Modern Liberalism

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Minoo R. Masani
(The Hague, 28 May 1979)

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Born:	In Bombay on 20 November 1905.
Education:	Graduate of Bombay and London Universities, barrister-at-law of Lincoln's Inn.
1932, 1933 and 1943:	Imprisoned for civil disobedience activities.
1943:	Elected Mayor of Bombay.
1945:	Member of the Indian Legislative Assembly.
1947:	Member of the Constituent Assembly and Provisional Parliament.
1948-1949:	Ambassador to Brazil.
1949-1951:
1957-1962:	Member of Parliament.
1963-1970:
1950-1952:	Chairman of the United Nations Sub-commission for the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.
1959:	Founded the Swatantra Party together with C. Rajagopalachari.
1959-1971:	General secretary and President of the Swatantra Party.
Since 1957:	Head of Personnel and Productivity Services, a leading firm of Management Consultants in Bombay.

Member of the Executive Committee of the All India PEN Centre.

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Interview with Minoo Masani

1. Gandhi

Bolkestein: Was Gandhi to you an example to follow because of his moral qualities or because of his political ideas?

Masani: I don't think I would dare to follow his example in life. There was nothing like him. He was an outstandingly great man: a bit of a prophet, a bit of a saint and an extremely great statesman. It is not given to us to have those qualities combined, so I wouldn't even dream of trying to copy him, but certainly learn from him, yes. I started knowing Gandhi in 1934 when we had just established the Congress Socialist Party in India and Gandhi, to whom I was introduced by my Father, thought he would save this young man from wasting his time. So he said: ‘Come and walk with me for ten days’, on a tour which he was carrying out in Orissa, ‘and let's discuss your ideas and mine’. This was a great privilege because I walked with him, with his hand on my shoulder and somebody else on the other side. Every morning and evening for ten days, for about an hour each time, so I got about 20 hours of solid conversation, which was quite a privilege for this brash young man. I was then full of nationalisation and the traditional Socialist way to the future. I tried to sell this to Gandhi but Gandhi just refused to buy any of it. Once he said: ‘Do you know my concept of nationalisation? It is that the people who work on the machines, the managers and the workers, should run and own them. Not the way the government own property in Russia, which is the bureaucratic way, but own them as trustees for the community’. When I went to Yugoslavia in 1955, long after the old man had died, they told me that workers' control meant that the managers and the workers own the factory as

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trustees for the community and not for the government. I said: ‘Do you know Mahatma Gandhi told me that first? You gentlemen are twenty years behind the old man. He was well ahead of all of us and we did not know it then’. So I would say that he was right from the point of view of social justice: a kind of participatory running of a plant with an ultimate responsibility to the community which Ludwig Erhard called social enterprise, a combination of private enterprise and social responsibility. This I think is the answer to the problem of social justice and that of advancing towards a more free and equal society.

I stood up to Gandhi for the best part of ten years but by the end of the ten years he converted me and I said: ‘Marxism is wrong, Gandhi is right’. I wrote a little book in 1945, that was ten years after I first met him, called ‘Socialism Reconsidered’, where I discarded Marx and the Soviet Union and turned to Gandhi as the example of a better social order.

Of course Gandhi was a tremendous democrat. I have never known a man who was so humble and unassuming with young people. For his time he was very modern and as far as his democratic approach is concerned there were many instances where he was generous to a fault. You could say the most critical things to him and he never reacted the way Nehru or others did by saying: ‘How dare you’.

For instance, in 1934 he indulged in a kind of political manoeuvre which I thought was not fair. I was sitting in the All India Congress Committee and I sent a little note to him which read like this: ‘Dear Gandhiji, is there a printer's error in your draft or have you gone back on your word?’ I signed it and sent it up and I saw Gandhi put it in front of him. After about an hour he answered me and said: ‘My friend Masani is somewhere in the audience and has upbraided me for breach of faith. Today I am presenting the resolution of the Congress Executive and I want to tell him that I was overruled. What we had agreed on, he and I and Jayaprakash, I couldn't deliver. I'm sorry but I can't deliver the goods. I have been outvoted in my own cabinet’. So J.P. and I went to him at tea time and we said: ‘We don't accept this. You don't tell us you have been outvoted when you really have made a commitment. You have let us down very badly because we have done something on the strength of your assurance and you have not delivered’. I said as I parted: ‘I think this is subtlety unworthy of a Mahatma’. It was very cheeky of me. I was only about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. When we

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got back, thinking that we had rather offended the old man, he started by saying ‘Gentlemen, I have been thinking over the tea-hour interval and I have come to the conclusion that this draft has to be altered overnight. I suggest that we appoint a committee of six or eight people’. The last two names were those of Jayaprakash and myself, although we were not on the executive. We voted and Gandhi got our opponents defeated. Now this showed the greatness of the fellow, that if two young chaps would go and cheek him, he would say: ‘By God, you're right, I have been rather too clever and that is not fair’, and eat his words.

That is one example. The other was his modernness. He was extremely modern. He looked very patriarchic and archaic, but he wasn't. He was a very modern man and I loved him because being also modern we were on the same wavelength. For instance, I would never go to him without an appointment which he appreciated very much. He said: ‘You know, you are the only chap who writes and asks: “Can I come on such and such a day”? People just walk in on me. They have no consideration for me. They think I am always waiting for them with nothing to do’.

The other thing was his punctuality. He was a wonderful man for time. He had a big kitchen clock in front of him. You asked for half an hour and you got it. You walked in at ten thirty and your time finished at eleven. When it got to eleven, he interrupted and said: ‘Masani, your time is over’. Of course your face dropped because you hadn't finished what you wanted to say. But Gandhi said: ‘Never mind, go to my secretary and get in the queue again. There is a man waiting whose time this is. Your time is over. You can't pinch his time but go and come in again in the afternoon’. So I would go out and ask for another half hour and when you came in again in the afternoon Gandhi would say: ‘Now this morning you were saying’, and he would pick up that half sentence and say: ‘Please continue’.

I got into trouble with the British in 1935. They took away my passport when I was in London. I was going to the Soviet Union when this happened. R.A. Butler, who was then the Home Secretary, said in the House of Commons that I was a dangerous Communist who had preached violence. Next morning the London papers carried a reproof from Gandhi who said: ‘The Secretary of State should know better than that. He is utterly ignorant. Mr. Masani is one of my men. He is no Communist. He preaches non-violence. Mr. Butler had better restore the passport with an apology’, which I got. Now this was the greatness

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of the man. He didn't need to be asked for help. He rushed to your aid even though you were not so much his man as a cheeky young Socialist.

Bolkestein: If one looks at Bombay and Calcutta today one sees the industrialisation that has taken place and one wonders whether the message of the spinning wheel hasn't been lost.

