by JAWED NAQVI
Before the advent of free-market policies of 1991, the battle cry of India’s masses fighting poverty and unemployment targeted the big business. “Ye Tata-Birla ki sarkar nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi.” (This Tata-Birla government must go.) After 1991, the levers to control a perennially anti-poor economy passed into foreign hands — the IMF, for example.
One hasn’t heard of the Tata-Birla slogans in a long time for other reasons too though there are sharp references surfacing in the media — and more stridently from Rahul Gandhi — to the Ambani-Adani duo, seen as profiting from their proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Gone are the days in Pakistan also when the promise of bread, cloth and house could sway the masses. Now, when a farmer commits suicide in Pakistan’s Punjab there’s only a whispered link if at all given for his plight — usury, otherwise banned in Islam. (I’ve preserved the anguished letter to the editor the late Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan wrote about the tragic state of farmers in Pakistan’s Punjab.)
In India, people often see Hindu fascism in abstract terms, as Pakistanis talk of the military being the de facto power behind the throne. Many Indians see fascism as some rarefied doctrine of racial and religious hatred not hinged in the logic of hard economics. They are missing the Tata-Birla idiom as the fountainhead of the malaise, which spawns authoritarianism.
The hand of India’s big business was there for all to see in the selection of a Gujarat chief minister as the prospective candidate to be prime minister. Far less widely known, even if it is intensely discussed in academic circles, is the role that Indian tycoons of every religious stripe played in enforcing the Partition in 1947.
Now, a kindly academic has shared an all-encompassing analysis by eminent social scientist Raghabendra Chattopadhyay on the subject. The study, not very recent, shows how even prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had to surrender before the clout of Indian businesses right before Partition, when they rallied against the “socialist budget” presented for the interim government of 1946-47 by Muslim League’s finance minister Liaquat Ali Khan.
The League was not planning to join the interim government headed by Nehru but was persuaded by Lord Wavell, the viceroy, to yield. Wavell suggested the home affairs for Khan. Sardar Patel would not hear of it. The Congress, according to Chattopadhyay, then offered Liaquat Ali Khan the finance portfolio, held at the time by a seasoned economist, Dr. John Mathai. The Congress believed finance was too technical a subject, and would ensure that the League “made a fool of themselves”. Khan surprised the Congress by producing proposals rooted in Nehru’s avowed socialist stance.
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