Engineering A Nation
Credit: Special Arrangement
A popular anecdote from Visvesvaraya’s Mysore years goes like this. The dewan had just concluded a strategic meeting with his councillors, the yuvaraja, and the maharaja’s private secretary, R H Campbell. At the end of the meeting, the participants were talking casually, when Visvesvaraya prefaced a remark thus: ‘I am a democrat, and . . . ’ ‘What did I hear you say, Dewan Saheb?’ Campbell cut in, looking him in the eye. ‘A democrat? You, a democrat! You are the greatest autocrat going!’
Everyone, Visvesvaraya himself included, had a merry laugh. The story, which is told by S Hiriannaiya, the dewan’s private secretary at the time, captures the tension at the heart of Visvesvaraya’s approach to governance. His self-image was that of a democrat, and he was indeed committed to democratic norms. Yet he had an instinctive attraction towards systems that had clear chains of command and enabled decisive action—a preference that grew stronger as he grew older and more impatient to see his ideas on development implemented. His twin faces as a democrat and a technocrat are crucial to understanding his legacy.
We must begin with the former. One of the most underappreciated aspects of Visvesvaraya’s career is his association with Liberal politicians and his deep involvement in debates on constitutional reform in colonial India. His friendship with Ranade and Gokhale did not just introduce him to nationalist economics. It also made him an informal member of a network of thinkers—Gokhale himself, Srinivasa Sastri, Chimanlal Setalvad, and others—whose political orientation drew upon the tenets of British Liberalism. They supported British legal and constitutional norms, aimed to establish a parliamentary democracy, and saw the state as being composed not of communities but of citizens with individual rights. They believed in private property and the role of the market, tempered by state intervention. They were incrementalists when it came to political reform. Although Visvesvaraya engaged with a wide range of political leaders during his career, he was most at home among the Liberals and those who were closely aligned with them.
It is against this backdrop that we must note his active involvement with issues of constitutional reform. As Dewan of Mysore, he expanded the legislature and its powers, while allowing the press a fair degree of freedom. Although these were halting measures, they went significantly beyond the steps taken by some of his predecessors. At the national level, he took a stand against the colonial government’s imprisonment of its political opponents. He played a key role in pushing for dominion status for India, and a crucial if unheralded part in producing an outline for a dominion constitution. Even more remarkable, given his own connection with the princely rulers of Mysore, was the active support he lent to the states’ people’s movement, which sought to assert the rights of the citizenry in the princely states. He was also an early proponent of federalism, insisting that provinces would be best placed to utilize their resources productively if they received greater autonomy.
Despite these interventions, there is no doubt that the more lasting impact of Visvesvaraya’s career on Indian society has been in the popularization of technocratic thinking. The Indian middle class has long had a fascination for technocrats. The term usually refers to unelected technical experts in government roles—individuals with a strong belief in the power of science and technology to solve the most pressing problems of society.
The technocrat is seen as skilled and efficient, a counterpoint to the venal politician and the arrogant, generalist bureaucrat. In the Nehru years, statistician P C Mahalanobis and his associate in the Planning Commission wielded enormous influence. In more recent decades, engineers such as Sam Pitroda and Nandan Nilekani have held positions of great power in government agencies, while Manmohan Singh was widely welcomed as finance minister and then prime minister on account of his brilliance as an economist, his lack of an electoral base notwithstanding. But they were all foreshadowed by Visvesvaraya, who became prime minister of an important state and adviser to national politicians without ever contesting an election himself.
Excerpted with permission from Engineering A Nation by Aparajith Ramnath published recently by Penguin.