The Bihar Famine and The Authorization o PDF

Working
Paper: ReVisions Seminar Series, University of Glasgow, 2017-2018.
The ‘Bihar Famine’ and the Authorization of the Green Revolution in India:
Developmental Futures and Disaster Imaginaries ∗
I. Introduction
Over the past few years’ large parts of India have reportedly been in the grips of a
long-lasting and severe drought. There is even mention of certain regions, being
affected by famine-like conditions1, a state of affairs troubling the triumphant claims
made in the 1980s that India had now achieved “freedom from famine”2. There has
also been a lot of talk of a serious ‘agrarian crisis’ – exemplified by large-scale
‘farmer suicides’ in particular regions of the country for well over two decades
now.3 Added to this are the concerns over worsening impacts of climate change in
the region.4
This paper is an attempt at clarifying the stakes of struggles over framing and
mobilizing this ongoing ‘disaster’ – as well as an attempt at exploring how this could
be both an opening for a transformation of our current neoliberal developmentalist
model but also, a further opportunity to deepen and perpetuate developmentalist
futures and the expansion of the jurisdiction of the authorities authorized by
them.5It hopes to do so by way reflecting upon a disaster past and how it was
framed and mobilized to deepen and extend the existing developmentalist regime in
the face of its crisis.
The particular disaster in question was the ‘Bihar Famine’, which purportedly
affected several districts in the north-eastern Indian state of Bihar, in a period
approximately between December 1965, when the U.S. administration first publicly
∗
Adil Hasan Khan, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, Melbourne Law School. This paper is dedicated to
the loving memory of my dear friend and guide, Vijay Nagaraj (1973-2017), who taught me
everything I know about the history and significance of peasant politics in India.
1 Harsh Mander, Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle Against Hunger, 2012.
2 B.M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India with Special
Reference to the Food Problem 1860-1990, Delhi: Konark Publishing: 1991, pp. 340-372. This
seemingly startling re-emergence of the specters of famines has of course not been limited to India
and now looms over parts of Yemen, Southern Sudan, North-Eastern Nigeria and Somalia. See BBC
News, ‘Why Are There Still Famines?”, 15 March 2017, available at:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39039255.
3 For an early account see P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, 1996.
4 See Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Risk and the South Asian monsoon’, Climate Change (2016), available at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1629-x.
5 This paper will therefore be an exercise in what Sundhya Pahuja refers to as “jurisdictional
thinking”. Pahuja provides an extremely lucid account of what jurisdiction, and this orientation
towards it, means, when she observes: “[Jurisdiction] refers first and foremost to the power and
authority to speak in the name of law…To orientate oneself through jurisdiction is therefore to give
primacy to practical questions of authority, and how authorization of lawful relations takes place.”
Sundhya Pahuja, ‘Laws of Encounter: a jurisdictional account of international law’, London Review of
International Law I, 1 (2013) 63-98, p. 68.
1
Working Paper: ReVisions Seminar Series, University of Glasgow, 2017-2018.

declare its imminence, and April 1967, when the Indian central Government finally
made an official declaration. Very much like in recent years, in both 1965 and 1966,
most of the Indian sub-continent suffered from a ‘failure of the monsoon’ that
created severe conditions of drought in many parts of the country. In addition there
were also floods in several districts, which in turn led to crop losses.6 As the paper
attempts to show, this famine was variously framed and mobilized, by both the cold
warriors in the Johnson U.S. administration and a particular section of the Indian
developmental administration, to authorize the Green Revolution - a significant
transformation of the U.S. assisted developmental project in India, that specifically
led to it’s expansion and intensification into the countryside by way of a large-scale
industrialization of agricultural production and a partial liberalization of the
‘agricultural sector’ of the economy.

Developmental Futures

Critical literature on the history of developmentalism in the Global South has, quite
rightly, laid emphasis on the authorizing force generated by the promised future
telos of attaining the hallowed status of a ‘developed country’ for various
developmental institutions and authorities and their violently transformative
policies and deeply interventionist programs for well over the previous century.7
Pertinently, very much like other significant Utopias of the 20th century, this
promised telos was very rarely (if ever) actualized, and its persistent quest has,
instead, generated several monumental calamities. However, and this where any
further similarities between developmental futures and ‘mass Utopias’ come to an
end. For while these other dreamworlds have indeed, under the burden of their
catastrophes, become “futures past”8 in a ‘post-cold war’ world9, developmentalism
has only tightened its grip, seemingly impervious to the vast catalogue of failures of
its promises in this ‘age of catastrophe’.10 How can we explain this? From the afore
mentioned critical literature on developmentalism we learn of a dynamic of
constant deferral, one whereby each failure to achieve the promise of development
only leads to its deferral onto a “not yet” future and the cause of this failure gets
displaced onto its Southern ‘objects’ – who must perennially occupy “the waiting-
room of history”11. This explanation is most illuminating and one which now has

6 See Paul R. Brass, ‘The Political Uses of Crisis: The Bihar Famine of 1966-1967’, Journal of Asian
Studies XLV (1986) 245.

7 See Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics
of Universality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Jennifer Beard, The Political Economy
of Desire: International Law, Development and the Nation State, Oxford and New York: Routledge-
Cavendish, 2002.
8 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Keith Tribe trans., New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004.

9 See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West,
Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000.

10 See Jonathan Crush et al., ‘Jonathan Crush (1995) Power of Development’, Progress in Human
Geography 41, 4 (2017) 546-553.

11 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 8.
2

many adherents amongst those who undertake international law and development.
However, I would argue, it remains only a partial explanation. Above all, it cannot
quite explain the intense anxiety and sense of urgency that has accompanied
development throughout its history. After all, efforts to achieve development futures
have about them something more akin to a war effort rather than a ‘slouching
towards Bethlehem’12. My argument in this paper is that in order to fully understand
this urgency we need to take into account the authorizing force of developmental
disaster imaginaries: catastrophic futural visions that have always been entangled
with the developmental promise. It’s dynamic operates not simply through some
differential deferral of historical time but also through the claim to make possible
it’s acceleration. Therefore, it is not just the “Not yet!” but also the ‘If not now then
chaos reigns!’ that explains the persistence and intensification of developmental
futures in our times.

II. The Cold War and the ‘agrarian question’ in Asia: The Emergence of the U.S.-
Indian Developmental Regime

Hunger and Containment

In contemporary accounts of the Cold War we learn that as the European theater for
the conflict entered a period of entrenchment from the early 1950s in a post-
Marshall Plan Western Europe, attention of the cold warriors shifted to what they
perceived to be largely ‘peasant societies’ in newly colonized Asia – a continent
teeming with ‘backward’ and ‘traditional’ peasants.13 We also learn that they came
to adopt the view that addressing the so-called ‘agrarian question’ (or ‘peasant
question’) was going to be key to containing communist expansion into Asia. 14 This
position rapidly took hold in the aftermath of the largely ‘peasant army’ of the
Chinese communist’s routing the U.S. supported Chinese nationalist army in 1949
and also their reversals in the Korean War of 1952.15

Exemplifying an “antiruralism” that they largely shared with their Soviet foes, U.S.
cold warriors represented the ‘Asian Peasantry’ as being both mired in static and
fatalistic ‘traditions’ and the web of hierarchical relationships associated with it and
also being almost pathologically susceptible to enemy propaganda of an alternative

12 To borrow from Yeats. See William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, 1920.
13 See Odd Arne Westad, The global Cold War: third world interventions and the making of our times,
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

14 See Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

15 Nick Cullather, ‘Hunger and Containment: How India Became “Important” in US Cold War Strategy’,
India Review 6, 2 (2007) 59-90, p. 61. For an account of how this particular formulation of the
‘peasant problem’ being, above all, a problem of insurgency, by U.S. cold warriors was an active
continuation of inter-war period British and French colonial responses to anti-colonial peasant
revolts throughout large parts of Asia and Africa see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-
Politics, Modernity, Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 123-152.
3

future.16 This perceived susceptibility of a ‘hungry Asian peasantry’ to the “virus of

communism” was seen as being a significant source of insurrectionary ‘instability’ in
a region where the jurisdictional authority and ‘capacity’ of the newly decolonized
states was taken to be limited and fragile (as suffering from “sovereignty gaps”17).18
These ‘reactive’ insurrectionaries, given to paroxysms of “spasmodic”19 violence,
were deemed as being entirely bereft of any normative expectations or alternative
futures for which, and against whose violation, these “shock troops of rebellion and
revolution”20 rebelled.21 Their violence was ultimately conceived as being a threat to
the security of the United States and the rest of the ‘free world’.

Simultaneously, a purported ‘non-militaristic’ solution to the peasant/agrarian
questions and peasant insurgency in Asia was stridently advocated by a group of
academics and it rapidly captured the imagination of the U.S. cold warriors.22 This
was the world-making discourse of development, one which was peddled by its
significant purveyors to the cold warriors “as a form of global counter-
insurgency”23 from the very outset.24 . Development aid promised to help these

16 This commonality when it came to the formulation and analysis of the ‘peasant problem’ between
both sides of the Cold War requires emphasis. For the more ‘conciliatory’ Soviet ideologues this was
expressed in the form of the belief that these ‘primitive’ peasants necessarily required the guidance
of ‘modern’ political forms (such as the communist party or the Soviets) in order to produce a
revolution – the goal of which included the abolishment of the very conditions of possibility of the
peasantry. A representative account for this can be found in Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution.
This ‘paternalistic’ account of peasant insurgencies could also be extended to several significant
‘Western Marxists’ scholars of the time, notably including the historian Eric Hobsbawm. See E.J.
Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, Manchester: The University Press, 1959, p. 6.
17 D. Nally and S. Taylor, ‘The politics of self-help: The Rockefeller Foundation, philanthropy and the
‘long’ Green Revolution’, Political Geography, 49 (2105) 51-63, p. 57.

18 An illustrative public statement of this perception was put forth in the Foreword penned by Chester
Bowles, a key foreign policy figure in the Kennedy administration at the time (and subsequently, the
U.S. Ambassador to India), to the English translation and re-issue of Henry Habib Ayrout’s colonial
counter-insurgency classic The Egyptian Peasant. See Henry Habib Ayrout, The Egyptian Peasant, John
Alden Williams trans., Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
19 E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past &
Present 50 (1971) 76-136, p. 76.

20 James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellions and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, New
Have Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976, p. 4.

