Author: Ramachandra
Guha
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: September 23,
2000
It is a strange admission
to make now, but as a student of economics in the Seventies I was in thrall
to the public sector. With others of that generation, I had been
taught to see dams like Bhakra and factories like Bhilai as the hope of
the new India. These projects, we thought, usefully married technology
to the state to produce prosperity and justice. Private companies,
and still more, foreign-owned companies we viewed with disgust, as they
were motivated exclusively by personal gain. I have never been able
to completely shake off those beliefs. When I applied for an email connection
sometime ago, I chose a public sector provider rather than a private one.
However, I was to discover that my gesture at political nostalgia was a
half-hearted one. A friend who is an exact contemporary asked for
my email ID, and when I said it was ramguha@vsnl.com, he answered, in disgust,
'Dotcom! Could you not have chosen dotnet?'
To many Indians the wrong
side of forty, the word "commerce" once had a deep and altogether distasteful
resonance. We were encouraged to distrust commerce and commercial
people by the example of such men as Rabindranath Tagore and M.K.
Gandhi. Psychoanalysts will doubtless see in their rejection an Oedipus
complex at work, for Gandhi was born into a merchant caste, while the Tagores
had made their money by trading. In any case, the rejection was complete.
Tagore eschewed the family business in cultivation of the higher arts:
poetry, painting, and spiritualism. Gandhi showed more interest in
economics, but in an economics conducted without benefit of the market.
The India of his dreams had 7 lakh self-sufficient villages, each based
on the voluntary exchange of goods and services. In this marketless
world there would be no place for priced "commodities."
Tagore died six years
before India became free, Gandhi a few months after independence.
Neither had any influence on the direction of economic policy in the new
nation. The person who did, Jawaharlal Nehru, exceeded them in his
contempt for commerce. Although a political democrat, he was a statist
in his economic thinking. He worshipped at the feet of the British
Fabians, who in turn worshipped at the feet of the Soviet central planners.
These held that the rational and all-seeing state was a more reliable instrument
of economic progress than the anarchic market. It was argued, with
some plausibility, that private companies could not be trusted upon to
bring about social justice. But it was also claimed, on the basis
of dogma rather than fact, that the state was a more efficient economic
agent as well.
All politicians, wrote
John Maynard Keynes, are beholden to the ideas of a long-dead economist.
But Jawaharlal Nehru's preference for state over market was a consequence
as much of aesthetic preference as economic theory. By temperament
and upbringing he would have as his heroes scientists and artists, not
traders and entrepreneurs. Nehru was known to cancel or postpone
an important political engagement for the opportunity of a conversation
with the anthropologist and poet, Verrier Elwin. However, there was
generally no place in his appointment book for the likes of G.D.
Birla and J.R.D. Tata.
The educated Indian's
distaste for commerce and enterprise was thus a product equally of intellectual
arrogance and cultural snobbishness. But history's residues might also
have contributed. For Indian intellectuals and decisionmakers have
come overwhelmingly from the top two varnas, Brahmin and Kshatriya.
These valorize brain power and military power and profess a disdain for
the traditional pursuits of the trading and working groups, placed below
them in the caste hierarchy.
In very recent times,
however, this ancient distrust of commerce has been spectacularly challenged.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the success of an open economy have
produced a new cultural climate. The politicians and technocrats
who now rule India have been swept, or perhaps swept away, by its winds.
The media and international agencies have called vigorously for a new attitude
to those who make money. Words like profit, productivity, efficiency, market,
trade, and commerce, which once had a pejorative currency, now have a wholly
positive one.
No event has more decisively
signalled this 180 degree shift than the recent visit to New Delhi of the
Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates. Sixteen chief ministers air-dashed to New
Delhi to have the privilege of being seated at the same dinner table as
the richest man in the world. The three or four chief ministers who were
granted a 15 minute interview with Gates saw this as a vindication of their
states' economic promise and of their own individual personas.
There has, indeed, been
an astonishing, and astonishingly swift, change in the attitude of Indian
professionals and Indian politicians to private enterprise. Even
ten years ago, a foreign capitalist like Gates would have had to apply
through proper channels for an interview with a chief minister. Were
the request granted, he would have had to make his way most humbly to the
state capital concerned, and be made to wait when he got there.
But perhaps the change
has come too soon and been too categorical for our own good. The
deification of commerce is as harmful as the distrust of it. For
politicians to roll out the red carpet to visiting entrepreneurs might
be as harmful as the old habit of shutting one's doors to them. It
promotes an uncritical attitude towards Gates and his ilk. By approaching
them as supplicants we lose the chance to drive a hard bargain, to take
what they have to offer on our terms instead of on theirs.
We once tended to exaggerate
the benefits of state-built dams and steel plants, and to disregard or
suppress their costs. There is every danger now that we are doing
the same with private initiatives. Is this, I wonder, because of
our belief in miracles? Is it that mythologically inspired Hindus seek
a spectacular way out of social difficulty, and are prone to seek redemption
through glamourous acts by godlike figures? We once hoped that Bhakra and
Bhilai would be the mystic inspiration for the transformation of India.
We have, it seems, now transferred those hopes to Microsoft and Infosys.
Their undeniably gifted promoters have acquired the same status that nuclear
physicists and dam-builders previously did. The political system,
eagerly aided by the media, is encouraging us to cast Bill Gates and N.
R. Narayanamurthy in the same heavenly light as was once enjoyed
by Homi Bhabha and M. Visvesvarayya.
There is no question
that the extreme distrust of private economic initiative in the first few
decades of free India was unnecessary and unproductive. There is
no question, either, that the present worshipful attitude is harmful as
well. Market forces and private firms can help generate and circulate
wealth and thus raise living standards. But unless we are vigilant
they might destroy the environment in the process. And what they
cannot do is promote health and education for all, to thus equalize life
chances. These are justly the responsibility of the state, a responsibility
that the current climate asks it to ignore.
It used to be said that
Jyoti Basu was the only communist who had a pragmatic, rather than dogmatic,
attitude towards private enterprise. It was notable, in this context, that
he refused to make the trip to Delhi to shake hands with Bill Gates.
In that refusal lies a lesson for all of us.
(The author is a historian
and sociologist whose recent book is Savaging the Civilized)
