Friends, let me take you back to recent history, when Congress was ruling the country on the socialistic pattern.
- Jawahar Lal Nehru’s socialistic policies were primarily based on the Russian model. Where most things were controlled by the state. Imagine, till the mid-1980s, if you wanted to construct your house, you had to apply for a cement license.
- Imagine, if there is a marriage in your family, and you need sugar in bulk for making sweets, then either you apply for a license or buy sugar on the black market.
- For buying scooters like Lambretta or Bajaj, you had to wait for years, as the government refused to give permission for increasing the production capacity.
- The same was the position for cars like Premier and Ambassador.
- In 1957, Nehru established the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), whose job was to prepare a master plan for the next 50 years. If you see the flats constructed by DDA in the late 60s or early 70s, they did not provide any parking place for, forget cars, not even scooters.
- Nehru nationalised Air India, and what happened to this premier airline over the decades is well known.
- Congressmen always say that Nehru had vision and farsight. In a book written by Gurcharan Das, who was CEO of Procter & Gamble in 60s, he has mentioned that in Nehru’s view, ‘why India should have 10 brands of toothpaste?’ In those days of Congress, if you wanted to produce more toothpaste, you had to take the government’s permission.
- There is a classic case of ‘Vicks Inhaler ’. Once there was a flu epidemic in Tamil Nadu, and the company asked the government’s permission to manufacture 5 lakhs more Vicks inhalers, as due to flu Vicks Inhaler stocks started dwindling. It took the government about 2 months to give permission; by that time the flu epidemic was over.
- Bajaj then also had the ability to produce more scooters, but then the Congress government never gave permission.
- It is known to all that when Aditya Birla wanted to start Hindalco, the government created so much trouble that Aditya Birla vowed never to do the project of any manufacturing company in India. After that, in his lifetime, he started more than 30 manufacturing facilities outside India.
And Congressmen always say that Nehru had the vision to start AIIMS and IITs. In reality, this claim is totally false; I had already written in my earlier blogs, how the first AIIMS and first IIT were established. It looks like Nehru always thought India would always remain a poor country, who will be depended on other countries to survive; he had no vision or thought of making India self sufficient, his socialistic and communist policies, where everything was under government control, failed miserably.
Even in Nehru’s days, there were industrialist groups like Tatas, Bajajs, Birlas, Goenkas and many more who were more than willing to put up big manufacturing plants, but in Nehru’s eyes, all the industrialists were only interested in making profits for themselves, and they would not work for the welfare of the country.
The truth is that by the end of the 1980s, this Nehruvian model totally flopped, and it was a PM, not from the Nehru/Gandhi family, who realised that this system needed an overhaul, and that PM was Narsimha Rao, who opened the economy, and see where India is now.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
2nd July 2026