The availability of food is the central issue of Indian life and politics. And since there will be something like 15 million tons more of food grains available this year than last, it should be possible to be optimistic. But those who cling to hope of what is possible for India in the face of the country’s overwhelming probabilities are again being disabused.

For the moment the disappointment isn’t in what the farmers are managing to accomplish but in what the politicians are able to make of these gains. The increases in production haven’t begun to be big enough to stimulate a mood of confidence in New Delhi that is anything more than rhetorical. And that kind of confidence doesn’t carry far. Indian political rhetoric is stale and ritualistic — confident only because it is supposed to be, rather than because of any new idea or development.

Thus a limited but real agricultural success isn’t producing a climate of success. New Delhi remains as despondent as it has been ever since Jawaharlal Nehru’s powers began to fail visibly in the early sixties. If anything, the sense of frustration has been rising at the same time as the production figures.

Nowhere but up

To accentuate the positive some observers have resorted to terms like “agricultural revolution” and “breakthrough.” That is obvious public relations; what they are really talking about is the beginning of modern agricultural entrepreneurship, signified by the vastly increased demand for new high-yielding seeds, fertilizer, pesticide, and basic farm machinery. The phenomenon is both widespread and spreading. But it has a painfully long way to go. If India’s food production is to outpace its relentless production of new Indians, new “breakthroughs” will be required every season — when the monsoon rains disappoint (as they did during the disastrous drought years of 1965 and 1966) as well as when they surpass expectation, as they did, luckily enough, last summer.

Famine in India need not be inevitable, despite the growing number of Jeremiahs in the West who warn that it cannot be evaded. Even if population growth is not arrested — the only prudent speculation based on the evidence available — there is still ample reason to believe that India will be able to feed itself in a marginal way in the years ahead. It is important to remember, though, that when it is said that India has “enough" food, that means little more than that mass starvation will be averted. It says nothing about the kind of food or the level of nutrition of those whose lives have been spared.

From a strictly nutritional point of view, there is no prospect of India’s having “enough” food in the foreseeable future. In several regards, India’s food situation has nowhere to go but up: its agricultural yields have been so extremely low in the past that any moderately correct application of existing technology is bound to have dramatic results. And the technology itself is also bound to get better, in the sense of being better adapted to Indian conditions. The Indian farmer has shown be is not impervious to the profit motive, that he is eager to grasp the possibility of change when the odds look favorable. Therefore, the race with the country’s human numbers (now more than 510 million) need not be lost.

“They’ve seen more of it”

But taking what is of immediate concern, overall production figures don’t yet add up to any kind of “breakthrough.” The indicated production for the past year of 95 million tons, which may prove to be a conservative estimate, is more than 20 percent larger than the previous year’s crops. But that was a drought year. The increase over 1964, the last good year, barely keeps pace with the demands of a population growing at the rate of one million a month (roughly 36 million, then, in the three years, more than the combined populations of North and South Vietnam).

Thus the government is not being irrational when it remains cautious about its food prospects. “They believe more in scarcity than plenty,” one of the less impatient American officials here commented. “They’ve seen more of it.”

But the fact remains that even before India receives a ton of food aid this year, it will be sure of having nearly 10 million tons of food grains more than it had last year after all the food aid it received then had been counted. It is possible to imagine a political leadership that might try to make something of that fact, one that might even think of challenging the farmers or appealing to nationalistic sentiments by trying to do without further food assistance. From a statistical or a developmental standpoint, that kind of posturing would be misguided. But a country that is tired of being stigmatized as an international beggar might respond to other compulsions. Or so one would think. This is a matter, it must be emphasized, of Indian psychology, not American; even though both sides now recognize that food assistance in the past helped make India complacent about agriculture, there is still something irritating and worse about any American contending that India gets too much food. But, keeping that caveat in mind, it is striking that no Indian party—not the Communists on the left nor the chauvinistic Jan Sangh on the right — appears to have considered the theoretical possibility that food aid this year could be suspended. The irony cuts two ways: the United States has also had a bumper crop, so there is more interest in Washington in “Food for Freedom” and food for India than there was last year when the need was really urgent.

For whatever reasons, India seems content to have the United States remain very much an interested party in its agricultural planning. The American mission has a prepared position on every subtle facet of agricultural pricing and distribution in India. Often the politicians grow restive under American pressure. It is too close a relationship to be invariably a happy one. Indian leaders never go out of their way to recognize the American effort, let alone to express gratitude for it, perhaps because that would mean acknowledging the extent of their dependence. That could also be why they are so remarkably slow to anger when Washington slows up the aid, as it seems to have done on several occasions in the past year, to express dissatisfaction with Indian positions on Vietnam or the Middle East. Yet, institutions and administrators being what they are, it is doubtful that either side is in a hurry to see that dependence reduced.

