Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: Free Press Journal
Date:
For a man who was thought to be preoccupied
with the big picture of the economy, Manmohan has chosen to skirt economic
issues altogether, preferring to spar with L.K. Advani on relative strengths
and weakness as a politician. More curiously, the Prime Minister appears to
have altogether discarded his economists' turban altogether.
Which goes a long way inexplaining the nominal
impact of critical thought in our intellectual life, is the collective penchant
for deification. It has become customary to raise individuals to lofty pedestals
and insulate them from the rigours of inquiry. The undefined "spirit
of persecution" and the "unquestioning obedience... (to) some mantra,
some unreasoned creed" that Rabindranath Tagore detected in 1921 when
proffering his critique of Mahatma Gandhi has not abated in six decades of
democracy. On the contrary, the spread of education and the media revolution
have, in the guise of celebrating achievement, reinforced the desire to swim
with the tide of conventional wisdom.
A small example may help illustrate this distortion.
Last week, the Infosys "mentor" published the grand-sounding A Better
India, A Better World, a collection of his speeches. In numerous interviews
on the book, the pioneer of India's IT industry who, had it not been for a
mishap over the singing of the national anthem, may well have been a claimant
to the palace on Raisina Hill, held forth sanctimoniously on the virtues of
what he termed "compassionate capitalism". It is an idea that is
often spouted by social-democratic and Left-wing politicians who are aware
of the limitations of statedriven enterprise but cannot bring themselves to
admit the innate superiority of the market economy.
Not being a practising politician, Murthy
isn't obliged to have a coherent world view. However, it has been rightly
presumed that the founder's commitment to "compassionate" capitalism
defines the corporate philosophy of Infosys. Indeed, the perception that Infosys
is many steps removed from the greed and cronyism of business has contributed
to its lofty status in public life. Infosys is the envy of Indian business
for its unquestioned ability to secure both a wholesome corporate image and
extract generous state support (in the form of concessional real estate) without
expending money in either advertising or political contributions.
Yet, last month, Infosys did something that
violated every tenet of the "compassionate" capitalism that Murthy
upholds passionately: it succumbed to market forces and sacked 2,100 employees,
ostensibly on the grounds of "non-performance". In various interviews,
its director Mohandas Pai spoke about the company's "zero tolerance"
of inefficiency.
In today's economic climate, Infosys' load-shedding
is understandable. Throughout India companies have fallen back on closures,
redundancies and pay cuts.
Infosys is no exception. What is astonishing,
however, is that an otherwise hard-nosed media didn't think it fit to ask
Murthy how his "compassionate" capital is including the advice to
show "fairness to the less fortunate"-fits into the logic of mass
sackings. In the West, they would have grilled him mercilessly and the tabloids
would have had a field day highlighting the apparent mismatch.
In India, however, Murthy is a holy cow who
must be treated with reverence. Sarojini Naidu used to wonder if the Mahatma
knew how much it cost to keep him in poverty. It is worth considering the
intellectual compromises involved in casting Murthy in a saintly mould.
This astonishing generosity is, however, not
reserved exclusively to non-political achievers like Murthy and, for that
matter, Amartya Sen. In the past few weeks it has extended to Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh.
That Manmohan isn't your typical politician
and has to be viewed differently isn't in any doubt.
Questions routinely hurled at, say, Prakash
Karat, Narendra Modi and Sharad Pawar, (Sonia Gandhi doesn't deign to respond
to queries) are, it is understood, inappropriate for India's most scholarly
Prime Minister. The consensus in the editorial classes and the intelligentsia
is that while Manmohan is untutored in the byzantine ways of politics, the
Indian economy is safe in his hands.
The Prime Minister's scholastic reputation
has intimidated the less qualified. It is unthinkingly presumed that what
is passed off as Manmohan-onomics is built on sound intellectual foundations
and, therefore, unworthy of simple-minded scepticism. When, for example, clutching
a clipping from the editorial pages of The Telegraph, the Prime Minister pronounced
to women journalists in Delhi last month that the BJP was guilty of non-application
of mind in promising a "low tax and low interest rates" regime and
repatriation of illegal money in tax havens back to India, it was presumed
that he knew what he was talking about. After all, this was economics-a subject
that the Prime Minister knows intimately.
The reality, unfortunately, is a little more
unprepossessing. For a man who was thought to be preoccupied with the big
picture of the economy, Manmohan has chosen to skirt economic issues altogether,
preferring to spar with L.K. Advani on relative strengths and weakness as
a politician. More curiously, the Prime Minister appears to have altogether
discarded his economists' turban altogether.
The most striking evidence of this is his
steadfast denial of an economic crisis. Manmohan has, for example, stubbornly
refused to review its assessment of a modest fall in the GDP growth from 8
per cent to what he claimed in Mumbai on April 13 was "a little less
than 7 per cent". Deputy chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh
Ahluwalia, who has emerged as the government's chief economics strategist,
meanwhile proclaimed in Washington DC that India was set to achieve a 6 per
cent growth. Ahluwalia's revised estimate is still better than the World Bank
estimate of 4 per growth in 2009-10.
The divergent estimates have a bearing on
the election. Manmohan's optimism has meant that the Congress has gone to
the people with a campaign that is prefaced on a mood of contentment, even
Jai Ho exhilaration. This is so markedly out of tune with the general buzz
about job losses, high interest rates, high food prices and belt tightening.
There are uncorroborated estimates of some 2.5 job losses, particularly in
the unorganised sector, on account of the slowdown. A recent study estimated
that the high-growth IT sector may experience one lakh job losses by September.
Tax collections have fallen by some Rs 20,000 crore, the fiscal deficit has
touched unsustainable levels and the public debt has crossed 80 per cent of
GDP. In the last days of April, the official smugness over zero inflation
was brutally punctured by grumblings over rising prices of food and anger
over the sharp increase in school fees-a consequence of the 6th Pay Commission
report.
.
Had Manmohan admitted the difficulties and chosen to reassure people that
sensible policies and patient endeavour would see India out of the bad times,
he would have struck a responsive chord. Just as people don't see any magic
wand solution to terrorism, there is an overall appreciation that coping with
an economic crisis demands mature handling.
Manmohan should have fitted the role of the
kindly and avuncular family doctor attending to a patient with concern and
low medication. Instead, by denying the illness altogether and choosing to
battle on an unfamiliar political turf, he undermined his position as a voice
of reassurance The BJP may well have a collective IQ of 60 or less, as the
haughty P.Chidambaram claimed last month, but this inadequacy hasn' led to
enhanced confidence in Team Manmohan.
The curious thing is that the intellectual
establishment has shied away from telling Manmohan that he has done his reputation
as an economist a grave injustice. In the academic world, a horrible misreading
of empirical data would have prompted derision and accusations of being a
charlatan. In the land of the holy cow Manmohan remains untroubled by critical
scrutiny
