ADDRESS OF SHRI K.R. NARAYANAN, VICE PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE COMMEMORATION OF LASKI AND HIS ASSOCIATION WITH KRISHNA MENON AND INDIA AT THE NEHRU CENTRE

LONDON, MAY 17, 1993

Mr. High Commissioner, Mrs. Singhvi, distinguished authors Prof. Kramnick and Mr. Sheerman, and distinguished friends,
 
It is in every sense an honour for me to have been asked to be present on the occasion of the release of the great biography of Professor Laski, my teacher.
 
I must congratulate The Nehru Centre and its very dynamic Director Gopal Gandhi for organising this meeting. The Nehru Centre, as Dr. Singhvi has pointed out, has become a very lively cultural and intellectual centre for Indo-British dialogue - a cause to which Laski, Krishna Menon and Nehru were all deeply dedicated. Although the book has come into print only today, I happen to have read it. Unlike the traditional Indian marriages, this is a case of the bridegroom having got to know the bride rather well before the marriage!
 
This is really a very enthralling biography. I had not hoped to read the whole manuscript, which the authors had so kindly sent to me, as there were many papers to read up before leaving for this visit. But when I took up the book, I found I just could not help reading the whole manuscript. I should like to congratulate the authors for the prodigious research work they have put into this biography. The book has revived for us what you have called the age of Laski in this century. My own knowledge of Laski was in a sense limited. Though I was his student, I did not know him personally in the sense of having ever gone to his house for the famous week-end tea parties.

I knew him only as a teacher. That came about rather accidentally. I had already spent two years at the London School of Economics and had during the second year specialized in economics for my B.Sc. course. At the end of two years, I came to the conclusion that economics was really not my subject. So I went to Professor Robbins and asked him whether I could change my specialization and go over to political science. Robbins got my records and looked at them and said "Yes, your marks show that you have done much better in the Constitution and other subjects related to politics and, therefore, I have no objection in your going over to the political science department; but you must first get the permission of Professor Laski before I can allow you to do so".

So I went and sought an appointment with Professor Laski. He asked me if I could stay one more year before I could go back to India. I said that I could not, because I was on a three year scholarship, and there was no likelihood of getting it extended, so I had to finish my course in one year. He asked "How can you do it in one year?" and then saying "let me see" he asked me to write an essay on a subject chosen by him. I wrote the essay and after having read it he said, "Well, I will take you".

He then gave me another subject to write on. In this way, for one full year, by sheer accident, Laski became my tutor. For one of the papers I wrote, I recollect what it was on -- the development of religious and political toleration in Britain -- I did a lot of reading and wrote a longish paper. Laski read it, and was very pleased with it and said, "If you keep up this standard you will get a first class. And if you do, I will write to Prime Minister Nehru about you". He then asked me "Do you think it would hurt you if I give a letter to the Prime Minister?" I said, "Sir, I think it will help me a lot because when I left India, India was not independent and I am going to a new India". He then went on to ask me a great many other questions such as "Do you have any one to help you in India?" When he found that I did not have any high contacts in India, he was delighted. He told me "In that case, we will get on famously. I am an `untouchable' in this country."
 
An interesting thing happened five or six months before my final examination. Laski wrote a letter to Krishna Menon who was the High Commissioner for India at that time, and asked me to go and see Krishna Menon. So I asked for an appointment with the High Commissioner, whom I had known before he was the High Commissioner. I went and saw Krishna Menon, but characteristically he did not say one word to me of Laski's letter. Finally, I did get a first class and met Krishna Menon at one of the garden parties organized by the Kerala residents of London. He was standing at the far end of the garden, leaning on his walking stick. I went up to him. Krishna Menon said, "Congratulations, Narayanan! I heard you got a first class." And then he winked and added mischievously "You know, sometimes you can get a first class by a fluke!" I could only answer, "So did you get it that way,

Sir?" He then said, "Now that you have got a good degree, do not spoil it by taking a Ph.D. after that." I was, therefore, rather surprised when I found from the manuscript of the biography that Krishna Menon himself wanted to take a Ph.D. at LSE but was rejected by the authorities because they thought that he would be a very bad influence on other students, not only on Indian students, but on British students as well. Laski went to the extent of writing to the Director that Krishna Menon was his best student and LSE could have either both of them or neither. So, he got his registration as a Ph.D. student but could never complete it because he was involved in his political and literary work. But it is interesting that he had advised me not to take a Ph.D. after my degree.
 
