This excerpt reproduces Chapters Six and Seven from Mark Hager’s recently published book, ‘Elusive Ideology: Religion and Socialism in Modern Indian Thought.’ Previous excerpts have appeared in Echelon and Economy Next since August 2022. Readers can find the book through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Barefoot Cafe, Expographic Books and Sarasavi Bookshop(s).
ASOKA MEHTA: GANDHI AS UTOPIAN SOCIALIST
Open-minded, disciplined scholar and activist, Asoka Mehta (1911-1989) was born at Bhavnagar, Gujarat and educated at Wilson College, Bombay, and at the Bombay University School of Economics. After imprisonment by the British for his role in the 1932 Civil Disobedience Movement, Mehta helped found the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, then served as editor of the Congress Socialist Weekly from 1935 until 1939.
Mehta served time again for participating in the 1941 Individual Satyagraha Movement and then again for the 1942 Quit India campaign. He later became Chair of the Praja Socialist Party (P.S.P.), formed in 1952 by merger between the Socialist Party, heir to the Congress Socialist Party, and the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party (“Kisan” means “farmer”; “Mazdoor” means “worker”; “Praja” can mean “citizen”). Later in the decade, he feuded with other P.S.P. leaders, especially Lohia, over Mehta’s view that the P.S.P. should cooperate extensively with Nehru’s quasi-socialist Congress government.
Mehta served in the Lok Sabha, powerful lower house of Parliament, in the years 1954-57, 1958-61, and 1967-70. He was Deputy Chair of the Indian Planning Commission from 1963 until 1966; Minister of Planning, 1966-67; and Minister of Petroleum, Chemicals and Social Welfare, 1967-68. Though he had been a minister in Mrs. Gandhi’s government, he later split from her faction of the Congress and became president of the oppositional Congress (O) Party. He was detained under Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency decree in 1975 and released in 1976. He played a key role in putting together the Janata Party coalition that temporarily toppled Mrs. Gandhi from power in 1977. Among Indian socialists, Mehta is perhaps the greatest scholar of socialist thought. He articulates his own changing socialist positions through commentary.
Among Indian socialists, Mehta is perhaps the greatest scholar of socialist thought. He articulates his own changing socialist positions through commentary on different schools in socialism. In the course of his career, his socialist views change considerably and so does his assessment of Gandhi.
CRITIQUE OF GANDHISM
In 1935, Mehta’s first publication, Gandhism and Socialism, explores various intellectual responses to industrial capitalism. One of these responses Mehta dubs “Romantic reaction.” This response erroneously blames industrialism itself for ills in capitalism and seeks return to an idealized pre-industrial world. Romantic reaction stresses a “revival of religion and mysticism” as antidote to the exploitational ethos of industrial capitalism. Mehta identifies Gandhi as an exponent of Romantic reaction, which Mehta calls “regressive.”
Gandhism, writes Mehta, envisions an impossible return to pre-industrial life. It naturally flourishes in India due to devastating deindustrialization under British imperial capitalism. Gandhism also advocates material renunciation as a religious value. Though Mehta scorns capitalism’s unceasing inflammation of appetite, he finds Gandhian renunciation over-severe and advocates instead an intermediate “vital standard” of appetite-satisfaction. In his later career, he develops more intricate quasi-Gandhian views on the socialist relevance of material abstemiousness.
Progress, argues Mehta in 1935, lies not in Gandhian reaction against industrialism but rather in socialism, an industrial order shorn of capitalist features such as exploitation, unemployment and periodic depression. Two features of Mehta’s early socialism require emphasis. First, he advocates what we have called state socialism—an emphasis on large-scale industry under direct state ownership and control. Second, he praises Marxist “scientific” socialism over pre-Marxist “utopian” socialism. Though he does not say so, state socialism and scientific socialism seem linked in his mind.
Mehta endorses the common Marxist or “scientific” socialist critique of utopian socialists such as Proudhon, Fourier, and Owen. The utopians, on this view, are essentially moralists without grasp of economic reality. They spend their time imagining or trying to build ideal production communities, failing to understand that their efforts are not generalizable so long as capitalist economic evolution is still taking place. Socialist community-building is premature and indeed impossible within the constraints of that evolving capitalist order. Hence, community-building is far less relevant to constructing socialism than is revolution-making. Rather than fantasizing about ideal communities, socialists should study the “laws of capitalist production,” which define actual reality and reveal how and when capitalism might break down and be supplanted. Once the state owns the economy, detailed problems of socialist organization can be worked out realistically.
