Roots of a commanding brawl | |
| CHARU SUDAN KASTURI | |
New Delhi, July 25: Jagdish Bhagwati will wake up on Friday morning in New York to a rare birthday on which the opportunities and platforms to engage in another round of “intellectual debate” with Amartya Sen will be numerous. From the pages of The Economist, the battle of the brains has now metamorphosed into a brawl about the Bharat Ratna between third parties on television screens. A BJP parliamentarian tweeted a “personal view” that Sen should be stripped of the highest national honour, conferred when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in power, for saying he did not want Modi as his Prime Minister. ( ) The differences between the two distinguished economists may have become political ammunition in the run-up to the 2014 elections but veterans feel they are rooted in India’s once relatively claustrophobic academic circles. Back in the late 1960s and 1970s when Sen and Bhagwati — briefly — came back to India to teach, a relatively closed academic environment existed at Indian universities caught in the nation’s experiment with Nehruvian socialism. The atmosphere was all the more stifling for those considered “non-Left” — where being “Left” did not necessarily suggest any association with a Left party. The ruling Congress, too, then had a substantial chunk of socialist proponents. It was common knowledge that a Left-leaning academic then stood a better chance of finding placement than one with comparable or better qualifications but with a contrasting view of socialism. A senior economist, who like Sen and Bhagwati studied in India before pursuing higher studies and eventually a career abroad, said the fear transmitted by his seniors from the 1970s played a key role in his decision to move out of India. “Growing up in the 1970s, it was a given that if you had economic beliefs that weren’t aligned with Marxist, or at least Keynesian, ideas of a substantive government, India wasn’t the place to be an academic,” the economist said, requesting anonymity because he knows both Sen and Bhagwati. At Cambridge in the 1950s, Sen became a follower of John Maynard Keynes’s school of thought that encourages governments to spend more through public programmes to propel economic growth. Bhagwati became a neo-classical economist, an advocate of free trade and less government intervention. Sen has written about the heated debates members of the two schools of thought had at Cambridge in the 1950s and the 1960s. Although Sen was not identified wholly with the Left, some of his views could be interpreted as more aligned with that school of thought, especially viewed against the outspoken positions of Bhagwati. Some old-timers feel that the wounds of slights suffered in the days of the command economy may still be raw and are adding an edge to the debate that has unwittingly turned political now. Last Friday, in response to a question from The Telegraph, Bhagwati referred to his days in the Planning Commission. “That India has many shortfalls in our social achievements is no news: if Sen had been paying attention to these issues when people like me were in the Planning Commission in the early 1960s and working on poverty reduction, he would have been aware of these shortfalls,” Bhagwati emailed. Bhagwati first taught at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta, and Sen at Jadavpur University. But they moved to the Planning Commission when it controlled the Indian economy in a manner unthinkable for those now in their 20s and 30s. They worked on projects for the Planning Commission between 1961 and 1963, until they were handpicked by the late economist K.N. Raj for positions as professors at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). When Bhagwati left the DSE for the US in 1968, his position was taken by Manmohan Singh, who launched economic reforms as finance minister in the 1990s and became Prime Minister in 2004. In April 1975, just two months before Indira Gandhi declared Emergency, Bhagwati published a research paper scathing in its indictment of India’s socialist experiment and its failure. Those were not times when it was easy to criticise the dominant government viewpoint. Gandhi-family baiter and Janata Party chief Subramanian Swamy, an economist, was sacked by the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi — he insists it was because he opposed then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s policies of bank nationalisation in 1969. “All the communists, both those who were in communist parties and those who followed the socialist policies of Indira Gandhi, ganged up against me,” Swamy had told this reporter in 2010 when he tried to get pension payments from the IIT using the Right to Information Act. Economist Bagicha Singh Minhas, who taught at the ISI when Bhagwati was there, later joined the Planning Commission as a member. There he criticised Indira Gandhi’s nationalisation of wholesale wheat, eventually quitting the Planning Commission because his ideas were stonewalled. What has ripped open old intellectual differences into a television spectacle is the bitter political war India is witnessing in the lead-up to the national elections, said economist Prabhat Patnaik. “There have always been these two fundamentally different schools of thought in economics and of course, the Sen-Bhagwati arguments reflect these schools,” Patnaik said. “But this spat has become important because it is mirroring a political divide.” Some credit Sanjay Gandhi, who attained notoriety for excesses during the Emergency, with breaking up the Left stranglehold on the academia in Delhi. The landscape has changed since then. Bhagwati’s latest book on the success of India’s growth story and its ability to lift millions out of poverty is likely to find more readers in India’s finance ministry now than it would have in the 1960s. | |
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Roots of a commanding brawl -- Charu Sudan Kasturi
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