1958–1959
Ambition is flexible.
Ideology is not.
The transformation did not announce itself. There was no resolution passed, no doctrine declared. It happened the way weather changes—gradually, until one day you realize the air feels different.
Criticism began to sound impatient.Questions began to sound unhelpful.Caution began to sound disloyal.
This was new.
And it unsettled me.
The Second Plan had given India something it had not felt before.
Momentum.
Momentum does not like interruption.
It rewards affirmation and punishes hesitation. It turns skepticism into obstruction and disagreement into delay.
In a country newly confident, delay felt intolerable.
The language of planning shifted.
Earlier, plans had been described as guides.
Now they were described as commitments.
A guide can be revised.A commitment must be defended.
That difference matters.
Steel and dams were no longer economic projects.
They became symbols of national intent.
To question them was to question belief itself.
And belief, once politicized, does not welcome nuance.
I noticed it first in small ways.
A Planning Commission memo dismissing local objections as "short-term thinking."A minister describing displacement as "necessary sacrifice."An economist referring to critics as "romantics."
The tone had hardened.
Efficiency had acquired moral superiority.
Public discourse followed.
Newspapers celebrated scale. Speeches praised audacity. Youth rallies spoke of catching up, overtaking, proving worth.
No one asked who set the pace.
Ideology thrives on urgency.
I thought of the First Plan.
How criticism had been tolerated—even welcomed.
Now criticism was managed.
Allowed, but sidelined.
This was not repression.
It was filtration.
And filtration is harder to detect.
The most troubling shift was internal.
I felt it in myself.
A growing impatience with delay.A tendency to defend projects reflexively.An urge to justify outcomes rather than question assumptions.
This frightened me more than opposition ever had.
A leader who stops doubting himself begins asking others to stop doubting too.
One meeting crystallized it.
A report highlighted rising costs and uneven regional benefit. I suggested a pause—just long enough to reassess sequencing.
The room fell silent.
Not hostile.
Worse.
Uncomfortable.
Pauses had become suspect.
Someone finally said, gently:
"If we hesitate now, we send the wrong signal."
To whom? I wanted to ask.
The people?
The markets?
Ourselves?
The Plan was no longer just a tool.
It had become a narrative.
And narratives resist correction.
They prefer continuation.
I began to see the outlines of a danger I had studied once before.
When economic strategy becomes identity, failure becomes betrayal. Adjustment becomes retreat. Learning becomes weakness.
Nations that reach this stage often move fast.
Until they hit something solid.
Yet pulling back was no longer simple.
Projects were underway. Expectations set. Political capital invested.
Steel plants could not be reimagined quietly.
Dams could not be half-believed in.
Ideology, once mobilized, demands consistency.
I wrote privately that year:
"Belief is strongest when it no longer tolerates doubt."
It was not a compliment.
Still, I did not reverse course.
Reversal would have been destructive.
Confidence once broken is harder to rebuild than patience ever was.
So I chose something else.
Containment.
I insisted—quietly—that planning remain technical, not moral. That criticism be recorded, not dismissed. That review mechanisms remain active, even if unpopular.
These were small acts.
They slowed nothing.
But they preserved memory.
Because ideology hates memory.
Memory reminds it of alternatives.
By 1959, India stood visibly transformed.
Factories rose. Power lines stretched. Maps filled with markers of progress.
And yet, beneath the confidence, strain accumulated.
Costs exceeded estimates. Resettlement grievances multiplied. Regional imbalances sharpened.
These were not crises.
Not yet.
But they were signals.
I felt a familiar unease.
The same one I had felt before Partition.
Before Kashmir.
Before planning itself.
The unease of momentum outrunning consent.
The country was not failing.
It was moving too confidently to notice where it was stepping.
And that, I knew, was how cracks begin.