Nikhil Menon

The Indian planning project was one of the postcolonial world's most ambitious experiments. Planning Democracy explores how India fused Soviet-inspired economic management and Western-style liberal democracy at a time when they were widely considered fundamentally contradictory. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, planning was meant to be independent India's route to prosperity. In this engaging and innovative account, Nikhil Menon traces how planning built India's knowledge infrastructure and data capacities, while also shaping the nature of its democracy. He analyses the challenges inherent in harmonizing technocratic methods with democratic mandates and shows how planning was the language through which the government's aspirations for democratic state-building were expressed. Situating India within international debates about economic policy and Cold War ideology, Menon reveals how India walked a tightrope between capitalism and communism which heightened the drama of its development on the global stage.

This book shows how colonialism shaped postcolonial projects in South and Southeast Asia including India, Pakistan, Burma, and Indonesia. Its chapters unearth the contingency and contention that accompanied the establishment of nation-states and their claim to be decolonized heirs.

The book places key postcolonial moments - a struggle for citizenship, anxious constitution making, mass education and land reform - against the aftermath of the Second World War and within a global framework, relating them to the global transformation in political geography from empire to nation. The chapters analyse how futures and ideals envisioned by anticolonial activists were made reality, whilst others were discarded. Drawing on the expertise of eminent contributors, The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia represents the most ground-breaking research on the region.

This essay offers a tour of historical scholarship produced in the last two decades on economic development in early independent India. It is a sub-field that for reasons of archival access and renewed interest is growing, like historical works on independent India more generally. Surveying this landscape, it appears that there are some analytical channels that seem to be exhausting themselves after having long pressed forward, and others that are mining rich seams and new terrain. Broadly speaking, these development histories of the early Indian republic cluster around three themes that spill into one another: interactions between the state and industrial capital, the centrality of food and water, and finally, interconnections with global development.

This essay interrogates the role of the charkha (spinning wheel) in M. K. Gandhi’s thought. It argues that spinning deserves to be recognized as belonging in the realm of other high concepts and practices such as non-violence, that have garnered much more academic attention. The article explores the centrality of the charkha to Gandhi’s ideology emphasizing underappreciated facets such as its physical, moral, and spiritual effects. Finally, it argues that the versatility of the spinning wheel to Gandhi offers insights into how he conceived of and negotiated the relationship between means and ends in his philosophy.

Since Independence, the Indian government had cultivated an international reputation for generosity  when it came to gifting baby elephants—often in response to requests from children. Nehru’s personal fondness for children aside, the highly favourable international publicity that accompanied these gifts advanced the diplomatic interests of a poor, young nation state looking for international aid, straining to remain non-aligned during the Cold War and aspiring to cultivate a positive image on the global stage.

Unlike most countries that used computers in the mid-twentieth century, in India their earliest use  was for development—not the military. Its potential for economic planning was how the Indian government justified their pursuit and enormous expense.

From when the Planning Commission was inaugurated in India in 1950, planners emphasized the distinctiveness of the Indian experiment—the braiding of centralized planning and parliamentary democracy. For politicians committed to planning, such as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, it wasn’t enough that India planned its economy. For the experiment to be a true success, they believed the Indian electorate had to be involved in and support the planning project. In other words, for ‘democratic planning’ to work, citizens had to be ‘plan conscious’ as well.
While there have been studies of the ideology of planning in India, little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Indian government sought to make planning democratic, and whether it ever fulfilled this promise. Focusing on the first three Five Year Plans, this essay tracks the Indian government’s attempts at make planning ‘democratic’ through convincing its citizenry of the need for planning, and attempting to secure their participation in it. This paper will offer an assessment of the government’s commitment to the slogan of ‘democratic planning’ by looking at the official and quasi-official propaganda campaigns that sought to spread the gospel of planning—the nationwide introduction of University Planning Forums; the channeling of voluntary bodies such the Bharat Sevak Samaj and Bharat Sadhu Samaj; the documentaries of the Films Division of India; and the dissemination of planning literature through official publications such as Yojana. Through interrogating the democratic claims of planning in India, this essay points towards the manner in which planning became a vehicle for postcolonial nationalism.

In the middle of the twentieth century statistician P. C. Mahalanobis strove to haul India into the computer age. Convinced that these machines were integral to the future of economic planning in India, he and the Indian Statistical Institute mounted a campaign to bring India its first computers. In the years following Independence, they acquired significant influence in the Indian planning process—culminating in them effectively authoring India’s Second Five Year Plan (1956-61). The tale of the computer’s journey to India demonstrates that the decision to centrally plan independent India’s economy, and the resultant explosion of official statistics, provided the justification for the pursuit of computers. It potentially solved what was considered centralized planning’s greatest puzzle: big data. Mahalanobis persuaded the Indian government of the need to import computers for the purposes of development, and then negotiated the import of these exorbitantly expensive machines during visits to Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the question of which country would provide India its first computers would ruffle Cold War feathers. This paper brings together and identifies a link between the research activities of the Indian Statistical Institute, its deepening association with economic planning, and the installation of India’s earliest computers.

During the first half of the twentieth century numerous efforts were made in Madras to taper the consumption of liquor among the cities’ workers. Those who put their weight behind such schemes included municipal and presidency governments, employers, missionaries and labour unions. Though their motives may have been divergent, they agreed that plebian liquor consumption was unacceptably high. Their endeavours ranged from restricting access to alcohol by various means to making repeated attempts at founding recreational clubs for workers. These clubs were intended as spaces of leisure that provided counter-inducements to alcohol. This article traces the methods employed in this urban temperance agenda noting the changes they sought to effect in the culture of popular leisure. Based on an examination of these temperance schemes—worker’s clubs in particular—I suggest that the regular appearance of tea and coffee in these campaigns indicates that their use as agents of sobriety consciously dovetailed with the creation of mass markets for these hitherto niche products.

It might be the end of the road for the Planning Commission. Despite having been in power for more than a month, the BJP government has chosen not to appoint new members to the commission, a decision viewed as portentous. The political consensus appears to be that the Planning Commission is now a zombie — well past its natural life and surviving only as a nuisance...The skepticism about the utility of a Planning Commission reflects how far opinion has shifted over the last six decades. In an altered polity and economy, centralised planning —  an idea that had once gripped the minds of many Indian freedom fighters and nation-builders — has lost traction. Once capable of dethroning ministers, it finds itself today in unfamiliar abeyance, nervously waiting on news of its own survival.