Since his appointment as India’s 14th prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist allies inside and outside parliament have been remodelling the Indian republic. This process concerns the transformation of India’s political culture including its distinct form of political secularism but also the republic’s institutional setup. Some institutions central to the democratic procedures such as the Election Commission have been deprived of their independence and thus significantly weakened in their functioning. Other institutions like the Planning Commission have since long struggled to demonstrate their political relevance, which Modi used as an opportunity to abolish them altogether. Common to these efforts is the Hindu nationalists’ obsession to do away with everything indefinable as Nehruvian heritage. Nikhil Menon’s book is an important contribution to advance our historical understanding of the early postcolonial era and the centrality of planning for the self-understanding and political aspirations of the Indian Republic in its early years under prime minister Nehru.
The ever-growing body of literature on the history of development and planning in India and Asia more generally centrally includes approaches of intellectual history1, transnational history of knowledge and expertise2, and approaches that emphasise the continuities from the colonial era.3 Menon’s book, by contrast, is a welcome plea for the historical relevance of local circumstances, experience and ambitions for the evolution of development. This monograph uses planning as a “lens through which to understand the Indian state and the nature of Indian democracy after independence” (p. 4). Such an understanding of planning leads far beyond the technocratic and administrative procedures to re-order state and society. It frames the endeavour of planning as a core element of postcolonial elites to re-imagine state and society after the decline of the imperial rule. In that sense, planning provided a central narrative for the young nation and its hopeful future.
The book consists of two parts, the first being dedicated to the career of statistical methods and computerisation in Indian planning mainly during the 1950s; and the second discussing the importance of planning for the evolution of India’s democratic experiment. Menon distances himself at least gradually from recently much-discussed transnational and international histories of development. Instead, throughout the book he emphasises how important specifically Indian questions, individuals and institutions were in these planning procedures, which he essentially considers “home-grown” (p. 17).
After having read the excellent and in most parts illustrative case studies of the main chapters, my take on this emphasis is at least partly ambivalent. On the one hand, the author provides an indeed beneficial focus on Indian specificities including national planners and engineers such as P.C. Mahalanobis or S.K. Mitra, the history of distinctively Indian institutions such as the Planning Commission and the Central Statistical Office, and the continuous relevance of local circumstances in the young democratic republic. At the same time, a continuous motive in all case studies is the international entanglement of these personalities and institutions including the formative ties with Unesco, US-American, European and Soviet intelligentsia, or international private foundations. While reading the chapters I kept coming back to the author’s prominent emphasis on the seemingly home-grown facets of development, asking myself why Menon considers this aspect to be so important in the first place for his historical interpretation. As I see it, the book is an illustrative analysis of how important planning was in the nascent self-perception mainly of Indian elites as a postcolonial collective. What the case studies show is that terms such as “home” or “foreign” centrally depend on each other to acquire meaning and are thus so intermingled that they are empirically hard to disentangle.
The career of statistics as an academic discipline and a tool for policy planning in India, for example, is part of a larger history of modernisation (theory) in the early years after the Second World War. Supported by Western academic developments and stimulated by Unesco and other international organisations, the planers around Mahalanobis used the momentum of a political conjuncture that privileged statistics as a central means for planning and policy making. Menon provides a fascinating account of the politics and institution building that moved technocrats and their quantitative measures into the very centre of the state apparatus and its political procedures, norms and values.
Such type of historical impact is less clear in the second case study on the ambitions of Indian planners to computerise their political-technocratic endeavours. As the existing historiography on the introduction of computers in postcolonial societies is only in its beginnings4, the chapter is no doubt a valuable contribution. What is more, the story is another illustration of the importance and the limitations of global networking after decolonisation as Indian planners found it challenging to get access to computer-producing technology abroad or build up these capacities in India. However, the concrete consequences of these computerisation efforts on the politics of planning remain vague. It is convincing that, as the author argues, this early history of the computer in India cannot be understood outside the history of planning and the state’s data-collecting competencies (p. 114). But what this technological innovation itself triggered, i.e., in how far the computer indeed altered (the implementation of) planning remains to be analysed. In this light, the chapter title “Chasing Computers” is indeed well-chosen.
The second part of the book puts a couple of rich insights forward that hopefully find ample resonance among historians of development in India and elsewhere. First, planning needs to be understood as a central devise for democratic mobilisation after independence. As the Indian authorities expected their citizens to participate and thus actively support the postcolonial rebuild of state and society, the state undertook several attempts via radio and other forms of mass communication to convey its planning to a national audience. In that sense, the elites shaped planning as a plebiscitarian strategy without granting the masses a real say in its design and conduct.
Second, these attempts targeted groups beyond the state bureaucracy such as universities, village volunteers, and Hindu ascetics (sadhus). The latter aspect is a contribution to a long overdue correction of the established notion of Nehruvian secularism, which sees the Indian state during the early postcolonial era as a neutral arbiter located above religious communities. As this case shows, significant parts of the political elites in New Delhi and in the states willingly instrumentalised Hindu orthodoxy and infrastructure for their political purposes beyond the noble principles of secularism’s principled distance to religious communities.
Menon’s book also proposes further research I found less explicitly covered in its empirical approach. The question how planning built on and transformed distinctions between urban and rural would be worth analysing more in detail. The study also recommends more research on how innovation in planning transformed protest and resistance against the state. And Menon’s Indian case study encourages more comparative perspectives on other early postcolonial regimes and their planning histories to examine the presumptively Indian specificities more in detail.
In conclusion, Menon’s monograph enriches our understanding of planning in India with many new and truly essential facets.
Notes:
1 Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India. An Intellectual and Social History, New Delhi 2005; L. Arizpe, The Intellectual History of Culture and Development Institutions, in: L. Arizpe (ed.), Culture, Diversity and Heritage. Major Studies, Springer Briefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol. 12, Cham 2015, pp. 58–81.
2 Corinna Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien. Eine internationale Geschichte 1947–1980, Göttingen 2015; Chris Sneddon, The ‘sinew of development’. Cold War geopolitics, technical expertise, and water resource development in Southeast Asia, 1954–1975, in: Social Studies of Science 42/4 (2012), pp. 564–590; Valeska Huber, Introduction. Global Histories of Social Planning, in: Journal of Contemporary History 52/1 (2017), pp. 3–15; Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia. From Decolonization to Globalization, London 2003.
3 See, for example, Joseph M. Hodge, British Colonial Expertise, Post-Colonial Careering and the Early History of International Development, in: Journal of European History 8/1 (2010), pp. 24–46; Uma Kothari, From Colonialism to development. Reflections of former Colonial Officers, in: Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 44/1 (2006), pp. 118–136; Uma Kothari, From colonial administration to development studies. A post-colonial critique of the history of development studies, in: Uma Kothari (ed.), A Radical History of Development Studies. Individuals, Institutions, and Ideologies, 2. ed., London 2019, pp. 47–66; Anne E. Booth, Colonial Legacies. Economic and Social Development in East and Southeast Asia, Honolulu 2007.
4 Some regions are better covered, though. See, for example, the special issue on East Asia’s history of computing of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 2016, Issue 2.