The Welfare Idea in India

By Prof. K. V. RAO, M.A., M.Litt.

The term ‘Welfare State’ is so often used in India that it has stayed permanently in our minds. Yet it is not a term used at all about five years when our Constitution was on the anvil, nor is it a term whose significance is understood by all that use it. I propose to analyse the implications of a Welfare State as understood by us in this country.

About the time when our leaders were busy making the Constitution, they were not using the term at all, though they again and again mentioned in their speeches in the Constituent Assembly that their Constitution was mainly intended to do justice to the ‘common man’–probably the economic and social under-dog. Though not directly discussed by the Assembly, the question incidentally cropped up whether the new State of India should be socialistic in conception or not. Opposing a move on the part of Prof. K. T. Shah to call India a ‘Union of Socialist Republics’, Dr. Ambedkar vehemently maintained that the State should not itself be based on any philosophy of life, but should strictly create a political machinery which will enable political parties from time to time to execute their policies, as approved by the electorate according to their own prevailing notions. “The Constitution,” he declared; “is merely a mechanism for the purpose of regulating the work of various organs of the State; it is not a mechanism whereby particular members or particular parties are installed in office,” and added, “what should be the policy of the State, how the society should be organised” on its social and economic side, are matters which must be decided by the people themselves according to time and circumstances.”¹ The same idea was reiterated by Sri Alladi. He said, “While it is not committed to any particular reorganisation of society, the people are free to adjust and mould the economic condition for their betterment in any manner they choose.” ² If it was not intended to usher in a socialistic State, neither was it intensified to preserve Capitalism. Speaking generally on the ‘property clauses’ in the Constitution (Art. 19 and Art. 31), Sri Krishnamachari, on behalf of the Drafting Committee, said: “This does not really mean that there is any particular right in regard to private property as such, no more than what any person even in any absolutely socialistic regime will desire, that what he possesses, what are absolutely necessary for his life...should be secured to him.”³ Speaking on Article 31 in the Constituent Assembly–especially about justiciability of the ‘compensation clause’–Pandit Nehru said emphatically that there was nothing like a fixed concept of property nor a fixed right in it–everything should yield before the good of the community.⁴

Thus, while we find thatthe makers of the Constitution were very vehement on the point that our State should be based neither on Capitalism nor on Socialism, we also see that on the whole their own sympathies were leaning more on socialistic conceptions. The same Dr. Ambedkar who said that no Constitution should be based on any particular philosophy of life, also claimed that our ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’ really aim at making the State socialistic. “If these Directive Principles of State Policy...are not socialistic in their conception,” he said, “I fail to understand what more Socialism can be.”⁵ Answering the critics, that the Objectives Resolution does not contain the word ‘democracy’, Pandit Nehru claimed that they “had given the content of democracy in this Resolution”, and even added, “not only the content of democracy, if I may say so, but the content of economic democracy in this Resolution.”

Thus we find that the makers were in a way wavering in the aim and purpose of the State they were about to create. There was a desire that it should be a ‘neutral State’ without any aim to fulfill; at the same time, there was an equally strong desire to make it serve the needs of the ‘common man’. Indeed, the common man figured so many times in their thought and speech that, if ‘Welfare State’ means the same as the one ‘for the common man’, that seems to be the exact purpose of the establishment of this Sovereign Democratic Republic. “We are here to bring about the real satisfaction of fundamental needs of the common man of the country, irrespective, of the race, religion and community,” remarked Dr. Radhakrishnan, the ‘Philosopher-king’ of India. “The first task of this Assembly,” said Nehru, “is to free India’ through a new Constitution, to feed the people and clothe the naked and to give every Indian fullest opportunity to his capacity,” and hoped that “this Constitution itself will lead us to the real freedom that we have clamoured for, and that real freedom in turn will bring food to our starving peoples, clothing them, housing them, and bring all manner of opportunities of progress.” Though the ‘Welfare State’ was not actually in the minds of the authors of the Constitution, the welfare of the masses was certainly in their minds. One member went to the extent of saying that they should aim at a State “where there is no dearth of food or cloth, and distribution is equitable.”

Here we have to grasp one important point. Even if the welfare of the masses was in their minds, the Constitution by itself does not contain anything positive in order to make it work for the welfare of the masses, except in a general way. And in a general way, we have to remember that all political thinkers from Plato onwards visualised the State itself as intended for the welfare of mankind–only all the thinkers did not agree on any one line of programme to achieve that ‘welfare’. “If you take English political thought and action from Pitt and Fox onwards, it seems to me,” writes Professor Gilbert Murray, “that you will always find present...strands of feeling which are due–of course among many other causes–to this germination of Greek influence: an unquestioning respect for freedom of life and thought, a mistrust of passion,...a sure consciousness that the poor are the fellow citizens of the rich, and that statesmen must as a matter of fact consider the welfare of the whole State.” ⁶ When Aristotle supported slavery, or Hobbes supported absolute autocracy, or Spencer attacked the system of poor relief, or Hitler introduced his Nazi methods, all were thinking of the welfare of the people only in their minds, and nothing else! We have, therefore, to find out if our Constitution goes beyond this general conception and sets up a machinery of government which will positively create a Welfare State.

