The Cold War as nightmare
envy: a view from India
ARVIND RAJAGOPAL
36
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
[T]he fact-respecting, secular historian in
India can bring his or her reasoning to the
public, but there is no guarantee that public
will bring their attention. Given their exper-
tise, it is only understandable that historians
in India should seek a role in adjudicating dis-
putes about the past in India. But what pre-
vents them from realizing this aspiration?
– Dipesh Chakrabarty1
[In a letter to Nehru in July 1963] I suggested
that in our schools and colleges there should
be a regular course on the freedom struggle
so that the new generation would learn
what it had all been about in a connected and
coherent fashion. I wondered why it was that
so many of the great events, themes and
debates of those days remained more or less
terra incognita to those who were born post-
1947… His reply came promptly. He agreed
that not enough had been done…
– Mohit Sen2
SOON after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
President Bush sought supremacy for
the United States in the Middle East,
and implicitly in the rest of the world
too, with war on Iraq. Interestingly, this
development registered with most
people outside the Middle East not as
American hegemony per se but first
1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Public Life
of History’, Public Culture 20(1), 2008,
pp. 143-168, at 144.
2. Mohit Sen, An Autobiography (abridged
by Anand Kishore Sahay). National Book
Trust, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 189-190.
of all, as more freely available infor-
mation. In India, as in many neighbour-
ing countries, the Cold War’s end came
with proliferating private satellite
dishes, granted de facto permission
despite the official state monopoly on
broadcasting, because of the emer-
gency situation created by the Gulf
War, and the amassing of refugees
from Kuwait. Satellite television,
about ten years old in the region, sud-
denly had a booming international
market for news.
The launching of Middle Eastern
conflict ensued with the American
sense that victory in the Cold War
was theirs. Ironically it was through a
Soviet satellite that CNN’s Middle
East transmissions conveyed the break-
ing news of the Gulf War.3 In fact as
late as 1989, Soviet satellites were
3. ‘Two years ago, [CNN] … in an agreement
that allowed CNN to use Stationsionar 12,
a Soviet government-owned satellite, could
also be seen in the Soviet Union, the Middle
East and Africa.’ Roxanne Roberts, ‘CNN, On
Top of the World: Keeping Abreast Abroad
Through Cable News Network’, Washington
Post, 21 August 1990, p. C1. ‘It was only ten
months ago that CNN have started beaming
their programmes over Asia after they hired a
Russian satellite….’ Satyajit Chattopadhyay,
‘Where the Action is’, The Times of India,
17 September 1990, p. 11.
important enough for the Head of Stra-
tegic Planning in the United States-
led Intelsat to suggest cooperation
with Intersputnik, the Soviet satellite
system.4
I t should be no surprise that infras-
tructure produced during the Cold
War remained relevant thereafter. The
issue is rather how we perceive it. If
history is a tale told by the victor, it
follows that the Soviet presence that
arguably shaped much of the twen-
tieth century history, is an uncomfort-
able one in retrospect. For countries of
the Global South the Soviet help they
received by way of soft loans, barter
agreements, and aid for heavy indus-
try, is like a guilty secret or an expla-
nation for their problems: they should
have embraced the market right away!
This ignores at least two facts. First,
that without aid, domestic capital was
insufficient for development, and sec-
ond, that without superpower compe-
tition, little or no aid would have been
forthcoming.
The ideological opposition bet-
ween capitalism and communism may
have been unyielding, but East and
West Blocs both relied on infrastruc-
tures and institutions that bore similari-
ties. This is clearest in Western Europe,
where socialism became influential.
There, progressive tax regimes funded
social welfare programmes to reduce
inequality sharply. Today, amidst a
steep global rise in inequality since
1980, when the Reagan-Thatcher
revolutions began, Europe still has the
least increase in inequality by far.5
4. Burton I. Edelson and Joseph N. Pelton,
‘Can Intelsat and Intersputnik Cooperate?’
Space Policy, February 1989, pp. 7-11. Joseph
Pelton was Head, Strategic Planning, for
Intelsat. My thanks to Asif Siddiqi for the
citation.
5. Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas
Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman,
‘The Elephant Curve of Global Inequality
and Growth’, WID World Working Papers
Series No. 2017/20, December 2017. https://
However, it was not Europe but
the United States that set the dominant
narrative of the Cold War, hailing capi-
talism’s evolution as reflecting inher-
ent virtues that were the inverse of
communism. Close reflection might
have compelled the acknowledgment
that competition with communism
shaped the post-war trajectory of capi-
talism, but victory was the goal. Wis-
dom would follow, but it could wait.
We are still waiting, one might say.
I t is only recently that revisionist
accounts have begun to transcend the
parochial focus of Cold War historio-
graphy on Europe and the United
States, and drawn attention to the glo-
bal scope of the Cold War. The most
important aspects of the Cold War, one
historian has influentially argued,
‘were neither military nor strategic,
nor Europe-centred, but connected to
political and social developments in
the Third World.’6
However, for the majority of
the world’s population, the Cold War
would have appeared at best as an
affair for their leaders or their foreign
ministry, and as secondary to the main
concern, of national development. This
was a view reinforced by historians,
whose interest was either absorbed
by the conflict between superpower
alliances and their rival systems, or
by questions centred on individual
nations. In this sense cosmopolita-
nism of the post-war era was percep-
tible mainly from an elite perspective,
for example via the formation of
inter-national NGOs such as the IMF,
the World Bank and the U.N. For
most of the world it was the dawn of
nationalism.
wid.world/document/elephant-curve-global-
inequality-growth-wid-world-working-
paper-2017-20/
6. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War:
Third World Interventions and the Making
of Our Times. Cambridge University Press,
New York, 2005, p. 396.
In this context of unresolved
rivalry between alternative forms of
modernity, if superpowers chose to
publicize the power they wielded, they
could only diminish their allies. As
such, to advertise would be counter-
productive; tact was of the essence.
In other words, while nations claimed
to be sovereign, they glossed over the
flows of foreign aid and expertise
enabling postcolonial development, and
donor countries were not aggressive
in demanding credit before foreign
nationals. This was a lesson Americans
had learned when implementing the
Marshall Plan in post-war Europe.