Masani: One shouldn't oversimplify his attitude to the machine. He said many things about the machine. He said: ‘I'm not against machinery as such. For instance, take a sewing machine which lightens a woman's labour. I think it is a wonderful invention and I think that every woman should have a sewing machine. I am all for electric power which lightens the burden of manual labour but I am against the craze for machines for the sake of machines, what with India having a large population and very limited capital resources. The man-to-capital ratio being as adverse as it is, one of the ways to improve this is to have technical advancement slowed down so that labour-intensive machines are used rather than capital-intensive machines’. Now I think that is legitimate. Nor do I think that it is completely lost. Mr. Charan Singh, who is a kind of farmers' leader, has taken over Gandhi's mantle on this. I do not agree with him because he takes an absolute position. In 1978 when he was Home Minister he said that the entire Indian cloth market should be reserved for handlooms which is one step ahead of the spinning wheel. I thought it was an outrageous proposition. I said: ‘You know, your idea is to create employment’. Yes, he said, labour-intensive as opposed to capital-intensive. I said: ‘Yes, but not this way. India has a very large modern textile industry, you can't just scrap it now. You could say that all future expansion should be reserved for hand-looms. I'm prepared to look at that, but to say that the entire labour population of thousands of people and their machines should all be scrapped, people thrown on the scrap-heap, that is no way to create employment! The first thing you create is a law-and-order problem of 500,000 people without jobs. Surely one doesn't start with this kind of absurdity? You had better re-state the whole thing.’

On the other hand the amount of money Nehru spent on the development of atomic power was a waste. He could as easily have waited for the rest of the world to develop this and then adopt it. We don't have to be autonomous or autarchic in every development like space or nuclear

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power. Surely we can let the rest of the world lead us. So I would draw a line and say I am Gandhian on atomic power. I don't see any point in these white elephants eating up capital while there is no drinking water in the villages. There has to be a sense of proportion, so I would urge a middle path.

2. Time

Bolkestein: In your autobiography, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn’, you comment on the lack of punctuality in the Indian mind. Some people have noted that the Chinese and the Japanese have a very strong sense of history and that they are able to date historical events with great precision. They have also noted a lack of feeling for history in Indian thought and they have come to the conclusion that Indians lack a sense of historical perspective. I mention this because it appears to me that management has to do with a sense of time.

Masani: I think it is unquestionable that we are a very unpunctual people. We are not unique - I shall give other examples - but we are. People will ask me to help them with a job. I will say: ‘Come and see me’, and you would think that was one interview where they wouldn't keep you waiting. But no, they turn up twenty minutes late. I say to them: ‘You are twenty minutes late when you want a job. How late are you when you don't want a job? I am very put out. I really have lost all my enthusiasm for helping you. This is a very poor start’. ‘Oh, the bus was full’. I said: ‘I know the bus was full but do you know what I would do in your place? I would get here fifteen minutes before time. I would walk up and down the footpath and I would ring the bell at the right moment. I do that quite often with busy people. I am sure you can do that’. This is a very good example of the utter lack of respect for time.

Having said that, let me also say that I have known worse. I was in Brazil as Ambassador many years ago. The Carioca has no sense of time at all. People will accept invitations for dinner and either come very late or not turn up at all, without an apology to the hostess.

It may be that the Chinese and the Japanese have a better historical perspective. The Indian is very vague. He talks of his glorious past but hasn't the foggiest idea what period he is talking about.

I think it is a function of the agricultural way of life. In agriculture

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you go by the sun. In the fields it doesn't matter whether it is seven thirty, quarter to eight or eight o'clock but in our daily lives every minute matters. Time is money. Now this concept that time is money is not part of a rural way of life. I would say that all rural peoples, maybe the Chinese are an exception, are unpunctual and lack a sense of time, whereas industrial peoples jolly well learn to accommodate themselves to time.

3. Metaphysics

Bolkestein: Another thing that has been said about the Indians is that of all the people in the world they have the most aptitude for metaphysics. In your autobiography you ask: ‘Is the Indian mind traditionally more dialectical than that of other people around the globe?’ Then you run into this problem of time. The contribution of the Indian mind to philosophy and metaphysics is enormous whereas the Chinese and the Japanese are very much of this world.

Masani: Well, I am not a scholar of the subject but it seems to me that the Hindu mind is dialectical and that black and white simply do not exist. Everything is grey. Everything is more or less equally good or equally bad. You are eclectic, you swallow everything and absorb it. Communism isn't bad, there are many good things about it, let's be tolerant, let's be neutral about it. So you sit on the fence about everything.

I believe that Nehru's policy of non-alignment, which we are still carrying on, somewhat tongue in cheek, is a policy of indecision, of sitting on the fence and not taking sides. I remember once in 1948 or 1949, before Nehru paid his first visit to Washington, he said: ‘You know the Americans want me to go to Washington and I am dodging it’. So I said: ‘Why?’ And he replied: ‘Well, they are a peculiar people. They want a yes or a no’. So I said: ‘What is wrong with that?’ He said: ‘I don't want to say yes and I don't want to say no!’ This whole theory of non-alignment came out of saying: why must I choose, let me sit on the fence between these two big chaps and keep both of them fairly happy, which we are still doing. So I think the Indian mind is involved and incapable of a decision. I am a management consultant and one of my conclusions is that the weakest thing in Indian business is decision-

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making. Everyone is stalling, everyone is waffling, everyone is trying to put-off, passing the buck up and down. It is carried to such an extent that the decision-maker stands out a mile. Most Indians do not want to take a decision because they do not want to face the consequences. The bureaucrats are exactly the same, so are the politicians and I think this comes out of the metaphysical nature of the Hindu or the Indian mind.

Salvador de Madariaga who was our great Liberal doyen and who died in 1978 came to Bombay as a guest of ours for the Congress of Cultural Freedom in 1951. After the conference he went to Australia and on his way back he passed through Bombay. We had breakfast together and he asked me: ‘Masani, something bothers me. Can you explain this: you chaps are so intelligent and so articulate, we admire this. I have just been to Australia and the Australians are not very bright. But look at the contrast: you had a beautiful garden and you made a desert out of it. They have made a garden out of a desert. Now who is intelligent, you or they?’ So I said: ‘I think both. There are different kinds of human intelligence. The Australian is the constructive kind that builds, shears the sheep, digs the land and makes water-works. We are the articulate, lawyer-type of intelligence, playing with words and arguments, who are not very good at construction.’ So I would say that the Australian has a constructive kind of intelligence and we have a dialectical kind which is not very constructive.

Bolkestein: In ‘An Area of Darkness’ V.S. Naipaul writes: ‘The Mahatma has been absorbed into the formless spirituality and decayed pragmatism of India. The revolutionary became a God and his message was thereby lost. He failed to communicate to India his way of direct looking’.

