Panditji considered all this not only wrong but dangerous. He saw things in a different manner. And his vision became our foreign policy. Naturally enough, our international economic relations too came to be shaped and guided by his vision. As far as I can assess at this distance, broadly two separate sets of considerations influenced his judgment in this matter. First, he had little doubt in his mind that in order to telescope the process of development and hasten the rate of growth, we have to borrow freely, wherever relevant, from the economic doctrines which the socialist countries have tried to put into practice. He was convinced that while we must nurture jealously our distinct political entity, preserve with care our precious values and free institutions, the democratic structure must not be allowed to be undermined. But he had visualised that in the sphere of economic planning, the models of growth which the centrally-planned economies had experimented with were of great didactic significance for us and that it would be folly not to study and analyse those models, and adapt whatever was adaptable to our institutions. At the source of development was capital formation; basic to capital formation was the endeavour to lay the base of a wide range of capital goods industries. An acceleration of the process of growth initially hinged upon enlarging the stock of capital goods. This could only be done by pushing up the rate of investment which in turn depended upon an improvement in the rate of domestic savings and the earmarking of a relatively large part of such savings for the capital goods sector. Panditji's emphasis on the importance of attaining self-sufficiency in the output of capital goods and on the importance of a sophisticated industrial sector could be linked to his overriding anxiety to eliminate avoidable hitches and obstacles from the path of growth. He had no hesitation at all in acknowledging the lessons he had learnt from the Soviet experience in this matter. He had, on several occasions, made his position quite explicit. We may not accept many of the things which the socialist nations consider dear to their heart, but for a poor economy, starting from an inordinately low base of per capita incomes, there is no escape from drawing largely on the models of growth which the East Europeans had developed, in case you want to close the gap in economic standards vis-a-vis the advanced countries.
It is the love for the common man which was the biggest consideration for Panditji. Planning was much more than an ordinary economic programme to him. Planning embodies the quintessence of his dream, his dream of a prosperous, socialist India. But time was a big constraint; somehow the time between the present and the future of his dream had to be cut short. It was his sympathy for the people which made him sift and analyse the essentials of the economic experimentation undertaken in the socialist economies. Not to accept the proven doctrines from East Europe on grounds of ideology would have been akin to denying the poor of the country the means and the opportunity to enter into a faster trajectory of growth.
