Radicalism on the Cheap

INDIA Radicalism on the Cheap India's Western-educated intellectuals have long paid homage, but little genuine heed, to socialism. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru believed that it offered solutions to India's enormous problems, but neither got very far in applying its precepts. Nehru's daughter. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, is no less convinced--and no less bewildered about how to make socialism work.

Last year, attempting to rally popular support for her struggle to control the ruling Congress Party, Indira nationalized the country's 14 largest private banks. So heartening was the response from the masses that from that point onward, she pledged again and again to accelerate India's move to ward socialism. The tactic was a political success. Carrying out her promises, however, has proved something else. "It is one thing to try to create an illusion of radicalism," editorialized the Times of India recently, "but quite another thing to become radical." That difficulty became uncomfortably clear when Indira's party held a plenary session in Bombay at the end of last month.

Bad News for Maharajahs. Before the Bombay conference, the party's radicals had hopes of swift, dramatic improvements. But Indira and her leading advisers, torn between radical impulses and hard political realities, endorsed only two firm moves, both of them considerably more symbolic than significant: 1) early abolition of the pensions paid to 279 former maharajahs, which will save about $7,000,000 a year, and 2) nationalization of auto, theft, fire and other general insurance, which will affect only the small proportion of Indians who own cars and homes (life insurance was nationalized in the 1950s). A third resolution calling for full enforcement of all existing land reform laws by 1971 was even less meaningful. Land reform is under the jurisdiction of the country's individual state governments, which are often totally unresponsive to New Delhi.

In addition, Mrs. Gandhi has spoken vaguely of increasing government control of the import-export trade, taking over the wholesale trade in major agricultural commodities and imposing a ceiling on the ownership of urban property. There are, however, no firm timetables for these plans.

Perhaps more noteworthy were the omissions. No mention was made, for instance, about just where additional funds were to be found for proposed social expenditures such as housing and education. Nothing was said about India's most pressing single economic problem--how to accelerate economic development to provide jobs for the 7,000,000 people entering the labor force each year. There was no mention of the becalmed family-planning program, though India's population is growing at a rate of 15 million a year and could reach 1 billion within the next 25 years. Because of that seemingly inexorable growth, the country's per capita income remains at roughly the 1947 pre-independence level of $70 a year.

A Revolutionary Turn? As far as Indira's leftist supporters are concerned, she is not going nearly far enough. Chandra Shekhar, a leader of the so-called "Young Turks," says: "People have lost patience. They have waited 22 years [since independence], and nothing has been done." Unless the resolutions are acted upon soon, Shekhar warns, "history in India will take a revolutionary turn." That may be an exaggeration, but the left's increasing restiveness is becoming a problem for Indira. Only two days after the party meeting in Bombay came to an end, her government announced that the giant house of Birla, which is to Indian radicals what Dow Chemical is to the American variety, had been licensed to build a $75 million fertilizer plant in partnership with U.S. Steel. The National Herald, founded by Indira's father and now the unofficial organ of her wing of the Congress Party, condemned the deal as "unsustainable."

Even the Syndicate, the Congress Party's conservative branch, has taken note of the fact that the idea of socialism exerts irresistible magic in Indian politics. A week before Indira's faction met in Bombay, the rival Syndicate gathered in Ahmedabad and found it expedient to shift markedly to the left in its own economic sloganizing. Syndicate leaders, however, were seriously considering talks with a couple of right-wing Indian parties to form an anti-Indira coalition. In public, some of the faction's orators savagely attacked the Prime Minister. Mrs. Tarakeshwari Sinha, for example, won heavy applause by charging that Indira was a "security risk" because of her apparent pro-Soviet leanings. Neither the negotiations nor the attacks, however, prevented the Syndicate from adopting much of Indira's approach in an effort to win popular support.

Mrs. Gandhi has no doubt about the effectiveness of her approach among the masses of India's voters. Privately, she seems aware that too rapid a shift toward socialism would damage India's fragile economy and alienate its budding middle class, and she has her foot firmly on the brake pedal. In public, her commitment to socialism knows no bounds--"not because it is a glamorous word," as she said in Bombay, "but because there is no other path for the solution to these problems. The question is, can we do it?" For Indira's half a billion people, there are even more pressing questions: How? And how soon?

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