Masani: The Indian has made Gandhi in his own image, he is all things to all men and they use his name quite cynically. Gandhi said: ‘There is no such thing as Gandhiism. Gandhiism is what I say from time to time. Since I am not very consistent and change my mind often, those who really want to know what to believe should take the later statement on a particular subject. Since I do not believe that consistency is good’ - he used to call consistency the virtue of the ass - ‘if I drop something and change my mind then please listen to what I said later because that is what I think’. People like Jayaprakash have picked up what he said and

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tried to interpret it. I would say that this is correct, though: we have not learnt the things from Gandhi that we should. Take ends and means. Indian politics today is in direct contradiction of Gandhi's statement that the end does not justify the means. Almost every Indian politician thinks it does and quite shamelessly says: ‘Well, my aim is good so you musn't quarrel with my method’. I would say Gandhi has failed on the biggest issue which he tried to put to the Indian people, but so did Jesus Christ, judging by what was done in his name.

4. Caste

Bolkestein: There is a third factor in Indian life: the sense of social stratification. It is the policy of the Indian Government to try and abolish caste. Is it happening?

Masani: It is probably fading out very slowly, not because the government wants it to go but because of the industrial way of life. You can't have untouchability in a factory: people working together and eating in the canteen, drinking water from the same water fountain, these things do not permit of that kind of discrimination. The caste system is breaking down slowly because of the change in the way of life. Also young people refuse to obey. There are Hindus and Muslims marrying Parsees and Hindus marrying Christians and foreigners and nobody gives a damn any more and the parents are there grinning from cheek to cheek quite happily, when twenty years ago they would have said: ‘I won't look at your face again if you do this’. In my time when I was a student it was considered absolutely unthinkable that you let your people down by marrying someone outside: you broke faith, you were destroying your community, your religion. So I would say that this is much more important than what the politicians say.

The politician, unfortunately, is thoroughly dishonest about it. Today caste is more important as a vote bank than it has ever been since Independence or before. Ideological things have faded away, but are you a Harijan? Are you a Jat? Are you a Brahmin? Are you a Sudra? People vote more or less according to caste. Jayaprakash said that caste is the biggest party in India. Indian politics have become almost caste-centred. The ideological fights that we carried on when the British were there have faded out. No one gives a damn about any ‘ism’. All they care about is: What caste does he belong to? They gang up by caste.

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Charan Singh is a Jat. Jagjivan Ram is a Harijan. Morarji Desai is a Brahmin. Mrs. Gandhi is a Brahmin. The Brahmins and the Harijans combine against the middle orders, and vice versa. So I would say that caste is breaking down socially and economically but politically it is still very much alive, unfortunately, much too alive and no thanks should be given to the politician.

Bolkestein: Naipaul quotes the Gita: ‘Do thy duty even if it be humble rather than another's even if it be great. To die in one's duty is life, to live in another's is death’. He adds the following observation: ‘Every man is an island; each man to his function, his private contract with God. This is the realisation of the Gita's selfless action. This is caste. In the beginning a no doubt useful division of labour in the rural society, it has now divorced function from social obligation, position from duties. It is inefficient and destructive; it has created a psychology which will frustrate all improving plans. Is has led to the Indian passion for speech making, for gestures and for symbolic action’.

Masani: This is harsh, but I think that it is basically true. Caste interferes with social mobility. It interferes with a democratic society. Gandhi used to say that caste started without this freezing into compartments. He said: ‘I have no objection to caste, if a Brahmin can be a Harijan and a Harijan can be a Brahmin depending upon his intelligence and his way of life, that's fine’. But that is not what caste is about. The essence of caste is that it freezes you into a compartment. So we must accept that Naipaul is right in his denunciation of caste. It is something that may have had sense or meaning thousands of years ago, but which has lost all of it.

Bolkestein: The Goans are Catholics and have been under Portuguese rule for centuries. Even there you find castes. Is there something in the Indian mind that has given rise to this social stratification?

Masani: Let's not ignore the factor of colour. Caste started largely as a distinction of colour. The Sudras and the untouchables were dark Dravidian peoples and the upper class who came from outside India, from Central Asia, were fair. There is no doubt that the Caucasian people drove down the Dravidian people who were more urban and more

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civilised than these nomads but the Northerners had the horse and the Southerners did not. In other words the tank was on one side and not on the other. So it was a military superiority but intellectually the South was more civilised.

Bolkestein: Isn't Madras one of the centres of Hinduism? Yet the people in Madras are on the whole darker than the people up North.

Masani: Yes, the Brahmin/non-Brahmin feuding has nowhere been as bad as in Madras. That is where the Brahmins have oppressed the non-Brahmins in the past so much that government circulars now keep Brahmin boys of the greatest brilliance out of positions. All jobs in government, barring a small minority, are reserved for non-Brahmins. The non-Brahmin, no matter how dull, is given priority over the Brahmin. This is retaliation for centuries of discrimination. This is ‘affirmative action’. In Tamil Nadu a dark man has priority over a white man, as in America. Brahmin boys are punished for the sins of their fathers who kept the non-Brahmins down. Now the Brahmins are paying for their guilt by being kept out of the medical profession, judgeships, government jobs. You can't become Chief Minister if you are a Brahmin in Madras or in Maharashtra. Rajaji was the last such to get to that position.

Bolkestein: Do you see the position of the Harijans improving?

Masani: We abolished untouchability by a stroke of the pen in the Constitution when I was a member of the Constituent Assembly, but that made very little difference because Hindu society as a whole has never abolished untouchability. In the villages, although no longer in the cities, the Harijan is discriminated against. In many cases he and his women are not allowed to draw water from the common well because they would pollute it. So there is another well where they can go. If they try to go to the village well, then sometimes they get away with it, but there have been assassinations over attempts by Harijans to establish equality. Now mind you, if he did not revolt nothing would happen. The examples which have come up in the last few years are an encouraging sign that the Harijan is trying to assert his right. Let us not idealise them either. They can ill-treat isolated people of the upper class

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just as cruelly as they have ever been treated by the upper class. There are examples of both.

Bolkestein: It is said that Charan Singh favours the land-owning classes and that the landless classes have become more oppressed.