Before I left London I went to Laski to say good-bye to him. He had very thoughtfully kept ready with him two testimonials, neatly typed out, and handed them over to me. I thought of the letter to Nehru he had promised but was much too shy to remind him of it. So I took the testimonials he handed over to me, said good-bye, and left. While I was going down the stairs, I heard his secretary running down the stairs, saying "Professor Laski wants you to wait because he had promised you a letter." This was months after he had told me that he would give such a letter. He gave the letter to me, written in his own hand, to be given to Prime Minister Nehru. It was with this letter that I went to Delhi. I would never have gone to see the prime Minister, inspite of all my admiration for Nehru, because I had no interest in getting a government job. I wanted to teach or to become a journalist. I went to see Nehru with this letter and the result was that he asked me to join the Foreign Service. So in that sense Laski was directly responsible for my getting into the Indian Foreign Service and in a way for the rest of my career. Looking back, I cannot but reflect on what a great teacher and what a great human being he was, to have remembered an offer of encouragement he had casually made and to have remembered it without my having to remind him of it. It showed the extraordinary human qualities of this great man.
 
Like other Indian students, I was profoundly influenced by Laski's ideas. Laski's influence over India is indisputable. But I should like to say that if, as Professor Kramnick has suggested, there was a chair left vacant at Nehru's cabinet meetings for Laski's ghost, it was so because Nehru in those days, was very much like Laski at the LSE. The world thought of LSE as a very radical socialist institution but as those who have studied there knew, there were several great conservative Professors at LSE, such as Professor Oakshott who succeeded Laski, Professor Lineal Robbins, Professor Hayek, Professor Karl Popper who taught logic and scientific method.

Laski was very much of a lonely figure. And so was Nehru in his cabinet in the India of those days. No wonder then that Nehru needed a notional chair to be `kept' for Laski at his cabinet meetings! Nehru often invoked Laski's name and ideas very effectively in getting his colleagues and the country to accept many of the socialist and welfare ideas that he as Prime Minister projected and popularised in India.

 Nehru was a Fabian in the sense that indirectly through constant teaching and reiteration of ideas he made it almost impossible for his conservative colleagues to oppose those ideas openly. They might not have liked some of those ideas but, they could not oppose them. Nehru was a great populariser. His ideas had trickled into the resolutions of the Indian National Congress and into public thinking. Even if many important leaders did not believe in those ideas they had to acquiesce in them, including the idea of the socialist pattern of society, which was accepted by the Indian National Congress. Laski's influence on India and in the general field of politics in the third world has been stressed very well in this new biography. Today, many people -- including socialists -- seem to accept that the era of socialism is over and that we live in a new era of strident liberalism or liberal conservatism, or in the age of triumphant private enterprise system. But after reading this book on Laski it becomes clear that the kind of socialism that Laski propounded, taught, and explained with brilliant rationality in his various books, is not yet dead.
 
I should like to mention particularly one or two aspects of Laski's thought. One is the pluralist nature of sovereignty or the federal nature of the State that Laski put forward early in his career. After the traumatic experience of the rise of Hitler, he did go back somewhat on his earlier pluralist theory of the State. He was overwhelmed by the triumphant march of dictatorship in Europe and by the persecution of the Jews by Hitler. Laski tended to move somewhat towards the concept of class-war, not that he accepted the class-war theory as such or the inevitability of violence or of a violent revolution for the working class to establish socialism.
 
