1957–1958
Faith returned to Indian politics disguised as engineering.
The Second Plan needed symbols.
Not for efficiency.For belief.
A nation that has survived too long on patience begins to doubt itself. Numbers no longer reassure. Stability no longer inspires. What people want then is proof—something they can point to and say this is what we are becoming.
Steel gave them that.
The steel plants were discussed with reverence.
Not as factories—but as declarations.
They were not described in terms of output or maintenance, but in terms of destiny. Diagrams looked like promises. Timelines sounded like oaths.
Steel meant that India was done waiting.
It meant entry into a different conversation.
The dams followed the same logic.
They were not framed as irrigation projects or power stations.
They were framed as conquest.
Rivers would be "tamed." Valleys would be "transformed." Nature itself would be reorganized into productivity.
I had once warned against spectacle.
Now I was authorizing it.
Not because I believed in it blindly—
but because belief had become a national requirement.
The rhetoric shifted.
Words like endurance and restraint faded.
They were replaced by modernity, capacity, arrival.
Arrival, I knew, was a dangerous word.
It suggests the journey is over.
In cabinet meetings, the tone had changed.
Where once we debated sequencing, now we debated scale.
"How big?""How fast?""How many?"
The first plan asked can we sustain this?
The second asked can we afford not to?
The Planning Commission became bolder.
Targets grew sharper. Deadlines tighter. Coordination more assertive.
This was not coercion.
It was momentum.
Momentum does not require force.
It carries people with it until resistance feels futile.
I watched administrators adopt a new confidence.
Engineers spoke of megawatts and tonnage with missionary zeal. Economists invoked multipliers and growth curves as if they were natural laws.
Growth, they argued, would solve everything else.
I hoped they were right.
I feared they were simplifying.
Steel plants were placed where logic and politics overlapped.
Railways nearby. Rivers accessible. States eager.
Each location became a promise to a region.
Promises, once made, cannot be unmade quietly.
The dams rose slower than the speeches.
Concrete does not respond to ideology.
Costs crept. Delays accumulated. Resettlement became complicated.
Displacement figures appeared in footnotes.
I noticed them.
Others did not.
Faith does not read footnotes.
Public response was overwhelming.
Photographs of construction sites circulated. Headlines spoke of giants rising. Schoolchildren were taken on tours.
For the first time since independence, India felt visually modern.
That feeling mattered.
More than I was comfortable admitting.
Privately, doubts remained.
Steel requires markets.Power requires demand.Dams require patience.
Faith assumes all three will arrive on schedule.
History is rarely that cooperative.
But the alternative—hesitation—was no longer politically viable.
A nation cannot forever justify caution.
At some point, it must risk belief.
I thought often of the First Plan.
How it had avoided myth.
How it had chosen boredom over pride.
This Plan was doing the opposite.
It was teaching India to believe in itself through scale.
Belief, however, does not forgive error.
One evening, reviewing displacement reports from a dam project, I paused longer than usual.
Villages moved. Fields submerged. Compensation debated.
Progress always has witnesses.
They are rarely invited to ceremonies.
Still, I signed.
Because leadership does not mean refusing the moment.
It means shaping it enough that collapse is not guaranteed.
I wrote one sentence that year, more prayer than policy:
"May belief not outrun capacity."
It was not an instruction.
It was a hope.
Steel rose.
Dams filled.
India changed how it saw itself.
That change would carry it forward—
and, in time, demand payment.