strongest Prime Minister of India, Modi or Indira? The rest don't count. While Mrs Gandhi redefined her politics in an ideology (deep-pink socialist) first out of compulsion and then preference, Modi was born, dyed and seasoned in his (saffron). Mrs Gandhi's power ebbed and peaked with the times. Modi's has almost been constant, barring the few months of hard dip after the 240 seats of 2024. Even at 240 now, one challenge he need not bother about is from within his party. He's marginalised all, replacing the state satraps with unknown lightweights. That isn't so different from Mrs Gandhi. On ruthlessness, therefore, they are equally matched. On dealing with the Opposition and free speech, the Emergency will be a hard act to match even if somebody—God forbid—wished to do so. On the respect for institutions, the competition is tough, like a dead heat. For convenience, let's limit ourselves to just one institution: the Rashtrapati. With V.V. Giri, Mrs Gandhi reduced the job to that of a porcelain president: a fragile, ornamental object expected to do nothing except sign on the dotted line. The Modi era presidents have been of a piece with those. Modi rose with the power of a '56-inch chest', Mrs Gandhi was often described in times innocent of political correctness as the only man in her Cabinet. Both lived up to these propositions. With Mrs Gandhi, we saw another manifestation of political skill, out of power and back again in 1977-84. But that period is out of the syllabus in this 11-year comparison. Also Read: One prime minister's 19-month legacy is bigger than another's Emergency An important question is who kept India's cohesion better. Mrs Gandhi ruthlessly fought insurgencies in Mizoram and Nagaland. Her troubles on this score came post-1980. Modi has made a dramatic improvement in the Kashmir Valley, and continued with normalisation in the Northeast. But Manipur is an unending failure. A big positive is the near destruction of the Maoists in east-central tribal India. This dovetails neatly into strategic and foreign affairs. Mrs Gandhi's 11 years were across the peak of the Cold War. She signed a treaty with the Soviet Union with a cleverly drafted mutual security clause, endured the Nixon-Kissinger tilt to China, and deftly navigated the narrow spaces still available to India. Modi started out with a 'friends with all' approach but Pakistan-China realities soon caught up with personalised diplomacy. Mrs Gandhi announced India's nuclear status in 1974 (Pokhran-1) but it took Modi in 2019 (Balakot) and in 2025 (Operation Sindoor) to call Pakistan's nuclear bluff. That's a big plus in his corner. As things soured in the neighbourhood, India warmed up to the US/West and then the complexity of Ukraine arose. This gave rise to multi-alignment. The Trump bull has trampled all over this China shop. Pakistan is playing the US and China as it did in 1971. And like Mrs Gandhi then, Modi has to look for alternatives, but then, the Soviet Union is long gone. His predicament is tougher than Mrs Gandhi's in 1971, but India is enormously stronger. The economy is where we might have expected to see many contrasts, but surprisingly, there are many similarities, too. Modi came to power promising to be the exact opposite of Mrs Gandhi, asserting that it's no business of the government to be in business. But on many basic instincts, he's emulated her. The larger, if enormously more efficient distributive politics, for example. An abiding commitment to the public sector instead of privatisation. Even this year, the budget allocated Rs 5 trillion for fresh investments in PSUs. Compare that with our defence budget, Rs 6.81 trillion. Modi has brought in some significant reform—digital payments, GST and the bankruptcy code. Many others, from mining to manufacturing and electricity economics, are meandering. In his first and second terms, Modi attempted some audacious reform—land acquisition, farm and labour reform laws, lateral entry into civil services. All have been given up now. Until Trump came to power, Modi seemed settled into the 6-6.5 percent figure, which we'd risk calling the Hindutva rate of growth. The logic: a politics driven by Hindu identity and polarisation would win elections with 6-6.5 percent risk-free. The Trump arm-twisting and the resultant free trade agreements have rocked that leisurely cruise. Let's see if this can force fresh reform at gunpoint. And finally, how do we compare the two greatest proponents of employing nationalism in their politics? For Mrs Gandhi the backdrop was multiple wars between 1962 and 1971. India was already a jai jawan, jai kisan country. The liberation of Bangladesh, Green Revolution and non-aligned world's adulation fuelled her nationalism. Modi's nationalism is more muscular, in military livery. We can't prejudge the consequences of a commitment trap in promising to respond militarily to a terror act and leave it to historians to reflect on the consequences of such strategic predictability. Under Modi, a new Hinduised nationalism has emerged. While this has united a critical mass of Hindus to keep him secure, it has also created divisions. India's adversaries would be tempted to run a dagger through these. We've seen the Pakistanis try that not just with our Muslims but also the Sikhs, especially during Operation Sindoor. Also Read: You can put words in Mrs Gandhi's mouth & get away. But too much fiction, and you mess with Bhindranwale
