AD Shroff’s avenging angels (draft version)

The final assault has begun. The Good Governance India Foundation has filed a petition in the Supreme Court asking for deleting the word ‘Socialist’ from the Constitution of India.

The preamble to the Constitution of India as originally written by the Constituent Assembly and adopted on 26th November 1946 and made effective on January 26th 1950, reads:

“We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign democratic republic..”

The 42nd Amendment Act 1976, which had far reaching implications inserted two additional words into that text — socialist and secular to make it read:

“We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic..”

This insertion was not an isolated tampering with the constitution. It was part of a much bigger effort to preserve Mrs. Gandhi’s power. There were many other changes brought about by that Act. It was a desparate attempt by Mrs. Gandhi to hold together and advance the passive revolution (read Sudipta Kaviraj’s ‘critique of passive revolution’ in EPW 1988 annual number) launched by her father — pursuit of fascist personal power in lieu of political leadership. More about that later. More about the previous attempts to remove the word secular also later. Why is the word socialist — of all the fascist baggage of that period being targeted for offloading now ? By whom and what should we make of it ? I ask this question because it seems to me that we are caught in a time warp. The assault on the legacy of center left fascism has many strange allies both in the left and the right but its secret reservoirs of power are among the regional elites. I call this the final assault not in the sense that it is all over after this, but because this is the denouement in which a number of tentative alliances which have been forming over the last decade will crystallize into nugets of neoliberal commonsense.

The is is not a frivolous petition as someone as some commentators have been suggesting. This is the coming of age of Ardeshir Darbarshaw Shroff’s progeny. A D Shroff was a member of the famous “Bombay Plan” of 1938 under Nehru’s stewardship – a time when a small number of parsi and marwari families — the big bourgeoisie or the national bourgeoisie depending on which left party you sympathize with — dominated the finance and industrial capital in India. By 1955, AD Shroff who was clued into big time finance capital flows, was a guest at the Brettonwoods conference, and had many friends among Frederick Hayek’s supporter’s (the anti Keynes camp based in the London School of Economics) – was instrumental in launching the Forum for Free Enterprise in Bombay. He was highly critical of the way the Indian planning system was going. Incidentally he was also a founder of ICICI. Transnational networks of neoliberalism which have been dormant for five decades began reorganizing and finding institutional expression since 1995 in all the major cities in India. It is not at all surprising that Fali Sam Nariman whose bible of Indian liberalism — “We the people” should be the advocate. Here is the website of the fairly well concealed network of Good Governance India Foundation. You will find the who is who of finance capital and neoliberalism — which incidentally in India goes under the name of liberalism– the donor organizations, and corporate identities all on that website. And the organizatio, I have no doubt in mind follows the excellent strategy followed by the Forum of Free Enterprise.

And Nariman is no fool. He is going to make a brilliant pitch which will have far reaching implications. He is absolutely correct in pinpointing the word socialist in the preamble to constitution by the 42nd amendment as embedded in a history of fascism. There is none better than him to do this — he resigned from his office of three years as additional solicitor general of India the very day on which Mrs Gandhi declared Internal Emergency. And whatsmore, he is perhaps the only Indian jurist who knows the ins and outs of international finance capital thorougly having been on several international bodies for commercial arbitration. The final assault on the Idea of India has begun. This is trench war. And whether or not the words ‘Socialist’ and ‘Secularist’ would eventually be removed from the Constitution is hardly the issue. The time has come for a vigorous rethinking of all we know about left politics in India. This is AD Shroff’s revenge. And for an effective albeit temporary palliative, I suggest that whoever can lay their hands on it, should read the pamphlet by Wadia and Merchant written from a Marxist Leninist perspective. I read it from a library in the US a while ago. It is a beautifully written document. But I cannot access it anymore. It may be easier to access it in any good Indian University library.

The Bombay plan : a criticism / by Professor P.A. Wadia and Professor K.T. Merchant. published in 1946 in Bombay by The Popular Book Depot.

I believe there is another book by title fascist economics — also a critique of Bombay Plan. Possibly a manuscript of MN Roy published later. Here is the title mentioned on Amazon, but I cannot find it anywhere.