Nikhil Menon - Planning Democracy: How A Professor, An Institute, And An Idea Shaped India

The recently elected Prime Minister of India addressed the nation from the sandstone ramparts of Red Fort in Delhi, his turbans long trail flapping in the dry, dusty summer breeze. It was Independence Day 2014 and Narendra Modis debut on this storied stage. With the Mughal forts soaring minarets as a backdrop, Jama Masjids giant white marble dome looming to his left and the Indian flag fluttering overhead, he put to rest months of rumour. The leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party confirmed what the public had suspectedthe end was near for Indias long experiment with economic planning. The curtain was coming down on the Planning Commission, an institution that had once been the beating heart of the countrys economy.

Born the same year, Modi and the Planning Commission He would build it by bulldozing a decrepit structure and raising a shiny new one, the NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India).

Sixty-four years earlier, days after the inauguration of the Republic, President Rajendra Prasad delivered a speech in Parliament. The thickly moustached veteran of the Congress Party declared on 31 January The Planning Commission was born.

The Indian planning project was one of the postcolonial worlds most ambitious experiments. It was an arranged marriage between Soviet-inspired economic planning and Western-style liberal democracy, at a time when the Cold War portrayed them as ideologically contradictory and institutionally incompatible. With each Five-Year Plan, the Planning Commission set the course for the nations economy. The ambit ranged from matters broad (free trade or protectionism?) to narrow (how much fish should fisheries produce to ensure protein in the national diet?). The Commissions pronouncements set the gears of government in motion. Shaping entire sectors of the economy through incentives, disincentives and decree, the Planning Commissions views rippled across the land to every farm and factory. Despite this awesome power, economic planning in India was considerably different from the kind practised in communist regimes. The Planning Commission was reined in by democratic procedure that required consultation with ministries in an elected government, with peoples representatives in Parliamentand ultimately with the popular willthrough citizens voting every five years.

During the formative decades of the republic, the urge to plan governed the nation. It was the vehicle chosen for rapid economic transformation after nearly two centuries of colonial rule, and it also became the language through which the governments aspirations for democratic state-building were expressed. It was a staple of national conversation and Five-Year Plans marked the calendar of governance. Politicians seldom tired of invoking the Plans, while the media dutifully reported on their progress. They were debated in civil society, and citizens found themselves called to work ever more energetically toward the Plans success.

As India emerged from generations of colonial rule in 1947, it faced the following question: would life be any better for 35,00,00,000 Indians? Dr Bhimrao Ambedkararch critic of caste and architect of the constitutionarticulated the fear that was on the

The Indian drama had the world watching. Files from the British Foreign Office and the American State Department reveal that they too shared Ambedkars fear. The fledgling nation was widely believed Indias moves.

Planning was meant to resolve what Ambedkar had called a life of contradictions by providing Indians with parity in their political and economic freedoms. Jawaharlal Nehru recognized the tension between the two, but he believed they could be eased through planning. Planning, though inevitably bringing about a great deal of control and co-ordination and interfering in some measure liberal democracy itself in peril.

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Development was long fundamental to arguments for why India needed to be free. An economic critique of colonialism was foundational for the Indian National Congress. It dated back to the early salvos launched by Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Romesh Chunder Dutt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Belief in Self-government was justified not simply on the political grounds of self-representation, but also because it was the necessary condition for economic advance.

In the decades leading up to Independence, planning emerged as the language through which Indian aspirations were expressed. Japans economic acceleration after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 turned heads, offering a glimpse of what a modernizing