India After Independence: 1947-2000 (3 page)

One positive feature was the growth of the means of transport and communication. In the forties, India had 65,000 miles of paved roads and nearly 42,000 miles of railway track. Roads and railways unified the country and made rapid transit of goods and persons possible. However, in the absence of a simultaneous industrial revolution, only a commercial revolution was produced which further colonialized the Indian economy. Also the railway lines were laid primarily with a view to link India’s inland raw material-producing areas with the ports of export and to promote the spread of imported manufactures from the ports to the interior. The needs of Indian industries with regard to their markets and sources of raw materials were neglected as no steps were taken to encourage traffic between inland centres. The railway freight rates were also so fixed as to favour imports and exports and to discriminate against internal movement of goods. Moreover, unlike in Britain and the United States, railways did not initiate steel and machine industries in India. Instead, it was the British steel and machine industries which were the beneficiaries of railway development in India. The Government of India also established an efficient and modern postal and telegraph system, though the telephone system remained underdeveloped.

Another important feature was the development of the small but Indian-owned industrial base. It consisted of several consumer industries such cotton and jute textiles, sugar, soap, paper and matches. Some intermediate capital goods industries such as iron and steel, cement, basic chemicals, metallurgy and engineering had also begun to come up, but on a paltry scale. By 1947, India already possessed a core of scientific and technical manpower, even though facilities for technical education were grossly inadequate, there being only 7 engineering colleges with 2,217 students in the country in 1939. Also, most of the managerial and technical personnel in industry were non-Indian.

There was also, after 1914, the rise of a strong indigenous capitalist class with an independent economic and financial base. The Indian capitalists were, in the main, independent of foreign capital. Unlike in many other colonial countries, they were not intermediaries or middlemen between foreign capital and the Indian market, or junior partners in foreign-controlled enterprises. They were also perhaps more enterprising than the foreign capitalists in India, with the result that investment under Indian capital grew considerably faster than British and other foreign investment. By the end of World War II, Indian capital controlled 60 per cent of the large industrial units. The small-scale industrial sector, which generated more national income than the large-scale sector, was almost wholly based on Indian capital.

By 1947, Indian capital had also made a great deal of headway in banking and life insurance. Indian joint-stock banks held 64 cent of all bank deposits, and Indian-owned life insurance companies controlled
nearly 75 per cent of life insurance business in the country. The bulk of internal trade and part of foreign trade was also in Indian hands.

These positive features of the Indian economy have, however, to be seen in a wider historical context. First, the development of Indian industry and capitalism was still relatively stunted and severely limited. Then, occurring within the framework of a colonial economy, this industrialization took place without India undergoing an industrial revolution as Britain did. The economy did not take-off. Whatever development occurred was not because of, but inspite of colonialism and often in opposition to colonial policies. It was the result of intense economic and political struggle against colonialism in the context of Britain’s declining position in the world economy and the two world wars and the Great Depression of the thirties. Lastly, fuller, unfettered or autonomous economic development or take-off could not have taken place without a break with and destructuring of colonialism.

The end result of colonial underdevelopment was the pauperization of the people, especially the peasantry and the artisans. Extreme and visible poverty, disease and hunger and starvation were the lot of the ordinary people. This found culmination in a series of major famines which ravaged all parts of India in the second half of the nineteenth century; there were regular scarcities and minor famines in one or the other part of the country throughout British rule. The last of the major famines in 1943 carried away nearly 3 million people in Bengal.

There were many other indications of India’s economic backwardness and impoverishment. Throughout the twentieth century, per capita income had stagnated if not declined. During 1941-50, the annual death rate was 25 per 1,000 persons while the infant mortality rate was between 175 and 190 per 1,000 live births. An average Indian born between 1940 and 1951 could expect to live for barely thirty-two years. Epidemics like smallpox, plague and cholera and diseases like dysentery, diarrhoea, malaria and other fevers carried away millions every year. Malaria alone affected one-fourth of the population.

Health services were dismal. In 1943, there were only 10 medical colleges turning out 700 graduates every year and 27 medical schools turning out nearly 7,000 licentiates. In 1951, there were only about 18,000 graduate doctors, most of them to be found in cities. The number of hospitals was 1,915 with 1,16,731 beds and of dispensaries 6,589, with 7,072 beds. The vast majority of towns had no modern sanitation and large parts of even those cities which did, were kept out of the system, modern sanitation being confined to areas where the Europeans and rich Indians lived. A modern water supply system was unknown in villages and absent in a large number of towns. The vast majority of towns were without electricity, and electricity in the rural areas was unthinkable.

Already by the end of the nineteenth century it was fully recognized that education was a crucial input and economic development, but the vast majority of Indians had almost no access to any kind of education and, in 1951, nearly 84 per cent were illiterate, the rate of illiteracy being 92
per cent among women. There were only 13,590 middle schools and 7,288 high schools. These figures do not adequately reflect the state of the vast majority of Indians, for they ignore the prevalence of the extreme inequality of income, resources and opportunities. A vast human potential was thereby left untapped in societal development for very few from the poorer sections of society were able to rise, to its middle and upper levels.

It is also to be noted that a high rate of population growth was not responsible for the poverty and impoverishment, for it had been only about 0.6 per cent per year between 1871 and 1941.

Thus, a stagnating per capita income, abysmal standards of living,

stunted industrial development and stagnating, low-productivity, semi-feudal agriculture marked the economic legacy of colonialism as it neared the end.