Expanded productive scale and centralization are key to capitalist evolution and industrial progress, Mehta argues. For this reason, the socialist productive regime will be a centralized one, characterized by large-scale production along with state ownership and control. Visions of decentralization fly in the face of economic science. Small-scale production under socialism will be a matter of art and enjoyment, but not of meeting basic needs.
GANDHI AND UTOPIAN SOCIALISM
To the early Mehta, both scientific socialism and state socialism seem to reflect hard-headed economic analysis, while utopianism reflects valid but misdirected moral ambition. Gandhi, meanwhile, represents a backward-looking romanticism inapplicable to current realities. By 1959, however, when Mehta publishes Studies in Socialism (also published as Studies in Asian Socialism), his views of both utopianism and Gandhi have changed drastically. By this time, he not only applauds both Gandhi and utopian socialism, he equates them with each other. He calls for an “upsurge of utopianism” and, contrary to his early view of Gandhi as a “reactionary,” praises Gandhi as the “highest watermark” of utopian socialism.
The essence of utopianism, Mehta argues, is “community-building.” Contrary to his early views, Mehta now criticizes Marx, who has “no patience with community-building.” Emphasis on community-building, thinks Mehta, follows from Gandhian insight into the “organic relatedness” between means and ends. Ends cannot be achieved except through means consistent with them. Means that partially embody their end cannot fail, since the end is at least partially realized in the means itself. Utopian community-building exemplifies this means-ends relationship. If the purpose of revolution is ultimately to foster community, community-building must itself be part of transformative effort. It cannot be left to emerge as by-product of revolution pursued through other means. Mehta writes that “we must create here and now the space now possible for the thing for which we are striving, so that it may come to fulfillment then… A post-revolutionary utopia…can emerge only through a pre-revolutionary utopianism.
Mehta praises Gandhi’s agenda for combining community-building—sarvodaya—with direct pressure—satyagraha—against oppressive structures. The Gandhian agenda hence avoids the possible Marxist error of over-emphasis on revolutionary activity, while also avoiding a possible utopian overemphasis on community-building to the neglect of direct efforts to replace the old order.
Utopian socialism’s focus on community-building implies de-emphasis on the state. Mehta therefore increasingly abandons his early-career allegiance to state socialism. Statist socialism, he suggests, is as much the enemy of community as is capitalism. Like several thinkers examined above, he stresses the importance of voluntary associations and intermediate communities standing between individuals and the state. He endorses a socialism of communities “small in scale and dense in structure,” coordinated by federalized association, not by a centralized state.
Utopian community-building strikes Mehta as primarily a moral and spiritual endeavor. Utopian socialism’s key contribution is cultivating an “ethos” or “spirit” of “community solidarity.” This ethos or spirit, however, requires appropriate institutions in order to thrive. Mehta applauds Gandhi’s vision of village communes, featuring coordinated and community-owned networks of light industrial and agrarian production. Such a system, he urges, provides what “alone can be the locus of healthy men and rich community.” The village commune, as he explains in Gandhian language, maximizes swaraj, self-government, in both its senses: democracy and personal spiritual discipline!
The Gandhian village vision is, for Mehta, the core of utopian socialism. It demands, if not common ownership, at least equal ownership with a hope that cooperative methods and common ownership may evolve. Mehta insists that landlordism and landless labor be abolished.
Mehta’s reassessments of Gandhi and utopianism prompt his growing appreciation for religion. Though Mehta develops no deep religious sensibility, he begins to speak of religion’s positive dimensions. The early Mehta had shunned the “religion and mysticism” he then associated with Gandhian “reaction.” The later Mehta, however, acknowledges an inevitable “streak of mysticism” in the utopian socialism he comes to embrace. Religion, a spiritual bond among humans, is the ultimate goal of socialism, he suggests. It should not be that religion restrict itself to spiritual concerns and socialism to material ones. In utopian socialism, he thinks, a true synthesis of religion and socialism can be found.
DEVELOPMENT AND SOLIDARITY-IN-AUSTERITY
Prior to full-blown embrace of Gandhi and utopian socialism, Mehta drifts through a transitional period characterized by disillusionment with his earlier state-centered and “scientific” socialism. In his 1951 book, Democratic Socialism , he expresses reservations about industrial socialism, provoked by growing disenchantment with the Soviet Union, the “Moscow Road” he once had praised. He worries that perhaps not only capitalism but industrialism itself “enriches economically, but vulgarizes and impoverishes spiritually. Moreover, he cities the Soviet Union as an example of how socialist overemphasis on industrial development leads to exploitation of the peasantry.
