| Nehru's
personality, as has been discussed all too often, was doubtless an
important factor in his choice of the socialist path to
industrialization, with its emphasis of the primacy of the public
and the subordination of the private sector. So was the fact of the
availability of Soviet assistance for heavy and basic industries.
But Nehru could not have carried the day in the ruling Congress
party, generally inclined to be anti-communist, if he had not
enjoyed the backing of a powerful constituency virtually in a
position to clinch the issue.
Nehru's was basically the same
constituency the intelligentsia which had brought about the
communist revolution in Russia. Incidentally, that would explain
support and sympathy for the Soviet experiment in India,
despite the exposure of its inhuman face and the existence of Gulag
archipelago, and much else, indeed the Nehruvian framework and the
survival in good odour of the two communist parties even after the
collapse of communist regimes in Europe and the outbreak of a crisis
of unknown proportions in the Soviet Union.
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