To remove or not to?

The word ‘socialist’ is these days creating a massive ruckus in public. People all over the country are debating the validity of the inclusion of this S word in our Preamble, and thus its significant presence in our constitution. Powerful politicians and ‘liberal’ journalists are clamouring for the word to be dropped from the great document altogether. However, now that we are in this position, let’s just explore the meaning of the word ‘socialism’.

Does this word only mean an economic principle in which the means of production are owned by the public? Did Karl Marx himself have this narrow definition of this rather old word? Thus, is a socialist also necessarily a communist? Can a capitalist never work for the society and be termed a socialist entrepreneur?

To me, the word has utopian connotations. A socialist state is one where every individual strives for his/her own betterment at the same time benefiting society around. A capitalist owning vast swathes of personal wealth thus qualifies as a socialist if he/she invests in products deemed procurable by people while the workers too enjoy at least reasonable working conditions with some amount of personal social security. Our country is now experiencing growth as never known before, surely soon to touch the remarkable double digit growth figure. The dream socialist state which Nehru envisaged never came to fulfillment. Instead, Manmohan Singh’s dream economy based on individual enterprise is apparently working better. But this to me does not render the word socialist as anything dangerous, to be confined to the dustbin.

To an extent, the apathy of today’s policy makers and the free press can be understood. Communism was perhaps the biggest lie of the 20th century. Human beings were denied basic liberty and instead of enabling the labourer to rise, it expected all people to behave as labourers. We all know about the Gulag camps in Siberia, the forced hunger deaths of the 3 million Kulaks in Ukraine, the liquidation of all the Russian church personnel in Russia and indeed a lot more. Yet, organized communism definitely served one good purpose. The former capitalist nations could no longer remain as ‘capitalist’ if you like as before. They had to modify in fear of a labour uprising on Leninist lines. Thus, the working classes in America and Western Europe experienced reforms as never before. The labour class was now coerced into a coalition ironically to protect the interests of the largely well established liberal economies.

Thus, let us not totally abandon the word socialism from our lexicon. Our industrial growth and Forex reserves might be at an all time, the rupee might well be gaining ground, but this does not qualify us as anti-social. One would like to believe that the rise of India is not exclusive of any group in the country and benefits everybody. In that case, we might as well still swear by our preamble, and continue to include the word ‘socialist’ along with the so far less controversial ‘sovereign’.