In the Soviet development strategy, Mehta argues, peasants are herded into state collective farms where they are forced to produce more, while their consumption is held down coercively. This generates surpluses needed to finance rapid industrialization. Light industry, helpful for agrarian needs, is neglected in favor of heavy industry. Mehta sees no advantage in this kind of socialist development, where the state squeezes investment surplus out of the peasant class, over capitalist development, where surplus is squeezed out of non-owning industrial workers by capital owners. He repudiates Soviet socialism as ruthless, centralized, totalitarian.
Mehta’s repudiation of Soviet development later pushes him toward Gandhi and utopian socialism, which emphasize agrarian well-being, not rapid industrialization. He indicates that this makes particular sense for India, with its massive agrarian problems. In another direction, meanwhile, Mehta grows preoccupied with the specific problem of generating investment surpluses for development. Development requires that society’s level of production exceed its level of consumption, so that investment surplus exists. Mehta seeks a surplus-generating method different from both capitalist labor exploitation and Soviet agrarian exploitation. He proposes generating socialist surplus non-exploitatively through collectively and democratically self-imposed restrictions on consumption levels.
This road, which Mehta calls “democratic socialism,” cannot succeed without radical economic equality, so that consumption restrictions rest evenly and voluntarily upon all, not disproportionately and forcibly upon some. As Mehta puts it in later works, democratic socialism requires “equality and austerity.” For a time at least, there must be a “low standard of life willingly accepted and evenly shared…”
Mehta joins thinkers examined above in criticizing the pointless and insatiable quest for higher living standards he finds in both capitalism and conventional socialism. He is stimulated in this by Gandhi’s influence but unimpressed with Gandhi’s emphasis on austerity as a spiritual end in itself.” He transvalues Gandhian austerity into notions of socialist solidarity. It is not austerity itself that is valuable, he contends. What is valuable is solidarity and equality, which may accompany austerity if proper arrangements prevail. Solidarity in-austerity can actually be directed toward achieving greater abundance. Abundance itself, however, is no more the goal than is austerity. The point is to maintain solidarity-in-austerity, whatever wealth level is desired or achieved. Mehta’s socialist ideal is a moderate abundance, where solidarity-in-austerity provides greater satisfactions than those obtainable from the ceaseless quest for greater abundance.
Because democratic socialism follows principles of solidarity-in-austerity, it can succeed only through cultivation of what Mehta calls a “high moral temperature.” This high moral temperature makes democratic socialism as much a spiritual as an economic regime, thus distinguishing it from state socialism. Mehta’s concern for solidarity-in-austerity, along with concern over spiritual emptiness he finds in industrial culture, fosters an emerging interest in religion. At first, Mehta cannot bring himself to speak specifically of “religion,” but he does speak of “self-culture” and “war against poverty of the spirit” as components of socialist life. Explicit endorsement of “religion” awaits his late-career emphasis on utopian socialism, with its community-building focus.
The revival of utopian socialism strikes Mehta as an Asian and Indian phenomenon. Like thinkers examined above, he sees India as current flag-bearer of the world’s most progressive views. He is not, however, entirely uncritical of utopian socialism. The Gandhian vision of village community can be overemphasized, to the neglect of issues concerning larger-scale production. Mehta’s own devotion to heavy industry has softened considerably over time, both for the spiritual reasons already indicated and because, as he comes to think, India’s labor surplus cannot be put to work by exclusive focus on heavy industry. He nevertheless insists that much large-scale production will remain necessary. Mehta’s exploration of these issues is complex and beyond our scope here. It is worth mentioning, however, that his growing anti-statism prompts an interest in forms of non-capitalist economic control other than exclusive state ownership. In this vein, he calls for worker management and for trade union ownership of enterprises. He also recommends limited use of markets, instead of exclusive reliance on state planning, to coordinate the economy. These new concerns point up a marked difference in style between the anti-Gandhi and the pro-Gandhi phases in his career.
As hinted, Mehta could be in the running for top-shelf straight-up socialist thinker among any of the figures considered here. As plausibly as anyone, he tries to think out how Gandhian socialism with its village focus relates to wider realities and priorities. Doing justice to that intellectual endeavor could make for a longish chapter and it would stray from my focus on Gandhian socialism narrowly. This is precisely because, as I think of it, Mehta is a “partial” Gandhian socialist. By no means is that a knock on him or reason not to consider his thinking closely. The shortness of this chapter is more compliment than oversight.