States’ rights

From the political point of view, the crux of the food problem is in the difficult negotiations between New Delhi and the state governments on what is called “procurement.” Essentially, it is up to the states to decide how much grain they will purchase or allow to be purchased for government ration shops and stocks, and at what price. In the end the issue becomes one of compulsion. Precisely because India is democratic, it becomes impossible to demand too much of local interests — a restraint Americans should respect. But democratic leaders should have resources other than crude force. They should find it possible to make a convincing case for urgent national interests. The short wars with China and Pakistan brought that kind of patriotic fervor to India, but the threat of famine hasn’t. Last year when Bihar faced starvation, it soon became more an American problem than one of concern to the other Indian states. Indian officials on the scene performed exceptionally well during the crisis. But had it not been for the emergency assistance the United States provided, mass starvation deaths would certainly have occurred.

Flabby with power

That constant pulling and tugging between New Delhi and the states over food has been aggravated by the rapid decline of the Congress Party. Before last February’s election there were no opposition governments in any of the Indian states. By July, nine out of sixteen were non-Congress; that is, twenty years after independence, two thirds of all Indians were living in states the Congress had lost. The obvious question, a profoundly shocking one for an older generation that had been accustomed to thinking of the Congress as something almost synonymous with the nation, was how long the party would be able to cling to power in New Delhi.

The trouble with the Congress Party was that it had grown flabby from too many years in power. For two decades it sat ritualistically under portraits of its patron saint, Mahatma Gandhi, doing its best, or so it sometimes seemed, to ignore what Gandhi had said. Its leaders were often preoccupied with questions of patronage —jobs in the “public sector,” licenses in the “private sector” — to notice that the movement was withering at its roots.

“Because they have no power against the ruling order,” the Bengal iconoclast Nirad Chaudhuri has written, “the great mass of the Indian people have to remain passive haters of the new Indian regime.” Even if that were only a half-truth, its implications for the Congress would be devastating.

Though none of the party’s top leaders deny for a moment that the Congress is in a sad state and possibly moribund, they have shown no sign of doing anything more than acknowledging the problem verbally. It is a comment on the nature and scope of the Congress’ complacency that it could still stand some scaling down in size. It is a comment also on the more general absence of élan in India today: the fatalistic acceptance of food aid and the fatalistic acceptance of the governing party’s decay both spring from the same inability or reluctance to grapple with the problems of the present in the present. V. S. Naipaul offended Indians by writing about their collective “intellectual failure.” Yet Indira Gandhi was talking about the same thing when, in an inspired moment, she castigated them for “not being angry enough.” So was the political commentator who wrote, “Our elite has made a habit of living in profound untruth.”

False sense of motion

Indian leaders are forever promising to lead their people past great landmarks a few years from now, after various “difficulties” that are keeping them off course have blown over, but the landmarks continue to recede. At the moment they are saying that the country will be fully self-sufficient in food grains and fertilizer by 1972 and self-sustaining economically by 1976. Nobody believes them, and the chances are they don’t really believe themselves. The first of those goals is still marginally within the realm of possibility; the second long ago lost whatever meaning it once had. But both remain equally sacrosanct, for it is considered unthinkable politically to set lower but realizable targets. Thus the ambitious Fourth FiveYear Plan survived in its draft form almost to the end of its second year until the government finally brought itself to admit that it could no longer be implemented because, for whatever combination of reasons —the Chinese threat, the tension with Pakistan, the droughts, or plain bad judgment by its authors — it no longer bore any useful resemblance to the Indian situation.

Similarly, the Department of Family Planning now says the birthrate will be reduced by more than one third (from 40 to 25 births for every 1000 members of the population) within ten years, even though it has yet to be reduced by even one percent. It is against all demographic and sociological good sense to imagine that the stated goal serves any real purpose beyond generating a false sense of motion and deferring a painful moment of recognition. But a big failure, it appears, has a kind of splendor that no small achievement can match.

The moment of recognition for the Congress Party, if it indulges itself this way, probably won’t come before the day it loses its majority in Parliament. Or perhaps the inevitability of that day has already been accepted in the party’s top echelons. Last spring Home Minister Y. B. Chavan skillfully moved to identify himself with the airy radicalism that the party’s rank and file is generating in its frustrated reaction to the organization’s failure and drift. He did this by leaking the word that he favored the nationalization of banks and abolition of the privy purses of maharajas.