The British evolved a general educational system, based on English as the common language of higher education, for the entire country. This system in time produced an India-wide intelligentsia which tended to have a similar approach to society and common ways of looking at it and which was, at its best, capable of developing a critique of colonialism—and this it did during the second half of the nineteenth century and after. But English-based education had two extremely negative consequences. One, it created a wide gulf between the educated and the masses. Though this gulf was bridged to some extent by the national movement which drew its leaders as well its cadres from the intelligentsia, it still persisted to haunt independent India. Second, the emphasis on English prevented the fuller development of Indian languages as also the spread of education to the masses.

The colonial educational system, otherwise also suffered from many weaknesses which still pervade India’s schools and colleges. It encouraged learning by rote, memorization of texts, and proof by authority. The rational, logical, analytical and critical faculties of the students remained underdeveloped; in most cases they could reproduce others’ opinions but had difficulty in formulating their own. A major weakness of the colonial educational system was the neglect of mass education as also of scientific and technical education. There was also the almost total lack of concern for the education of girls, so that in 1951 only eight out of 100 women in India were literate.

The character of the colonial state was quite paradoxical. While it was basically authoritarian and autocratic, it also featured certain liberal elements, like the rule of law and a relatively independent judiciary. The administration was normally carried out in obedience to laws interpreted by the courts. This acted as a partial check on the autocratic and arbitrary administration and to a certain extent protected the rights and liberties of a citizen against the arbitrary actions of the bureaucracy. The laws were,
however, often repressive. Not being framed by Indians, and through a democratic process, they left a great deal of arbitrary power in the hands of the civil servants and the police. There was also no separation of powers between administrative and judicial functions. The same civil servant administered a district as collector and dispensed justice as a district magistrate.

The colonial legal system was based on the concept of equality of all before the law irrespective of a person’s caste, religion, class or status, but here too it fell short of its promise. The court acted in a biased manner whenever effort was made to bring an European to justice. Besides, as court procedures were quite costly, the rich had better access to legal means than the poor.

Colonial rulers also extended a certain amount of civil liberties in the form of the freedoms of the Press, speech and association in normal times, but curtailed them drastically in periods of mass struggle. But after 1897, these freedoms were increasingly tampered with and attacked even in normal times.

Another paradox of the colonial state was that after 1858 it regularly offered constitutional and economic concessions while throughout retaining the reins of state power. At first, British statesmen and administrators strongly and consistently resisted the idea of establishing a representative regime in India, arguing that democracy was not suited to India. They said only a system of ‘benevolent despotism’ was advisable because of India’s culture and historical heritage. But under Indian pressure, elections and legislatures were introduced both at the Centre and in the provinces. Nevertheless, the franchise, or the right to vote, was extremely narrow. Only about 3 per cent Indians could vote after 1919, and about 15 per cent after 1935. The government thus hoped to co-opt and thereby weaken the national movement and use the constitutional structure to maintain its political domination. The legislatures, however, did not enjoy much power till 1935 and even then supreme power resided with the British. The government could take any action without the approval of the legislatures and, in fact, could do what it liked, when it liked. But the legislators did have the possibility to expose the basic, authoritarian character of the government and the hollowness of colonial constitutional reforms.

The legislatures did, however, provide some Indians experience of participating in elections at various levels and working in elected organs. This experience was useful after 1947 when Indians acquired representative institutions. Meanwhile, the nationalists used the constitutional space in conjunction with mass struggles and intense political, ideological campaigns to overthrow colonial rule.

The colonial legacy about the unity of India was marked by a strange paradox. The colonial state brought about a greater political and administrative unification of India than ever achieved before. Building on the Mughal administrative system, it established a uniform system which penetrated the country’s remotest areas and created a single administrative entity. The British also evolved a common educational structure which in
time produced an India-wide intelligentsia which shared a common outlook on society and polity, and thought in national terms. Combined with the formation of a unified economy and the development of modern means of communication, colonialism helped lay the basis for making of the Indian nation.

But having unified India, the British set into motion contrary forces. Fearing the unity of the Indian people to which their own rule had contributed, they followed the classic imperial policy of divide and rule. The diverse and divisive features of Indian society and polity were heightened to promote cleavages among the people and to turn province against province, caste against caste, class against class, Hindus against Muslims, and the princes and landlords against the national movement. They succeeded in their endeavours to a varying extent, which culminated in India’s Partition.

The British ruled India through a modern bureaucracy headed by the highly-paid Indian Civil Service (ICS) whose members were recruited through merit based on open competition. The bureaucracy was rule-bound, efficient and, at the top, rather honest. Following Indian pressure the different services were gradually Indianized after 1918—by 1947, nearly 48 per cent of the members of the ICS were Indian—but positions of control and authority were up to the end retained by the British. Indians in these services too functioned as agents of British rule.

Though their senior echelons developed certain traditions of independence, integrity, hard work, and subordination to higher political direction they also came to form a rigid and exclusive caste, often having a conservative and narrow social, economic and political outlook. When massive social change and economic development was sought after 1947, the rigidity and the outlook of the bureaucracy became a major obstacle.

While the ICS was more or less free of corruption, it flourished at the lower levels of administration, especially in departments where there was scope for it, such as public works and irrigation, the Royal Army Supply Corps, and the police. During the Second World War, because of government regulation and controls, corruption and black marketing spread on a much wider scale in the administration as also did tax evasion, once rates of income tax and excise were revised to very high levels. There was also the rise of the parallel, black economy.