Politics can never dismiss History

Planning was a vision, a part of the nationalist movement and its history goes back even to pre independence era in India. Now it became a stranded dream of linking knowledge and power to serve society.
 “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away” 
This might also be the fate of most institutions. However, it was not true of the Planning Commission, which was terminated brusquely. One of the most hallowed institutions of the Nehruvian era was dismissed from history as an anachronism. There was no goodbye, no obituary, no sense of nostalgia. A great institution died as less than a footnote. As a wag noticed, “People get rid of their old cars with a greater sense of loss.” Such a dismissal makes a spectator reflective.

 Three names in particular, come to our minds when we think of planning commission. The first is the physicist Meghnad Saha, the second, the engineer M. Visvesvaraya and the third, the eccentric Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. Each idea, each career demands a storyteller as each one of these founders was a remarkable intellectual.

Meghnad Saha, an ionospheric physicist, a Royal society fellow, carried the dreams of physics into society, had always dreamt of a society based on scientific methods. For Saha, the Gandhian way was anathema and he condemned it as a “society based on the loin cloth and the bullock cart.” He planned according to the Russian model in post revolution period. His policies coincide with that of Lenin's who coined the slogan “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” It was a great dream of energy, scientific and romantic. In 1930s, Subhash Bose had just been elected President of the Indian National Congress. Saha felt it was an optimal time to end the Gandhian epidemic and asked Bose what he intended to do. Saha proposed the establishment of the National Planning Committee. The Congress meeting was held in Delhi in 1938. Saha attended it a day late and in the meanwhile, Visvesvaraya had been elected head of the Planning Committee. Meghnad Saha approached the great engineer and requested him to step down. He argued that planning needed a reciprocity between science and politics. Visvesvaraya generously agreed and Jawaharlal Nehru was made head of the National Planning Committee. Nehru’s legendary speech, that the future belonged to science and that “dams and laboratories are the temples of modern India,” was only a watered-down variant of the Leninist dreams of energy.

Saha’s utopia of planning met its variant in Visvesvaraya. Visvesvaraya was a legend, a great engineer known for his immaculate dress sense and honesty. For Visvesvaraya, character-building, dam-building and nation-building were equivalent activities. The emphasis was on planning and discipline, an emphasis which extended to his private life. Visvesvaraya was immaculate in differentiating between the public and the private. Legend has it that he always carried two fountain pens, one for official use and the other for personal use. When one reads his memoirs, one feels it reads like a policy document. The eccentric and the innovative combined brilliantly in this life. He was closer to business and this stream of ideas culminates in the Bombay Plan, a business model of planning.

Patrick Geddes combined ecology and locality, to emphasise that the region was the ideal unit of planning. Geddes’ idea of geotechnics eventually culminated in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a great dream of regional planning which revived a stagnant America. Geddes also developed the idea of educational and urban planning in India. He wrote town plans and was involved in the planning of Tagore’s Shantiniketan. In fact, there is a fascinating fragment in one of the Tagore-Geddes letters where Geddes emphasises the need for planning and Tagore responds by admitting that he builds a school in the same way he writes a novel, a germ of an idea that spontaneously grows into an essay or school. The debates of science in the nationalist movement are fascinating. 

The least we owe the history of the idea of planning is a book which captures these ideas. Planning today summons controversy. It earlier summoned the storyteller to tell tales of the dreams of science in India. To condemn it to silence would be to insult history. The Nehruvian years of planning had a halo of the power and resonance of knowledge. The second Five-Year Plan became legendary in its emphasis on heavy industrialisation. But, by then, the ironies begin. Saha died then, a few yards away from these days. 

Then we met many sensible and sometimes legendary events from the planning commission. Then the Emergency created a whole gamut of question marks around economics and planning, questioning the democratic pretensions of both. A whole spate of social movements challenged the logic of planning, chronicling the devastation called development. Simultaneously, the other social sciences began questioning the scientific pretensions of economics and also the scientism of science. Ecology added to planning a reflectiveness it had not dreamed of. By the 1990s, planning was no longer a major social gestalt. It was now a technocratic, bureaucratic body, centred around fragmentary debates. The legend had shrunk but its power to determine life chances remained.

By the time the results of Mr. Modi’s victory were declared, the future of the Planning Commission was in doubt. There was a sense that planning was impervious to the needs of the new federalism. In his Independence Day speech, Mr. Modi dismissed and dispensed with the institution without a footnote of thanks. There was a sadness to his rank indifference. But politics cannot dismiss history. Planning was once a great idea, a wonderful fable of the dreams, even the arrogance of knowledge. It was a great experiment which became erratic, but its history, its genius, its innovations need to be told and told fully. This much even the critics of planning owe this great institution.

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