Tyabji Nasir. Forging Capitalism in Nehru’s India Neocolonialism and the State, c. 1940-1970

Oxford University Press, 2015. — 197 p. — ISBN-13: 978-0-19-9457595This book has taken a very long time· to emerge from the scattered process of thought that provided the germ of the ideas that underlie its present form. This was principally due to two reasons. First, the
ideas emerged disjointedly in the course of earlier work undertaken by me in a study of the underlying reasons for the technological torpidity displayed by Indian industry. It took me a considerable amount
of time to appreciate the implications of the dialectical relationship between the potential embodied in Indian industrial companies and the stifling short-term perspectives of the overs of these firms, whether entrenched in the form of managing agencies, or later, in the form of closely held business groups. Evidence of these myopic
perspectives came in the form of defensive statements by individual industrialists when they were confronted by instances of errant behaviour by some of their compatriots. When faced' with specific
challenges to their existing modes of business behaviour, such businessmen resorted to truculent modes of response, which signified an obsessive preoccupation with self-aggrandizement: the Liaquat
Ali Khan and T.T. Krishnamachari budgets of 1947 and 1957 being key instances. The explanation offered, that the narrowly motivated behaviour clearly displayed was confined to 'businessmen' and not true industrialists, was indicative of an objective phenomenon.