T he U.S. experience with the
Marshall Plan had shown that aid
identifying the donor could generate
resentment and fuel hostile propa-
ganda. In any case Americans were
unsure what their intellectual res-
ponse to Communism, their principal
enemy, could be. Hence their decision
to focus on tangible outcomes and to
avoid argument. ‘Ours in a new sense
must be a propaganda of the deed, of
visible accomplishments’, argued
Paul Hoffman, head of the Economic
Cooperation Administration imple-
menting the Marshall Plan.7 At the
same time,Americans travelling abroad
were reassured that the $13b aid pack-
age to Western Europe was not a gift,
but a way to safeguard national inter-
ests: ‘It’s expensive and burdensome
but fire insurance in a high-risk area is
never cheap.’8
Different arguments for differ-
ent constituencies, within a single
planet whose fate was suddenly in
question due to superpower rivalry.
Alongside polarization and compart-
mentalized arguments, then, a new
7. Paul Hoffman, Peace Can Be Won.
Doubleday & Co, New York, 1951, p. 143. 37
8. The Marshall Plan: Information For Ameri-
cans Going Abroad. US Economic Coopera-
tion Administration, 1949, p. 6.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
 vocabulary emerged, reflecting pro-
cesses of homogenization and unifica-
tion, and the spread of dispositifs and
epistemes that were similar across
East and West. Nation-centred per-
spectives began to transform an older
language of civilizational uplift and
imperial rule. Circumstances demanded
an overtly unbiased and egalitarian
vocabulary of international alliance
and of global governance. The need
for neutral terms was not immediately
obvious to all; for example, those who
feared Soviet influence most vocally
held that partisanship was a must, and
denounced neutralism. The following
observation by the social scientist
Daniel Lerner is an example:
‘Neutralism indicates a failure of shared
purpose in the America-centred Free
World coalition, which today stands
opposed to the Soviet-centred Comin-
tern coalition in the struggle for world
power. The failure is this: the people
who were counted as members of the
Free World coalition, in fact decline to
identify themselves with it, and to share
its purposes. Neutralists are those who
refuse to join either coalition. Since
there may be no other place to go, in a
bipolarizing world, there are elements
of political fantasy in this attitude. But
that does not make its political conse-
quences less potent.’9
T he demand for neutralism was due
to a growing desire to affirm national
sovereignty at every turn, and a refusal
of any hint of foreign control, Lerner
later wrote: ‘The hatred sown by anti-
colonialism is harvested in the rejec-
tion of every appearance of foreign
tutelage. Wanted are modern institu-
tions but not modern ideologies, mod-
ern power but not modern purposes,
modern wealth but not modern wis-
38 9. Daniel Lerner, ‘International Coalitions
and Communications Content: The Case of
Neutralism’, Public Opinion Quarterly 16(4),
Winter 1952, pp. 681-688, at 682-683.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
dom, modern commodities but not
modern cant. It is not so clear, how-
ever, that modern ways and words can
be so easily and so totally sundered.’10
A t least two points are worth noting
here. First, at the height of the Cold
War, the majority of the world’s popu-
lation had little interest in the ideolo-
gies or pedagogies of the time. In other
words, ideas emerging from Europe
or the United States had to appear as if
they were products of a spontaneous
process arising more or less every-
where simultaneously. Second, a suit-
able terminology had to be devised to
reflect a widespread distrust of ideas
and of hierarchical influence, prefer-
ring instead what seemed like rela-
tively tangible products, institutions
and capacities that anyone could own.
Modernization and development are
the most familiar of these terms, but in
addition, the circulation of words such
as technology, public sector and pri-
vate sector grew exponentially in the
post WWII period.11
The new prominence of these
words indicate the adaptation and
domestication of Cold War tensions
to a national scale in postcolonial
countries such that no direct acknow-
ledgement of the ideological battle
was necessary, even while super-
powers pursued their campaigns.
Here we have a Cold War hetero-
glossia, where the force of authorita-
tive discourse was diffused and
transformed across multiple national
languages and dialects.12
10. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional
Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Free
Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1958, p. 47.
11. This can be seen on Google’s NGram
Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams/
graph?content=technology%2C+public+sector
%2 C+private+sector&year_start=1900&
year_end =2000& corpus=15 &smoothing
=3& share=&direct_ url=t1%3B%2Ctechno-
logy%3B %2Cc0% 3B.t1%3B%2Cpublic%2
0sector%3B% 2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C pri-
vate%20sector% 3B%2Cc0
In this sense the Cold War’s
global influence was largely indirect.
The battle between capitalism and
communism could seem distant to
societies dominated by practical con-
cerns of survival. What former colo-
nies wanted was ‘modern power but
not modern purposes, …modern com-
modities but not modern cant’, Lerner
remarks, doubting if these were in fact
separable. But with the benefit of hind-
sight, we can ask whether perhaps the
world’s majority knew more than
Lerner suspected, and if the East-West
battle over political economic systems
missed something more fundamental.
Disinterest over this conflict was not
due to unfocused anti-colonialism, but
to a sense that the former colonies
could only lose if they joined the battle
between superpowers. Thus when
Jawaharlal Nehru announced at the
Bandung Conference in 1955 that the
world wanted peace, not war, and that
India was neither Communist nor
anti-Communist, that was postcolonial
politics at work.13
I n the years after WWII, both super-
powers were concerned whether
India would be a showcase for capi-
talism or for its opponent. India was
not only poor, it had intellectuals who
were attracted to communism, which
was powerfully represented in two
neighbouring countries, the Soviet
Union and China. It was for such rea-
sons that the Cold War was fought,
namely to decide the fate of revolution
in countries like India. The principal
warring sides were not equal how-
ever, in economic and military power,
or for that matter in their hostility to
12. M.M. Bakhtin, in Michael Holquist
(ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981,
p. 324 and passim.
