For Nehru, on the other hand, the limits of the possible are circumscribed by property law and contract law as they were imposed on India by the British. For him they are, according to one of Peter Berger’s ideas that I think Nehru would endorse, among the institutional concomitants of the modern technology that promises (and, Nehru thought, alone promises) to end India’s poverty. Their circumscription of the possible remains even when the workings of the market are modified by what Richard Peterson has called “state policies which take market abstractions for granted.” (27). It remains even when legal title to resources passes out of private hands and into government ownership; it remains even when a series of public laws superimposed on private law prescribes minimum wages, maximum hours, and collective bargaining. It remains as the horizon of the endless debates about nationalization vs. privatization and free markets vs. planning. Gandhi opens up a wider rationality because his viewpoint is one that generates additional alternatives.

 

On the eve of India’s independence Gandhi generated an alternative no one else known to history thought of, although if Gandhi was as much in tune with the mentality of the Indian peasant as Nehru said he was there were probably some unknown peasants somewhere in India who also thought of it. Gandhi proposed that the Muslim League be invited to form the Government of India. The League’s leader, M.A. Jinnah, made it clear that he would regard such an invitation as the British returning India to the Muslim Mogul Empire from which (on Jinnah’s view of history) they had stolen it.

 

In Gandhi’s mind, his proposal made perfect sense. The young boy who gave up what he most desired, surreptitious carnivorous feasts with his friend, for the sake of his relationship with his mother, had become an elderly man willing to give up twenty five years of struggle for the independence of India for the sake of the love that ought to exist between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi’s alternative was not rejected for good reasons in the course of the deliberations that ultimately led to partition and to mass murder. It was not considered. It made no sense –it was not on the conceptual map—for the minds of Nehru, Lord Mountbatten, and the other principal decision-makers.