Chapter 6 - Asia as a Third Way? J.C. Kumarappa and the Problem of Development in Asia

Summary

Abstract

Unsatisfied with the trajectory of Indian development in the early 1950s, famed Gandhian economist and activist Joseph Cornelius (J.C.) Kumarappa did not turn to the Soviet Union or the United States as examples to follow. Rather, he looked closer to home to find a more suitable model of development. This chapter tracks the way that J.C. Kumarappa saw China and Japan in particular as two different visions of an ‘Asian’ solution to India’s problems with food security, land management, and industrialization. It argues that for Kumarappa, ‘Asia’ was defined primarily by the issue of underdevelopment, but that he was uninterested in either of the two dominant models being imported into the region – American laissez-faire capitalism and Soviet-style central planning – in favor of a locally run, village-based development plan that could serve as a viable ‘third way’.

Keywords: Kumarappa, Asianism, Third Way, socialism, development

By the early 1950s, the famed Gandhian economist and political activist Joseph Cornelius (J.C.) Kumarappa felt that India was confronting a profound crisis. Kumarappa believed that the country, having recently been rent apart by Partition and deprived of Gandhi’s moral leadership, lacked the political program necessary to ensure that independence would be accompanied by economic empowerment. Gandhi’s constructive workers had been made either politically irrelevant or captured by the interests of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party, the questions of land reform and food scarcity seemed no closer to being solved, and plans for economic development largely focused on heavy industry and top-down industrialization drives. Amidst all this, even as Congress paid lip service to the image of Gandhi and his calls for self-sufficiency, India had begun accepting American aid. Observing the field from his position as the leader of the long sidelined All-India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) at his experimental Pannai Ashram, Kumarappa despaired that few Indians seemed willing to “build our new-born nation on a firm social foundation of equality and self-respect restoring to everyone the dignity of a human being”.

It was in this context that Kumarappa looked to changing political currents in the region to find solutions for India’s social and economic ills. Specifically, Kumarappa believed that by looking at the diverging paths of China and Japan, Indians could understand their country’s comparative shortcomings and advantages, and formulate a vision of decolonization that did not simply imitate older colonial policies.