13. Press Trust of India, ‘World Faces
Grave Danger of War Warns Mr. Nehru:
Asian-African Nations Must Work For Peace’,
The Times of India, 23 April 1955, p. 8.
the other side. The Soviet Union had
long ago settled on the idea of ‘social-
ism in one country’, and bracketed the
idea of international revolution in
preference to providing a counter to
capitalist growth.14 It was the United
States that believed that ‘capitalism
could not flourish in one country’, fear-
ing that a free market economy at
home would be restricted by autarky
abroad.15
I t is only recently, however, that schol-
ars are considering what the Cold War
meant for countries outside the East
and West Bloc. The conventional view
has been that the ideological conflicts
of the Cold War were distant from a
non-aligned country like India. Aware-
ness of the conflict’s existence was
not absent; the issue was rather how
it was understood, as noted by an
American anthropologist: ‘My arrival
[in the village] was viewed in Cold
War terms. It took a lot of living in
the village to push this into the back-
ground. One month after we arrived,
a man arose in the bus we were tra-
velling in and said, “This man has
come to [our] country to see whether
we love America more or Russia more
so they can decide whether to give us
money”.’16
As this story suggests, in a North
Indian village the Cold War could
seem like prospecting for a marriage
alliance, where the performance of
14. The topic is discussed in extenso in
E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924-
1926. Vols V and VI of A History of Soviet
Russia. Macmillian and Co., New York, 1958
and 1960.
15. This felicitous formulation is from Srinath
Raghavan, The Most Dangerous Place:
A. History of the United States in South Asia.
Penguin Random House, New Delhi, 2018,
p. 120.
16. Yole G. Sills, ‘USA and USSR English
Language Publications Distributed in India.’
Prepared for the United States Information
Agency by the Bureau of Applied Social
Research, Columbia University, January
1962, pp. 11-13.
sentiment was an issue, and not the
profession of ideology. If East and
West Blocs saw India as a prize worth
fighting for, in this anecdote, India
reversed roles with superpowers,
viewing the latter’s competition as a
means of increasing the prize accru-
ing to Indians; otherwise the contest
seemed to leave Indians unchanged.
T he self-absorption indicated here
was not limited to the village. As
Ashis Nandy has noted, the concerns
in a newly independent country were
mostly native – destitution, communal
riots, entry of politics into more and
more areas of life …and so on.17
Analysis of these issues relied on
modern categories imported from
abroad, Nandy notes. Imports tended
to be of categories that reproduced this
self-absorption, on the whole. Thus
‘cold war’ rarely figures except in dis-
cussions of foreign policy. One of the
few occasions on which I have noticed
the term ‘cold war’ in domestic com-
ment, is in an essay on the Indian docu-
mentary film, of all things. The author
describes the period he was writing,
in the early 1960s, as ‘…a time in our
national history when there is a “cold
war” between the Public and Private
Sectors in all industries and when the
terms “Free Enterprise” and “State
Ownership” have acquired peculiar
connotations…’18
Placed between private and pub-
lic sectors, documentary film makers
had a vantage point on national deve-
lopment. Collaborating with artists
who operated internationally, such cul-
tural producers negotiated constraints
that limited their persuasiveness too.
17. Ashis Nandy, ‘The After-Life of the Raj
in Indian Academe’, in Vinay Lal (ed.), Dis-
senting Knowledges, Open Futures. Oxford
University Press, New Delhi, 2000, p. 105.
18. Jag Mohan, ‘Panorama of the Private
Sector of the Indian Short Film Industry’,
Marg 2(4), 1962, pp. 9-15, at p. 9.
National development might appear
like a sovereign activity in the gov-
ernment’s own claims, while in fact
reflecting prevailing geopolitics.
The scarcity of the Cold War in
post-independence historical analysis
signals not the irrelevance of the Cold
War so much as the domestic focus
of nation-building in its initial phase,
on the view of most commentators.
The issue today, with globalization’s
advance, would be to disentangle the
dynamics of superpower conflict that
occurred behind the façade of nation-
building, that might shed light on our
historical present.
T o this end my paper offers three main
points. First, there is the paradox that
national development was in part a
product of international rivalry, such
that commitment to the former entailed
denying the influence of the latter. Sec-
ond, experts were crucial in mediating
and insulating transnational influence
while supervising national develop-
ment. Such expertise was politically
shielded from the pressures of a wider
public in a way that has increasingly
become difficult after the Cold War. It
is worth noting that the period of the
Cold War was also the period when
national communication systems
began to be developed in much of the
Global South. Hence, awareness of
international context depended on
access to education and information
that were usually not so widely avail-
able during this time.
Last but not least, the end of the
Cold War has brought on, not the end
of history as Francis Fukuyama
argued, but its beginning. At least for
non-aligned countries like India, the
end of a relatively uncontested rule of
experts and the greater awareness of
a world market of goods and ideas, has
led to a popular demand for history, as 39
one way of accounting for the place of
the nation in relation to the rest of
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
 the world. Here polemic and myth-
building have had the advantage over
academic historiography, which has
dwelt mainly on the colonial era and
the triumph of anti-colonialism, and
has been relatively late in turning its
attention to the postcolonial period.
Here my argument is specific to India.
The rush to globalize Indian history
has occurred in the public sphere but
without much scholarly analysis.19 It
has been accomplished by identifying
with the victors of the Cold War, and
by rejoicing in the defeat of socialism,
although India was not in fact a com-
batant in that war; rather it benefited
from both sides.
F ollowing George Blaustein, we can
call this Albtraumneid or Nacht-
mareifersucht, coinages that translate
as nightmare envy or nightmare jeal-
ousy.20 Unlike schadenfreude, which
is the pleasure in another’s misfortune,
Albtraumneid or Nachtmareifersucht
express envy for misfortune. What it
refers to in this case is the socialist
oppression that the East Bloc was
supposed to have endured, and that
India never experienced. In fact, there
seems to be a widespread conviction
in India that there was an absolutely
real historical predicament that the
country had to endure for decades
and only managed to emerge from
due to the worldwide triumph of
market forces, and incidentally (or not,
depending on one’s views), thanks to
the assertion of Hindu identity.
An official posted to New Delhi
with the United States Information
Agency in 1950, a Yale-trained archi-
tect, was told when hired, ‘India is the
most important country in the world.’21
19. A noteworthy exception here is Arjun
Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization. University of
40 Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.