Masani: This is basically Communist propaganda. There is an element of truth but not more. Charan Singh represents the landed farmer and communist propaganda is that he is the kulak leader. The kulaks were the salt of the earth. They were very good farmers whom Stalin killed because they came in the way of his wretched collective farming system. Now our kulaks are very small men because we abolished the feudal landlord system even before Independence. The zamindari system was abolished. Peasant farming alone remains. Now peasant farming is not equal: somebody has two acres and somebody has twenty acres and perhaps somebody may have fifty acres. We have middle-class farmers. We had a big convention in Delhi a few months ago and the reporters who interviewed the farmers found that mostly they weren't kulaks at all. They had two or three or five acres of land and had come to back Charan Singh politically. This myth is really left-wing propaganda which sells throughout the world. The Director General of the Indian Institute of Agriculture, who is one of our leading agricultural scientists, said to me: ‘We have made a study of this and we are going to publish papers to show that the benefits of subsidies and of fairer parity of prices do trickle down, even to the landless worker, but it takes a few years' time. You can't have it overnight’. Therefore it is not true that the green revolution only benefits the richer farmer. The green revolution is going to trickle down but it will take a generation.

Bolkestein: How have Charan Singh's policies affected the Harijans?

Masani: The Harijans are not all landless either. Most people in the West probably believe that the pattern of land-ownership is a pyramid with an apex and a very broad base. It is not so: it is an inverted triangle. There are more landed people in India than there are landless. If ‘one man one vote’ is worth anything, then it is more democratic not to be against the landed! It is true that the quantity of land is unequal. Among the landed, one would include a man with half an acre of land

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but that does not mean to say that psychologically he is not a land-owner. Nehru made the point in a debate with me, when he was in favour of collective farming, saying: ‘Mr. Masani talks about the landed but how much land? Half an acre!’ My answer to the Prime Minister was: ‘Sir, a Mother loves her child however small it is, so the farmer loves his half acre as much as you might love forty acres, and you can't take it away like this’.

Bolkestein: What about the Adivasis, the tribals? Are they becoming integrated into national life?

Masani: Alas, yes, and I am against it. The Adivasis are the original inhabitants of India. That is what Adivasi means: the original inhabitant. They were the people who were there before the Dravidians. The tribals are the Gonds, the Bhils, the Murias, the Nagas and a hundred more. I am not an expert on tribals but I did stand for and represent in Parliament a tribal constituency in Bihar. The Adivasis wanted a separate state from the other people of Bihar who were caste-Hindus and I stood for them. They elected me. It is quite clear that they have an entirely different cultural pattern. I wore grey bags and a felt hat with an open shirt. In no other constituency in India could I have been elected if I had dressed like that. I was advised that if you put on a Gandhi cap you were a dead duck. The Gandhi cap and the khaddi-dressed Hindu were the enemy of the tribals. They call him a dacoit. You would be taken for one more dacoit who had come to exploit them. This was in 1957. I got elected. Nehru came and opposed me, but he couldn't make a dent because the tribals didn't care what the Hindu wanted. They said: ‘This man looks like the Sahib, the British who were here were our friends. They gave us hospitals’. The missionaries have done a wonderful job for the tribals. Throughout India the tribals have been looked after by the Christian Missionary. The Nagas are Baptists. They are more civilised than the North Indian Hindu. Their women are free. When our soldiers started rape they said: ‘You are barbarians. How can we be Indians? We don't rape women! We wait for them to accept us’. It would be a great pity if they did integrate because they don't want to, they want to have their own way of life. They would be more modern and civilised if they were allowed to come into the modern stream without going through the traditional Indian way.

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5. Character

Bolkestein: In your pamphlet ‘Too Much Politics and Too Little Citizenship’ you mention Indian character. You write about the moral preaching of Indians.

Masani: This lack of character is a lack of discipline and of home and school training. There is nothing wrong with the Indian child when it is born, but the conditioning at home and in school and college is all wrong. Let's start with the home in North India. We think of the Gangetic Plain as being typically India. As you go South we think that we are more civilised and more down to earth. We look down on the Northerner. We think that India's evils come from the fact that all the Prime Ministers have come from U.P. which we think of as a sink of backwardness. That is true of literacy or education or the position of women. Bengal and the South are well ahead in all these things. They are cleaner, they are more decent, their women are freer. The social degradation is worst in the North. Now let's take the Northern home. In educated bourgeois families the boys are spoilt beyond redemption. These little brats are pampered from the time they are born because they are valuable. The girls don't matter. Formerly they used to bump off the girls. Now they just neglect them. This is still going on. This neglect is not a joke. India is one of the few countries where the male population is in the majority. Hospitals have two thirds of the beds reserved for men. The boys are looked after, but as the brat grows up he is spoilt. I have known Hindu families to send their boys to school in cars while the girls walked.

Nothing is denied to the male child, everything is laid on for him, he is the future boss, while the girls are neglected. Now the interesting thing is that in family after family of that kind, the girls wear the pants. The girls have character and back-bone. I think that the North Indian woman is twice the man and Indira Gandhi is no exception. I find in the boureoisie as a whole that the women are very much people, while their brothers are not. I am not saying that this is a good thing but this is how nature has rewarded or compensated for the injustice.

Bolkestein: Would you say that this is why Indians tend to moralise?

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Masani: There is the difference between profession and practice which you are hinting at. We say one thing but don't practice it. I think this comes of being spoilt. Now again there is no discipline in school. There is rank indiscipline. In the last few years students have beaten up Vice-Chancellors with impunity and nothing has happened to them. There is also indiscipline in Parliament. They don't listen to the Speaker. They shout the Speaker down because they have a louder voice than the Speaker and then the Speaker says: ‘What can I do?’ and the Prime Minister doesn't name them because he or she is frightened of losing their support. So we have rampant indiscipline and I blame it on bad upbringing. The Battle of Britain was won on the playing fields of Eton. Well, we have no playing fields of Eton. We have got about twelve Etons in the whole of India and the politicians are busy destroying them on the ground that public schools are not compatible with socialism. In other words everyone must have an equally rotten education.

Bolkestein: To return to the matter of India, you know Nirad Chaudhuri's thesis as he put it in his book ‘The Continent of Circe’. Let me give you a quotation: ‘To put the matter briefly, the Hindu is the European distorted, corrupted and made degenerate by the cruel torrid environment and by the hostility both real and imagined of the true sons of the soil’ (page 149) and again on page 170 he talks about the Hindu outlook and he says: ‘That outlook is possible only among those who have been beaten by nature and broken in spirit. All of it boils down to one simple fact, collapse of courage and vitality. There is no hint anywhere that anything is happening in the moral or spiritual sphere - all the suffering is placed in the secular order, in one word, in the torturous Indogangetic plain’. Nirad Chaudhuri obviously looks to the harsh climate of the North Indian Plains as an important factor in the Indian mental make up.