21 The classic scholarship to subsequently challenge this paradigm, both with regard to contemporary
‘Third World’ peasantry, as well as 18 and 19th century British history, remains the above-cited essay
by Thompson and Scott’s book, as well as Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in
Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
22 See Max F. Millikan and W.W. Rostow, A Proposal: A Key to an Effective Foreign Policy, Cambridge:
MIT, 1957; W.W. Rostow and Richard W. Hatch, An American Policy in Asia, Cambridge, MA: The
Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1955.
23 David H. Price, ‘Soft Power, Hard Power, and the Anthropological “Leveraging” of Cultural “Assets”’,
in John D. Kelly et al. (eds.), Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, 2010, p. 256. See also David
H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology, pp.
118-121.
24 This case is clearly made in W.W. Rostow and Max Millikan’s note to CIA Director, Allen Dulles, in
1952, wherein they bluntly observed: “In the short run communism must be contained militarily. In the
long run we must rely on the development…of an environment in which societies which directly or
4

countries breakout of ‘the cycles of stagnation and poverty’ and save their peasantry
from hunger and provide them with the benefits associated with a ‘modern’ lifestyle
– ultimately entailing industrial wage labor - and, as a consequence, to keep them
from engaging in insurgency.25 This can be described as the cold war strategy of
containment by way of preventing hunger.26

For the most part, the ruling nationalist elites of recently decolonized states were in
agreement with this developmentalist framing of their agrarian problem. However,
for them it had been largely created by and formed a part of the problematic legacy
bequeathed to them by their former colonial rulers and their rapacious policies that
had been characterized by large-scale immiseration of the agrarian populace, in part
on account of its active policy of de-industrializing and progressive “ruralizing”27of
the country.28 For them the dramatic exemplification of this (mis)rule was the
infamous “imperial famines” 29 that had frequently ravaged the colonized in
numerous colonial states over the previous two centuries.30

Centrality of India

In this counter-insurgency battle of the cold war, India, with its vast ‘peasant
population’, ‘democratic regime’ and shared boundary with communist China,

indirectly menace ours will not evolve. We believe the achievement of a degree of steady economic
growth is an essential part of such an environment.” Max Millikan and W.W. Rostow, ‘Notes on Foreign
Economic Policy’, FOIA CIA MORI ID 30405, 5/21/54, p. 6-7, op. cit. Price, Cold War Anthropology, p.
120.
25 For an account of the persistence of this development paradigm in which hunger in the periphery
gets connected to security concerns in the center into the present see Jamey Essex, ‘The Work of
Hunger: Security, Development, and Food-for-Work in Post-Crisis Jakarta’, Studies in Social Justice 3,
1 (2009) 99; Jamey Essex, ‘Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Tools: The Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of
Hunger’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102, 1 (2012) 191-207.
26 Cullather, The Hungry World.
27 To get a better sense of what immediately follows, it is instructive to provide the full quote from
which the above term is plucked, namely, from a speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first
Prime Minister of independent India, to the Indian National Congress on the eve of independence:
“India, under British Rule, has been progressively ruralized, many of her avenues of work and
employment closed, a vast mass of the population thrown on the land, which has undergone continuous
fragmentation, till a very large number of holdings have become uneconomic. It is essential, therefore,
that the problem of the land should be dealt with in all its aspects. Agriculture has to be improved on
scientific lines and industry has to be developed rapidly in its various forms…so as not only to produce
wealth but also to absorb people from the land…”. Reproduced in A. Moin Zaidi, A Tryst with Destiny: A
Study of Economic Policy Resolutions of the Indian National Congress Passed During the Law 100 Years,
New Delhi: Publication Department, 1985, p. 72.
28 David Ludden, ‘Subalterns and Others in the Agrarian History of South Asia’, pp. 206-207; David
Arnold, Famine, pp. 115-118.

29 David Rieff, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century, 2015.
30 David Arnold, Famine, p. 118. For an earlier Indian nationalist critique of British colonial rule as
producing famines see Romesh Dutta, The Economic History of India, I: Under Early British Rule,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1901.
5

emerged as the “cold wars most important economic battleground”31. As the “largest
domino”32,it had to be prevented at all costs from falling over to the communist side,
a consideration which explains why, by the early 1960s, it had become the largest
recipient of U.S. economic aid in the world.33

Staging Development

In this choice of India and this particular configuration of the problem and its
possible solutions, one thing that also comes across is how significant the register of
the dramatic was for these cold warriors and development experts from the very
outset. It was clear to many of them that they were engaged in a project of world
making, with a global audience, and with the ‘Third World’ as the stage for their epic
performance. It promised to be an epic drama in which a country absolutely
immersed in ‘poverty’ would be redeemed through the heroic actions of a new
benevolent (and non-imperial) ‘superpower’.34

In keeping with this frame, these U.S. cold warriors perceived India as the site for
staging a contest to establish the superiority of the U.S. model of development by
pitting it against the communist model, represented in this case by India’s neighbor,
China.35 For the U.S. officials this contest took the form of a dramatic race between
two similarly placed Asian countries with vast peasant populations and ‘backward’
agriculture, in order to achieve the telos of development.36 By assisting ‘democratic’
India they hoped to demonstrate to the rest of the world the incontrovertible
superiority of the U.S. model in helping the ‘underdeveloped’ ultimately achieve
economic development and in adequately resolving the ‘agrarian question’.37

Viewed from a slightly different vantage point, this was essentially a contestation
over which form mimicry would be most suited in undertaking the development
endeavor, with the spectacular achievements of the Soviets and more recently the
Chinese competing against the ‘developed’ U.S. and European examples and

31 David C. Engerman, ‘The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War’,
Diplomatic History 28, 1 (2004) 23-54.

32 Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 210.
33 Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The U.S. and India’s Economic Development, 1947-1963, Chapel
Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990, p. 1.

34 Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 134. For an early reflection upon this aspect of development see .
Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Enquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, abridged by Seth S. King, New
York: Pantheon Books, 1971.
35 See Wilfred Malenbaum, ‘India China: Development Contrasts’, Journal of Political Economy 64
(1956) 1-24.
36 As the Indian economist (and later Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister) P.N. Dhar,
nostalgically reminisced several decades later: “…India in the first decades of its independence was
looked upon by many in the Western world as a new democratic model for economic development and
social change and was presented to other developing countries as an alternative to the Chinese model.”
P.N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2000, pp. 228-229.
37 Cullather, The Hungry World, pp. 137-146.
6

experiences as norms for resolving this ‘Third World’ problem. 38 For the U.S.
policymakers, the choice essentially came down to deciding between a ‘violent and
coercive’ communist solution, one that relied upon violent break-up of rural
societies, forced land appropriation from large landlords and individual landowners
and forcefully moving towards collective farming, as against a more ‘peaceful’
solution which initially relied upon land reforms through legislations, reforms which
promoted a more equitable distribution of agricultural land by way of providing
land to individual tillers and having in place a ceiling on maximum landholdings
and transforming the relations, practices, psyche and institutions of the peasantry
by way of ‘community development’ efforts, a solution offered by the so-called ‘free
world’. Pertinently, in making the case for the superiority of the later path, the U.S.
officials repeatedly invoked the occurrence of several severe famines in the making
of the Soviet planned economy (and later in the case of the Chinese) and its large-
scale transformation of rural societies.39 As they saw it, wherever communism went
famine followed (an entanglement that operated along with their other trope:
wherever famines went communism followed!) and a U.S. development aid backed
India would avoid this fate.40

From 1954, a part of this effort also included ‘food aid’ from the U.S. to India in the
form of it’s surplus wheat as per five-year duration agreements entered into by the
two countries under the aegis of the U.S. Public Law 480 (Agricultural Trade
Development and Assistance Act). Under these agreements India could pay for these
transfers in concessional terms in Indian rupees and thus conserve its own scarce
foreign exchange and utilize it for other ends. These Indian rupees were then
transferred back to India as part of other forms of U.S. economic development aid. It
also very conveniently allowed the U.S. to dispose off its own accumulated wheat
surpluses, surpluses that had accumulated as part of its ‘food aid’ policy for Western
Europe under the Marshall Plan.41

If ‘Third World’ development was a drama, then its genre of choice was definitely
romance and its denouement was the event of “take-off” 42 . 43 The theorist par
excellence of this purported pivotal stage within the drama of development was the

38 To employ the terminology recently used by the historian David Engerman, while there was
agreement amongst states belonging to all ‘Three worlds’ regarding the importance of improving
economic ‘performance’, the contest became over what form of ‘economic organization’ should be
adopted to achieve this ‘performance’ and what ‘priorities’ should be identified within it. See
Engerman, ‘The Romance of Economic Development’, p. 24.
39 The significant famines in question were the Russian Famine of 1932-34 and 1974, and the Chinese
Famine of 1958-62. See Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2009.
40 For a powerful account of how this conflation and displacement of famines onto ‘totalitarian
regimes’ continues to play out in current historical accounts of famines in China and the Soviet Union
see Samuel Moyn, ‘Totalitarianism, Famine and Us’, The Nation, 7 November 2012.
41 See James Warner Bjorkman, ‘Public Law 480 and the Policies of Self-Help and Short-Tether’, p.
360.
42 Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, pp. 36-58.
43 See Engerman, ‘The Romance of Economic Development’.
7

doyen of U.S. development economics and modernization theory at MIT (and soon to
be senior National Security Advisor to both President’s Kennedy and Johnson), Walt
Whitman Rostow.44 For Whitman, the take-off stage, and the necessarily preceding
“pre-conditions for take-off” 45 stage, were not only full of great developmental
promise, whereby ‘underdeveloped’ societies first stirred and then were poised to
accelerate historical time and leave behind the “lethargy of traditional economic
stagnation” 46 , but were also simultaneous fraught with great danger, as the
unmanaged desires that transition necessarily unleashed threatened the society
with disintegration and a disastrous “return to stagnation” 47 . Tellingly, he
compared take-off to an airplane’s initial ascent off the ground48, simultaneously the
most exhilarating part of the flight and the one most fraught with the possibilities of
this (air-)ship of the (post-colonial) state falling and disintegrating. To the
prospective Cold War as development dramatist he advised that India was poised at
this stage, and if disaster was to be avoided and a smooth transition to the Utopia
(“the age of High Mass-Consumption”49) ensured, then U.S. development assistance
was going to be essential.50It is noteworthy, at this stage, even Rostow was quite
clear that the in order to take-off India was required to emphasize rapid
industrialization as the rate of growth in the industrial sector would outstrip any
possible growth in the agricultural sector.51

For their part, the Indian policy elite both went along with parts of this cold war
script, while also re-formatting it for their own ends.52 Thus, while being very much
on board with the project of economic development and achieving ‘take-off’, they
balked at the idea of having to exclusively choose between either of the two models.
Instead they went about combining and mixing these available models and ended up
producing a development project cocktail of Soviet style five-year planning and an
emphasis on rapid large-scale industrialization, along with U.S. influenced
‘community development’ strategies for rural India.

The purchase of U.S. surplus wheat under the P.L. 480 agreements allowed Indian
policymakers to follow a development program primarily aimed at achieving rapid
and planned industrial development. Not only did these purchases, allow them to
conserve their foreign exchange and invest it in the import of inputs for heavy
industries, but also enabled the depression of prices for essential food items, thus
allowing industrialists to keep labor wages low without having to worry about labor
unrest and concomitantly to squeeze and transfer labor and capital from the

44 See Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, pp. 190-201.
46 Rostow and Hatch, An American Policy in Asia, p. 43.
48 Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, p. 193.
52 See Michael E. Latham, Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold
War to the Present, Cornell University Press, 2010, pp. 65-75
8

agricultural rural India to the factories of urban India.53 The ultimate solution to the
‘agrarian question’ imagined here was to simply transform peasants into disciplined
urban wage laborers working the furnace of industry.