I am reminded that, very strangely, there is some parallel between Laski's pluralist federal concept of State power and the decentralised political and economic system that Mahatma Gandhi had propounded. Laski talked about voluntary organisations, associations, groups in society having autonomous power of their own, and of sovereignty not residing in the absolute sense in the State itself but being distributed across the entire society through these voluntary organisations which in many societies have acquired a life of their own. If we study Gandhiji's concept of decentralised democracy in India, we will find a very interesting parallel between that period or that stage of Laski's political theory and what we in India have imbibed from Gandhiji. Even today, we are engaged in the process of decentralisation of power to the villages, to the village Panchayats empowering them in a very significant way. Only recently we have passed a Panchayat Bill which will empower the village institutions in India with actual power and with finances for making them function effectively as decentralised units of a federal system. The pluralist concept of power is being asserted to-day in several parts of the world in different forms.
 
The other great innovation or contribution by Laski lay in his being one of the few political philosophers who wrestled with the central problem of our time, that of reconciling Marxism with Democracy. When I was a student that was really the greatest issue of the time. The idea of social democracy and bringing about a social democratic revolution by consent, and not by violence and dictatorship, had occupied our thoughts. This heroic attempt to reconcile and combine the central principles of Marxist social justice with the central principles of democracy, to reconcile the centralising tendency of the modern State with the pluralist demands of democracy, was Laski's unique contribution to political philosophy. No other political thinker of our time consciously attempted to bring about such a reconciliation as Laski did. In this biography there is reference to this. Was it Professor Beales who said that if a leftist can be in the Labour Party and if a socialist can stand with his head high to-day, it is because of Laski's efforts in propagating the theory of democratic socialism.
 
Democratic socialism, to my mind, is what is emerging out of the so-called triumphalism of private enterprise that is trumpeted in the world today. One has to look realistically at the situation and not ideologically. If capitalism has survived today, it is not as capitalism but as capitalism modified by borrowing and absorbing ideas of the welfare state, ideas of socialism.
 
An American writer has compared the welfare state in Europe with the welfare state that has emerged in America. He says that in Europe people followed welfare policies as fragments of a Utopia, as the ideological fragments of Utopian socialism. In America, on the other hand, the state has, over a period absorbed some of the ideas of welfare socialism, not as fragments of a Utopia fallen on earth, but simply because it was common-sense to adopt such welfare policies in modern society. Even in Europe, as distinguished economists like Galbraith and Tinbergen had pointed out, what has emerged is really social democracy and not unadulterated capitalism. The Germans have called their current liberalized system social market economy meaning private enterprise tempered or modified heavily by measures of social welfare associated with Socialism.
 
What is taking place today is not the so-called end of history propounded by Francis Fukuyama but rather part of an endless process of combining different ideas and different systems in the adaptation of society to changes in conformity with the technological developments of our time.
 
I should like to add something to what Professor Kramnick has said about the new phase in Indian economic development. (He had wondered if the old socialist oriented ideas will continue in the new phase.) It is necessary to add a little background to that. I am one of those who believes that an economic, social or political system has something to do fundamentally with the state of technology of the time. This is essentially a marxist idea, but I think it is one of the marxist ideas which has been vindicated and which is pragmatic. I could project this to the whole world but I shall limit it to India today. We established in Nehru's time, State control over the commanding heights of the economy and almost everybody in India accepted it at the time. This was a period when nobody else, certainly not Indian private enterprise, could have established these commanding heights in our industry and in our economy. But having pursued this kind of policy over a period and having built up a variegated and widely spread technological infrastructure in the country, we could not successfully proceed further in our economic development unless more freedom was given to the middle and entrepreneurial classes which had come up during the period.

This has happened the world over in different periods of history. The collapse of the Soviet system to my mind was not a failure of socialism as such. As Gorbachev once put it, what failed in the Soviet Union was not so much socialism as the bureaucratic and authoritarian system of politics, economy and government which had been established by Stalin and his successors. The Soviet system had become so rigid that over time, while immense technological developments took place in that country, its management system became completely outdated.