Masani: There is no doubt that the climate makes people what they are. Extreme heat and humidity undoubtedly contribute to the lassitude and the low vitality of the Indian in many instances. Combined with malnutrition it becomes very marked, so I do not at all disagree with Nirad Chaudhuri, he is a very good observer. I think that his description of the Hindu being the European spoilt by the environment is a very good one. After all when the Aryans came, they were sturdy dynamic

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vital people and you see this in the Punjab and in Haryana where the Aryan has not been affected much by the climate and the resistance of the people around. The Punjabi and the Haryana people are still the most vital people in India. They are the sword arm of India. They are the best farmers. They produce crops of grain which are out of all proportion to anyone else's. They have the only surplus state and the green revolution has caught on. Everyone there is part of the green revolution but in the rest of India it still touches only the fringe. The Punjabi and Haryana farmer has big crops and makes a lot of money and feeds the rest of India. You do have this contrast between these two Northwestern states and the rest of India.

6. Politics

Bolkestein: What is your opinion of the rôle of political parties in India?

Masani: They started well. I was Member of Congress Party at Independence, the party of Gandhi and Nehru. I left in 1952 and started the Swatantra Party with Rajagopalachari in 1959. I think by and large the party system has decayed instead of developing. Every hope that a two party system would emerge gets frustrated. The atomisation and the splintering are part of the Indian temperament. Now in India we have a tremendous prejudice in favour of the two party system because we adopted our ideas from the British and the Americans.

There was a variety of little groups: two Communist Parties, two Socialist Parties, the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra Party, all coming and going but never any chance of getting into power. The result was an irresponsible opposition. In March 1977 we thought: At last Morarji Desai and the Janata are in power. Mrs. Gandhi has got a good minority position. Now we can have a two-party system. But it is not happening. I think this is part of the Indian nature.

I said this to Sardar Patel, in 1947 or 1948, before he became deputy Prime Minister. In a Committee of the Constituent Assembly we were discussing the system of election and I moved P.R. and Patel said: ‘No Masani, we can't have P.R.’ - this was in a committee where we could talk freely - ‘we want the British two-party system. I know it is unfair, you might get a lopsided parliament but that is exactly what India needs: a strong government with 80% of the people behind it in Parliament

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doing things and the others waiting their turn’. I said: ‘But Sir, you won't get this’, and he said: ‘Why not?’ I said: ‘Because we are Latins and not Anglo-Saxons’. He replied: ‘Explain that’. I said: ‘We are the splintering, disputatious kind. We do not have this great thing of compromise which the Anglo-Saxon has. They know how to submerge minor differences for the sake of cohesion and therefore they can afford to keep two parties going, which are coalitions but fairly disciplined. In India you won't have it because we will quarrel and we will split. All our societies, all our universities, all our trade unions bear witness to that. These parties will not stay together because of personal rivalries and factions’. This is what happened. The Socialists split and then we have three Communist parties, the CPI, the CPI (M) and the CPI (ML). I wouldn't be surprised if there were two Jana Sanghs in another two years, a moderate and an extreme. I would say that being Latins we must have a multi-party system and to have the British electoral system is nonsense because it distorts the whole thing.

Bolkestein: Do Indian political parties have a clear identity?

Masani: There is nothing to distinguish any two parties ideologically except the Communist and a slight Hindu orientation among the Jana Sangh. I would say the rest are completely footloose and opportunist and shift from time to time because of power considerations.

7. The Jana Sangh^*

Bolkestein: What do you think of the future of the Jana Sangh?

Masani: This is beyond any political prognosis at present. There are people who think that out of all these re-alignments the Jana Sangh will emerge as the Hindu Conservative Party on the one side and the Communist and the Marxists on the other. That could happen, but when you have got all these racial minorities which hate the Jana Sangh because they are Hindu and if you add to the Muslims and the Christians and the Tribals and the Harijans a certain modicum of anti-clerical Hindus, if I may put it in Western terms, then you get a majority that

* This interview took place in May 1979.

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way, so I don't think I should like to venture any guesses on the future of the Jana Sangh.

Bolkestein: Elsewhere in the world there has been an Islamic revival. Is Hinduism gaining in intensity?

Masani: There is a tremendous spiritual revival of Hinduism, a kind of grass roots thing which is decent and noble and prepared to open its arms to include non-Hindus like Christians and Muslims. That is a good thing, but most Hindu manifestations of late have been rather unpleasant. Take for example the Freedom of Religion Bill which was introduced by a Jana Sangh Member of Parliament. It professes freedom of religion but achieves exactly the reverse because it says that any conversion obtained by force, which is all right, or fraud, which is all right, or inducements, material or spiritual, is illegal and a crime. Now naturally all conversions are induced by spiritual inducements, otherwise why should a man want to change his religion? It is heaven after all and salvation for his soul that he does it for, so by definition this bans all conversions. This has been strongly resisted by the Christian churches and the Christian laity who say that this is an anti-Christian measure, and there are many of us who support them as a minority. The same with cow slaughter because the old man, Vinoba Bhave, threatened to die if the banning of cow slaughter was not made statutory throughout India. In Kerala and West Bengal which are ruled by Communist governments it is not. These two governments refused quite rightly to be influenced by the old man's fads. He has threatened to die and now they are going to introduce a constitutional amendment, with the banning of cow slaughter, which was a State subject, transferred to the Union where the Hindu majority can legislate against it. Both these are extremely dangerous symptoms of revivalism.

Take the Aligarh Muslim University Bill. When I was Chairman of the Minorities Commission in 1978 we unanimously reported that Aligarh is a Muslim University and should get the benefit of article 30 of the Constitution which says that minorities should have the right to establish and run their own educational institutions. Morarji Desai is a bit of a Hindu, though a moderate one. He considered this very dangerous and now they are trying to pass a Bill which says that Aligarh is not a Muslim Institution. I think that this is very objectionable as it is

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of great importance to keep it alive. This is a most reactionary move of the Janata Government. Fortunately the Upper House has passed a Bill saying that it is a Muslim institution, a private member's Bill backed by Indira Gandhi and the Congress Parties. Altogether these are not very pleasant symptoms and therefore the anti-Jana Sangh feeling among decent Indians and even Hindus is strengthening.

8. The Swatantra Party

Bolkestein: You are co-founder of the Swatantra Party. How would you describe its fortunes?

Masani: We came into existence in 1959 as a reaction to the fact that all parties in India were either Communist or Socialist and that there was no non-Socialist party worth mentioning, except the Jana Sangh which was a denominational party. So Rajaji and I decided that it was time to have a Liberal-Conservative party. Rajaji was conservative and I was Liberal. Professor Ranga, who was the President for many years, was an agrarian who belonged to the Green International. So there were three trends. Rajaji was the conservative Hindu, Ranga was the agrarian, a farmer's man like Charan Singh, and I represented the Liberal bourgeoisie. These three elements came together to form this party. Rajaji wanted to call it a conservative party but Ranga and I both objected on the ground that we were not prepared to join a conservative party. Jayaprakash wanted it. He said that India needed a conservative party, it was a conservative country, but we thought it was a non-starter. In the end Rajaji invented the word Swatantra which means self-determined. ‘Swa’ is self and ‘tantra’ is a mechanism, so this means individual self-determination, freedom from within.