NARENDRA DEVA: GANDHI AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
Sought-after speaker and lifelong organizer, Narendra Deva (1889-1956) was born at Sitapur, (U.P.), the son of a well-to-do and well-educated lawyer. In his youth he learned Sanskrit, Pali, and Bengali. While acquiring his B.A. at Allahabad, he became an admirer of the Extremist leaders Aurobindo and Pal. Though he received a law degree in Benares in 1915, he had little interest in a legal career. Instead, in the early 1920s he became a lecturer in Benares at the Kashi Vidyapith, founded after Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement so as to fortify national education. Highly learned, Deva knew a great deal about classical Indian culture. He fervently admired Aurobindo and served under Das at the Kashi Vidyapith, succeeding him as Vice-Chancellor in 1926.
In 1934, Deva presided over the founding conference of the Congress Socialist Party. In 1936, he helped found the All-India Kisan Sabha (Peasant Society), designed to function as political instrument on behalf of progressive agrarian development. He twice served as president of that body. Deva served prison terms in the early 1930s and early 1940s for anti-imperial activities and was hand-picked by Gandhi to help organize and lead the Quit India movement. Following the achievement of independence, he redoubled his socialist organizing efforts, despite the cumulative effects of lifelong respiratory ailments. He was chair of the Socialist Party at the time of its 1952 merger with the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party.
The newly-formed Praja Socialist Party (P.S.P.) was soon torn among the divergent viewpoints of its major leaders. Mehta favored co-operation and possible merger with Nehru’s quasi-socialist Congress. Rammanohar Lohia favored militant party-political opposition to the Congress. J.P. Narayan stressed village campaigns aimed at securing bhoodan, voluntary redistribution of agrarian land from rich to poor. Deva died in the course of mediating such struggles in an increasingly splintered socialist movement.
Deva was, from the 1930s until his death in 1956, perhaps India’s most prominent socialist spokesman. He served as president in all three major incarnations of the organization that began as the Congress Socialist Party, socialist wing of the Congress, then became the independent Socialist Party, and later, through merger, became the Praja Socialist Party. Unlike Aurobindo, Das and others, Deva never tries to interpret Indian tradition as in any meaningful way “socialist.” He is as steeped in Marxism as in classical learning and his loyalties as social thinker lie with the former. Faint traces of Aurobindo appear in his thought, however, along with major influence from Gandhi. These influences help modify his early views of socialism, eventually leading him to notice some loose associations between Indian tradition and socialism.
SOCIALIST MORALITY
Deva displays his early Marxism in his 1934 Presidential Address at the All-India Congress Socialist Conference, which resulted in formation of the Congress Socialist Party. The address stresses large-scale economic issues, including analysis of the worldwide depression and why capitalist remedies must fail. The details cannot detain us, except to note that Deva diagnoses the depression as symptomatic of capitalism’s tendency to stagnate under demand shortages caused by artificially low mass purchasing power. Deva argues that only socialism can permanently remove this problem. He contends that the Soviet Union, untouched by the depression and unemployment afflicting capitalism during the 30s, is making rapid progress while capitalism stagnates.
Socialism, as Deva argues in his speech, must strive for revolutionary economic change, not for moral transformation in human nature. He specifically advocates “scientific socialism” as opposed to “utopian socialism.” Like the early Mehta, he equates utopian socialism with ineffectual “social reformism.” Improvement in “character,” humanity’s moral stature, can only follow upon abolition of capitalism. Hence, Deva in the 30s exemplifies what I call “materialist socialism.” He does not entirely abandon this view of things for many years. As late as 1950, he writes that social change cannot be sought in the “minds of men,” but only in “forms of production and exchange.” Socialism must stress “economic structure,” not “philosophy.”
Much different is Deva’s viewpoint when he authors a policy statement for the 1955 P.S.P. conference. The statement contains a key chapter on the “Socialist Conception of Morality.” The most striking thing about this chapter is that it is there at all. In it, Deva addresses a range of concerns he would previously have viewed as peripheral. Where he had earlier stressed economic transformation as the practice of socialism and prosperity as its objective, he now stresses moral development as something integral both to socialist practice and to its objectives. In contrast with his earlier view that moral development awaits establishment of socialism, Deva now thinks that “conscious human efforts for moral development” must be part of efforts to achieve it. This “moral evolution” requires a “moral attitude,” which presupposes “subjective efforts for self-cultivation.”