20 George Blaustein, Nightmare Envy and
Other Stories. Oxford University Press, New
York, 2018, p. 2.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
This was a view from the United
States, which saw Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru as a reliable oppo-
nent of communism within India, and
as a potential ally who had to be sup-
ported.22 India also became a key for
Moscow to gain a foothold in the
Global South.23 The Soviet Politburo
thus proceeded to give Nehru and his
ambassador K.P.S. Menon abundant
proof of their commitment to Indian
development.24
A recent historical account observes:
‘Events in India had worldwide
impact. The country stood at the cen-
tre of a global contest over the eco-
nomic future of the Third World by
virtue of its early independence, its size
and the outsize presence of founding
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
The case of India drove the practices,
and later the theories, of both Ameri-
can and Soviet economic assistance;
both superpowers learnt development
assistance by reckoning with Indian
conditions.’25
In fact, the superpowers learned
not only techniques of development,
but ways of managing their ideologi-
cal conflict within the Global South.
They were aided by indigenous expert
21. Jack Masey, retired Director of Exhibi-
tions, United States Information Agency,
personal interview, New York City, 15 Octo-
ber 2014.
22. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘India’s Nehru is
Viewed as Western Counterpoise of China’s
Mao’, Washington Post, 16 October 1949.
23. Andreas Hilger, ‘Building a Socialist
Elite? Khruschev’s Soviet Union and
Elite Formation in India’, in Jost Dulffer
and Marc Frey (eds.), Elites and Decoloni-
zation in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave
Macmillan, Basing-stoke, 2011, pp. 262-86
at p. 264.
24. See e.g., K.P.S. Menon, The Flying Troika.
Extracts From a Diary. Oxford, London,
1963. Also K. Krishna Moorthy, ubi infra,
footnote 29.
25. David Engerman, The Price of Aid: The
Economic Cold War in India. Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, 2018, p. 4.
classes, who built on old literate cul-
tures to fashion ingenious mechanisms
of rationalization and legitimation, that
subordinated incommensurable sys-
tems with adroit equivocations across
warring sides. Indian experts demon-
strated to the superpowers that despite
the relatively limited quantum of
resources the USSR provided, prob-
ably a quarter or less than the US in the
case of India, mere quantity was less
important than the kind of aid and
where it went. Not only did the United
States learn lessons from this experi-
ence, but devised new strategies in
response to it, that it would be a mis-
take to enfold into an argument about
the triumph of capitalism.
T he United States preferred aid cen-
tred on commodities, with a heavy
emphasis on inputs to agriculture, where
a little prosperity could go a long way
to reducing the chances of peasant
militancy. The U.S. was reluctant to aid
state institutions, since on the reading
of their experts, that would empower
socialism, and history showed the error
of such a choice. There was one major
exception, namely communications
infrastructure, for which the United
States accepted the inevitability of
state ownership and control, and pro-
vided material aid and a great deal of
advice. This was an exception that
confirmed the American preference,
as things turned out. Crucial here was
the U.S. assurance that a commercial
revenue model would ensure adequate
funding while posing no threat to the
state’s monopoly over the airwaves
and over the polity itself.26
‘A rule of experts’ has overseen
economic growth across the globe, it
has been influentially argued, helping
26. Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Television in India:
Ideas, Institutions and Practices’, in Manuel
Alvarado, Herman Bennett, Milly Buonanno
and Toby Miller (eds.), Sage Handbook on
Television Studies. Sage Press, Beverly Hills,
CA, 2014, pp. 83-104.
to bridge the gap between abstract
reason and facts on the ground.27 The
realm of reason was hardly pristine
however; it could involve seemingly
incompatible claims, e.g. of capitalism
versus socialism, such as experts in
non-aligned nations confronted. Tech-
nocrats had to navigate political cross-
currents at global, national and local
levels, as they confronted divergent
hierarchies of valuation that required
political imagination as well as scien-
tific reason. Hence the practices of
economic planning could yield dif-
ferent results given otherwise similar
circumstances. For example, P.C.
Mahanalobis who oversaw the Second
Five-Year Plan, was heavily influenced
by the Soviet model, whereas subse-
quent planners such as D.R. Gadgil,
who directed the Fourth Plan, moved
away from it.
T he Cold War period was thus a time
when not only models of the nation
but modes of affiliating with it, namely
nationalism, could be subject to dif-
ferent interpretations, without wider
repercussions. That is to say, nation-
alism too was ruled by experts during
this period. Expert nationalism can be
distinguished from official nationalism,
such as the Czarist imposition of
Russian identity on the people under
Alexander III’s rule, through, e.g. com-
pulsory primary education, militarism
and the rewriting of history.28 By com-
parison, in the first decades after inde-
pendence in India, the absence of any
significant attempt at mass indoctrina-
tion is striking. Mass mobilization
had fostered a variety of popular sen-
timents united mainly through anti-
27. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt,
Technopolitics, Modernity. University of
California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
2002.
28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communi-
ties: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Verso, 1983, London and New
York, pp. 88-89; 101.
colonialism, and thereafter, the state
did not require nationalism to be culti-
vated as a mass ideology. Instead, it
became a domain of experts for at least
three reasons.
F irst, concerns other than national-
ism, e.g. development, took precede-
nce due to the weakness of challengers
to the Congress party’s rule, during
the years when its dominance seemed
assured. Such challenges as did arise
were typically accommodated within
the party framework, while the Con-
gress maintained its claim of ruling
over a unified, secular nation. If the
ruling party was difficult to dislodge, it
was due not so much to the extent of
its power but to a consensus favour-
ing one party that could represent the
country as a whole. The quality of rule
was a secondary consideration; the
practical need was for a common
ground that could only be provided by
a party with a national scope. This
meant that debates on different ways
of defining the nation were confined
to the margins.
Second, the limited infrastruc-
ture and the relatively small size of
the educated population also helped to
contain contests based on divergent
models of the nation. Alternative
models could not achieve much trac-
tion given the limited scope for their
politicization. Last but not least, while
a significant nationalist historio-
graphy arose, influenced by Nehru too
among others, that scholarship focused
mainly on the colonial period. This
meant that the reigning political model
in the post-independence period did
not necessarily have to be questioned.
