I have written repeatedly that socialist leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, as well as left intellectuals, suffered from a deep inferiority complex. They simply did not believe Indian business could compete globally.My view has been contested hotly by some readers. One says there was no trace of inferiority in Nehru's Discovery of India, or in Constituent Assembly and Lok Sabha debates. “It sounds illogical that Nehru and others who spent the better part of their lives fighting for independence on the grounds that we were competent enough to rule ourselves, should after independence feel inferior to the ousted colonial powers.” When Gandhiji was asked what he thought of western civilisation , he quipped “it would be a good idea” Very funny and very superior.Yes, early leaders of independent India saw themselves as morally, civilisationally, and intellectually superior to whites Many were also bitterly critical and ashamed of the caste system and Indian feudalism, and sought to modernise traditional social structures. Nevertheless they claimed moral superiority.Yet this superiority complex on morality co-existed with an inferiority complex on business. Leaders claimed that Indian industry had been stunted by British rule. So, did they plan to open up and compete globally after a transition period to overcome the alleged British stunting? Not at all. As a matter of principle they sought self sufficiency over trade, and attacked foreign investment, to attain what they called economic independence to buttress political independence.This approach, they claimed, reflected not an inferiority complex but the superiority of their socialist thinking. Many had witnessed the collapse of capitalism during the 1930s, and saw the Soviet model as the one to follow. Yet their lack of intellectual honesty was plain in their refusal to draw lessons from the phenomenal post-war success of capitalist countries — including Germany and Japan , the losers of World war II — which soon left the Soviets far behind.Anand Chandavarkar's recent book Unexplored Keynes and Other Essays has a lovely anecdote about Nehru's unwillingness to see beyond Fabian socialism. Nehru asked B P Adarkar, Trade Commissioner to West Germany,” What is the secret of Germany's phenomenal economic recovery?” Adarkar forthrightly responded: “Mr Prime Minister, I know the answer but you will not like it. It is free enterprise.” An impassive Nehru merely looked out of the plane window!Some socialists — intellectuals and politicians — defended their policies on the ground that infant industry protection was legitimate, mainstream economics. Yet they did not bat an eyelid in protecting textiles, the second oldest industry in the world after prostitution. Indian socialists sought to protect infants, geriatrics and all others without discrimination For all their claims to moral superiority this reflected a deep inferiority complex in economic matters.Rajni Kothari and several other contributors to Economic and Political Weekly forecast in 1991 that economic reforms would make Indian industry collapse or become indentured labour to MNCs. They also claimed that accepting patents in the Uruguay Round would destroy India's pharma industry. Events soon proved them economically illiterate and intellectually bankrupt. Kothari moaned in 1989 that India had moved from self-reliance to Reliance. He could not even conceive that it would be a change for the better!Nimai Mehta of American University makes a separate point. Nehru and other Indian leaders did not have an inferiority complex, he says. Rather, they had a superiority banias complex with respect to their own citizens — shudras and lower castes — whom they regarded as lesser mortals requiring a guiding hand from great minds. “The trade of ordinary Indians, whether in gold or food grains, was suspect from the start. In this sense, Nehru perhaps was equally infected by what Hayek has termed as socialism's fatal conceit — the belief that others should live their lives as per his wishes.”Mehta is right. Nehru and Co felt that Indian Brahmin-intellectuals were superior to whites, but also that Indian marwaris and banias were inferior. Their superiority complex on the moral and intellectual plane co-existed with a deep inferiority complex on the business plane. Their solution was to go for central planning. This approach assumed that benevolent planners knew better than producers or consumers what should be produced or consumed. The licence-permit raj asserted that people were best off when they had no power at all to decide what should be produced or consumed — that was best left to the rulers!But this was more than what Hayek called the fatal conceit of socialism. Their socialist conceit was compounded by caste conceit. India's high-caste leaders could not stand the marwari and refused to believe that any economy could thrive if it gave marwaris more freedom than Brahmins.Let me quote a telling passage from Nehru's Autobiography.“Right through history, the old Indian ideal did not glorify political and military triumph, and it looked down upon money and the professional money-making class. Honour and wealth did not go together, and honour was meant to go, at least in theory, to the men who served the community with little in the shape of financial regard.” (Readers, please note this was Nehru's own Brahminical viewpoint: non-Brahmins like Shivaji and Jagat Seth would have disagreed.) “The old culture managed to live through many a fierce storm and tempest, but though it kept its outer form, it lost its real content. Today it is fighting silently and desperately against a new and all-powerful opponent — the bania civilisation of the capitalist West. It will succumb to the newcomer, for the West brings science, and science brings food for the hungry millions. But the West also brings an antidote to the evils of this cut-throat civilisation — the principles of socialism, of cooperation, and service to the community for the common good. This is not so unlike the old Brahmin idea of service.”So there you have it from the horse's mouth. Nehru himself says that socialism is a form of casteism, one that rightly puts the bania in his place. Will today's socialists please own up too?