Deva remains Marxist enough in his 1955 statement to stress the limited possibilities for moral transformation within confines of a pre-socialist order. He remains convinced that true human morality can fully emerge only in a society of cooperative work and common ownership of productive property, with no “distinction between owners and producers.” Unlike Gandhi, who sees perfection of virtue as pre-requisite to full socialism, Deva sees socialism as prerequisite to full virtue. He nevertheless emphasizes a close interdependence between a “psychological” dimension of moral self-transformation, and a “social” dimension of economic transformation. There must be “simultaneous change.” A socialist party should pursue the moral aspect of change along with the economic. He urges his party to “cultivate socialist morality and promote socialist culture.”
The late-career shift in Deva’s viewpoint appears also in his criticisms of the famous 1958 Congress resolution endorsing a “socialistic pattern of society.” That resolution struck many as weak, vague, and open to varied interpretation. Many scorned it as a tepid rhetorical compromise with landlord and capitalist elements in the Congress, who might take offense at a more forthright call for “socialism.” Deva predictably ridicules the “apologetic tone” of the Congress’s brand of socialism. Less predictable is his critique of the Congress resolution as too narrowly focused on mere economism. Deva insists that socialism be understood not merely in reference to the “economic sphere” but also as a “philosophy of life.” This is a far cry from his earlier insistence that socialism deal with “economic structure,” not “philosophy.” The socialist philosophy, to be sure, cannot be seen as “formal doctrine.” Still, it must have a “basis in some set of beliefs.” Socialism, for Deva, has acquired quasi-religious overtones.
RELIGION: GRUDGING RECONCILIATION
Deva’s views on religion itself are not easily sorted out. He delivers denunciations of religion but also makes tentative attempts to reconcile religion with his social concerns. Though he ultimately grows fairly comfortable acknowledging spiritual components in socialism, he insists on separating those components clearly from their original religious contexts.
In his denunciatory mode, Deva assesses religion as a hindrance to human progress, distracting people with other-worldly concerns and attributing divine sanction to oppressive social structures. Religion “defiles and disintegrates human life” and “wants to maintain the status quo.” Socialism, he argues, “helps release man from the thraldom of religion” by presenting a “correct perspective.” He rebukes Indian religion specifically for encouraging retreat into “mysticism” and for its deeply “pessimistic” outlook on worldly change.
Despite these denunciations, Deva offers in one speech a defense of Indian religion, which he says can “help establish a moral order,” crucial to satisfactory human life. A cursory and tentative character to his argument reveals his reservations. Key to Indian religion, he argues, is moksha, liberation, attained through personal “meditation” and “introspection.” The point of religious practice is to “correct ourselves” and bring about “purity in behavior.” Thereby, “the whole society may improve.” This, of course, smacks of pure religious ideology and Deva voices this viewpoint wanly and briefly, as if aware that it lacks due attention to conscious institutional transformation.
Deva’s strong Marxist sensibility allows him only the most guarded endorsement of religion. His growing concern with “socialist morality,” however, prompts at least some critical sympathy with religion. The “basic principles” of socialist morality can be found among past religious figures such as “Rishis, Acharyas and prophets… Saints and Sufis,” he suggests. Such “basic principles”—properly segregated from their original backward religious context, especially its “hierarchical character”-can support a “spiritual humanism” underpinning socialist culture. “Spiritual humanism,” to Deva, is a sort of socialist religion. By the time he writes his 1955 policy statement, Deva has arrived at a view that true socialism—true Indian socialism, at least—lies in a creative synthesis” of Indian and Western spiritual and social insight.
He shares this conclusion, more or less, with all the thinkers examined above. He is more cautious than any of them, however, about linking socialism specifically to “religion.”
Aurobindo’s influence can be discerned in Deva’s thought about socialism’s spiritual component. Deva writes that, “It is man’s nature to seek self-realization by expanding his self.” Aurobindo-like, he imagines humanity poised before its next big evolutionary step. He even takes up Aurobindo’s suggestion that this step will be led by a “new race of men who will form the elite of society,” in their superior spiritual vision and humanitarian instincts.” This notion of a spiritual elite stands out strangely, for Deva is convinced that mass action, perhaps by what Marxists call the proletariat, functions as the main agent of social change. For Deva, leadership by the “spiritual vanguard” and by Lenin’s “proletarian vanguard” are one and the same. In Deva’s mind, Gandhi embodies this confluence of “spiritual” and “proletarian” vanguard. He praises Gandhi for his genius in bringing mass participation into India’s national struggles.