They were so archaic that the new forces of technology were struggling to get out of that restrictive shell. They got the opportunity when Gorbachev started liberalising, and he had to liberalize if the economy was to be salvaged. If capitalism has survived in the West, it is because it has had the flexibility, for various reasons, to absorb ideas including those of socialism, and to change its management and control systems in accordance with technological requirements. This is no longer the age of giant steel mills and gigantic dams. We are in the age of computers and of fast communications which require a different political and economic management system. It is therefore very superficial to say that socialism as such has collapsed and the old style private enterprise system has become triumphant.
 
 Laski's effort to combine some of the essential principles of marxist socialist thought with democracy, liberty and freedom, was, to my mind, one of the most constructive theoretical and philosophical endeavours of practical significance undertaken by a political scientist in our time. Laski used to tell his students that political theories are theories of the battlefield and also that they have to be marketed just as other products are marketed, so that people will come to prefer certain theories over certain other theories. Laski used to say that while in Oxford, you had fugitive education, at the LSE you had education through conflict. You knock your head against everybody else's, you argue and you get educated in that process.
 
Now I should like to add something about the role of Krishna Menon. This biography contains a quotation from someone as saying that Laski's was the most brilliantly destructive mind in Europe and that he was an international trouble maker. Very much the same phrases were used against Krishna Menon. So they were kindred spirits in that sense. Krishna Menon was the first to introduce Laski's ideas into India and they spread in India because Nehru managed to influence the conservatives in the Indian National Congress and through a constant filtering of these ideas into the minds of people they permeated among the educated classes and took root in the minds of thinking people.
 
What we in India have undertaken today is, to my mind, not an old-style capitalist experiment but a further step, in the Nehruvian tradition, in the new era of technology and economics. We have to provide greater freedom to private enterprise and initiative in society and introduce new management systems which are akin to management systems in the modern, developed capitalist countries. It is in conformity with social democracy or democratic socialism. I recollect a saying by Aneurin Bevan that socialism is a product of the relativist philosophy under which one has to "pursue with passion qualified judgements". Laski pursued with passion judgements which were rational and social democratic.
 
I should like to say something before ending on the element of `jewishness' in Laski which asserted itself in the last days of his life. He was a rebel against many jewish customs as shown by his marriage itself. But after the persecution of jews by Hitler, his mind had changed. For historical interest I may disclose that in 1939 or 1940 Nehru had prepared a list of jewish scientists in Germany who had left the country. He prepared that list for the Indian National Congress with the idea of inviting them to India so that we could use their talents for our development when we became independent. So there was something in common between Nehru and Laski in regard to sympathy for jews who were persecuted by Hitler.
 
Laski was a great jew in spite of all his cosmopolitanism. I have read a quotation from a German novel on the great men of the Jewish race. If I may paraphrase it: There was first Moses who looked to the skies and said everything comes from the heavens. Then there was Solomon who lowered his gaze and touching his head said everything comes from the head, from intelligence and wisdom. Then, there was Jesus who lowered his eyes still further and said everything comes from the heart, you must love your neighbour. Then after sometime, Marx came and lowered his eyes further and said everything comes from the stomach. Almost immediately, came Freud who looked further down and said everything comes from sex. Then, suddenly, leapt up Einstein who said "be quiet boys, everything is relative."

If one is to fit in Laski in this list of great men of the Jewish race, I should say that he combined Solomon's intellectualism, Christ's qualities of the heart, and Marx's materialism, producing a philosophy which, though it was for sometime drowned by the magnificent metaphysical outpourings of Michael Oakshott, will survive the strident arguments of Sir Patrick Hastings and the judgment of Justice Goddard. Laski's ideas are becoming more relevant in the changed times in which we live, in which both capitalism and socialism have changed and are changing.