Aid and Modernization

India and the West.
by Barbara Ward.
Norton. 256 pp. $4.50.

This engaging book, written by a highly accomplished writer, is a passionate appeal to the Western conscience to give economic aid to India on a much larger scale and firmer basis than has ever been contemplated hitherto. The Marshall Plan put Europe on its economic feet; we now need “a ‘Marshall’ decision with regard to Indian aid.” If the West fails to rise to this challenge, we are told, Communism will win, and “the West would begin to look like Mr. Khrushchev’s picture of it—a few capitalist buttons sewn on to a Communist coat.” We should let India have aid, preferably in the form of outright subsidies, of $2 billion a year, a mere two-fifths of one per cent of the combined national incomes of the rich countries of the West, and perhaps not even one-sixtieth of what they spend on arms. Such a transfer of income from the wealthy to the poor will stave off world Communism, yet it “is not a bribe or a dole or a means of buying off the Communists. It is not charity. It is justice.”

“This is the West’s unfinished business,” says Miss Ward. Through imperialism and colonialism the Western powers, “having achieved the first breakthrough into economic growth,” have started something which they cannot now, in justice, leave unfinished.

They launched all the continents on the tremendous experiment of modernization, and opened them up to trade and settlement whether they wanted it or not. They carried to them new ideas of economic and national equality which effectively helped to undermine old ideas and old institutions. But now, with the ruins all around them of traditional societies, and with painful struggles apparent on every side of a new order waiting to be born, the Western powers suddenly seem to be abdicating—as though the wrecker’s job were enough, and they had little interest in the buildings to be raised on the world’s dismantled sites.

These are, perhaps, hard words, but there is truth in them. “With the ruins all around us” there must be reconstruction. How is it to be done? Miss Ward says that the modern industrialized world offers two possible patterns:

The informal, experimental Western mixture of market forces and government direction, relying on a considerable degree of decentralized decision-making and local initiative; and Russia’s total state plan imposed from above by iron political control.

She believes that the underdeveloped world has to choose precisely between these two, and she wishes, of course, that it should choose the former. But what is the picture—or image, as one says today—which the Western world is projecting of itself? “In the West today, the engine of progress seems to lack the motor power of social discontent. ‘You never had it so good’ is the theme of modern elections, ‘I’m all right, Jack’ the motto of once militant trade unions.” On the other hand, glossing over the force and the tyranny and looking only at the propaganda, “one might say that in the world at large it is Communism that chiefly expresses the profoundest aspirations of the West.” Hard words again, and if they are true, what remains of the “possible pattern” offered by the West?

_____________

I must confess that I find it exceedingly difficult to make out what Miss Ward is really saying. The West is affluent, and affluence makes it easy to practice tolerance, liberality, and a modicum of social justice, just as it makes it unnecessary to drive people to work and to impose upon them excessive burdens of labor while keeping their consumption at a minimum. But the affluent society can hardly be a model for the poor. How did it become affluent? Miss Ward invites us (or does she?) to “leave out of account some of the most economically resourceful but politically barren of economic breakthroughs which followed after the British experience,” namely, Germany, Russia, and Japan (but later on she often seems to take Japan as a model). In her view, the really paradigmatic example is that of Britain.

In Britain, on the contrary, flexible institutions and a more moderate spirit of reform interacted upon each other to produce not a single violent revolutionary upheaval, but a steady process of accommodation. . . . The Reform Bill of 1832 set in motion the extension of the rights and liberties of the few to the people at large.

No one would wish to underestimate the importance of these political developments; but what was the economic condition of the people at that time and for a long time thereafter?

The miseries of the poor, the wretched labors of little children, squalid slums, desperate outbreaks of industrial unrest, the disproportionate growth of wealth among those who were wealthy already—they were simply costs, regrettable perhaps but inevitable, that had to be paid in return for the increase in power and wealth of the community as a whole. This attitude was not all hardness of heart or social complacency.

Well, then, is this supposed to be the model for the underdeveloped world? Such a system, when practiced today, particularly under the flag of Communism, is being, and deserves to be, condemned as “hardness of heart and social complacency.” As Miss Ward knows, it produced the protest and revolt of Marxism, and can in no way be reconciled with the values of an “open society.” Yet she seems to be advocating (or is she not?) something of just that kind.