During this initial decade and a half period after independence the main domestic
advocates for the dominant approach (referred to as the “industry first approach”),
were the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the powerful Indian
Planning Commission. During this period of the “Nehru settlement”, these two
significant actors, who had garnered a powerful jurisdictional authority over the
‘Indian economy’, primarily addressed their jurisdictional claims towards the
‘industrial sector’, as they conceived rapid industrialization as the most effective and
swiftest route towards achieving the goal of development. While they did try out
several institutional experiments in the ‘agricultural sector’, including land reform
and community management schemes, in order generate greater equity and
improve overall productivity, they did not support a large capital outlay for this
sector, reserving this instead for the ‘industrial sector’. Crucially, they failed to push
through any large-scale land redistribution, and were faced with serious
jurisdictional contestation from the provincial states backed by the jurisdictional
division schema enshrined in the Constitution on this front.54This approach, for its
own reasons, dovetailed well with the cold warriors own interests and
recommendations, at least at the time, for as the Rudolph’s have noted:

“Nehru used the food aid to pursue investments in Industry that he believed
would make India economically independent. The P.L. 480 food aid made it
possible for India to avoid the political costs of extracting food from the
countryside. India would industrialize like the Soviet Union but would avoid
sacrificing lives and freedom to do so. It was a bargain that benefitted both
participants. Nehru got what he wanted while American farmers, who were
producing enormous surpluses during these years, got the prices and income

53 See Essential Commodities Act, No. 10 of 1955. It should however be noted that these P.L. 480
transfers also had an inflationary effect on the Indian economy. See James Warner Bjorkman, ‘Public
Law 480 and the Policies of Self-Help and Short-Tether’, p. 367.
54 While the Rudolph’s observe of Nehru that: “…his mind and heart lay with industry. It and only it
could make India powerful and independent.” Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In
Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1987, p. 12. I would prefer a more jurisdictional reading. When we consider the case of India’s
ultimately stymied land redistribution efforts we find that a significant factor in making these
reforms so contested was on account of the constitutionally ordained federal structure as per which,
while industries were under the jurisdiction of the center, agriculture belonged within the
jurisdictional ambit of the state units. See The Constitution of India, ‘Seventh Schedule’, New Delhi:
Government of India, Ministry of Law and Justice (Legislative Department), (2016). As a result any
significant national-level policy measures in this area would require either getting the state units on
board or a reformulation of the constitutional jurisdictional schema that would strengthen the
powers of the center vis-à-vis the states. See Norman K. Nicholson, ‘Political Aspects of Indian Food
Policy’, Pacific Affairs 41, 1 (1968) 34-50.
9

they wanted. The publicly funded purchases of the Commodity Credit

Corporation helped maintain a floor under American agricultural prices.”55

III. Crisis of the U.S.-Indian Development Regime

The passing of two charismatic figures, J.F. Kennedy and Jawaharlal Nehru, within a
year of each other, by the mid-sixties signaled the onset of the crisis of this above
discussed development regime and the authorities associated with it in both India
and the US. In the case of the cold warriors in the US, the development optimism
about the race between India and China, which had reached its peak during the early
days of Camelot, began to go awry soon after.56As Engerman and Unger observe:

“The 1960s, which the Kennedy administration declared the ‘Development
Decade’, instead became the decade in which development programs and the
technocratic optimism that motivated them, ran aground, dashing hopes…”57

That this technocratic disillusionment only further strengthened a long-standing
antagonism towards the U.S. development project by a powerful section of U.S.
Congress Republicans must also be taken into account.58 This conservative section
of the U.S. establishment had not only remained unconvinced of Indian
development’s concrete foreign policy benefits but also saw in it the extraversion,
on a global level, of programs and policies that they domestically associated (and
fiercely opposed) – with the New Deal.59 Furthermore, in the specific case of India,
these Republicans - very capable of organizing strong opposition to proposed
developmental aid within the Congress - had progressively expressed an intense
dislike for Nehru, especially on account of their sense that despite years of ‘ unduly
generous’ U.S. development aid he had persisted with practicing an ‘unacceptable’
‘neutralism’ - both in terms of foreign and developmental policy, a performance
whereby the Indian’s were “playing both ends against the middle”60.

Another development was one which progressively rendered the P.L. 480 ‘food aid’
as food grain ‘surplus disposal’ untenable for the U.S. administration - namely, the
reconfiguration of the domestic political balance of powers in the U.S. in the wake of
the US Supreme Court decisions on electoral reapportionment. These judgments
reduced the power of the rural areas in the Congress and thus made the existing
farm subsidies granted up to that point at the behest of the rural lobby untenable,
which in turn rendered that annual surplus unsustainable.61 To add to all this,

55 Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, p. 319.
56 Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, pp. 98-99.
57 Engerman and Unger, ‘Towards a Global History of Modernization’, pp. 275-276.
58 Latham, Right Kind of Revolution, pp. 70-75.
59 Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, pp. 174-175.
60 Latham, Right Kind of Revolution, p. 71.
61 The main case in this regard was Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 217 (1962), after which the lower
courts proceeded to impose a one-man-one vote rule in the states. See Robert B. McKay,
‘Reapportionment: Success Story of the Warren Court’, Michigan Law Review 67, 2 (1968) 230. In its
10

primarily on account of the spiraling military expenditure generated by the ongoing

‘hot’ war in Vietnam, the U.S. was faced with a significant balance of payments crisis.

On the Indian side, this crisis was also the outcome of a longer series of events,
commencing in many ways with the reversals suffered by the second five-year plan
(1956-60) mid-way through its duration, in 1958, when things did not quite go
according to plan and India suffered from a foreign exchange shortage and a balance
of payment crisis and it required emergency debt relief. This eventually came by
way of the International Bank for Development and Reconstruction (IBRD) – which
later became the World Bank – led the Aid-India Consortium, that has been
described as being in the style of “multilateral aid coordination”62 and which was
heavily supported by its biggest contributor, the United States.63

Following on from this, the outbreak of the Sino-Indian War in 1962 and the heavy
reversals suffered by a visibly underprepared and ill-equipped Indian military force
had disastrous consequences particularly with regard to the previously uncontested
jurisdictional authority of Nehruvian developmentalism. 64 Not only was this a
reversal that reflected badly on his ‘enlightened’ foreign policy approach towards
China but it also reflected poorly on the claims made by his developmental regime to
having achieved progress towards making India a powerful ‘modern’ nation. 65 In
fact, it seemed to badly affect his own confidence in his actions and he never quite
recovered from this “erosion of authority”66.

There were further direct deleterious impacts on the developmental regime as only
one year into the third Five Year plan (1961-1965) the decision was made to
exponentially increase the defense budget. 67 The main brunt of this new
expenditure was borne by the already paltry allocations made to the agricultural
sector in this second successive Five Year Plan. This was soon followed by Nehru’s
death in May 1964 and in just over one year, in September 1965, India was engaged
in another war, this time with Pakistan. With wartime emergency measures in place,
strict food rationing was put into place and inflation also grew. Though this time
around the military campaign itself was a ‘success’, it precipitated the immediate
cessation of all aid from the U.S. to both countries, including Food Aid.

aftermath, as Cullather notes: “The suburban voters at the receiving end of the shift in electoral power
were expected to reinforce a trend in Congress toward supporting lower consumer prices rather than
higher farm incomes. With the Democratic Party’s base shifting from the country to the city, the era of
big subsidies and big surpluses was coming to an end, and Johnson was adapting policy to the new
conditions.” Cullather, ‘Scenes of Disaster’, pp. 179-180.
62 Akita, ‘The Aid-India Consortium, the World Bank, and the International Order of Asia, 1958-1968’,
Asian Review of World Histories 2,2 (2014) 217-248, p. 222.

63 Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, p. 74; Lewis, p. 85.
64 See Judith M. Brown, Nehru: A Political Life, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003,
pp. 316-337
65 See Cullather, The Hungry World, pp. 196-197.
66 Brown, Nehru, p. 316..
67 Brown, Nehru, p. 330.
11

While the overt aim of this measure was to bring about a cessation in hostilities
between both belligerents, when Food Aid resumed in its aftermath, it was made
conditional, short-term and now required direct Presidential approval (i.e. “short
tether policy”). As we will see, the condition the U.S. President spelled out pertained
to a re-orientation of the Indian developmental regime from a ‘lop-sided’ preference
towards industrialization to making heavy investments in re-organizing the
‘agricultural sector’. However, this narrative of corrective re-organization elides
how this ‘lop-sided’ developmental regime had been fundamentally enabled by pre-
existing U.S. policies, especially when it came to Food Aid, but also, as we have
previously noted, that it had been actively supported by cold war development
mandarins who had proclaimed that industrialization offered India the quickest path
to take-off.

The simple fact was that over a decade of Food Aid had fundamentally reoriented
the Indian economy and created a path-dependency that was definitely not only of
the Indian’s own making and this sudden attachment of conditionality’s created
acute food shortages and drove up inflation. It is important to emphasize that it is
misleading to describe this dip in food availability as being somehow ‘general’ – it
was, as always, differential in its impact, as the poorest Indians were the worst
affected. In terms of its differential impact in the countryside, this naturally entailed
a serious decrease in access to food amongst the landless peasantry. 68 Not
incidentally, this was a group created out of the failure of the developmental regime
to seriously pursue and implement policies of equitable land redistribution over the
past two decades, a failure again greatly enabled by the access to surplus U.S. Food
Aid.

All this precipitated growing unrest in both towns and the countryside, including
large-scale demonstrations and food riots. Writing a decade later, the American
political scientist, Francine Frankel, drew a picture of this crisis of food shortages
and rising inflation that seemed to confirm the actualization of the disaster
imaginary associated with the development as counter-insurgency paradigm:

“By the mid-1960s, the combination of food shortages, rising prices, and
increasing income disparities threatened to undermine much of the hard-won
gains in political stability achieved since Independence. Sections of the
population normally immune to agitational appeals were mobilized for
bandhs or general work stoppages to protest the “anti-peoples policies” of the
government…Trade union leaders, protesting rising prices, launched lightening
strikes for higher wages that tied up industries and services in large parts of
the country…Potential for violent protest was also evident in the countryside,
especially in regions where communist agitators were actively organizing
among the peasantry.”69

68 Brass, ‘The Political Uses of Crisis’.
69 Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947-1977: The Gradual Revolution, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 341.
12

It is in this historical context that the South Asian monsoon failed over consecutive
years, in 1965 and 1966.

IV. The Response and the Transformation Package: The Green Revolution

In the wake of this crisis what followed was a re-orientation of the Indian
development project and the US-Indian development relationship. At the heart of
this transformation was a series of policy reforms that have various referred to as
the “New Agricultural Strategy”70, agricultural modernization and (later) as the
“Green Revolution”71.

As described by various commentators, it was really a ‘package’ of reforms.72 This
included a technological component, namely in the form of specially engineered
High Yielding Varieties (HYV) of Seeds, that not only exponentially increased the
yield of certain crops (such as wheat and rice) but also required a concentrated
application of nitrogen fertilizers and water in order to be effective and increased
investments in mechanized agricultural inputs. It also included a component that
sought to actively transform Indian agriculture along market-based lines, including
introducing a market oriented agricultural ‘commodities’ pricing-support policy that
sought to make it profitable for agriculturists (no longer ‘peasants’) to increase
production, along with financial support for them in the form of loans from rural
banks. It also brought about a re-orientation of existing planning priorities and now
sought to prioritize obtaining the necessary inputs for this program of agricultural
modernization, such as nitrogen fertilizers, by utilizing precious foreign exchange.
Finally, partly in order to make all of the above fiscally feasible and to make the
Indian economy appear as an attractive destination for further international loans
and foreign investment, a de-regulation and ‘liberalization’ of the ‘agricultural
sector’ of the economy was also undertaken. 73

As these reforms progressed over the course of three years - between 1965 to 1968
- there was a marked reversal of the transfer of resources between urban and rural
sectors of the economy, as well as the explicit favoring of certain regions over others
when it came to the transferring resources within the rural economy, both

70 C. Subramaniam, The New Agricultural Strategy: The First Decade and After, New Delhi: Vikas
Publishing House, 1979.

71 Scholars trace the coining of the term back to William S. Gaud, then head of USAID, in a speech he
delivered to the Society for International Development in Washington DC in 1968. See Patel, ‘The
Long Green Revolution’, p. 5.
72 Amrith, ‘Risk and the South Asian Monsoon’.
73 As Cullather notes, this “package” ticked all the basic boxes of the liberalization of an economy: “…a
37 percent devaluation of the rupee, shifting cotton acreage to wheat… relaxed control on the private
sector, and opening state industries, including fertilizer, to foreign investors…”Cullather, The Hungry
World, p. 225.
13

developments which went totally against both the urban bias and the immaculate
emphasis on maintaining regional equality in the Nehruvian economy.74

The fundamental question that arises for our purposes is how did this
transformative response get formulated and actualized? Before proceeding to
provide what I believe is the most persuasive answer, I would first like to mention
two extremely influential and, in my estimation, erroneous responses to this
question.

