The following text is Aditya Mukherjee’s Sukhamoy Chakravarty Chair Lecture at the Centre for Economic and Social Progress (CESP), Jawaharlal Nehru University on ‘The Historical Roots of India’s Development Strategy,’ delivered on September 23, 2025. 

I would like to first thank the CESP, the leading Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the country for decades. I would also like to thank Professor Praveen Jha for giving me the honour of delivering the Sukhamoy Chakravarty Chair Lecture. We have all been beneficiaries of Professor Sukhamoy Chakravarty and his great scholarship. He was in fact, as Praveen would know, often compared with Amartya Sen for his brilliance. The difference was that Chakravarty gave up a purely academic career and chose to play an important role in the shaping of India’s development strategy. He advised the government over a very long period of time. He played a very important role in the evolution of India’s development strategy over time, apart from writing about it very brilliantly.

I’ll have occasion to mention both of these aspects of Chakravarty later. While delivering my talk on the historical roots of India’s development strategy, I would therefore like to pay my tribute to him and acknowledge his guidance which I was privileged to occasionally receive. I’m humbled to speak before an audience of eminent economists and very bright young students, which CESP has been always very fortunate with attracting. From them I’ve learned a lot. In fact, over the years, and as Praveen referred to it, I’ve been around Jawaharlal Nehru University for more than 53 years. So, over the years, one has had the occasion to learn from and interact with the range of very illustrious scholars who were of the faculty at the CESP. So, I am delighted to be able to speak at the CESP and very grateful to see a large number of colleagues and friends who have come to listen to this talk. 



What was unique about India’s development strategy since independence, unlike most other post-colonial countries, was that it occurred in a democratic and independent context, as opposed to a strategy pushed through by an authoritarian regime or by a regime willing to be a junior partner to some superpower. 

The question is why was it so? Why did India adopt such a strategy? It’s certainly not because, as our current top leaders tell us, because we were the ‘mother of democracy’, or because we were the vishwa guru, or because we knew everything including nuclear technology and plastic surgery in ancient India. You may remember the former vice president, stating that Arjun in the Mahabharat had a nuclear tipped arrow or our prime minister boasting about the knowledge of plastic surgery in our ancient past through which the Hindu god Ganesha got his elephant trunk on a human body. Obviously, it is not our ancient knowledge that dictated our development strategy. At a serious level, the answer to the question lies in the nature of the state that was born at independence. Here is where history comes in, and the discipline of history  as you know, is at the moment the victim of a great amount of distortion and misuse, but nevertheless, we cannot answer the question that I have raised without going back into history.

A very obvious fact that is often overlooked by a range of scholars is that the nature of a state is a function of or is critically determined by the nature of the movement that led to the creation of the state. For example, you cannot have a Bolshevik revolution and at the end of it say let’s have a bourgeois democratic society, or you cannot have a movement led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the name of Islam and then give a speech saying now that we have Pakistan we will be a secular country. Jinnah’s words were not only drowned in blood, but for quoting him, as you know, L.K. Advani lost his position in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). You can’t do it; you can’t ride a tiger and just get off whenever you like. So, the point I’m making is that the nature of the movement  is critical in determining the nature of the state.

Economists have unfortunately ignored this historical link. By and large, most economists that you will read talking about India’s development strategy tend to begin with 1950 as if the world began with the first plan. Occasionally a mention is made of the National Planning Committee and the Bombay plan of the late thirties and forties, but basically there is no linkage drawn. I want to give you a very telling example.

One of the most quoted economists for the study of India’s land reforms after independence is Professor A.M. Khusro. He makes this astounding statement which I want to quote to you. He said :

“The elaborately conceived and many sided programme of land reforms launched in the country during the 1950s could be said in a considerable degree to be a gift of the administration to the peasantry.” 1

“The elaborately conceived and many sided programme of land reforms launched in the country during the 1950s could be said in a considerable degree to be a gift of the administration to the peasantry.” 1

There is no link drawn with the national movement, no link with the fact that since the 19th century the Indian intelligentsia had been arguing for the necessity of land reform with people like justice Ranade even drawing out a possible blueprint and no reference to the fact that there were powerful peasant movements for nearly a century including the powerful Kisan Sabha movements of the 1920s and 1930s fighting for changes in the agrarian conditions.2 In fact, the success or failure of land reforms in various parts of the country were often determined by the nature of the peasant movements that preceded them in those parts. They were determined by what kind of class balance had emerged in those parts as a result of those movements. 

Undoubtedly, some bright, committed bureaucrats like P.S. Appu and D. Bandyopadhyay were involved in India’s land reforms,  however you cannot even begin to talk of land reform if you do not go back into history. You cannot begin to understand how this historically unique effort at transformation of agrarian relations could happen within a democratic framework in India. There was no General MacArthur’s army overlooking land reforms as in Japan, there was no forced collectivisation. It was done within a democratic framework and it could only be done because of the background that I mentioned, because of decades of sacrifices and activities of the peasantry before that.