The Party grew for two reasons: ideologically the people wanted something which was non-Socialist. We gave the electorate a chance to vote against Socialism and they made good use of this. We became the biggest Opposition Party straight away, which was quite something. We got 21 seats in the First House and we were neck to neck with the Communists, who had been financed by Moscow for about thirty or forty years and were well organised. We outstripped the Jana Sangh, just like that, on coming into existence. By 1967 we had 45 seats in Parliament and I became the Leader of the Opposition.

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This was the first reason for our success: people were getting sick of Nehru-Socialism which was statist, sterile and counter-productive. People were beginning to get fed up being overcontrolled. The other reason was our relative political competence. We made the best of our limited resources. The other politicians of India lived in a different world. I was brought up in the Labour Party in Britain and I introduced modern techniques of publicity, propaganda, films and posters. After the first election we started nursing constituencies, which was absolutely unknown in India. In India all parties adopt their candidates a few days before nomination. There is trouble between different castes and groups as to who should get what seat. It is done on a purely opportunist basis. Now I said: ‘Nonsense. That is not how you should run a parliamentary democracy. You nominate your candidates the day after the last election and you give him five years to nurse his constituency and get known. You give him resources and an office to work in and an agent’. All these British concepts which I introduced were absolutely revolutionary. My party disagreed. They said: ‘We must watch the other candidate and then appoint a man of the right caste’. That was considered smart: you oppose a brahmin by a non-brahmin and so on.

From 1962 until 1967, being General Secretary of the Party, I was able to say that anyone who nominates a candidate will get so much from the central office for an agent, whom we would approve of and who would report to us every month. Of course this was a great temptation to the average candidate so we nominated candidates from the word ‘go’ and by the middle of the term half of our candidates were in position. This paid dividends because many people got elected simply because they had worked in the constituency for three of four years which nobody else had.

Bolkestein: And then what happened to the Swatantra Party?

Masani: Well, what happened was very sad. In the 1971 elections Mrs. Gandhi had this ‘Indira wave’. She won the elections hands down not so much in votes but in seats and we were decimated. We came down from 45 to 8. Well, that is part of the game and I was quite prepared for it but I found that the Party was demoralised because in India everyone thinks very short-term. They thought that this was the end. I stepped aside and I let younger people take over. My first successor was H.M. Patel who

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was Home Minister in Delhi in the Janata Government. He lasted a year or two and then he gave over to a young man called Piloo Modi, who was very immature and brash. Modi made a deal with Charan Singh, who then had a party called the B.K.D. Charan Singh was a Jat and he was a regional leader. We were a national party with support from all over the country, however small it was, but the demoralization was so intense that the Party outvoted me. It was decided to dissolve the Party and merge with the B.K.D. This I condemned as a very short-term move. I said: ‘The day will come when India will need the Swatantra Party, for God's sake keep it alive’. This happened in 1973. I refused to join the B.K.D. I stayed out and I have not joined any other party since. I thought that this was a great tragedy because, when March 1977 came, the Swatantra Party could have been the hard core of the new Janata Party. It might well have kept the Janata Party from going the way of all flesh, kept it a principled ideological party of the middle of the road, a Democratic Liberal Party.

Bolkestein: Do you think the Swatantra Party can be resurrected?

Masani: I don't quite see it. Indian politics have gone down an awful lot in the last ten years. Skulduggery has become absolutely normal. Mrs. Gandhi has destroyed standards. Now everyone is behaving like her and says: ‘Well, she does it, why not?’ So I think it would be very much more difficult now to form a Liberal Democratic Party with high moral standards and clean hands, considering how low we have sunk.

As I see it the choice between Indira on the one side and the Janata on the other is a terrible choice for any country to be driven to. Many people will vote for Indira Gandhi as a reaction against Janata, just as they voted Janata as a backlash to Indira. It is not good because they will move from the frying pan into the fire and back again.

I imagine that it will take much more of this kind of decay before people say: ‘For God's sake, let us put an end to it now’. This may lead to another dictatorship or to a military intervention, I don't know. So meanwhile we can go on talking about the principles which we espoused. For instance, I said to the traders of Maharashtra in Bombay: ‘You know, Rajaji was a great admirer of the trader. He said he was the salt of the earth but you gentlemen, misled by the big capitalists, have become cowardly. You have never stood up for yourselves. I am very

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glad that for the first time you are prepared to fight for your right to live, all honour to you, we are with you, because we Liberals believe in the small entrepreneur, the self-employed man being the salt of the earth’. So I think we ought to keep the spirit alight and I hope that somebody will say: ‘To hell with all these controls, let's go the Singapore way, the Hong Kong way’. Our day will come but it may not be very soon.

Bolkestein: Do you think that your Party has left its mark on Indian politics?

Masani: I think so. The reactions to statism that are taking place would not have happened if there had been no Swatantra Party for ten years, putting free enterprise on the map of India.

9. Nehru

Bolkestein: Returning to an earlier period and to Nehru whom you knew well, what did Gandhi see in him?

Masani: Nehru was Gandhi's spoilt child, in a way. He was very fond of him. There is a tremendous contrast which Gandhi probably found attractive. One was Hindu, the other was modern; one was conservative, the other was a fellow-traveller. Nehru was everything Gandhi wasn't. They quarreled of course a great deal but Nehru was a very smart politician and whenever they quarreled Nehru gave in. Unlike Subhas Bose and Rajagopalachari and M.N. Roy, who fought Gandhi and left, Nehru never allowed his differences with Gandhi to come to the top. He gave in and Gandhi liked this. Sardar Patel was very bitter about it. He was really Gandhi's loyal lieutenant. He felt this injustice very much and he used to complain to me about it. He said: ‘Gandhiji has a soft spot for him, he is spoilt, he is well educated, he is rich, he is bourgeois, he is anglicised, he is smart and I am not’. Sardar Patel was a farmer's man.

Bolkestein: What was the effect of Nehru on Indian political life?