Firstly, there is the realist contention that this transformation was simply an
externally imposed fiat of the cold warriors, including the U.S. government, and the
philanthropic institutions associated with it, such as the Ford Foundation and the
Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Bank (though clearly, as we will see, all these
actors did indeed push for, and enabled, this transformation).

To begin with, very much in keeping with what several other scholars, prominently
including Ashutosh Varshney, have clearly established, such an account simply gets
the timeline of events completely wrong. Important sections of the Indian
development establishment had already initiated these reforms before pressure
began to be applied on them to do so by ‘external actors’.75 This realist account not
only simply elides this element of domestic initiative but more significantly, entirely
ignores the long history of a powerful domestic constituency within the Indian
development elite supporting this transformation.

This competing position within the Indian development discourse, referred to as the
‘agriculture first’ group, advocated for a favoring of agriculture over the demands of
industry, in what they viewed as being primarily an ‘agricultural economy’,
especially in terms of provision of livelihood. While the crisis of the Nehruvian
developmental regime had allowed this group to make a bid to exert control over
reins of the country’s development regime - now including within their ranks the
new Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri and his Minster for Agriculture and Food,
C.S. Subramaniam - this line of contestation within the Indian development elite had

74 See C. Subramaniam, The New Agricultural Strategy.
75 This argument is well supported by the excellent detailed analysis of this transformation provided
by the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney. See Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, development, and
the countryside: Urban-rural struggles in India, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998, pp. 48-80. To draw out this gist of this Varshney’s argument it is useful to quote Stuart
Corbridge and John Harris: “The United States government, under Johnson, tied the continuation of
Public Law 480 food aid…to much of the same set of policy changes [i.e. the liberalization package]. But
these external influences coincided with internal pressure for change…and it is simply not true to argue,
as some have done, that the policy changes which came about at this time were the result of ‘American’
or ‘World Bank’ intervention. Key players in the ‘home team’ had shown their hands before the push for
change came from the outside…Shastri also appointed C. Subramaniam as Minister of Agriculture, and
Subramaniam led the decisive move away from the institutional approach from the institutional
approach to agricultural development preferred under Nehru to what he himself referred to as the ‘New
Agricultural Strategy’.” Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India, pp. 70-71.
14

pre-existed decolonization, and already marked a divide amongst anti-colonial

nationalists taking up the discourse of development.

Crucially, once we take seriously the history of this contestation and the competing
set of arguments it mobilized, we are immediately struck by what is actually shared
by and ultimately holds together these developmentalist factions, for as Akhil Gupta
notes:

“Among leading anticolonialists, the two main positions on the agrarian
question were more similar than their protagonists would have dared to admit.
One side argued that industrialization was a precondition for agricultural
improvement, and the other, that the application of scientific knowledge to
agriculture was the most urgent task, given that the economy would continue
to depend mainly on agriculture in the foreseeable future…Postcolonial
discourses of development in India continued to reflect the tension between the
those segments among the ruling elites who emphasized industrialization at all
costs and those who thought that because industrial growth depended on
adequate and reliable supplies of food, the first task of the new nation-state
should be to raise agricultural productivity through the application of scientific
knowledge.”76

As will become clear from the discourse emanating from these ‘agriculture first’
folks championing this transformation that we will analyze in the next section, this
fundamental commonality extended to conceiving development as entailing rapid
economic growth and the attainment of the development telos as demanding
accelerated economic take-off and the securing of status of total sovereign self-
sufficiency for the developmentalist state.77 While the route taken was no doubt
different both the ultimate developmentalist goal and the belief in the necessity for
speed in the journey were shared.78

Even more significantly, this commonality between the two developmentalist
factions, points towards a convergence and commonality between them and the re-
configured U.S. Cold War developmentalist establishment. Ultimately, as I hope to

76 Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1998, p. 44 and p. 48.

77 Here it is instructive to note Cullather’s analysis of Subramaniam’s agricultural transformation, as
not representing a “radical break with developmental orthodoxy” but rather a continuation with
transformed emphasis on making agriculture more productive and thus calling for a more radical
developmental transformation of the agricultural sector than had previously been envisioned by the
development project. As he puts it: “Like earlier interventions, it was designed to induce a mental
awakening. Subramaniam hoped for a “shock” that would instill a modern outlook on family planning,
education, and the market. The price-credit-fertilizer-contraceptive combination would, according to
Rockefeller advisers, “overcome the lethargy associated with traditional farming.” Tellingly, proponents
did not defend farmer’s entitlements to fair prices or technology; instead, they presented these as
motivational tools. The package would galvanize peasants to work harder to fill industry’s needs.”
Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 209.
78 See Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 209.
15

show more clearly in the next section, they continued to share (though not without a
degree of respective contestation) a dynamic of developmentalist futures and
disaster imaginaries for India. However, this does mean that these different actors
were themselves always necessarily aware of this commonality, or at least wanted
to publicly let on that they were. The analysis of the interaction between the two
establishments in this case provided by American political scientists Lloyd and
Susanne Rudolph, namely that this was a case where the cold warriors, were both
“leaning against open doors” and also enabling the shift in strategy, especially by
way of making available the necessary technological inputs, is perhaps most
accurate.79

This commonality also does not mean the lack of contestation, opposition and
struggle between these different elite actors, let alone on the part of the countless
others whose lifeworlds were being transformed by their actions. This is why, it is
my contention that approaching this transformation in terms of active processes of
authorization – whereby we are dealing with effects of force rather than some
overwhelming and uni-directional absolute power – is more illuminating.
Furthermore, as I hope to show in the next section, it is the particular authorizing
force generated by disaster imaginary that authorized this agricultural
transformation and not only re-established the U.S.-Indian development regime but
even expanded its jurisdiction.

Secondly, there is the more revisionist contention that we ultimately owe this
transformation simply to pure chance or, as Varshney would have it, to “the
serendipity of the monsoon”80.

As I will try to show, in the section that follows, ‘disasters’ don’t simply just occur,
(and certainly never in a vacuum) and somehow extraneously determine social
processes of ordering the world. Rather, active work goes into their mobilization
and framing.

I contend that the ‘Bihar famine’ was “the pivotal event of India’s agricultural
transition”81. That said, I do hope to show how this determinative role had little to
do with serendipity and a lot to do with the force of authorization generated by the
active work of mobilizing and framing of disaster imaginaries by particular actors
and factions within both the U.S. and Indian sections of the U.S.-Indian development
regime.

79 As they observed: “The question of whether India adopted a production-oriented agricultural
strategy in 1964-65 because of United States and/or World Bank pressure or whether the World Bank
and the United States were “leaning against open doors,” probably requires a “both/and” answer.”
Rudolph and Rudoplh, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, pp. 322-323.
80 Varshney, Democracy, development, and the countryside, p. 57.
16

V. Authorizing the Green Revolution Package: The Force of Disaster

Imaginaries

a) The U.S. Framing and Mobilization of the Disaster Imaginary

It was the administration of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson that inherited the
crisis ridden U.S.-Indian development relationship and consequently, the
development as counter-insurgency paradigm. It was Johnson, who has been
described as someone with “a flair for political dramatics” 82 , who played a
significant role in authorizing the ‘Green Revolution’ as a response that the U.S.
attempted to not only press upon the Indians, but also upon an important skeptical
domestic audience, as well as a more international audience primarily made of
certain ‘developed states’ and the World Bank. In doing so, he both transformed and
consolidated the U.S.-India development regime and also expanded
U.S./international jurisdiction over the Indian economy.

As I will try to show in this section, the key to this transformation lay in his
successful re-framing and mobilization of ‘Third World famines’, specifically his re-
framing and mobilization of the ‘Bihar famine’, that he described in apocalyptical
terms as India’s “worst threat of starvation in a hundred years” 83 , and thus
authorizing actions which otherwise would have been jurisdictionally highly
contested. Crucially, this produced a more acute disaster threat to U.S. national
security and hence mobilized a powerful and re-figured Cold War disaster
imaginary to authorize U.S. developmental policies. Johnson himself clearly
recognized: mobilized disasters generate excellent dramatic openings for
authorizing violent developmental action.84

i) (Re-)Framing Famine and Re-Figuring the Cold War Disaster Imaginary

Given the previously mentioned unease amongst several Republicans regarding the
desirability of the Indian development program, the ongoing balance of payments
crisis and the lack of support in the U.S. Congress for a continuation of U.S. farm
subsidies, the Johnson administration seemingly faced a seemingly insurmountable
crisis when it came to preserving the U.S.-Indian development regime. How did it
manage to not only (re-)authorize the Food Aid program but also authorize further
transfers to enable the ‘Green Revolution’? My argument in this sub-section is that
this authorization was a consequence of the re-figuring of the U.S. Cold War disaster
imaginary on account of the re-framing of the disaster of ‘famine’ in India,
specifically in terms of its causation, and the mobilization of its potential disastrous
impact on U.S. national security.

83 Johnson, The Vantage Point, p. 223.
84 As he put it: “The new crisis created problems but also, I believed opportunities. If we went about in
the right way, I thought we could encourage increasingly far-reaching changes in India’s farm policy
and in the supporting actions of other nations.” Johnson, The Vantage Point, p. 228.
17

To re-cap, in the development as counter-insurgency paradigm, famine was
represented as being an endemic part of the Indian reality, a part of the perennial
‘agrarian problem’, one which made the Indians particularly susceptible to the
threat of a ‘red revolution’ and which ultimately needed to be averted in order for
the U.S. itself to be secured from ‘cold war disasters’ of its own. What transforms is
that to this hunger-communism dyad gets added the demographic element of
increasing population, the unreconstructed Malthusian element in the Johnson
administration’s ‘famine’ re-framing. Thus, what emerges from this is the
“population-national security theory”85, as per which it is the gap between a fast
growing ‘Third World’ population and a static agriculture that is at the disastrous
root of the hunger of the peasantry.86

The basic framing of famines, in this case was informed by a Malthusian framework,
wherein ‘agrarian problem’ was (re)cast in purely productivist terms and thus
famines conceived in terms of a failure to adequately respond to and keep up with
the (natural and calculable) increase in the population – or as Gupta puts it “the
specter of increasing population”87. Gupta goes onto observe:

“The “problem with Indian agriculture” was…theorized in terms of food
production keeping up with population growth. Proof that population had
outpaced food supply was found in the fact that “during the past 400 years the
country had suffered 45 famines…”88

85 John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War, New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 259-260.