Let me very quickly go over specific features of the Indian national movement which not only created the post-colonial state but which I think were critical in determining the nature of the state and what strategies it could adopt. I will just mention a few. Firstly, the Indian national movement was a prolonged  mass movement, a movement over nearly a century which involved vast masses of the Indian people. It was not a coup, not a mere capture of power, not a guerrilla movement led by professional revolutionaries, not an insurrection, not a Red Army marching through and capturing power. It was a movement built upon the mass of people over a long period of time. So, the ideas of the movement went deep down into the masses and they could not be easily reversed. You cannot suddenly change direction in a democratic society. If a certain idea has gone deep into the minds of the people, changing that is a very prolonged process.

Second, what were these core ideas that went deep into the minds of the people and are relevant to the strategy of development that India adopted. First, that India would be a sovereign country, independent, anti-imperialist, and supportive of anti-imperialist movements globally. As Professor Irfan Habib recently said in the First Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture, that the ideas of anti-imperialism, democracy, and so on did not have to wait for communism or Marxism to catch up in India.3

One of the most comprehensive critiques of imperialism emerged from India by the early nationalists simultaneously with Marx, decades before Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. The writings of early nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji and Ranade were seminal in understanding the economic framework of imperialism, including complex ideas like unequal exchange, which we often think were developed only by Marxists in recent years.4

The second core idea was that India would be a democracy. In the 1980s, Tilak was already talking of adult franchise, decades before it was practiced widely in the world. Europe got voting rights for women decades later well into the 20th century and the USA in the 1960s was still witnessing civil rights movements demanding equal treatment for the black people! In India, democracy was  a very foundational idea critical to the imagination of the Indian nation since the 19th century.

Third, India would be a secular country. Secularism  and democracy were inseparable, they were used as conjoint terms, ‘secular-democracy’. The way it was understood was that you cannot have one without the other. You cannot claim to be democratic while excluding certain religious or other communities. If you are democratic, you must also be secular.

Fourth, the future India would be pro-poor. Not necessarily socialist or communist, though those strands were strong during the freedom struggle, but there was broad agreement on a pro-poor orientation. The early nationalists like Naoroji, whose work on poverty highlighted the central issue, (his major work was titled Poverty and Un-British Rule in India) and writings of Ranade, R.C. Dutt etc. all saw poverty as a core consequence of imperialism and it was given as a basic reason to oppose it. Later leaders carried this idea forward further with Gandhiji’s  focus on the poorest, the last man and his formulation of Daridranarayan, god residing in the poor and Nehru, the socialists, and communists making the demands of the poor central to their concerns.

Fifth, there was the idea that India would not remain an obscurantist, superstitious, ritual-driven society but would move toward a modern and scientific approach, which Jawaharlal Nehru called the scientific temper.

The key point is that there was a consensus across the wide spectrum of the Indian national movement, from Moderates to Extremists, from Gandhians to Nehruvians, from socialists to communists, from revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh to even large sections of the capitalists, on all these five elements of the vision of India discussed above. The only groups that did not share this vision were those who were opposed to the freedom struggle, such as the communalists and the loyalists.

For the rest, these ideas formed the shared foundation of their politics. The Indian state was therefore born carrying these core ideas of the freedom struggle, what Tagore called the “Idea of India.” These ideas were later embodied in the Constitution of India, where each of these principles finds expression, including the emphasis on scientific temper.5

At the time of independence, there was an  attempt by the communal forces to alter  the nature of the new born Indian state. Utilising  the holocaust like situation of the late 1940s with communal violence and upheaval caused by  the partition and the planned murder of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, creating an extreme increase in communal feelings, the communal forces in India tried to create a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ a mirror image of ‘Muslim Pakistan’. However, these efforts were pushed back strongly by the leadership of the national movement.

Within a few years, the first general election of 1951-52 was like a referendum on whether India would be a Hindu Rashtra or secular inclusive India. The Indian people overwhelming supported a secular vision of India. Only 6% of the electorate voted for the all the Hindu communal parties put together Hindu Mahasabha, Ram Rajya Parishad, etc. they secured only 10 out of 486 seats in the Lok Sabha!  This demonstrated how deeply the ideas of the freedom struggle were rooted among the people. It also illustrates that the ideas of a prolonged mass movement are not easily reversed. They are deeply embedded in society.6

Returning to the main theme, any development strategy adopted at independence had to operate within the framework set by these core ideas. No one argued for a model of growth without democracy or for one in subordination to a superpower. Even the plan chalked out by the capitalists, the Bombay Plan,7 assumed a democratic framework, welfare orientation, land reforms, and independence from foreign domination.8 No one argued for the models witnessed in East Asia, of an authoritarian state in partnership with an industrial bourgeoisie pushing though development, or of a semi-sovereign state under the umbrella of a super power ensuring rapid growth, postponing the issue of democracy and sovereignty to the future. Anyone who did that in India at independence would have been in the dustbin of history, such was the popular mood. At independence, therefore, multiple development plans existed, including Gandhian, socialist, and capitalist approaches, but all remained within the broad parameters of the ‘Idea of India’.

 However the path chosen – combining industrialisation with democracy and sovereignty – was unprecedented. As Jawaharlal Nehru noted, there was no historical precedent for this uncharted path which was therefore “unique in history.”9 The process of primitive accumulation........

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