To see comments / or comment go to this origianl Post :
Dear Dr./Bharat Ratna/former Master of Trinity/current
Thomas W. Lamont professor at Harvard/Nobel laureate/economist/moral
philosopher/Sanskritist/ greatest living authority on Adam Smith/the
last great Bengali/lodestone of the greater good/town crier for the
oppressed/the last word on social justice, welfare economics, good and
evil, and many other things, etc., etc., Sir…
Sir, do you really believe you are still an economist?
Your career trajectory surely indicates that you have left that dismal
science far behind. You have spent much of the last four decades
studying philosophy, especially moral philosophy, and ancient Indian
texts that no one other than you has heard of. Yes, your contribution to
the field of economics is immense, and your Nobel Prize came 28 long
years after the seminal contribution you made in social choice theory,
and forced every economist worth his or her salt to re-examine all
assumptions.
But what have you done after that? Your much-touted Kerala
development model is a joke, especially among Malayalis who have a sense
of humour. The state—which, anyway, is a money order economy—leads the
country in suicide rates, the number of mentally ill people, domestic
violence, alcoholism, bandhs and man-days lost, and lust for gold
jewellery. Reams of statistics have been hurled at you, and yet you keep
speaking about it, but then, philosophers don’t care about data, do
they? Only economists do.
Any number of economists have expressed doubts about your
data and your methodology in some of your most well-known works. For
the food security Bill which you have been championing from every forum,
you even went to the extent of concocting a random figure: that a
thousand Indians will die per week if the Bill was not passed. And then,
you brazenly admitted that this number was fictitious; “to capture
people’s attention, you have to have a number” was what you said. All
government data shows that shoving free cereals down the throats of the
poor (if the cereals ever reach them) makes no sense. India’s problem is
malnutrition, which has to do with access to food other than cereals,
sanitation and healthcare. The food security ordinance is ruinous for
the economy and will help no one other than the already obese lower
bureaucracy.
Let’s come to the growth versus development debate then
(which should not be a debate at all, but you and that Gujarati have got
into it). You have said that a focus on growth helps the
“already-privileged”. In fact, if your own life is any indication at
all, the “already-privileged” have it good any way, growth or bust. You
created a world record when you became professor and head of the
department of economics in Jadavpur University at the age of 23 (may be
Robert Mugabe anointed a grandson as vice-chancellor of some university
in Zimbabwe at the age of 18, I wouldn’t know). You weren’t even a Phd
then. But you were from the aristocratic Brahmo Samaj clique. P.C.
Mahalanobis, czar of the Indian planned economy and another Brahmo, was
your father’s friend and was impressed with you, and there you were,
airdropped from a masters degree in Cambridge onto the throne. India was
stuck in the Hindu rate of growth, but that didn’t hamper your career,
did it? One can only hope that this extreme nepotism shaped your ideas
when you grew older. But I have never heard you say that you were
privileged in any way.
Ah, vice-chancellor? Who, may I ask, is Gopa Sabharwal,
vice-chancellor of the Nalanda International University that you are
supposed to be the big boss of, after A.P.J. Abdul Kalam left in
disgust? Three names were forwarded to the government for the
vice-chancellorship—Ramachandra Guha, Pratap Bhanu Mehta (I hope these
two men need no introduction) and Gopa Sabharwal, an associate professor
at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi. You put your weight behind
Sabharwal, even justified it in public, and she has been drawing a
salary of over Rs.5 lakh per month for the
last two years, with no university in sight. I think, sir, you are in a
rather weak position when you talk of privileges.
And you are the icon of secularism. So you’ve said
recently that Narendra Modi should not be prime minister. Fair enough.
You are free to voice your opinion. As you did in 2006 when you said in
Britain that if a school had to be religion-based, it should be a
Christian school. Many of your friends, you said, were educated in St
Xavier’s, Kolkata, and they were fine men. But other religions you were
suspicious about. How do you justify that, sir?
So my humble request, sir, is that you return to your
philosophical texts and learn, once more, that silence is often more
eloquent than words, and that—you needn’t go to ancient Sanskrit texts
for this—people who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones. They
fall right back on your head.
Sandipan Deb is a senior journalist and editor who is interested in puzzles of all forms.
