indu view of socio-economic order

H
By D.B. Thengadi

THE Common Minimum Programme (CMP) of the Congress-led government is virtually an acceptance of errors and faults inherent in the unrestrained economic reforms which have been pursued since 1991.

Fortunately, the original author of the Indian eocnomic reforms, Dr Manmohan Singh, now the Prime Minister of the country, has been compelled by the people'smandate to accept the need to revise the policy of economic reforms. However, there is no word against the WTO regime in the CMP.

Both Shri M.S. Golwalkar and Pt. Deendayal Upadhyay emphasised the need to give up the pseudo-ideological division between the ?right? and the ?left?.

There is a need to formulate policies keeping national perspective as a paradigm. Both Shri M.S. Golwalkar and Pt. Deendayal Upadhyay emphasised the need to give up the pseudo-ideological division between the ?right? and the ?left?. In this context, it is worthwhile to take cognisance of the views expressed by Shri Guruji on this subject in his address at the All India Pracharaks meet at Thane on November 2, 1972.

• The basic needs of life must be available to every citizen.
• Material wealth is to be acquired with the object of serving society, which is but a manifestation of God in the best possible ethical manner, and out of all that wealth, only the minimum should be used for our own purposes. Allow yourself only that much which is necessary to keep you in a condition to do service. To claim or to make a personal use of more than that required is verily the act of theft against the society. He is a thief who deserves punishment.
• Thus we are only the trustees of the society. It is only when we become true trustees that we can serve the society best.
• Consequently, there must be some ceiling on individual accumulation, and no person has the right to exploit someone else'slabour for personal profit.
• Vulgar, ostentatious and wasteful expenditure is a sin when millions are starving. There must be reasonable restrictions on all consumption. Consumerism is not compatible with the spirit of the Hindu culture.
• ?Maximum production and equitable distribution? should be our motto; national self-reliance our immediate goal. (WTO was not formed at that time.)
• The problem of unemploy-ment and under-employment must be tackled on a war footing.
• While industrialisation is a must, it need not be blind imitation of the West. Nature is to be milked and not killed. Ecological factors, balance of Nature and the require-ments of the future generations should never be lost sight of. There should be an integrated thinking on education, ecology, econo-mics and ethics.
• Greater stress should be laid on labur-intensive rather than capital-intensive industries.
• Our technologists should be required to introduce, for the benefit of the artisans, reasonably adaptable changes in the traditional techniques of production, without incurring the risk of increase in unemployment of workers, wastage of the available managerial and technical skills, and complete decapitalisation of the existing means of production, and to evolve our own indigenous technology with emphasis on decentralisation of the processes of produc-tion with the help of power, making home, instead of factory, the centre of production.
• It is necessary to reconcile efficiency with employment expansion.
• Labour is also one form of capital in every industry. The labour of every worker should be evaluated in terms of share, and workers raised to the status of shareholders, contributing labour as their share.
• Consumer'sinterest is the nearest economic equivalent of national interest. Society is the third and more important party to all industrial relations. The current Western concept of ?collective bargaining? is not consistent with this view. It should be replaced by some other term, such as, ?national commitment?, i.e. the commitment of both the employers and the employees, to the nation.
• The surplus value of labour belongs to the nation.
• There need not be any rigidity about the pattern of industrial ownership. There are various patterns, such as private enterprise, State ownership, co-operatives, municipal ownership, self-employment, joint ownership (state and private), democratisation, etc. for each industry and the pattern of ownership should be determined in the light of its peculiar characteristics and the total requirements of the national economy.
• We are free to evolve any variety of socio-economic order, provided it is in keeping with the basic tenets of dharma.
• But changes in the superstructure of the society will be of no use, if the mind of every individual citizen is not moulded properly. Indeed, the system works ill or well according to the men who work it.
• Our view of the relation between the individual and society has always been not one of conflict, but of harmony and cooperation, borne out of consciousness of a single reality running through all the individuals. The individual is a living limb of the corporate social personality.
• The samskaras of identifica-tion with the entire nation constitute the real infra-structure of any socio-economic order.