86 As Orville Freeman, Johnson’s trusted Secretary of Agriculture, put it in an article that cited
Malthus’s “gloomy prognosis” as established wisdom: “For our purposes I would like to…say “Security
is food.” Without an adequate supply of food in the developing countries, the prospects for economic and
political stability are not good.” Orville L. Freeman, ‘Malthus, Marx and the North American
Breadbasket’, p. 592. See also Orville L. Freeman, World Without Hunger, New York et al.: Frederick A.
Praeger Publishers, 1968.
87 Gupta, Postcolonial Development, p. 54.
88 Gupta, Postcolonial Development, p. 58. This Malthusian construction of the ‘famine’ on the part of
the cold warriors, embellished with dramatic renderings of looming disaster, was later re-stated by
Johnson in a chapter in his autobiography that was dedicated to the ‘Indian Food Crisis’. In it he
recalled his first impressions from his tour of India as Vice President in 1961: “I saw for the first time
in my life what writers have so often described as the “teeming masses of Asia.” One look at these rows of
packed humanity told me better than any elaborate technical report what India’s “population problem”
meant. The worn and shabby clothing of many of the people made me aware of their abject poverty. I
saw children with fat stomachs, bloated not from eating too much but from eating too little…I saw
portions of the Indian countryside…it was depressing to observe that primitive plows hitched to water
buffalo were still being used to till the soil…I saw little or no irrigation and I wondered how India could
ever feed its growing population under these circumstances. If the rains are good, I thought, they can
probably get along, but one real dry spell and they are in trouble.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage
Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963-1969, New York et al.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p.
222.
18

The Malthusian framing constructed the causation of the famine in naturalized

terms, sans any distributional decisions producing it, with population appearing as:

“…an independent and external variable, with its own inexorable logic,
unconnected to the distributional and welfare consequences of the techniques
and methods of production. The metaphor of a race between production and
population puts them into separate and unconnected tracks, the logic being
that if one did nothing about production, population would simply zoom away
and “win” the race.”89

In this casting, the natural force here is entirely predictable and certain - in its
arithmetic growth it drew comparisons with a ‘ticking bomb’, one that ultimately
threatened U.S. national security.90As Orville Freeman, Johnson’s trusted Secretary
for Agriculture, formulated it:

“As a nation we must cease asking how much how much it will cost to solve the
food/population problem and begin asking how much it will cost if we fail to
solve the problem in the allotted time. Time is the critical dimension. Today’s
hungry countries must compress the progress of centuries into decades and
decades into years if they are to feed their rapidly multiplying peoples.”91

Ultimately, this re-configured the Cold War disaster imaginary. Now the threatening
disaster for the cold warriors was one where the U.S. would be overwhelmed by a
ever-growing and famished swarm of ‘Third World peasants’ turned communist
insurgents.92

It was in this context, with all its active work of re-framing and re-configuring, that,
in December 1965, Johnson dramatically announced an ongoing and imminent
famine in India.93

89 Gupta, Postcolonial Development, pp. 55-56.
90 As William and Paul Paddock (one an agronomist and plant pathologist and the other a former
Foreign Service Officer at the US State Department) put it in their popular sensationalist book from
1967 that announced the imminent collision between increasing population and slowing agricultural
production globally by the year 1975 (unless the U.S. stepped in and acted): “The famines which are
now approaching will not, in contrast, be caused by weather variations and therefore will not be ended
in a year or so by the return of normal rainfall. They will last for years, perhaps several decades, and
they are, for a surety, inevitable. Ten years from now parts of the undeveloped world will be suffering
from famine. In fifteen years the famines will be catastrophic and revolutions and social turmoil and
economic upheavals will sweep areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” William and Paul Paddock,
Famine – 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive?, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and
Company, 1967, p. 8. See also Ronald Segal, The crisis of India, Penguin Books, 1965.
91 Freeman, ‘Malthus, Marx and the North American Breadbasket’, p. 593.
92 On the naturalization of peasant actions in the discourse of counter-insurgency see Ranajit Guha,
‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, p. 46. Ultimately both the vagaries of nature and the
unpredictable violence of the peasantry demand developmental mastery.
93 See Cullather, The Hungry World.
19

At display was how, with the necessary framing and mobilization, the disaster
imaginary generated tremendous force to authorize a ‘speedy’ developmental
response that claimed to focus on generating a rapid increase in the agricultural
production in India by the way of the application of ‘cutting-edge’ technology.94 The
P.L. 480 was duly re-authorized and the ‘Green Revolution’ package also supported.

Staying with this point regarding the role of particular technology in this entire
process I would add that this re-framing of the disaster was in many ways co-
produced by particular technologies for modeling and predicting famines in the field
of demographics. Specifically, this meant the statistical modeling technologies for
forecasting famines worldwide that were devised in the U.S. by economists working
with Economic Research Service (ERS), a unit in the U.S. Government dealing
particularly with long-range forecasting, in the early 1960s.95

ii) Creating an International Developmental Authority and Responisibilizing the ‘Third
World’

Another aspect of Johnson’s re-framing of famine and mobilization of the ‘Bihar
Famine’ specifically sought to further address the acute balance of payments crisis
faced by the Americans, and to also respond to the skepticism on the part of those in
the U.S. establishment who felt that they were not getting enough ‘bang for their
development buck’ and were alone having to bear this burden.

Basically, it was the Johnson administrations’ framing of the threat created by
‘famines’ in global terms that proved to be decisive in this regard. This global
framing of the ‘disastrous’ problem was mobilized them to try to bring about an

94 Pertinently, around this time, competing Malthusian narratives emerged that painted an even
gloomier picture of the disastrous future to come, including Paul Elrich’s widely influential 1968 U.S.
bestseller, The Population Bomb. Elrich suggested that responses that focused on raising agricultural
production were no longer going to be adequate as “…the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the
1970’s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in
spite of any crash programs embarked on now.” As historians William Connolly has shown, this
narrative, which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the authorization of the ‘Green Revolution’
in India, was to later authorize the draconian forced sterilization campaigns in the country during the
mid-1970s during the ‘emergency’ regime of Indira Gandhi. See William Connolly, Fatal
Misconception.
95 Cullather writes: “Working from demographic projections and the FAO’s country balance sheets, they
constructed a “world food budget” indicating total supply and requirements five years into the
future…they concentrated on key staples such as rice and wheat. They adapted techniques used by the
CIA to gauge dietary levels in the Soviet Union and China, translating data for bulk crops into calories
and multiplying population projections against national standards…to estimate per capita availability.
The budget documented a sinking trend in which the number of calories per Asian was falling and
would soon drop into negative figures…This model represented a significant change in the way famine
was understood.” Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 219.
20

“international sharing of the burden” amongst the other ‘developed’ nations. 96 As

Johnson declared to the U.S Congress:

“Hunger is a world problem. It must be dealt with by the world.”97

In keeping with this ‘internationalization of development’ Johnson also began to
actively involve the World Bank and sought impress upon its new chief, George
Wood why the state of India’s agriculture should be the Bank’s concern. 98

What we see here is the creation of an international authority whose jurisdiction
gets extended into the ‘Third World’ and is organized around the threat and
occurrence of famines. Noting the significance of the ‘Bihar famine’ for the creation
of this international jurisdiction, one that in the decades to come got further
consolidated and extended, Cullather observes:

“Illuminated by Johnson’s klieg lights, famine gained a new significance in
international affairs. Cataclysms unleashed by drought or the market formerly
challenged local authorities but aroused little or no high-level diplomatic
response. Johnson turned them into rituals of global leadership, a substitute for
the periodic superpower showdowns that once offered the only demonstration
of allied and domestic solidarity.”99

While it was certainly bandied about as some sort of a international sharing of the
burden of India’s development, as a consequence of which the U.S. responsibility in
bringing this about was somehow diluted, one needs to bear in mind a couple of

96 Johnson himself described this as being one of the key shifts in the foreign policy enacted by his
administration, observing that this meant: “…to emphasize our realization that world problems had
grown far too large, too numerous, and too complicated for the United States to deal with alone. The
time had come for other prosperous and advanced nations to take on an increasing share of
responsibility for the world’s stability and progress.” Johnson, The Vantage Point, p. 223. This also
signaled a shift in the U.S. approach towards the development drama, whereby it was no longer
played out as a race between a purported communist model and a U.S. model but was rather
transformed into a site for staging international cooperation on which “confidence building and
collaboration between superpowers” could be performed. Cullather, ‘LBJ’s Third War’, p. 135.
97 Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘Special Message to the Congress: Food for Freedom’, February 10, 1966. See
also Nick Cullather, ‘Beyond the Cold War: Lyndon Johnson and the New Global Challenges of the
1960s’, in Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood eds., Beyond the Cold War: Lyndon Johnson and the New
Global Challenges of the 1960s, OUP, 2014. Cullather brings to the fore how a significant audience for
this was the remaining U.S. establishment when he writes: “As the National Security Council observed,
a “fully visible international sharing of the burden was necessary to maintain America’s will in the field
of aid and to help offset dangerous isolationist pressures in the other areas of foreign policy.”””
Cullather, The Hungry World, pp. 230.
98 Paul W. Hammond, LBJ and the Presidential Management of Foreign Affairs, pp. 77-79. Amongst
other things, this lead to the creation of a consortium under the auspices of the World Bank, which,
apart from the U.S., also included Canada, Australia, Japan, U.K., Austria, Belgium, France, West
Germany, Italy and the Scandinavian countries, who now provided ‘assistance’ to India in order for it
to procure the grains that it required from outside (grains that it had earlier been importing
exclusively from the U.S. as part of the P.L. 480 agreement). See Johnson, The Vantage Point, p. 230.
99 Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 229..
21

important features of this re-structuring of (international) developmental authority.

Firstly, what this essentially entailed was a sharing of the security burden,
something that would be crystal clear if we retain the understanding of
development as cold war counter-insurgency.

Secondly, any talk of the dilution of American responsibility for India’s development
in this shift did not entail any dilution of the ‘superpower’s’ authority. Rather what
we witness is a further garnering of development authority through the
displacement of the actual responsibility for achieving ‘development’ onto the
Indian ‘beneficiaries’. In the decades to come, this was to consolidate into an
established structuring feature of the relationship between the global North and the
‘Third World’. Namely, with the “short tether policy” adopted by the Johnson
administration towards the Public Law 480 ‘food aid’ to India, that reformed it in
terms of the “principle of self-help”, one that required the Indian’s to periodically
impress upon the U.S. via submissions that it was taking the necessary reforms in
their ‘domestic economic policies’ to bring them in line with what the U.S.
policymakers considered as sound economic policy to deal with the threat of
‘famine’, thus purportedly fulfilling ‘their side’ of the development bargain.100As
Johnson saw it, ‘food aid’ to India needed to be transformed into a “conditional
gift”101 and the terms of amendments to the P.L. 480 program now required:

“…the president to make periodic judgments regarding the progress of
recipients in lessening their dependence on donated food. Countries like India
submitted blueprints for raising agricultural productivity. If the blueprints
failed to pass muster or if the countries’ actions failed to match the blueprints,
the program’s enabling legislation mandated a suspension. Because the
president was the one judging success and failure, he possessed enormous
power over this key area of foreign policy.”102

In the specific case of ‘food aid’ supplies to India, this ‘blueprint’ took the form of the
secret agreement entered into by Freeman and Subramaniam in November 1965 in
Rome (while attending the FAO biennial conference), which included the main
features of the ‘Green Revolution’ package – which was promptly formally adopted
by the Indian Parliament on the 7th of December 1965.103Johnson’s approval of these
development policy reforms came in the way of his own prompt authorization of the

100 Johnson, The Vantage Point, pp. 225-226.
101 H.W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism, p. 140.
102 Brands, The Wages of Globalism, p. 140-141. See Sections 101 and 103 Food for Peace Act of 1966.
103 Very much in keeping with both Johnson’s (and, as we shall see Subramaniam’s) keen sense for
how disaster imaginary mobilization was going to be crucial to authorizing this transformation, one
section of the agreement stated: “It was agreed that efforts to dramatize and mobilize public sentiment
to demonstrate the urgency of action in agriculture would be made. Such actions as public statements
by the President, Prime Minister and other leading public officials will be used even more in the future.”
Agreement between Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman and Minister of Food and Agriculture
C. Subramaniam, November 1965, Rome, Italy, available at:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v25/d253 (last accessed 21/Dec./2016).
22

release of one and a half million tones of wheat as part of the ‘food aid’ supply and a
fifty million dollar fertilizer loan by way of AID.104 This should be seen as operating
in conjunction with internationalization of development aid and the important role
therein played by the World Bank led consortium previously mentioned, we must
also mention here the recommendations contained in the report of a group of
experts appointed by the World Bank (known as the ‘Bell Mission Report’) who had
conducted a review India’s economic development performance in 1964-1965, and
which included a call for India to make more capital intensive investment the
agricultural sector and away from heavy industrialization, and to also devalue its
currency.105

What we see here is the operation of an early iteration of the logic of
responsibilization of the ‘Third World’ for their own transformation in order to bear
the burden of securing the ‘superpower’ from their own citizens, in which the ‘Third
World’ assumed the position of the supplicant and ‘the North’ that of the
authoritative judge with the necessary jurisdiction to make these disciplinary
demands. In the next decade or so, with the rise of International Financial
Institution (IFI) conditionalities and the Structural Adjustments in the wake of the
debt crisis, this was further consolidated.106

b) The Indian framing and mobilization of ‘famine’: Centralization of Authority
and localization of responsibility

By early 1966, as India reeled under another Prime Ministerial change (as Shastri
died after suffering a sudden heart-attack and Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, was
selected by party bosses to replace him), it had started becoming clear that the
country was faced with the prospect of a widespread failure of the monsoon for the
second successive year. By most estimates, one of the worst affected Indian states
by conditions of drought this time around was the populous northern state of Bihar.