Other social sciences, e.g. political
science and sociology, focused on the
post-independence period, generating
concepts such as ‘Sanskritization’
(M.N. Srinivas) and ‘the Congress
system’ (Rajni Kothari) that operated
within the given national framework.
This tacit division of labour meant
that post-independence history was
not rewritten so much as it was neg-
lected, and hence the prevailing model
of nationalism was harder to question.
I will return to this point below.
A few aspects of this rule of experts
can be briefly outlined to clarify the
character of the Cold War’s impact on
India. First, economic aid. The U.S.
had a head start over the Soviet
Union, which commenced its aid pro-
gramme only after Stalin’s death in
1953. But Soviet aid reached nearly a
hundred public sector projects, and
provided an economic foundation
for national independence, one that
was lacking in many other nations of
the Global South, as one observer
noted in 1987:
‘The non-aligned state of India can be
maintained only by building upon the
bedrock of heavy and defence indus-
tries – steel, oil, power generation,
engineering goods, aircraft manufac-
ture, ordnance and space ventures. In
all these ventures, the USSR has
extended a helping hand... A time span
of thirty years is not a long period in
the life of nations. But during this
period, the close association with
the Soviet Union had helped India
to erect strong national edifices in
the public sector which in turn have
enabled the country to escape the
sort of captivity under MNCs or neo-
colonials that is the sorry state of
affairs in many Latin American and
African countries.’29
As for the U.S., the economist
V.K.R.V. Rao, who was the inaugu-
ral director of several institutes of
higher education, and also served as
cabinet minister for several years,
argued that the Soviet Union had
taken the lead in defining how aid could
41
29. K. Krishna Moorthy, The Road Begins
at Bhilai. Technology Books, Madras, 1987,
pp. 29-30.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
 be most helpful in overcoming under-
development:
‘...Indian opinion was disturbed by
the hesitancy with which the United
States approached the question of aid
for economic development in this
part of the world in contrast to its total
commitment to the recovery of
Europe. And it attributed this luke-
warm attitude on the part of the U.S.
to the failure of India to qualify on
the political front within the larger
context of the cold war… [I]t was only
with the entry of the Soviet Union and
other communist countries into the
field that western countries also began
displaying some enthusiasm for offer-
ing aid to the underdeveloped countries
at the governmental level.’30
N ow, a detailed account of aid to the
Indian government is beyond the
scope of this paper.31 My aim here is
rather to indicate how behind the
façade of domestic debates on deve-
lopment, there was Cold War compe-
tition that did not necessarily manifest
to the common person.
Nehru once remarked to the U.S.
ambassador in India, J.K. Galbraith,
‘The Americans help the Tatas and
Birlas who are already rich. By con-
trast the Soviets or British build
plants that belong to the people.’32
Galbraith did not contradict Nehru
but strove to prove him wrong, by
securing President Kennedy’s sup-
port for a steel plant in Bokaro, India’s
largest till that time. Congressional
opposition scuttled the effort, how-
ever. It was Soviet aid that came to the
rescue.33
30. V.K.R.V. Rao and Dharm Narain, Foreign
Aid and India’s Economic Development.
Asia Publishing House, New York, 1963,
p. 71.
31. See Engerman, op. cit., footnote 25.
42 32. John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s
Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy
Years. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1969,
p. 215.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
I n all likelihood, neither superpower
would have been motivated to engage
in such aid without competition from
its rival. Nor did aid arrive unmarked;
it carried the seeds of Cold War poli-
tics, which grew into battles between
the private and the public sector. In
Arne Westad’s term, the Soviet Union
stood for an empire of justice, whereas
the United States championed an
empire of liberty.34 But these battles
had a different colour on the ground,
and could appear as dispassionate
views on sectoral performance rather
than as ideologically driven or as prin-
cipled stances. Nation-building and
nationalism as they were understood
at the time of independence, offered
little room for disagreement. For exam-
ple, leading industrialists had joined
to recommend public investment in
infrastructure, in a statement known as
the Bombay Plan, that anticipated the
country’s Five-Year Plans.35 Within a
few decades India’s planned economy
would be denounced as a Stalinist
imposition, while Nehru became akin
to Stalin and even to Hitler.36
Now, the challenge for India’s
planners had not only been to manage
33. Galbraith, ibid., pp. 81-82. Thomas F.
Brady, ‘Soviet Offers Aid for Mill in India;
Would Help Build Bokaro Steel Plant – U.S.
Denied Request for Assistance’, New York
Times, 2 May 1964, p. 1, 4.
34. Westad describes the Cold War as a battle
between the United States’ ‘empire of liberty’
and the Soviet Union’s ‘empire of justice.’
See Westad, ibid., pp. 8-72, e.g.
35. The signatories were: J.R.D. Tata, G.D.
Birla, Ardeshir Dalal, Lala Shri Ram,
Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Ardeshir Darabshaw
Shroff, Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas and
John Mathai. See Purushottamdas Thakurdas
(ed.), A Brief Memorandum Outlining a
Plan of Economic Development for India
(2 vols.). Penguin, London, 1945. For a
recent account see Medha Kudaisya, Tryst
with Prosperity: Indian Business and the
Bombay Plan of 1944. Penguin, New Delhi,
2018.
36. Jay Dubashi, ‘From “Shilanyas” to Ber-
lin Wall’, Organiser, 26 November 1989, rpt.
in Jay Dubashi, The Road to Ayodhya. Voice
the economy efficiently, but also to
discipline Indian capitalists, many of
whom were conservative caste Hin-
dus who had avoided engagement
with social reform, and shunned Indian
nationalism itself. Here is Jawaharlal
Nehru on the subject in the Lok Sabha:
JN: Unfortunately this is our mis-
fortune that even private enterprise
which shows some intelligence in other
countries, even capitalism which has
become to some extent, a modernized
form of the old type of capitalists (sic),
even in countries like America or Eng-
land or France or elsewhere, even that
degree of modernity has not come to
our capitalists.
M.R. Masani: Nor to your socialism.
JN: And so I find with an ever-
increasing amazement the type of
stuff that is doled out here in the name
of capitalism and private enterprise,
and the type of stuff that is doled out
against planning etc. which nobody in
the wide world, except some persons
with hardly any intelligence, can accept
in any way.37
T his glancing encounter of Nehru-
vian ‘socialism’ with Indian conserva-
tism offers the sense of an unequal
exchange, between Nehru’s state-
backed reform and a critic with a
grouse rather than a game plan.