GANDHI AS DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST
Deva credits Gandhi with providing Indian socialism its trans-economic focus on moral and cultural transformation. The essence of socialist morality, Deva writes at one point, is “purity of means,” a Gandhian notion. It links to particular practical ideas, most importantly satyagraha and democratic decentralization. Satyagraha and democratic decentralization lie at the core of Deva’s brand of socialism, which he labels “democratic socialism.”
Deva repeatedly emphasizes that Gandhi envisioned using satyagraha not only to overthrow imperialism, but also to secure social and, economic justice in independent India. There is as he contends, good reason to stress non-violent strikes and civil disobedience as an ongoing Gandhian program. The Congress government, he argues, has done far too little in securing social justice in post-independence India, yet has meanwhile condemned satyagraha as out of place in a democratic national state. More specifically, he Congress government, while paying lip-service to socialism, restricts rights of workers to strike and does little to alleviate capitalist ills. Furthermore, progress towards socialism has been hobbled by the Indian Constitution’s guarantee of a fundamental right to property.
Under these conditions, “constitutional parliamentary” democracy, though valuable in a limited sense and certainly not to be ignored or abolished, cannot exhaust the meaning of either democracy or Gandhian ahimsa, thinks Deva. He meanwhile rebukes communism for countenancing violence and for disregarding the real, though limited, value of parliamentary democracy. Stressing Gandhian “purity of means,” he argues that “democratic socialism” insists on fundamental moral linkage between methods and outcomes in social struggle. In this respect, he contrasts “democratic socialism” with communism, which he thinks pays no heed to moral methods in pursuing revolutionary aims. He portrays non-violent satyagraha and strikes as simultaneously democratic and revolutionary, representing an alternative between revolutionary violence and mere parliamentary democracy. Because it represents collaborative endeavor aimed at securing economic justice, satyagraha is “democratic socialism” par excellence.
Another key Gandhian legacy, writes Deva, is the notion of “decentralized democracy and economy.” He enthusiastically belabors themes of agrarian community-building. The core program lies in co-operative enterprise for production and marketing, he argues. Through resource-pooling, cooperative enterprises will foster improved techniques. Meanwhile experiences of collaborative endeavor will promote fraternal spirit. In short, decentralized agro-industrialism can provide villages with new forms of production, employment and experience.
Popular participation is central to such a regime. Deva endorses Gandhian panchayat raj, which envisions village governments spearheading village reconstruction. He is more realistic than Gandhi however, in calling for state action to support villagers in pursuing agrarian transformation. Where Gandhi had often disparaged state action and in his late career urged the Congress to transition from parliamentary party into rural reconstruction movement, Deva reminds socialists to pursue “parliamentary work aimed to secure state action” alongside village work. The state must take the lead, first, in land re-form, which cannot be entrusted to local popular pressure acting with-out help against rural elites. The state must act, second, with education and propaganda on habits and skills needed for cooperative and progressive agrarian production.
Deva carefully distinguishes democratic socialism from Soviet socialism. An early admirer of Soviet economic achievements, he remains more hopeful than some that the Soviets will eventually create a non-repressive political culture. Nevertheless, he finds serious fault with Soviet emphasis on centralized state ownership and economic control, which he thinks yield bureaucracy and repression, scarcely an advance over capitalism.
Democratic socialism, in avoiding Soviet centralism, must not fall into the opposite error of exaggerated decentralization. There must, Deva insists, be national economic planning and an appropriate level of heavy industry, publicly-owned. At the same time, however, there should be maximum popular participation in economic decision-making. To ensure this, stress should lie on what Deva calls “social ownership”—public ownership at levels below that of “state ownership” by the entire society. Workers, meanwhile, should have protected rights and powers in enterprise governance.
Satyagraha and democratic decentralization, key ingredients of “democratic socialism,” are also distinguishing aspects of what Deva calls “Indian socialism,” the “creative synthesis” of Indian and Western insight. That which makes socialism most Indian—satyagraha and de-centralization—also make it most democratic. Unlike thinkers examined above, Deva repeatedly denies that democracy has any roots in traditional Indian culture. To create democracy in India is to conjure something wholly new. Nevertheless, thanks to Gandhi, modern Indian socialism emerges as the world’s breaking wave in democracy, thinks Deva. Like socialism itself, democracy carries quasi-religious overtones for him. It is a “creed and a living faith,” governing a people’s “entire life and behavior.” Ahimsa is likewise a “creed.” Through its democratic socialism, crystallized in satyagraha and decentralized democracy, India may come to occupy the world’s spiritual frontier