People searching for an answer usually find it in the Preamble and the Directive Principles ofState Policy. But I find nothing out of the way there to help us in this direction. In the first place, neither of them is binding on the people or enforceable by any means, including the legal means. In the second place, both the Preamble and the Directive Principles contain words and terms which do not carry any fixed meaning, so that they please all creeds, and communities without displeasing anybody. Take, at random, the idea of ‘Justice’ in the Preamble, the establishment of which is one of the Objectives of the Constitution. Now ‘justice’ has no fixed meaning; and from time to time it has meant what the majority meant it to be. Thus, today, in America it means every man getting and retaining what he produces, while justice in Russia means, roughly, every man producing what he could and getting in return an almost equal remuneration with others. Justice, according to the Muslim Law, means daughters getting same share in the paternal property, while, according to the Hindu Law, it means daughters getting nothing. It is interesting to note that when Jefferson enunciated and handed over to posterity his great truth that ‘All men are created equal’, he was definitely having in his mind, all white men, but not all men. Similarly when the U. S. Preamble desired to “secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and posterity”, the blessings of Liberty were not meant for the Negroes. Thus also when our Constitution (Preamble) says that it wants to secure the ‘dignity of the individual’ it means almost nothing when we remember that the same Constitution provides also for preventive detention and suspension of fundamental rights, or when our leaders tell us that dignity lies in manual labour.

I need not be misunderstood. I am not decrying the Constitution, nor its great Preamble, for both of which I have great respect amounting to veneration. All that I am labouring to prove is that the Constitution of India has not got the idea of a Welfare State ingrained in it. It is meaningless to say that we have created a Welfare State in India.

The welfare idea came after the inauguration of the Constitution, and it came from outside–especially from England. But it refers to a programme of the party in power whereby that political party want to achieve the welfare of the masses, the common men and women, by producing more, creating more opportunities for employment, and raising the general standard of life. To give it any morestatus than that, is trying to see the picture with a jaundiced eye. In fact, it is the exact meaning which Englishmen themselves would like to give it, and this ‘Welfare State’ in England came into vogue during the second world war, more as an expedient than as a result of any careful thinking; and, as Laski would have liked to call it–following the line of thought in his ‘Development of European Liberalism’–a natural corollary of what England was doing all the time. In fact, the concept of the Welfare State in England, and the ‘neo-capitalistic’ State America is supposed to evolve in the 20th century, are both the result of a realisation on both sides that absolute Capitalism based on pure laissez faire should yield to the needs of the community, but not to the extent of creating a full communistic State. Anybody could notice a similar but opposite tendency in the U.S.S.R. whereby the purely communistic idea pf absolute equality has gradually given place to inequalities of income, private property–though on a very small scale–and family rights. The ‘welfare idea’, whether one likes to call it so or not, is nothing but a via media between extreme Capitalism and extreme Communism and in this sense, ‘welfarism’ is a common tendency of all the countries in the 20th century, whether based on Capitalism or Communism. This idea was put nicely by Pandit Nehru in the Constituent Assembly speaking on Art. 31. “When we consider equity...we have to remember that the equity does not apply to the individuals but to the community,” and put the philosophy of the new Constitution in a nut-shell, when he laid the formula that, “No individual can override ultimately the rights of the community at large; no community should injure and invade the rights of the individuals, unless it be for the most urgent and important reasons.” ⁷

Conceived thus, the Welfare State may be defined, to use my own language in another connection, as “one which allows equality of opportunity to all and equal share in all essential amenities of social life, without impairing individual initiative and efficiency.” ⁸ This Welfare State has many facets–the spiritual, the economic and social. From the spiritual point of view, welfare is a vague word, often associated with the equally vague term ‘happiness’. On the economic side it has two facets–the productive and the distributive; and on the social side, associated intimately with the distributive facet of the economic aspect, it means the distribution of social amenities, social service as we ordinarily understand it. Let us not forget that originally Socialism started in England with the idea of social service. On the productive side of economics, its manifestation is seen in the State-ownership of the means of production, running side by side with private enterprise, called ‘mixed economy’ in India; and on the social side (coupled with the distributive side of the economy aspect) it is seen in the State running schools and hospitals.

What is very often forgotten is that we in India inherited this idea of a ‘Welfare State’ when in 1947 we got independence. By that time the State in India owned many means of production, and it was running schools and hospitals. What is seen now is that the Government wants to carry this on, on a larger scale, with the triple object of increasing production, creating more employment, and raising, the general standard of life. So far so good; and we have nothing but admiration for thisattempt. It is the duty of all Indians to co-operate with the Government in achieving the objectives, as they are concretely expressed in the Five Year Plan.