In a very poor society, the provision of incentives runs into the agonizing problems of justice and “fair shares.” In the domestic economy as in the great arena of the world market, the law of “to him who hath” still rules. If you want maximum output you must give the vigorous, enterprising man his head, you must back the expanding enterprise, look out for the most profitable techniques, put more funds into the richest regions. In the long run, such policies can pay off in terms of a better life for everyone. Provided wealth is being created, some of it can be taxed away and redistributed. But the immediate effect is to accentuate and increase existing inequalities. The farmer with twenty-five acres moves further away from the farmer with five. . . . Modern enterprise wipes out village enterprise. The Punjab and Gujerat grow richer. The Eastern United Provinces slip further behind.

Anyone who has seen the deep poverty of the Eastern United Provinces will shudder at the thought of their slipping further behind, for this would not simply be a “relative” slipping but a further impoverishment. When modern enterprise, concentrated in a few metropolitan areas, “wipes out village enterprise,” hundreds of millions of people are left with nothing but a low-level agriculture which, for the lack of cultural or industrial stimulus, can only deteriorate further.

_____________

I am simply at a loss to understand the meaning of the suggestion that there are two models of industrialization and modernization, the Western and the Communist, between which India might make a meaningful choice. And here I come to another very puzzling feature. The book is called India and the West, but I cannot really find India in the book at all. Of course, India is mentioned all the time but, it seems to me, the reference is not to India as a real, living entity, but merely to some 430 million anonymous people, most of whom are exceedingly poor.

To create the conditions of modern living for over 400 million people, to rescue from extreme poverty nearly half the inhabitants of the free yet under-developed world, to bring into the age of atomic energy and outer space one of the most ancient of the world’s great civilizations. . . .

This does not seem to me to be a correct statement of the issue. I have no desire to quibble over words, but I think a writer of Miss Ward’s quality wishes to be taken seriously when she defines the subject of her book. What does it mean “to bring into the age of atomic energy and outer space one of the most ancient of the world’s great civilizations”? It can only mean to abandon this civilization, to give up everything that is specifically Indian, to complete what Miss Ward had previously called “the wrecker’s job” and turn India into a copy of either Russia or America. What does it mean “to create the conditions of modern living”? The author herself quotes Hamlet’s bitter question—“What is a man/If his chief good and market/of his time/Be but to sleep and feed?”—and predicts utter destruction for the Western peoples “if they carry on with their round of fun and distraction, their TV and their quiz shows, their golf and their tourism, while all across the world the pressures of poverty and despair steadily gather strength.” “Ah,” it might be said, “this is not what we mean by ‘modern.’” Very well, but then it should not be suggested that the only salvation for India is the copying either of the modern West or of the West’s heretical offspring, Communist Russia.

Maybe Miss Ward believes that no third alternative is feasible. But in her book she has not even considered the question. Every destruction of an Indian institution or custom is simply hailed as an advance. There is a dangerous trait of “historicism” going right through the book, suggesting that history is not made by men but by certain irresistible movements, like the movement of “modernization”—whatever that may mean.

Those who offer new molds for the lava flow of human hope are certainly working with and not against the general movement of the age: a visionary age, impatient, violent, and aspiring.

I think it should at least have been mentioned that there are many influential and thoughtful Indians who do not accept this alleged “movement of the age,” who are not propelled by atomic and outer-space visions, but have dedicated their lives to patient and non-violent work for those who are most in need of help. Jayaprakash Narayan is twice mentioned in Miss Ward’s book, but there is no hint even of his conviction that India’s current policies of Westernization, as summed up in the Third Five Year Plan, are likely to lead to utter ruination. Vinoba Bhave also receives a mention, but I think the reader ought to have been warned that Vinoba’s views are diametrically opposed to those of the planners in Delhi.¹ Many other outstanding men could be quoted, and what do they have in common? Simply the belief that fruitful development in India must take as its point of departure not some theoretical notions of “modernization” or “industrialization,” of Western Capitalism or Russian Communism, but the simple needs and capabilities of hundreds of millions of humble Indian cultivators, artisans, and laborers.

Miss Ward’s immensely readable and persuasive book, I think, fails to give the reader a fair and reasonably complete exposition of its subject matter. It is a propaganda tract to mobilize aid for India. As such, I hope it will succeed.

_____________

¹ See “Last of the Saints,” by Arthur Koestler, COMMENTARY, February 1960—Ed.