Masani: I think it was disastrous and more and more people are now beginning to see that Nehru has ruined the future for India. Nehru was not

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a practical man. He never earned his living for one day in his life. He was a Brahmin, pampered by his father. I don't say that that was his fault, but I think it is a very great handicap in life not to know what it means to make good. Secondly, he was pedestrian. He was greatly overrated as an intellectual. He was very derivative and Krishna Menon dominated him intellectually. He put things more clearly. Nehru was a confused man: half democrat, half Stalinist. Nehru was a political democrat and an economic Stalinist. He wanted a complete Stalinist society including collective farming but without violence, by democratic plebiscitary democracy. Krishna Menon knew that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. He was a complete Communist and he led Nehru step by step along the path which Nehru was only too happy to follow. But Nehru used Krishna and when the time came in 1962 Nehru dropped him into the waste-paper basket without any scruples. There was a tremendous upsurge in Parliament to demand Krishna's resignation as Defence Minister on the ground that he was losing the war and that he was not to be trusted. That morning at the Party meeting when Nehru was asked to drop Krishna, Nehru said: ‘Well, in that case I'll have to go also’. Now whenever Nehru had said this during his whole career, people had backed down but on this occasion they did not and a man called Tyagi, a junior minister, said: ‘All right Sir, in that case you may also go’ and everyone kept quiet, meaning that was all right with them. Nehru then realised for the first time it wasn't only Krishna - his own neck was at stake.

Now I happened to be involved in this because Nath Pai, a Socialist M.P., came to see me and persuaded me to go and see Nehru before lunch that same day saying: ‘You must go to Nehru and make him realise that he can drop Krishna without being thrown out himself. Krishna is telling Nehru that you and Lohia and Kripalani are out for his blood. He says you are only attacking him for the moment but that as soon as Nehru drops him you will demand Nehru's resignation as pro-communist and you want an anti-Communist government’, which of course we did. If we assured Nehru that we would stand by him if he dropped Krishna, he would do so. So I went along to Nehru and we had an amusing talk. I said: ‘Jawaharlal, I want you to know that you have old friends like me and Kripalani and others. We have nothing against you but we are very much against you allowing Krishna to run this country and this war. If you fight the Chinese communist aggression as

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we want you to, the whole country and we will rally around you and behind you and see the war to its conclusion’. And he smiled and very unhappily said: ‘Thank you’ because I'm sure he didn't like this at all. But the point is that that evening Nehru had accepted Krishna's resignation. So I would say that Nehru was quite unprincipled. Instead of saying: ‘Right, we were together, we did it together, we go together’, he was quite prepared to remain Prime Minister and sacrifice Krishna. So in a way all the evil was not on one side. I think they were very close to each other. They were as thick as thieves ideologically. But Krishna led Nehru by the nose intellectually.

Bolkestein: Your verdict on Nehru is quite harsh.

Masani: Well, it is what I think. He was a disaster for India.

Bolkestein: Was Nehru instrumental in causing partition?

Masani: No, there he was not to blame. All of them, except Gandhi, were on the same wave length. All wanted a partition of India to become masters in their own home. They were sick and tired of the coalition with the Muslim League. Nehru joined the other politicians in demanding immediate partition when Mountbatten was prepared to offer it to them. Gandhi and Jayaprakash were both against it. I was against it also. I remember asking J.P. to plead with Gandhi to fight it. J.P. came back and said: ‘No - Gandhi says: “I will remain passive, you do the same”’. We were a hopeless minority among a nationalist upsurge. Gandhi told J.P.: ‘Don't oppose it when it comes up in the Congress Party. These men represent their constituency. The people of India have had enough of it, they want partition. I don't want it. I want independence with a United India, but we have lost the battle for the people's mind, let them have it and don't come in the way’.

Bolkestein: Could it have been avoided at all?

Masani: I think so. I think if Mountbatten had not been sent by Britain to do this cheapjack act of withdrawing and leaving us to kill off a million people on each side, India could have been free and independent in another five to ten years. Mountbatten did an excellent job for Britain

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and a lousy job for India, and that was what he was sent to do, to scuttle. The Belgians did the same in the Congo and the Portuguese in Mozambique and in Angola. I think that a great power has no business to withdraw and leave the people to chaos after making its situation such that it can't do anything immediately. It must stay and see its responsibilities through.

Bolkestein: You say that it is a feud but it is a feud between brothers. Would you say that some time harmonious relations will come into existence between Bangla Desh, India and Pakistan?

Masani: Well, you've shown the way. I mean if France and Germany and the others who are not blood brothers and have had a feud for centuries can come together in a European Community, this is what we should do. We should have a sub-continent which is a community.

Bolkestein: There are about 50 million Muslims in India. Are they discriminated against?

Masani: Yes and no. I would say that they are definitely not oppressed. To say that they are oppressed would be unfair - as the Hindu has been oppressed in Bangla Desh and Pakistan, no. But there is discrimination. Take, for instance, the army and the police. It is not on paper but it is known that there is discrimination in recruiting, mostly in the army and the police. During the riots in Aligarh and Jamshedpur the police, who are 100% Hindu, were partisan against the Muslims, which would not have happened had there been a Muslim element in the police. So I would say that certainly many Muslims in India feel that they are second class citizens but I don't think there is any question of ill treatment. Of course, they certainly have justice, but historically they are made to feel that they are not quite trusted. There are people in the Jana Sangh who say that the Muslim must be Indianised before he can be accepted as a real Indian and I say: ‘What do you mean, Indianised, they are just as much Indian as you or I’, and they say: ‘Yes, but you can't trust them. If Pakistan were not there, then the Indian Muslim would be all right, but as long as Pakistan is there, we can't trust them’.

Bolkestein: If you look down the period that the British were in India,

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what would you say about it?

Masani: Well, when they were in India I was very much opposed to them on nationalist grounds. I went to British prisons in India three times. I supported Gandhi without any reservations. I wanted independence, but after it came I saw no point in being nationalist anymore because its purpose had been served and to be nationalist after freedom means to be a victim of communist ‘neo-colonialist’ propaganda, because that is how the Communists influence the third world: by making them imagine that their freedom is in danger, which it isn't. So I evolved a world view and, looking back on it now, I think that British rule had its benevolent aspects and in some ways was a good thing for India. It gave us certain things we never had or probably would not have developed without them. The biggest, of course, was a common language and a common national feeling. I think H.G. Wells said that nationalism was nothing but a common aversion to a common enemy. Well, the British by being there gave us a catalyst against whom we could gang up and people of entirely different kinds who could never have combined did combine under Gandhi to throw them out. So I would say to the extent that India has developed Indian nationalism as opposed to linguistic or religious sub-nationalism, which are very alive, the British certainly contributed to it. The other thing they gave us was the rule of law. We had no concept of the rule of law or of civil liberties. When Nehru founded the Civil Liberties Union in 1935 or so under the British, a friend said: ‘Sir, do you realise that civil liberties are not understood in India, that the good old Nawab did what he liked and people don't understand this? It is an alien concept’. He was not opposing it, he was just explaining the difficulty of trying to explain. Thirdly, they brought a decent Civil Service and administration which we had not known. I would say that they did play a part in creating a modern nation. To what extent it is I don't know, but to the extent we are a modern nation the British certainly helped the process.

Bolkestein: But you regret the way in which they left?