“The politics of gesture”

Whatever the merits of those proposals may be, neither one had any other urgency behind it than the need the Congress Party felt to prove to itself that it could still act; both were embarrassing to the government. But then, as one columnist noted, Mr. Chavan was not “playing at the politics of action seeking reform but, rather, the politics of gesture seeking recognition.” “Anyone who has talked with Mrs. Gandhi on the subject in recent days,” another commentator wrote in November after the bank nationalization proposals had been shelved, “can sense that she has no deep personal convictions on this issue. She has, however, a strong instinct for survival.”

The trouble, or so many observers now suggest, is that this assessment would go equally well for Mrs. Gandhi’s position on almost any other issue. Her virtues are said to be her flexibility and national standing—“her catholicity of outlook and her freedom from narrow loyalties of any kind,” as the Statesman once put it. But her flexibility sometimes seems to serve no other end than the preservation of her standing. By her own standard, she does not seem angry enough. For a long time after the election, New Delhi’s main preoccupation wasn’t the food situation, or the new political alignments, or even the condition of the Congress Party, but an oversubtle tussle for power involving Mrs. Gandhi, Chavan, and Deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai. No one of these three, it seemed, wholly trusted the other two. Possibly there were a few abortive instances of real plotting, but mostly there was only compulsive, time-consuming maneuvering for advantage. All big political decisions had to be taken in the light of what they would do to the Indira-Morarji-Chavan equations; frequently that meant they were deferred. There is such a thing also as the politics of inaction.

“The power structure”

When the scope of the Congress debacle at the polls last year became clear, there were those who saw it as a positive gain for Indian democracy, and therefore a hopeful omen for the future. The gain for democracy is hardly arguable, but the hope has dimmed. The shock of the election results has not redeemed the Congress. Nor have the opposition governments– except in Madras, Orissa, and Kerala — produced anything like viable alternatives. In the beginning the popularity of these governments was the opposite side of the coin of the unpopularity of the Congress. But now with petty politicians gravitating from party to party with every fluctuation in the political stakes, the lofty concept of democratic choice has been somewhat cheapened. A new election would probably produce new setbacks for the Congress without producing promising alternatives.

But the Congress cannot be expected to submit passively to the processes of decay, however far advanced these may seem to be. It still represents what in America would be called “the power structure.” It hesitated for months but finally convinced itself that its control of the national government gave it levers it could use against opposition regimes in the states. Three of these regimes– in West Bengal, Haryana, and the Punjab — were brought down in one week in late November, though the Congress in none of these states was ready to return to power. There were those who complained bitterly that the constitution had been stretched out of shape in the process. But the reassertion of power showed at least that the Congress would not fall because of a failure of will, even if it didn’t begin to meet, and possibly only aggravated, the political problem of regaining popular confidence.

There are some observers who believe that a polarization of the standard left-right sort is under way today in Indian politics, and that eventually the pieces will fall neatly into place. But that is a hard argument to sustain. The Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, and Kerala governments have contained rightwing and left-wing forces at the same time. For that matter, the right and the left have been coexisting within the Congress Party itself for years.

Any assumption that the Communists would gain inevitably from continuing muddle on the Indian political scene would also be much too neat. At present they are strong only in West Bengal and Kerala. They took leading roles in the governments of both states after the election, but what they gained as a result was not half as striking as the dissension that responsibility for government churned up in their ranks. “If Ho Chi Minh had been like these chaps,” a high police official in Calcutta remarked contemptuously, “there would never have been a Vietnamese revolution.”

Exploiting the good ones

No doubt India can survive the infirmity and meretriciousness that characterize so much of its politics these days. The strong, purposeful leaders Asia has seen in recent years –the Sukarnos, Diems, and Ne Wins — haven’t offered anything nearly as good. As for Ayub Khan next door in Pakistan, the final verdict on his regime had better be withheld until it begins to cope with the problem of a succession. Nearly everyone agrees that a dictatorship in India would be a disaster from every point of view, if not an outright impossibility because of the country’s size and diversity. But is the difficulty of dictatorship enough to ensure the survival of democracy?

In the meantime, it is never too soon to start worrying about the next monsoon. If it is good, the farmers should be able to sustain the momentum they achieved this past year and pass it on to India’s recession-bound industry. Probably there is less point in worrying about what will happen if it is bad, for India is an old hand at coping with bad years; it is the trick of exploiting the good ones that it has yet to master. —Joseph Lelyveld