Masani, a founder of the conservative
Swatantra Party, actually accepted the
need for a mixed economy, and dis-
tanced himself from religion as well
as from nationalism. He upheld ins-
tead a combination of liberalism
and Gandhism.38 Whereas Nehru’s
objection was to unregenerate indige-
nous capitalism, that only grudgingly
began supporting the Congress party,
of India Press, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 18-20,
at p. 19.
37. Lok Sabha Debates, Vol XLIV, cols. 1665-
1682, 9 August 1960.
38. See e.g., M.R. Masani, ‘Liberalism’,
Freedom First, April 1985, pp. 33-41.
mostly from 1944 onwards, that is,
when independence seemed all but
inevitable.39
Once independence was achie-
ved, Indian business came forward to
claim the benefits, likening itself to its
foreign counterparts. Advocates for
Indian business countered Nehru’s
complaints with an obbligato of
accusations of socialism. But such
criticisms were in a minor key during
the heyday of economic planning. In
contrast, a wide consensus supported
state intervention not only to channel
and direct capital but also to restrain
it out of democratic concerns. By the
time of liberalization, this history
would prove to be too nuanced for
recollection; evidence that today’s
adversaries who were often in the
same camp not long ago, would prob-
ably be rejected by many critics of the
Congress.
H istorical research, far from pro-
moting comparative understanding
during the Cold War, tended instead
to elaborate national mythologies,
or at any rate to avoid challenging
them. The Cold War generated dream-
worlds amongst the superpowers,
Susan Buck-Morss has argued, differ-
ent forms of mass utopia that could
only be experienced in highly scripted
and mediated ways, e.g. as empires of
‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ respectively.40
The unexpected emergence of closed
and self-reproducing worlds, precisely
while greeting the arrival of a com-
munication revolution and when
many nations seemed poised for ‘take-
39. Claude Markovits, Indian Business and
Nationalist Politics 1931-1939: The Indig-
enous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Con-
gress Party. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1985, p. 183.
40. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and
Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia
in East and West. MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA, 2000. On the empire of liberty versus
the empire of justice see footnote 6 ubi sipra
on Westad.
off’ to modernization, requires expla-
nation.41
Unlike previous wars, the Cold
War was distinct in seeking to prevent,
not prosecute conflict. The goals of the
war were abstract, as was the space
in which it was conducted – the fate
of the whole world was at stake after
all. But since it did not correspond to
any discernible events for most ordi-
nary people, it was largely through
expert knowledge that one could know
the war was on, and that one was in it,
if one knew anything about it at all.
Cold War scholars were prepared for
a conflict that could last indefinitely,
and were completely taken by surprise
when the Berlin Wall fell and the
Soviet Union voted to dissolve itself.
As such the expert knowledge guiding
Cold War strategy had its own reality,
and that it might bear little correspond-
ence to ground realities could remain
unnoticed.
W e might ask whether a dream-
world did not characterize India too
during this period, albeit of a different
kind. Here, as I have indicated, the
battle was not a direct transposition of
the battle between capitalism and
communism. Rather, the poverty and
backwardness of the country required
urgent remedy, to catch up with the
more advanced nations. For various
reasons, economic growth and social
mobility, already low, failed to increase
as expected. To the extent there was
a visibly shared culture in this secular
period, it was perhaps created by the
cinema, which was not allowed to
engage with politics and proceeded to
devise a commercially successful for-
mula. ‘Formula’ films showed a self-
regulating Indian culture to which the
state was somehow external; thus the
41. See in this context Paul N. Edwards, The
Closed World: Computers and the Politics of
Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press,
Cambridge, 1997.
policeman always arrived not only
after the crime had been committed,
but after the culprit had been caught.42
This dreamworld of Indian cinema
was in its own way a product of Cold
War deterrence.
C old War deterrence pertained not
simply to the arms race. It slowed
down the pace of political change by
deterring challenges to prevailing
forms of nationalism. Large flows of
aid to the Congress-led government
strengthened the party’s hands against
its opponents. Jawaharlal Nehru’s
importance in this context was in
negotiating between reform and reac-
tion at home, and between superpow-
ers abroad. For his admirers he may
have been exemplary, but in fact the
ideological impasse of the time was
most easily transcended through the
figure of a leader, whose personal
qualities compensated for the ad hoc
and at times inconsistent approach
that constraints dictated. This is the
second aspect of the rule of experts,
namely that it had to be defended and
overseen by a charismatic leader
whose personal appeal could better
withstand ideological challenges.
A third aspect, closely related to
the above, is a partitioning between
domestic and foreign affairs. National
politics concerned itself almost exclu-
sively with domestic matters, while
foreign policy was left to the leader
and his aides, and to episodic parlia-
mentary debates. The onset of inde-
pendence and of nation-building not
surprisingly necessitated an absorp-
tion with the trials of development
while retaining electoral consensus. A
glance at the front pages of newspa-
pers after 1947 shows a steep decline
in foreign news coverage, and its
replacement by local stories, with poli-
43
42. M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the
Hindi Film: A Historical Construction.
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
 tical news always having the greatest
prominence.
This paradox of the Global Cold
War is worth emphasizing, namely
that it could be most present where it
was least noticed. What made nation-
building possible was a set of back-
ground transactions with global powers
whose details the public at large was
spared, and whose management was
delegated to experts. The greater sense
of national sovereignty this afforded,
often amounting to chauvinism, meant
a trade-off with cosmopolitanism, with
the latter becoming mainly the pro-
venance of educated classes.
T he same was not necessarily true
of the socialist bloc, which usually
recognized multiple nationalities within
each country, and which exposed their
citizens to international culture. Social-
ist party rule was the point of unifica-
tion, and extended across cultures;
foreign culture was in principle wel-
come, therefore. For example, during
the 1970s, Indian films imported into
the Soviet Union were shown, on an
average, 2.5 times more extensively
than their Soviet competitors.43 By
contrast, foreign films had relatively
minuscule audiences in India.