Masani: I only regret the speed with which they left. I'm very glad they left the way they did because they left without bloodshed between them and us, without hatred, and there I think the credit goes both to Britain

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and to Gandhi for playing a game with gloves on. They played cricket, they sparred in accordance with the Queensbury Rules. What would have happened under the Japanese or Hitler or Stalin is quite easy to imagine. It would have been quite different. There is a strong pro-British feeling in India. There is more anti-Americanism than anti-English feeling, to the extent that you can generalise like that.

Bolkestein: Why is that?

Masani: It is a world phenomenon. I once mentioned it to an American, who was very bitter and resentful of this injustice, after all the aid they had given. I said: ‘That is exactly why you are disliked: because you are helping us’ and I quoted Confucius who writes that one man said to another: ‘Why do you dislike me so much, I have never done anything to help you?’

10. Communists

Bolkestein: Kerala has the highest percentage of Christians, of literates and also of Communists. Is there a connection between these facts?

Masani: Well, it is difficult to say. Bengal comes a good second. You know the saying ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’. I wonder if the literacy of the kind and nature that we have in Kerala and Bengal does not play a subversive social role. You give people a certain amount of knowledge or access to knowledge, not really much wisdom with it, and what is otherwise acceptable becomes unacceptable. The Indian mass is docile and resigned to its fate because of karma. You must have done something to deserve your present lot. Now that is the old Hindu philosophy which makes a man live in a hovel and see a big mansion and not throw that fellow out and occupy his place - which he well could. He doesn't because he thinks: ‘Well, that is his lot and this is my lot, I must have deserved it - God made it like this’. I think that in the Middle Ages in Europe you must have had the same thing, the rich man in his castle and the poor man in his hut, and people accepted this feudal system. The seigneur was here and you were there. Now that was broken up by the French Revolution. I think that a similar process or catalyst is working in Kerala and Bengal. The fact that there is more literacy and

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perhaps more Christianity, which is also a modernising element, makes people more reluctant to put up with things that are not acceptable to them. This takes a Communist form but it may not necessarily be evil in so far as its motivations are concerned. They are very intelligent people, both the Kerala and the Bengal people.

Bolkestein: Are the three Communist parties a potent force in India today, either singly or separately?

Masani: I never really thought that there was any early danger of India going Communist. In the last paragraph of my book on the Communist Party of India I wrote that in themselves the Communists were too weak ever to take over India but certain extra-territorial loyalties and a disciplined dedication to their cause made them a dagger pointed at its heart. I think they are a threat to our freedom and our way of life but I can't see them ever taking power by themselves. They are much too peripheral and much too alien.

Incidentally I should like to record my caveat against the words ‘left’ and ‘right’. They are very dangerous words and I find that the Western intellectual is a sucker for using these words and doing a lot to help Communist propaganda. What does it mean? To me a man who is ‘right’ is a Czarist. I accept the term right-reaction and I think that the Communist Parties of the world are the embodiment of right-reaction because they want to carry on the tradition of the Czar: absolutism, to use the human being as a serf or robot. To me Gandhi represents the extreme left of a near-anarchist individualist libertarian order where you have minimum government and maximum individual liberty. The Italian Liberals led by my friend Malagodi are always called right-wing party by American and English journalists. I think they are crazy. These words only help the Communists because they make everyone look ‘reactionary’ while the Communists look ‘progressive’. There is nothing more reactionary than a Communist, when you consider his ideas of human society and of the role of the individual. So one must be very careful in using these words. When my Party was called rightist I said: ‘Nonsense, we are extreme left because we want to liberalise Indian society’.

Bolkestein: Why is Communism an alien force in India?

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Masani: The CPI has been financed and directed from Moscow right from the start. Not so much the CPI (M) at the moment, or the CPI (ML), but certainly the official party has been known to have an extra-territorial loyalty. This is documented in my book on the Communist Party, documents by Philip Spratt and others, who took their money and said they took it from Moscow, through Britain. You know, it is very interesting, the Soviet Empire in India was run through the British Empire while the British were there. The Communist Party of Great Britain ran the Indian Communist party for Moscow. They were Viceroys, and Palmdutt and Pollitt, whom I used to meet and talk with, were the people who gave the line to the Indian Party.

11. Two Nations

Bolkestein: There has been quite a spate of articles in the Western press about the fact that India seems to develop into two nations, an urban developed one of maybe 150-200 million people which is like the industrialised parts of Brazil or Mexico or Italy and then 500-600 million people in half a million villages. Do you see this cleavage?

Masani: I don't think that this is a likely development. It is true that there are two nations, to follow Disraeli's words. He talked of the rich and the poor, we talk of the urban and the rural, which is the main divide in India because, by rural standards, even the working urban class in India is privileged. So it is true to say that the real proletariat is rural and the urban classes are the ruling race. But I think that the Janata Government and Charan Singh particularly have been pulling the other way. Apart from Charan Singh there is B.P. Singh, who was Minister of State for Agriculture. He was a Swatantra man. These people are trying hard to narrow the gap by creating a new parity of prices, as rural prices are lagging painfully behind urban prices. They are trying to equate them. I published recently statements from B.P. Singh showing how much urban prices have shot up compared to rural prices. But there is a very conscious effort to put more money into rural projects.

If only enlightened policies were followed, India could become a raw material exporting country, which it should be. We are still trying to sell steel at uneconomic prices and coming a cropper. India should export processed foods, fruit, fish, rice, food grains and so on and buy manu-

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factured goods with it. India can more than feed itself, if we don't neglect agriculture as Nehru did. We want to reverse those priorities: heavy industry, consumer goods, agriculture. We want to put agriculture first, then consumer goods and heavy industry last. Charan Singh was on the right track as a green international man. He is the nearest to what we stood for because we were also an agrarian party. So I feel that the trend now is to heal this rift and not to allow it to develop. I don't think the Western press would be right if it didn't bring out that there is rural urbanisation and rural industrialisation going on.

Bolkestein: A famous phrase of Engels is: ‘Die verdammte Bedürfnislosigkeit’, which means: ‘This damned lack of desire for something better’. Do you think this is still a factor of rural life in India?

Masani: Well, yes and no. This theory of karma makes the average Indian, whether urban or rural, extremely docile. He accepts his lot, even the worker, to the extent that he has not been wound up by propaganda. He is still prepared to accept that the boss is the boss and he is what he is and that is how it should be, so there is no real discontent. Now, how to inspire discontent when people don't feel it? I'm not sure that just inspiring discontent without adding the capacity to feed it or to meet the needs would be such a good thing. It might only lead to what is happening in Iran without giving anything better. I personally believe that discontent is divine and that people should try to improve their lot, but I don't know whether just having the psychology without the production would be such a good thing. It is probably good that people are contented until they can really get more.