ABSTRACT
The Indian National Congress has left its mark on the country's politics. Its establishment, nearly a century ago, marked the birth of modern political consciousness in India. Over the years leading to independence from British colonial rule, the Congress became a haven for political activists across a broad spectrum of ideologies. As the premier political vehicle articulating liberal interests, the Congress dominated the nationalist movement. In its fold you could find men and women of various political persuasions: from Marxists to votaries of Adam Smith, all of whom were prepared to bury ideological differences in the quest for freedom. One of the most perceptive analysts of the interplay between politics and business is Stanley A Kochanek. In his book Business and Politics in India (1974), Kochanek noted the umbrella character of the Congress and wrote:
'The Indian National Congress, at the time of independence, was an extremely broad-based political movement comprised of a variety of groups. All those groups agreed on the imperative of gaining control of the national identity, but each had a different image of the pattern of society the Congress party should establish for free India. The left wing of the Congress party supported a policy of state planning and economic growth through state-owned public sector investment; the right was committed more to private ownership with a large but subsidiary role of the state; the Gandhians preferred government support for decentralised village and cottage industries organised into cooperatives. Under pressure to satisfy each of these disparate tendencies, Congress economic policies fluctuated erratically in the early years after independence After 1955, the struggle within the Congress party was concerned less often with questions of whether or not there should be a private sector than with determining the size of the public relative to the private sector and a sufficient degree of dispersion of private sector growth among existing and potential entrepreneurs.
