EDITORIALS & ARTICLES
Analyse A.R. Desai’s views on India’s path of development. (UPSC CSE Mains 2018 - Sociology, Paper 2)
- In Recent Trends in Indian Nationalism (1960), Desai assesses the path of development and sums up the significant characteristics of the post-independence trajectory.
- He highlights the uneven nature of capitalist development and a bourgeoisie (capitalist class) tied to feudal and semi-feudal origins. The feudal social origins and composition of Indian bourgeoisie made it incapable of fulfilling the tasks of a bourgeois democratic revolution, i.e. the destruction of feudalism and the organization of the national economy and an overall democratisation of the society.
- Besides, the state apparatus inherited at independence was almost a replica of the colonial state apparatus since independence was not a genuine independence but a transfer of power in which the Indian National Congress, heavily influenced by business and capitalist interests, played a leading role.
- For Desai, the choice of the path of development was clear: it was bourgeois industrialization versus socialist industrialization. He argues that a clear distinction between the two is necessary since this would result in qualitatively different types of social, institutional, ideological and cultural patterns and thereby the kind of structural pattern of the society.
- The principal focus of his work is the capitalist transformation of India and the role of the State as a prime mover in this process. The relationship between the capitalist class and the State, the moulding of different institutions, i.e. legal framework and administrative apparatus for facilitating capitalist development, along with the major policy initiatives, the public sector, planning as a major instrument, the mixed economy and even the welfare state are all designed to facilitate capitalist development.
- Indian society was being shaped along capitalist lines and the State that has emerged in India after independence was a capitalist State and was following the capitalist path of development. Therefore, sociologists and social scientists need to address the question of the path of development and analyse the class character of the Indian state in order to understand the processes at work and the impact of these on the Indian people. Thus, the central concepts are class and the state in attempting to understand the processes at work in Indian society. In his endeavour to understand Indian society and the social, economic and political processes at work in post-Independence India and the impact of these processes on the Indian people, he found the Marxist approach most relevant.
- In the pre-Independence period, colonialism and nationalism as concepts and fields of action were central to Desai’s intellectual and political engagement, while in the post-Independence years it was the character of the State and the A R Desai path of the development.
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