The fourth aspect of the rule of
experts during the Cold War was
an overt insulation and separation
between the precincts of politics,
economics and culture, that, it was
expected, would continue into the fore-
seeable future. The domain know-
ledge for each precinct was distinct,
and reposed in distinct communities
of experts. That such an arrangement
obtained across much of the world
indicated a convergent process of
secularization at work. Values based
on religion and ritual, and on biological
44 43. See Masha Salazkina, ‘Soviet-Indian
Coproductions: Alibaba as Political Alle-
gory’, Cinema Journal 49(4), Summer 2010,
pp. 71-89, at 74.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
and cultural difference, were nomi-
nally and usually legally subordinate to
more neutral systems of order. Where
this obtained, it reflected secular
nation-building, for which the Cold War
was a key enabling condition, insulat-
ing politics within the nation from the
Cold War itself. It is worth pointing out
that the net result of superpower com-
petition in this sense was that more
people moved out of poverty than at
any other time in recorded history,
notwithstanding the conflicts that also
occurred during this period.
Within the political sphere, where
nationalism was dominated by a single
party, the choice was between affilia-
tion and alienation, or between identi-
fication and critique. For example,
what it meant to be a nationalist in cul-
ture might be secularism, or for that
matter some variety of religious com-
munalism, and nationalism in econom-
ics could mean socialism or capitalism,
or simply more production.
T oday in India, Nehru stands for
socialism, which critics assume to be
inseparable from arbitrary rule and
political corruption; he is like a human
smoking gun whose mention allows
the opposition to rest its case against
the Congress. 44 Ironically, it was
Nehru’s reliability as an anti-commu-
nist at home that was most reassur-
ing to his American supporters. 45
Although the Congress oversaw the
low growth period and also ushered in
economic reforms, the party is viewed
by many opponents as socialist or even
Marxist. However, while the Cold War
lasted, Congress ideology was not the
object of complaint because, then as
now, the party was not defined by ideo-
44. For a satirical response to contemporary
criticisms of Nehru as original sinner incarnate,
see https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/
nehru-did-it/cid/1686874
45. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘India’s Nehru is
Viewed as Western Counterpoise of China’s
Mao’, Washington Post, 16 October 1949.
logy; rather it was the party of national
consensus. Opposition parties did not
offer an alternative so much as con-
stitute lobbies for specific constituen-
cies and interests. Disagreements
were negotiated within the frame-
work of the national party.
Today the BJP occupies a simi-
lar position but unlike before, there
is another party that at least until
recently, proved capable of building a
national coalition to challenge it. This
may explain the scale of the invective
against the Congress, but not, I suggest,
either its form or content.
T he BJP’s denunciation of the Con-
gress imputes to it corruption, nepotism
and ideological rigidity too for good
measure. All of these faults are alle-
gedly symbolized best by Nehru, who
in fact seldom unilaterally imposed his
will and was conscientious about insti-
tution-building. Arguably it was Indira
Gandhi who took authoritarian meas-
ures across a decade beginning in 1967,
when she outmanoeuvred her oppo-
nents through a series of pro-poor
measures, culminating in the National
Emergency of 1975-77.46
But the Congress was in power
for more than two decades thereafter,
during which time it instituted a series
of economic reforms, most signifi-
cantly in 1991. Only in 1998 did the
BJP come to power, leading a coalition
of more than two dozen parties. By
this time however, affluent middle
class and upper caste support for
reforms had taken on a saffron colour.
And the BJP had declared itself as the
party of reform in contrast to the Con-
gress, which on the former’s account
was the party of reaction.
Political polemic is the very
opposite of Occam’s razor: in it, logical
46. See Arvind Rajagopal, ‘The Emergency
as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle
Class’, Modern Asian Studies 45(5), 2011,
pp. 1003-1049.
entities multiply relentlessly. Critiques
accumulate until it is hard to determine
whether the objection is to a principle
or to the party, and whether there is a
rank ordering of objections. There is
safety in numbers: there’s no telling
which criticism will matter for whom,
when wedge issues are used to attract
uncommitted voters, many of whom
lack education. But it is worth noting
that a key opposition from an earlier
time, namely secular versus com-
munal, has lately given way to a more
capacious opposition of national and
anti-national, where anti-national can
signal Communism, Naxalism, Con-
gressism, or anti-Modi-ism. Little unites
the terms but they can be treated as
equivalent in contemporary politi-
cal abuse, a prominent news anchor
notes. 47 Mention of Hindutva and
the BJP here give way to Cold War-
era totems, to the Congress itself as
a stand-in, and to the figure of the
leader as the point where contradic-
tions resolve and enmities clarify.
I t is interesting that the Cold War-era
hostility towards communism exhi-
bited in the United States reappears in
the Indian context with the Congress
party as the culprit, and Nehru as the
arch villain of the story, although by
no stretch of imagination was Nehru
equivalent to Stalin or Mao, nor did
the Congress make more than token
gestures towards socialism.48 Low
economic growth was not accompa-
nied by mass annihilation, or by des-
truction of productive capacity. There
were no Soviet-style Gulags in India,
47. Remarks passim by Ravish Kumar, ‘Mein
anti-Modi nahin hun, mein bas unse savaal
poochtha hun’, [I am not anti-Modi, I am just
asking him some questions], #The Wire Dia-
logues, published 27 February 2019. https://
w w w. y o u t u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = p u f 8 6 Z
kmAKE (accessed 8 March 2019).
48. However, see Jay Dubashi, ‘From Stalin-
ism to Nehruism’, in Jay Dubashi, The Road
to Ayodhya. Voice of India Publications, New
Delhi, 1992, pp. 105-107.
nor famines with a Great Leap For-
ward as in China.
This is a view that has taken
shape after the end of the Cold War,
and at a time when overt state social-
ism had little support in India (state
welfare and a mixed economy do
not constitute socialism). Narendra
Modi’s demand for a Congress-mukt
Bharat exhibits something similar to
the indignant righteousness of Ameri-
can anti-Communism in the Cold War.
The sentiment is directed, however,
against a party that represented a
broad consensus when it was in power
and, far from resisting market liberali-
zation, was its indispensable enabler.