104 John P. Lewis, India’s Political Economy: Governance and Reform, Delhi et al.: Oxford University
Press, 1995, p. 113.

105 The agricultural component of this review was headed by the Australian economist and civil
servant, Sir John Crawford. See The Report to the President of the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development [IBRD] and the International Development Association [IDA] on
India's Economic Development Effort, 1965.
106 The ‘material’ nature of this temporal connection comes across in the World Bank’s own
assessment of the lessons learnt from the role played by the ‘Food Aid Consortium’ during the Indian
‘famine’ crisis: “The Consortium can probe deeper and recommend stronger changes in Indian
development policies and programs than an individual donor country, since its international character
eliminates problems of national sensitivities and sovereignty.” World Bank, Working Paper: India
Consortium, July, 1968. As John Lewis, the resident director of USAID Mission to India during this
entire period, was to later observe in an influential tract penned mid-1990’s: “…the early Indian story
is highly relevant to contemporary policy-based lending.” Lewis, India’s Political Economy, p. 61. More
recently, Jason Kirk, in his work on the relationship between India and the World Bank, has noted:
“…some of the very same Bank personnel involved in the dialogue with India in the mid-1960s…would
go on, a decade-and-a-half later, to serve as key architects of the structural adjustment loan
instrument.” Jason K. Kirk, India and the World Bank: The Politics of Aid and Influence, London et al.:
Anthem Press, 2010, p. 21.
23

As previously mentioned, the Johnson regime had already started declaring the
existence of a famine in India by late 1965 and when Gandhi made her first foreign
trip as Prime Minister to the US to request Johnson to release extra P.L. Food Aid to
tide over the shortage he and his administration put great pressure on her to follow
suit. Gandhi however resisted. Over the next year or so it became clear that when it
came to disaster imaginary mobilization on the part of these advocates of the ‘Green
Revolution’ in India, actually declaring the occurrence of a famine entailed a very
different set of calculations for the Indians than it did for Johnson and his cold
warriors. In the following sub-section I intend to show why such a declaration was
not desirable for the Indian development elite, while in the subsequent sub-section I
intend to bring out how the threat of the famine was indeed successfully mobilized
by them to garner developmental authority against their ‘industry first’ rivals, and in
the final sub-section show what particular framing of the disaster imaginary actually
allowed them to actually declare the famine eventually and to mobilize it to extend
the jurisdiction of the developmentalist central state into the Indian countryside.

i) The Specter of Famines and (Post)colonial Developmental Authority

In order to better understand this distinction between the Indian and US
approaches one needs to bear in mind the centrality of famines for the
developmental authority and jurisdiction of the Indian developmentalist state, in
both its colonial and postcolonial avatars.

As historians of South Asia have shown, famine policies had always been closely
identified with the emergence of a developmentalist discourse in colonial India, both
in terms of the nationalist anti-colonial critique and the colonial state’s strategies to
ground its jurisdictional claim.107It is in this context that there was an enactment of
this developmental jurisdiction by the British ‘developmentalist’ colonial state in the
form of its Famine Codes, which has been described as “the first modern reaction to
famine” 108 and was one of the most extensive developmental policies of the 19th
century. While the jurisdictional claim of this Indian developmental authority
essentially hinged on the successful aversion of famines, this was a relationship full
of paradox and tension. For, as we will see in the next sub-section, without the
palpable threat of famine, or famine as a problem to be averted, resolved and
overcome, the necessary authorizing force of disaster imaginary to sustain
developmental jurisdiction, and hence developmental authority, dissipated.

As was previously mentioned, large-scale famines were associated by the Indian
nationalists with the ‘dark days’ of British colonial rule and its ‘deliberate
underdevelopment’ of India. The claim to jurisdiction of the postcolonial
developmentalist state greatly drew upon a staging of a rupture from that colonial

107 See David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 182-
185.
108 David Rieff, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century, New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2015, p. 21
24

past and successfully developing India into a country where all such disastrous
famines were a ‘thing of the past’.109 For our purposes, this explains why any
acknowledgement of the widespread existence of a famine after almost two decades
of the postcolonial development project would have been deleterious to the
jurisdictional claims of the Indian developmentalist state. I would argue that it is
this anxiety for developmental jurisdiction that explains the initial reluctance on the
part of the Indian policymakers to go along with Johnson, and actually issue
vehement denials, when he initially started making these claim.110

That said, all through this postcolonial period a more spectral presence of famines
did indeed generate a powerful authorizing force for the developmental jurisdiction.
As Amrith observes:

“The perceived threat of large-scale famine haunted Nehru’s generation. The
most recent of these disasters, the Bengal famine of 1942-3, had killed three
million people, and was still fresh in the collective memory. Bearing in mind
this sense of crisis helps to explain the sense of urgency underpinning the
deployment of state power – including its coercive power – to undertake
large-scale projects…”111(emphasis supplied)

ii) Subramaniam, disaster imaginary mobilization and the authorization of
the Green Revolution

In many ways, the Indian counter-part to the populist Johnson in the authorization
of the ‘Green Revolution’ was the technocrat, C.S. Subramaniam, who had been
appointed as the new Minister for Food and Agriculture by Nehru’s successor to
Prime Ministership, Lal Bahadur Shastri. Subramaniam had previously been the
Minister for Steel and Mines under Nehru, a portfolio intimately associated with the
heavy industrialization that Nehru so privileged. As Subramaniam was informed by
several others, this new appointment was widely perceived to be a punishment

109 It is instructive to note that this practice of displacing disasters oto a ‘ruptured from past’ in order
to ground jurisdictional authority in the present was itself one which had a well-established colonial
pedigree. See Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers
and the Literary Cultures of South Asia, Hampshire and New York: palgrave macmillan, 2013, pp. 35-
36.
110 An editorial published in early March 1966 in Yojana, a journal published on behalf of the
Planning Commission, exemplified this initial line, clearly contesting the American Malthusian
‘famine’ framing when observing: “True, population has grown, too, and prices have gone up. It is rise
in prices and expectations, and inadequacies of distribution, that are at the base of our current food
troubles much more than any actual absence of food-grains. Despite the worst failure of rains in a
century, the harvest is not certainly among the poorest in memory. This in itself is a tribute to the
substantial advance we have made in strengthening our agriculture. If such a thing had happened
before freedom, the result would have been catastrophic. Let us not forget…that the death roll in Bengal
alone in 1943-44 was three million and more. Even a millionth of it happening now is unthinkable. It
will not be allowed…The Prime Minister therefore is very correct in saying that there is no famine in the
country. There is not and will not be any starvation.” Editorial, ‘Food, 1966’, Yojana X, 5 (1966) 1, p. 1.
111 Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Risk and the South Asian monsoon’, 2015.
25

posting, a fall from the heights of the command economy as Minister of Steel to the
depths of the Ministry known as the “graveyard of reputations”112. However, this
reading of the appointment was a clear misreading of Shastri’s larger designs for
agriculture. Shastri, who went onto to coin the iconic slogan, Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!
(Hail the Soldier! Hail the Farmer!), in the euphoric aftermath of the military victory
over Pakistan in the summer of 1965, clearly invested great hope in Subramaniam
helping him in bringing about a transformation in development policy towards one
which favored an ‘agriculture first’ model and vigorously backed Subramaniam in
his various contests against factional opponents over this period.113Subramaniam,
for his part, brought with him a technocratic vision that failed to distinguish
between the logics, institutions and concerns of the industrial and agricultural
sectors and promising to undertake the same efforts at ‘modernization’ that he had
adopted for the Steel and Mining Sector to the hitherto ‘neglected agricultural
sector’. 114 It was this effort to ‘modernize’ Indian agriculture that Subramaniam saw
as being at stake in his proposed ‘New Agricultural Strategy’.115

What is relevant for us here is that in order to push through this ‘New Agricultural
Strategy’, against the pushback by its opponents (including stalwarts of the ‘industry
first’ approach in the Planning Commission and the Minister of Finance, T.T.
Krishnamachari), he mobilized his own disaster imaginary.116

112 The lack of jurisdictional authority of the Ministry no doubt played a large role in this reputation.
Nicholson, ‘Political Aspects of Indian Food Policy’, p. 35.

113 In fact, one must acknowledge the undeniable work of disaster imaginary mobilization Shastri
himself performed for the ‘Green Revolution’ package. This came by way of his powerful symbolic
linking together of the war with Pakistan, in September 1965, with the struggle for overcoming the
‘agricultural crisis’ in the wake of the drought of 1965 amidst the growing uncertainty of Johnson’s
‘short-tether’ policy – a linkage clearly suggested by the above-mentioned slogan. In a radio speech
that he delivered to the nation in October 1965, in the aftermath of the war, he drew an equation
between the sacrifices on the part of soldiers in the struggle to preserve the security of the nation in
the disaster of war with the sacrifices of the farmer to preserve the ‘food security’ of the nation. By
doing so he sought to authorize ‘other measures’ (i.e. the ‘Green Revolution’ package that had already
been placed before the Planning Commission in August 1965) that were required victory in this other
struggle. Lal Bahadur Shastri, Produce More Food and Preserve our Freedom, Broadcast over All India
Radio, Delhi, 10th October, 1965 op cit. Madhumita Saha, State policy, agricultural research and
transformation of Indian agriculture with reference to basic food-crops, 1947-75, Graduate Theses and
Dissertations. Paper 12450, 2012, p. 123. See also Lal Bahadur Shastri, ‘Produce More Food and
Preserve our Freedom’, Indian Farming 15, 7 (1965) 3-4.
114 See Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 209.
115 See C. Subramaniam, Hand of Destiny: Volume II Green Revolution, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan, 1995; Subramaniam, New Agricultural Strategy.

