The Rise of Conservative Criticism in India

Extract

A new mood of criticism is abroad in modern India. The mood can be characterized as one of dismayed re-evaluation of the entire direction of development efforts since Independence. Its character was presaged by the withdrawal from politics of J. P. Narayan as long ago as 1953, but it has only been in the last two years that the mood has begun to produce tangible political effects as well as to liven markedly public debate. To be sure, the efforts of the government of India have, for many years, come under sustained attack by leftists—notably, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party of India—the force of their argument being that those efforts have fallen far short of what is necessary for the certain amelioration of the lot of the mass of Indians. The singularity of the new wave of criticism is that it is producing a genuine conservatism, in the sense that its thrust is directed against the headlong pace, as well as the novelty, of Prime Minister Nehru's “socialist” program. The Swatantra Party, founded in 1961, is the organizational manifestation of this mood in active politics. It is being led by the redoubtable C. Rajagopalachari, former Vice-President of India and veteran of the Independence struggle. The central tenet of the new conservatism is that India's ills can be traced to overrapid innovation and too sweeping a departure from Indian ways. India's economic and social predicament is not amenable to Western social engineering, based primarily upon socialistic components within a democratic political frame; it can be bettered only by a return to the methods of spiritual appeal, individualistic effort, and tutelage in the fundamentals of political democracy that are associated with the revered name of Mahatma Gandhi.