The difficulty comes only when the economic and social aspects are mixed up with what I have called the philosophic or the spiritual aspect of a ‘Welfare State’. It is one of the old controversies in Economics whether ‘wealth’ and ‘welfare’ are organically connected with each other, and this new idea of a Welfare State has once again roused a heated, and a very learned, controversy on the subject.⁹ Two questions are involved here: if the State should be used to create utilities or happiness; and if the utility which an individual or a group of people get can be measured at all. While nothing can be said about the final result of this controversy, one good thing that it has done is that it has once again connected Politics with its old cousin Economics, from which it was separated of late. In England, generally two arguments are advanced against this Welfare State: (i) that it has resulted in less incentive to produce, especially in the nationalized industries (what we call the ‘public sector’ in this country), and (ii) that it has interfered with the free choice of the consumer to adjust his own demand schedule. A third is also occasionally advanced (in which we are all immediately interested, as this complaint is true of this country also) that the Welfare State has resulted in the ‘ill-fare’ of the middle class. ¹⁰

The enthusiasts of a Welfare State in India should ponder over these complaints carefully and watch the progress of our own achievements in this direction. Apart from the defects or draws noted above, two immediate manifestations of the Welfare State in India should be carefully noted. In the first place, a rapid redistribution of national wealth and capital is taking place in this country without any heed to the consequences, either to the productive capacity of the people or their incentive. Secondly, a rapid re-evaluation of old ideas and institutions is attempted, depending sometimes upon the fads and fancies of individuals and groups in the name of the Welfare State, irrespective of the wishes of the people or their obvious repercussions on the society that has remained intact for centuries, and has been adjusting itself to the changing needs and circumstances from time to time without the aid of legislation.

I am not opposed to the idea of a Welfare State nor am I oblivious of the great strides that our country is making in the economic field, ‘this great Adventure in India’ as our Prime Minister described it the other day. I am only worried about the great changes rapidly introduced into our social and economic values by ill-digested ideas and half-baked fantasies. Is this plethora of legislation justified either on grounds of democracy or ideas of welfare?

Take for example two ideas, one in the economic field, the idea of redistribution of land; and the other in the socio-religious field, the Hindu Code Bill. Both of them are undertaken as a step to implement the welfare idea. As a matter of fact, every thing that is done today in India goes in the name of the Welfare State! We do not know how a redistribution of the land belonging to the middle-class people is conducive either to our ideas of justice or ideas of production; nor do we understand how the Hindu Code Bill–with its various manifestations–is going to improve and revitalise the society. A greater question is whether the reform of Hindu society is done in the democratic way. Are the people consulted? And have they expressed their approval through any mandate at the time of the elections? Even granting that these steps are for the improvement of the general masses or people of India; such reforms could be introduced only as a result of careful thinking and in the democratic way of seeking a straight mandate from the people.

Any other course would expose our democracy to the danger of paternalism. Another point we have to realise is that there are no ‘people of India’ but only ‘peoples of India’ whose interests are not always identical with each other, so that a step taken for the welfare of one section might result in the ill-fare of another section. Two lessons should be learnt by our masters,–that changes involving great stakes should not be hurriedly introduced without proper thinking and proper planning; and that all changes need not be introduced by legislation alone.

I would suggest that we put a stop to all this hurry, and resort to a slow process of consultation, enquiry and thinking so that we need not repent leisurely what we do in a hurry in the name of the Welfare State.

¹ C. A. D. Vol. VII, p. 402.
² C. A. D. Vol. XI, p. 840
³ Ibid. Vol. VII, p. 172
⁴ Ibid. Vol. IX, p. 1192-94
⁵ C. A. D. Vol. VII p. 402
⁶ Quoted by E. Barker in ‘Political Thought in England’. (Italics mine)
⁷ C. A. D. Vol. IX, P. 1194.
⁸ ‘Indian Review’, Madras, p. 303 of the issue of July, 1953.
⁹ Readers interested in the subject may read with profit A.C. Pigou: ‘The Economics of Welfare’; H. L. Hla Mynt: ‘Theories of Welfare economics’; P. A. Samuelson: “Foundations of Economic Analysis’; I. M. D. Little: ‘A Critique of Welfare Economics’, and M. W. Redder: ‘Studies in the Theory of Welfare Economics’.
¹⁰ Readers interested in this aspect of the problem may read with advantage D. C. Wright: ‘Capitalism’; Bertrand de Jouvenel: ‘Problems of Socialist England’, and his ‘Ethics of Redistribution’ ; Walter Euken: ‘This unsuccessful Age’; and L. Robbins: “The Economic Problem’ in Peace and War’.