T he post-Cold War period in India
is obviously recent and its history
remains to be written. The BJP fought
to replace the Congress but the battle-
field was not defined by the latter’s
socialism or by the pace of economic
reforms for that matter. These were
subjects on which there was no dif-
ference between the leading parties.
Instead the most contentious issues
were Mandal and Masjid, that is, cam-
paigns against reservations for inter-
mediate castes, and the campaign to
demolish Babri Masjid and build a
temple to Lord Ram in Ayodhya. Eco-
nomists and political scientists who dis-
cuss the reforms however, tend not to
dwell on the caste and religious strug-
gles dominant at the time. Other schol-
ars note the contiguity of the two
streams of events, but without asking
how it was that opposing parties figured
in both and yet one set of events was
harmonious and the other conflictual.
All indications are of a conflict
stage-managed by a formally secular
party ceding ground to assertive Hindu
nationalism.49 The Congress was reluc-
49. I have written about this in Politics
After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the
Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2001. For a diffe-
tant to claim credit for the reforms,
since to do so would ensure its elec-
toral defeat, or so the then Prime Min-
ister Narasimha Rao feared. Margaret
Thatcher might exhort British voters
to sacrifice while she undertook
reforms. But in a country where pov-
erty was tracked by calorie intake
because income data was unreliable,
sacrifice was already long-standing.
What is striking is that opposition
parties allowed the reforms to proceed
without debate. Presenting itself as
the last hope against the tide of Hindu
communalism, the Congress party
pacified the left, whose support was
vital for economic reforms. The timing
was crucial. Rajiv Gandhi’s attempt
at reforms failed in 1985, but by 1991,
East European regimes were failing,
and that there was the sense of a world-
wide move away from socialism.
T here is a convention of viewing
India’s reforms as enacted by ‘stealth’,
but in fact liberalization was loudly
praised as part of a worldwide story of
the market economy’s triumph over
socialism. Pundits began to envision a
‘golden age of capitalism’ not long
after Mikhail Gorbachev applied for
full membership in the IMF and the
World Bank in mid-1991.50 At about
the same time, India’s reforms were
detailed in its budget of 24 July 1991,
decisively shifting away from the
license-permit raj. 51 Within a few
months the Soviet Union voted to dis-
solve itself, and in this environment,
pro-market arguments discarded all
restraints.
rent point of view see Rob Jenkins, Democra-
tic Politics and Economic Reforms in India.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
50. Alan Murray, ‘Gorbachev Applies for
Full Membership for Soviets in IMF and the
World Bank’, The Wall Street Journal, 24 July
1991, p. A12; David D. Hale, ‘The Coming
Golden Age of Capitalism’, The Wall Street
Journal, 7 November 1991, p. A14.
45
51. Jairam Ramesh, To the Brink and Back:
India’s 1991 Story. Rupa, New Delhi, 2015.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
 The way in which news of the one
event reflected the other could have
led an external observer to believe
Indians too had been held hostage by
communism, and that the end of the
Cold War presaged their victory too.
The experience of evolving a mixed
economy had had mixed results, to be
sure, but it suddenly transformed into
a story of overcoming political tyranny,
as if capitalists had been victims rather
than participants and beneficiaries.
O ne columnist hailed reforms as the
‘opening of the Indian mind.’52 J.R.D.
Tata wrote that in India, ‘Berlin walls
should fall.’53 Another industrialist,
Ramakrishna Bajaj, called for Indian
consumers to become assertive to
ensure socialism’s defeat.54 A promi-
nent Bombay businessman, Ashok
Chowgule, responding to a newspaper
columnist, noted, ‘greed is a product of
the political theory called socialism’,
and liberalization was its remedy.55
The Cold War-era stalemate
between superpowers allowed an
alliance between political liberalism
and big business, an alliance that in
India has come to be misrecognized,
or perhaps wilfully misrepresented,
as statist and denounced as Nehru-
vianism, and as low-growth, elitist and
dynastic as well. That alliance, where
the state played the leading role, helped
create an industrial and communica-
tions infrastructure for the country, as
well as a sizeable middle class. Infra-
structural expansion, notably that of
communications, had at least three
outcomes that changed the conditions
enabling their emergence.
52. Subir Roy, ‘Opening of the Indian Mind’,
The Times of India, 18 October 1992, p. 16.
53. J.R.D. Tata, ‘Berlin Walls Should Fall’, The
Times of India, 1 August 1991, p. 1.
54. Ramkrishna Bajaj, ‘Socialism’s Anti-
46 consumer-bias’, The Times of India, 16 May
1991, p. 15.
55. Ashok V. Chowgule, ‘Answer to Greed’,
The Times of India, 23 February 1992, p. 12.
SEMINAR 719 – July 2019
First, the dreamworld of the
Cold War era, where experts ruled and
the nation could be variously imagined
by the multitudes, if it was imagined
at all, with little fear of being chal-
lenged, depended on a sociotechnical
combination that was already being
transformed from at least the 1980s
onwards.56 Dismissing this era as delu-
sion and domination, rather than as
history, a new understanding took
shape, as if economic liberalization
had actually inaugurated the subject of
post-independence history, one that
happened to be Hindu.
S econd, big business no longer found
its liberalism to be convenient, and
welcomed the onset of a higher growth
regime with fewer limits on accumu-
lation. That this was an overwhelm-
ingly Hindu upper caste dominated
business class is no doubt relevant.
Thus the argument that secularism
was alien to Indian society, and that
nationalism would have to embrace
the majority religion, was persuasive
to most of this class. Apart from what-
ever cultural analysis this view con-
tained, this was a specifically political
calculation, rather than one merely
premised on economic rationality.
And third, the masses who had
only episodically been consulted as
far as most political parties were con-
cerned, in what had been a broadly
consensual developmental process,
became more easily available for
mobilization. Here in the absence of
directed political transformation
where the majority was actively invol-
ved, it was counter-revolution that
was likely to come to the fore. Neither
the language of liberal procedural-
ism nor that of economic opportunity
alone was equal to the task of mass
engagement.
56. See my ‘Emergency as Prehistory of the
New Indian Middle Class’, Modern Asian
Studies, ibid.