116 As Subramaniam later described it, the crux of the struggle was a jurisdictional one over the
jurisdictional authority to determine and regulate the price being offered agricultural produce within
India as well as over both internationally procuring and subsidizing the distribution of fertilizers to
Indian agriculturists. Both the Finance Ministry and the Planning Commission saw these questions as
falling within their proper remit and also opposed any approach which sought to transfer resources
from the industrial to the agricultural sector, one which providing price incentives to agriculturists to
grow more crops and internationally procuring and subsidizing the distribution of fertilizers no
doubt did. See Subramaniam, Hands of Destiny, pp. 109-119.
26

Much like in the case of Johnson, one of the key outcomes of this disaster imaginary
mobilization included a reorganization of the development establishment whereby,
the Planning Commission’s vice-like grip over the Indian development regime was
loosened and jurisdictional authority got partly transferred to the Prime Minister’s
Secretariat (headed by L.K. Jha, Principal Private Secretary to Prime Minister
Shastri)117 and eventually with Subramaniam himself getting a seat on the Planning
Commission.118 The Ministry of Agriculture also started having an independent say
on the deployment of the precious foreign exchange, as against the earlier
dominance of the Finance Ministry. 119 Clearly noting the effects of a disaster
perception on the amenability of the Indian development elite to Subramaniam’s
pandering of his ‘new agricultural strategy’, Lewis writes:

“…emergencies…tend to loosen official mindsets and open the way for major
reforms…in the 1965 case, mounting concern about the seriousness of the crop
failure quite clearly increased the receptivity of both cabinet and parliament to
Subramaniam’s new strategy.”120

One significant aspect of the relationship between the mobilization of disaster
imaginary and developmental authority that this episode brings to light is how
enabling a dramatic transformation of developmental policies and authorities
hinges upon a framing of disasters more in terms of what the literary studies scholar
Robert Nixon has referred to as “spectacular and instantaneous violence” –
conceived in this case in terms of total starvation deaths etc. – rather than in terms
of a “slow violence”, associated with structures of impoverishment, which occurs
over several years and whose effects are less spectacularly visible. 121 Thus,
Subramaniam’s framing of the disaster imaginary sought to push through his ‘New
Agricultural Strategy’ by emphasizing spectacular harms and losses that would

117 As B.K. Nehru, the Indian Ambassador to the U.S., observed in his memoirs: “From LK’s [Jha] time
started the movement towards the centralization of power in the Prime Minister, whose office, in effect,
tended to become a super-government, and the PM’s functioning started becoming presidential in
character.” B.K. Nehru, Nice Guys Finish Second: Memoirs, New Delhi: Viking, 1997, p. 421. This
powerful body has since then come to be referred to as the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). See Bipin
Chandra et al. (eds.), India Since Independence, p. 272. Jha also chaired the Foodgrain Prices
Committee, which was constituted in August 1965 by Shastri on the advice of Subramaniam, and
which came out with its report in September 1965 that heavily supported the Subramaniam ‘New
Agricultural Policy’ position on agricultural pricing and fertilizers against the Planning Commission
opposition to it. See Foodgrain Prices Committee, Jha Committee on foodgrain prices for 1964-1965,
Department of Agriculture, Ministry of Food and Agriculture, 2nd ed., 1968.
118 See Subramaniam, Hands of Destiny, pp. 113-119.
119 For an informative account of this battle between Subramaniam and the ‘industry first’ faction
within the Indian State see Ashutosh Varshney, ‘Ideas, interest and institutions in policy change:
Transformation of India’s agricultural strategy in the mid-1960s’, Policy Sciences 22 (1989) 289-323.
120 Lewis, India’s Political Economy, p. 122.
121 See Robert Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013.
27

occur if the path ordained in this strategy was not adopted. Sacrificial ‘slow
violence’, on the other hand, got construed as simply being inevitable.122

This framing of the threatening disaster in instantaneous terms also enabled the
authorization of the ‘Green Revolution’ in more specific terms. Namely, in
Subramaniam’s various confrontations with his opponents at this time, this
technological fix, along with other components of the ‘package’ necessary for its
adoption, was presented as the only viable disaster response available to India on
account of it possessing the virtue of speed. Speed of course only assumes the status
of a virtue when the problem to which we are responding gets imagined and
construed in terms of urgency. I would argue that it was a powerful mix of both the
“technological optimism” that imagined that the technological fix would swiftly
produce a revolutionary solution to the ‘food-shortage problem’ in India and the
concomitant disaster imaginary which represented the looming disaster as swiftly
bearing down upon the nation unless the course correction of adopting the
technological fix was made, that went a long way in authorizing the ‘Green
Revolution’ India. 123

Here I would add that Subramaniam and other advocates for the ‘Green Revolution’
drew upon the more commonly shared assumption that was very much held even
by their most bitter opponents in the ‘industry first’ approach – namely, that the
response to the urgent postcolonial vulnerability to disasters was none other than
the attainment of economic development. 124 Thus, being developed here was
equated with being secure and invulnerable to disasters. In this regard, they
ultimately associated the ‘Green Revolution’ with that Holy Grail of development

122 As Cullather shows, this distinction also played out in when it came to determining what counted
as a ‘successful’ famine response in Bihar in 1967. Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 229.
123 Thus, in a series of lectures delivered almost a decade later, Subramaniam explicitly framed the
authorization of the ‘Green Revolution’ in terms of the urgent need to overcome the disaster of a
looming ‘famine’. What is really interesting in terms of our discussion is how this ex post ante
invocation of a looming ‘famine’ by the Former Minister of Agriculture is one which is framed as a
global phenomenon at the time (a problem which is being faced by the entire globe!) and not merely
some Indian shortcoming, and secondly, how it gets explicitly invoked in terms that emphasize its
successful overcoming by the Indian developmental state by way of its ‘new strategy’. As he exults:
“The prediction made in early 1964, that India was one of the incurable countries and therefore millions
would have die in the 1970s, has not been realized in the 1970s. As a matter of fact there are other
predictions today. Recently there was an article in one of the London dailies in which another expert
predicted that in the year 2000 there would be a great scarcity of foodstuffs and great famine in many
countries but, he stated categorically, not in India.” C. Subramaniam, The New Strategy in Indian
Agriculture, p. 21.
124 Here Gupta’s discerning point regarding the erasure of ongoing ‘disastrous consequences’ in the
so-called ‘developed’ world as a direct consequence of deploying the very ‘exemplary’ policies being
pandered to the developed world as disaster panacea in the development discourse is striking. One
can see how it was essential to preserving the idealized aura of economic development as a complete
overcoming of vulnerability. Crucially it elided how the experience of disastrous consequences
continued to be unevenly distributed, amongst the elites and the marginalized sections of even so-
called ‘developed’ societies that had purportedly overcome vulnerability. See Gupta, Postcolonial
Developments, pp. 53-54.
28

theology – i.e. “take off”125. The stark choice that was presented in this heady mix of
a disaster imaginary and the possibility of their utopian overcoming was captured
by Indira Gandhi’s formulation of the ‘problem’ in a speech given at the National
Press Club in the U.S. during her 1966 visit – in which, very much channeling
Rostow, she declared India was faced within the decade “for either takeoff or
disintegration”126.

We also find that the seemingly contradictory case for liberalization on the grounds
of attaining self-sufficiency actually grounds itself in a claim to liberalization being
part of a package of ‘agriculture first’ which offers the quickest path to ultimately
attaining self-sufficiency, the telos of economic development and thus overcoming
‘Third World’ vulnerability to disasters. This shared assumption clearly is the key to
successfully authorizing any transformation or re-transformation of developmental
policies – one which resolves the seeming contradiction by positing the exposure of
liberalization as being transitory sacrifice necessary in order to attain
invulnerability – and is most clearly exemplified in the framing of the problem by
Subramaniam, for as Varshney observes:

“Subramaniam believed that in the context of the mid-1960s, the institutional
approach [i.e. the Nehruvian response to the ‘agrarian question’] amounted to
“mere slogan shouting,” stressing that a “pragmatic approach” was needed. The
choices were clear: “Would you like to have…high production and attain self-
sufficiency within the country…or would you prefer to continue dependence
upon food imports indefinitely?” The institutional approach would lead to the
latter; his own approach would usher in food self-sufficiency.”127 (emphasis
supplied)

So, as suggested above, the key to the force of this approach and thus the
authorization of the agricultural transformation, lies in it’s framing of ‘agriculture
first’ as being the quickest path to attaining self-sufficiency while framing the
alternative as being mired in a similar closed circle that the development discourse
associated with underdevelopment. In this framing, the exposure to external
dependence that the ‘industry first’ pathway entails (in the form of reliance on
American PL. 480 food aid) assumes a certain permanence, thus severely belying its
claim to being the successful for pathway to achieving ‘take off’ and thus also
making untenable the sacrifices it demanded from the nation.

125 Francine Frankel noted this shared commitment to the ideology of take-off when in 1971 she
observed of the ‘new agricultural strategy’ that: “The production gains of the last few, while still
modest, offer the most hopeful sign since the beginning of planning that modern science and technology
can break through India’s long closed circle of poverty to spearhead an agricultural “take-off” that will
provide the missing momentum in rural resources and demand to rapid industrialization.” Francine R.
Frankel, India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs, p. 8.
127 Varshney, Democracy, development, and the countryside, p. 57.
29

Of course, as pointed out by keen observers of these developments at the time itself,
this optimism regarding the swiftness of technological innovation was one that
failed to take into account the more glacial and obdurate institutional structures,
present in any society, that greatly determined the social uptake of the concerned
technological innovations and thus its ultimate ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in achieving its
stated goals.128 These institutional reforms and transformations, such as carrying
out comprehensive land redistribution prior to undertaking the ‘Green Revolution’
for instance, were of course widely acknowledged as requiring slow, protracted and
difficult institutional transformations. As it turned out, on account of authorizing
force generated by disaster imaginary immersed in notions and concomitant
imperatives of a race against disaster, speed was a virile virtue that garnered all
jurisdictional authority, while slow and careful perseverance was associated with
inaction and a luxury that the ‘developing nations’ chased by impending disasters
could ill-afford.

iii) Declaring the ‘Bihar Famine’: Localization, Claiming Successful Overcoming
and Extending Developmentalist Jurisdiction

In April 1967, the Central Government of Indira Gandhi did declare a famine in the
state of Bihar. I argue that a careful examination of the contours of this declaration
and how it sought to construe this particular disaster illuminate how the declared
‘Bihar Famine’ also ended up serving the goal of authorizing the ‘Green Revolution’.
In order to do so, the players who undertook this particular disaster imaginary
mobilization skillfully managed to avoid some of the key issues connected with
famine declaration mentioned earlier.

To begin with, when it came to the declaration of a famine in India, one significant
site of contestation between the U.S. framing of the famine and the Indian one was
over its spatial extent. So while the U.S. officials and experts construed the famine in
1966-67 as affecting the entire Indian nation and its exploding population, the
Indian officials and experts continuously sought to localize its ‘threat’ or occurrence
to particular regions and localities within the state. So when the declaration finally
came, we see that it was one that sought to confine and localize it to the Indian
federal state of Bihar, which at the time also came to be ruled by a regional party in
opposition to Gandhi’s Congress.129This way Gandhi and her associates managed to

128 The most influential and insightful piece of scholarship in this regard remains the masterful work
by the Swedish development economist, sociologist and public intellectual Gunnar Myrdal. Myrdal,
Asian Drama, pp. 254-284.
129 In fact, as Subramaniam’s autobiography suggests, this dynamic of confinement of the disaster to
Bihar and the reconfiguration of the relationship between the center and federal states, with a
garnering of considerable jurisdictional authority by the former over the later, had already begun in
early 1966 with the coming to power of Indira Gandhi when Bihar was still ruled by a Congress
Government (though one which was apparently not aligned with Gandhi’s support group within the
party). At this stage, the Famine Code powers were used negatively by the center, in that it refused to
commit to transferring economic resources to the state, which such a recognition of famine would
entail, and instead sought to indirectly control the state administrative apparatus by appointing
bureaucrats answerable to the center in key administrative positions within the state at the district
30

both generate the urgency from disaster imaginary mobilization while

concomitantly confining the responsibility for postcolonial developmental failure to
a separable unit and thus preserving the jurisdictional authority of the postcolonial
developmentalist state.130

This was accompanied by a temporal confinement of the famine by its configuration
as being “unprecedented” or exceptional and thus using this to “mask the fact that
the crisis situation was less of a deviation from the normal situation for some people
in the state than for others”131. For those sacrificed in the everyday by the project of
development, including the landless peasants and the urban impoverished, the
starvation associated with ‘famines’ had become a more acute feature of existence,
one that the declaration and definition of disaster as exceptional simply sought to
erase.132

