1959–1960
Cracks never announce themselves.
They appear as explanations.
At first, everything could be explained.
Costs rose because ambition had risen.Delays happened because projects were unprecedented.Displacement complaints were dismissed as transition pain.
Every system creates reasons for its own discomfort.
India was no different.
The steel plants advanced slower than speeches.
Imported machinery arrived late. Skilled labor lagged. Coordination between ministries frayed under pressure. None of this was surprising.
What surprised me was how unwilling people had become to acknowledge it publicly.
Acknowledgment felt like sabotage.
The dams filled unevenly.
Some delivered power ahead of schedule. Others lagged, entangled in resettlement disputes and geological surprises that had not appeared on diagrams.
Nature, it turned out, did not read planning documents.
Regional imbalance sharpened.
States with early projects surged ahead politically and economically. Others watched and waited.
Waiting breeds suspicion.
Suspicion, left unaddressed, becomes grievance.
I noticed a change in reports.
Where earlier drafts had included cautionary notes, newer ones softened language.
"Challenges" replaced "failures.""Adjustments" replaced "mistakes.""Revisions" replaced "overreach."
This was not deception.
It was self-protection.
The Planning Commission still functioned.
But its voice sounded different.
Less tentative.
More defensive.
It had moved from coordination to justification.
That transition worried me.
Institutions that defend outcomes stop correcting them.
The first protests appeared not in cities, but near project sites.
Displaced villagers demanded compensation promised but delayed. Workers complained of safety shortcuts taken to meet targets.
These protests were small.
They were ignored.
Ignoring small signals is a learned behavior.
The press noticed inconsistencies.
Editorials praised ambition, then quietly questioned execution.
Criticism remained polite.
That politeness was deceptive.
It masked growing doubt.
I felt the strain personally.
Every visit to a project site involved ceremonies. Cameras. Prepared narratives.
Unscripted questions became rare.
When they appeared, aides intercepted them quickly.
Efficiency had learned to manage exposure.
One evening, reviewing a report that minimized a significant cost overrun, I rewrote a sentence in the margin.
I replaced unanticipated delay with error.
The document came back revised.
The word was gone.
That was the moment I understood.
The system had learned how to protect belief.
I did not confront it directly.
Confrontation would have produced loyalty tests.
Instead, I asked for more audits. More cross-checks. More independent reviews.
These slowed nothing.
But they documented everything.
Memory again.
By 1960, the cracks were visible to anyone willing to look.
They were not structural failures.
They were stress fractures.
Symptoms of ambition stretching institutions faster than they could adapt.
I thought of the First Plan again.
How dull it had been.
How resilient.
That memory no longer comforted me.
The country had moved past dullness.
It would not accept retreat disguised as wisdom.
What concerned me most was not economics.
It was tone.
Confidence had turned brittle.
Criticism, once debated, was now managed.
Belief had become protective.
And protected beliefs do not age well.
I wrote privately:
"We have taught ourselves to believe.""We have not taught ourselves to doubt."
Doubt is not weakness.
It is maintenance.
The cracks did not break anything.
Not yet.
But they marked lines where pressure accumulated.
And pressure, left unattended, does not disappear.
It relocates.
The Second Plan continued.
The symbols stood.
The speeches flowed.
And beneath them, the ground shifted quietly.
Preparing for a test no one yet named.