In the weeks that followed its declaration, the undertaking of a spectacular and very
public ‘successful’ ‘famine relief response’ directed by the Central Government (and
entirely sidelining the State Government), clearly sought to authorize the
jurisdictional authority of the Indian developmentalist state and its ‘spectacular’
developmentalist responses, by construing this as a ‘local’ disaster that had been
‘successfully averted’ by the necessarily massive (and abstracted) national response
– steps which crucially now included the successful transformation of the national
agricultural policy.133 While vulnerability had to be frequently acknowledged and
decried, successful disaster aversion on account of the ingenuity and tireless effort
of the developmentalist state had to be also constantly asserted.134

level with the express aim to “save Bihar from a tragedy of giant proportions”. Pertinently, the
assumption embodied in Subramaniam and Gandhi’s response was that the “stupendous task” of
disaster response demanded an exponential expansion and extension in the existing (centralized)
state developmental machinery. See Subramaniam, Hand of Destiny, pp. 221-222.
130 Cullather, The Hungry World, pp. 228-229.
131 Paul R. Brass, ‘The Political Uses of Crisis’, p. 255. A good example of such a construction of the
‘Bihar Famine’ is the official report on the causes of the famine issued by the Government of Bihar in
1973. See Government of Bihar, Bihar Famine Report, 1966-1967, Patna: Secretariat Press, 1973.
132 Ibid.
133 See Paul D. Brass, ‘The Political Uses of Crisis’, pp. 257-259. This move proved to be crucial in the
jurisdictional struggle between the center and the states over agriculture. As Subramaniam was to
later observe, under the existing constitutional schema, the degree to which the central government
were able to ultimately exercise jurisdiction with regard to the agricultural policy of the states came
down to “a question of persuasion and demonstration”, and one could argue, that Subramaniam
himself, as the Union Agricultural Minister in Indira’s Central Government during the period, did
exactly successfully engage in such practices of authorization by way of mobilizing the specter of
famines and thus successfully garnered jurisdictional authority over state agricultural policy terrain
when it came to the Green Revolution reform. See Subramaniam, The New Strategy in Indian
Agriculture, p. 3.
134 So in this specific case, while the ‘Bihar Famine’ was eventually officially declared under the
Famine Codes in April 1967, this came with a clear proclamation of its successful containment. A
notable example of this is provided by Prime Minister Gandhi’s Press Secretary, George Verghese’s
account of the famine in George Verghese, Beyond the Famine: An Approach to Regional Planning for
Bihar, New Delhi: Super Bazar under the auspices of the Bihar Relief Committee, 1967. See also R.
Constantine, ‘Famine Effectively Tamed’, Yojana XI, 11 (1967) 19-21.
31

In the end, as a consequence of skillful disaster imaginary mobilization, the ‘Bihar
famine’ declaration operated not only to preserve the authority of the
developmentalist postcolonial state but in fact to authorize the expansion of the
central developmentalist state’s jurisdiction over agriculture and to de-legitimize
any state government’s opposition to the new agricultural policy (e.g. on
constitutional grounds) as standing in the way of successfully responding to the
famine (and averting a real ‘national disaster’). It is worth emphasizing that this
successful garnering of jurisdictional authority to the developmentalist center over
the concern of agriculture in the case of the ‘Green Revolution’ stands in stark
contrast to the failures to achieve a similar jurisdiction for the center and its policy
measures when it came to the concern of land redistribution in the past decade and
a half when the central government’s policies had been persistently stymied by the
state government’s constitutional recalcitrance. 135 This deepening of the
developmentalist state in the countryside, a mere three years after the crisis of the
developmentalist regime with the death of Nehru, no doubt owed a great deal to the
disaster imaginary mobilization of the ‘Bihar Famine’. 136

VI. Conclusion

Continuity Thesis

This paper has attempted to advance an argument that is premised in what might be
referred to as a ‘continuity thesis’. It suggests that we, and our ‘modern’ ancestors,
are after all not as distinct – for better or worse – much as we are wont to fantasize.
What some of us nostalgically take to be more hopeful, romantic and naïve times
regarding the possibilities of utopian futures, were also very much in the powerful
grips of competing disaster imaginaries, and the force of utopian developmental
futures was as much impelled by an urgency to avoid catastrophe as it was by the
certainty of success. The fact is that this ‘episode’ would suggest that there was an
intimate relationship between development’s ‘technological optimism’ and an
imperiling ‘disaster imaginary’.

Apart from other things, such attentiveness might help us avoid the kind of nostalgic
amnesia that would lead to calls for a resurrection of the developmentalist ‘social
state’ to respond to the ongoing crisis of global ‘food security’ or even one wherein
the co-production of disasters and developmental authority somehow gets confined

135 Gupta, Postcolonial Developments. Here it should be reiterated that this greater centralization of
state authority in ‘Third World’ states, enacting a centripetal force against the dissensual pull of
regional state parties, was very much in keeping with the U.S. development elite prescriptions at the
time. See W.W. Rostow, ‘The Sharing of the Good Life, p. 809.
136 On the constitutive relationship between what he, following Carl Schmitt, refers to as a “a total
state”, i.e. “a state whose apparatuses penetrate every sphere of life, and no aspect of human affairs is
immune of it ever expanding mechanism of normalization, regulation, and legislation”, and disasters
see Adi Ophir, ‘The Two-State Solution: Providence and Catastrophe’, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8
(2006) 116, pp. 132-136.
32

to its neoliberal avatar.137 Why must our historical methods of anachronism and our
forms of relating the present to the past analogically be set aside when confronted
with a development that ‘the present’ proclaims as being something exceptional
already contained within it?

This paper’s approach hopefully allows us to undercut the move to exceptionalize
our own ‘disastrous times’ and to catch in the narrated image of the past a familiar
resemblance.138

Disrupting the Disaster Dynamic

As this paper has attempted to show, disasters produced by development don’t
simply engender the crisis and collapse of developmental authority. In fact, the work
of their framing and mobilization, which includes their defining and declaration, is
fundamental to developmental authority’s re-authorization and jurisdictional
expansion, especially in times when it already embroiled in a deep crisis. Given this
mobilization of disasters by developmentalism to further entrench its futures the
fundamental question facing us today is how to disrupt this dynamic, and foster
alternative futures?139

One possible strategy that is strongly suggested by this particular story is for the
need to contest the developmentalist framing of disasters – across the board – as
somehow being exceptional and extrinsic events and threats that bear no
connection with a longer history of distributional decisions, especially a longer
history of violent developmental actions purportedly aimed at overcoming disasters
by accelerating time and taking-off.

Commonality Thesis

Furthermore, in the wake of a narrative that has hopefully also drawn our attention
towards what both sides competing in the Cold War fundamentally shared, I would
like to expressly trouble the tradition of narrating the Cold War as a clash between
two starkly opposing systems. The point here is to reiterate what Susan Buck-Morss
has referred to as “the commonalities of the Cold War enemies”140when it comes to
the reproduction of the relationship between developmentalist futures and disaster
imaginaries. In the case of the Soviet developmental practice and discourse, this

137 I would like to draw attention to the fact that these arguments have been advanced in recent
scholarship that I have found to be most illuminating, and particularly instructive in writing this
paper. See Anne Orford, ‘Food Security, Free Trade, and the Battle for The State’, Journal of
International Law and International Relations 11, 2 (2015) 1; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Picador, 2008.
138 Here I am indebted to Anne Orford, ‘On International Legal Method’, London Review of
International Law 1, 1 (2013) 166-197, pp. 170-177.

139 See Gustavo Esteva and Arturo Escobar, ‘Post-Development @ 25: on ‘being stuck’ and moving
forward, sideways, backward and otherwise’, Third World Quarterly (2017).

140 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. xv.
33

went to such an extent as to lead to a declaration of a “war against time”141, as Stalin,

and the Soviet developmentalist state that he had inaugurated, sought to forcefully
“order time to speed up”142 – significantly through the concept and technology of
Five Year Plans that we saw proved to be so appealing to the Indian developmental
elite.143 Where the U.S. development economist cold warrior’s gave us “take-off”, as
the ‘descriptive’ metaphor to articulate the relationship between developmental
Utopia and disaster, the Soviet’s coined and purveyed “velikii perelom” (“the great
break”)144. Not incidentally, included in the rogue gallery of spectral figures who
(other)worlded this disaster imaginary were the ‘internal’ enemy peasant “Kulaks”
who threatened with an archaic contamination that would slow down the tempo of
development.145 They had to be violently removed from the ‘historical stage’ in
order to achieve Utopia.146

Acknowledging Peasant Futures

All this leads me to the point that if we are to take seriously the possibilities of
alternative futures, we must return to the question of peasant insurgency in a
context of dearth and immiseration associated with famines. It is exactly this
attentiveness to recovering possible ‘peasant futures’ that came to serve as the chief
preoccupation for the extremely influential South Asian movement of critical
historiography, called the Subaltern Studies collective, that emerged in the early
1980s. Nowhere was this more forcefully exemplified than in the scholarship of one
of its founding exponents, Ranajit Guha, especially in a text that has subsequently
been described as “the founding document”147 of Subaltern Studies - The Elementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India.148 We learn from Guha both about
the forceful displacement of ‘peasant futures’ by an expert discourse (one which he

141 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 37.
142 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 37.
143 Buck-Morss observes: “The rapid industrialization of the First Five Year Plan was conceived as
historical “acceleration” (uskorenie). Lewin writes: “The pace and violence of the changes were
breathtaking,” as no one was positioned in society in 1938 where they had been in 1928; at the same
time, “the sense of urgency in the whole upheaval is baffling: the pace imposed suggests a race against
time, as if those responsible for the country’s destinies felt they were running out of history.” Any
proposal for “slowing the tempo” (gromozhenie) of economic production became tantamount to
counterrevolution. The present was an obstacle to be overcome, a continual sacrifice for the sake of the
communist future.” Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 37.
144 Engerman, ‘The Romance of Economic Development’, p. 27.
145 After an initial, and somewhat unsure, policy of bringing about conciliation between peasants and
urban workers under the New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced by Lenin after the civil war, a more
hardline policy to smash the ‘old ways’ and expropriate ‘surplus’ from the peasantry in favor of the
industrializing towns, eventually came to be adopted by Stalin with the Five Year Plans. See Sheila
Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 2nd ed., pp. 111-119.
146 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, pp. 6-7.
147 James C. Scott, ‘Foreward to the Duke Edition’, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, p. ix
148 See Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency; Ranajit Guha, ‘One Some Aspects of the
Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies No. 1, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1982, 1-8; Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.),
Subaltern Studies No. 2, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, 1-42.
34

memorably referred to as a “prose of counter-insurgency”149) and also about the

kind of careful scholarship required to understand peasant insurgencies in their own
terms, which include normative visions and moral universes. 150

To anyone seeking to attend to the problem of the current agrarian crisis and the
emerging 21st century famines, this remains a vital lesson. To all those struggling to
discern a “horizon of possibility” amidst this “age of impotence”, it offers hope.151 To
jurists, it provides an invitation to acknowledge the dignity of other peoples’ laws.152
And finally, for us in this seminar, it offers the possibility of engaging in an exercise
of re-vision.

149 Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’. This also clearly established the long colonial
provenance of the Cold War counter-insurgency strategies and thus the continuities between formal
empire and American imperialism.
150 Pertinently, it is exactly this problematic of the historicist construction of peasant insurgency,
with its concomitant erasure of alternative peasant futures, and the acknowledgement of the radical
challenge posed to it by Guha, that forms the basis for Dipesh Chakrabarty’s subsequent call for the
need to recognize the plurality of historical time in Provincializing Europe. The current paper
conceives itself as very much taking up this concern and tradition. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe, pp. 11-16.
151 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, London and
New York: Verso, 2017.

152 See Pahuja, ‘Laws of Encounter’. For an exemplary example of such scholarship by a jurist,
included in the Subaltern Studies collections, see Upendra Baxi, ‘The State’s Emissary: The Place of
Law in Subaltern Studies’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds.), Selected Subaltern
Studies No. 7, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, 247-264.
35

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