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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 39, Dated 29 Sept 2012 |
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The Rational Optimist
In his new book, Gurcharan Das makes the case that economic growth has been achieved by India’s people despite their government. It's now time, he tells Shougat Dasgupta, for the State to do its bit
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Photo: Shailendra Pandey |
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IT IS difficult to imagine Gurcharan Das as a corporate executive. His library, in his Jor Bagh house, is a professor’s platonic ideal — all loft, leather, canvas and grandcozy disarray. There are more shelves in the study, books on all sides stretching up to the high ceiling. The shelf above the slightly battered sofa on which I wait, contains bound notebooks and folders bearing the legend ‘Dharma of Capitalism’. Also on this shelf are books by Shashi Tharoor; Das himself; one by the academic Patrick Olivelle, an expert on dharmasastra; a thumbed paperback copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. The shelf reflects the preoccupations that have informed Das’ new book India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State. Launched this week, it’s the reason for my presence in Das’ study, looking at the books, the photographs of children and grandchildren, the evidence in the unshowy prosperity around me of a full, successful and, yes, happy life.
When Das enters his study, a slight, owlish figure, he looks the platonic ideal of a bookworm. Later, as the photographer seeks to manipulate him into position, Das jokes that despite the photographer’s best efforts, despite having once been the CEO of Procter & Gamble India, he cannot cut a commanding figure. “I am,” he says, folding his hands demurely in his lap to demonstrate, “just not macho enough.” Of course, what Das doesn’t need to say is that there are many ways to command attention.
India Grows at Night extends an argument Das made in The Difficulty of Being Good, about accountability, personal responsibility, sadharana dharma. He tweaks this argument to point out that while the people of India are working to pull themselves up into the middle class, the State has not stepped up. Das explains the evolution of his own thinking: his move from a firm libertarian conviction in small, hands-off government to an equally firm conviction that the country has gone as far as it can with a dysfunctional government. A strong, liberal government, he now argues, is necessary for further progress. He defines such a government as not a “benign dictatorship but a constitutional, accountable State that relentlessly and fairly enforces the rule of law”.
Das’ libertarianism, he tells me, emerged out of the “humiliations” he suffered “going cap in hand to politicians” before the liberalisation of 1991. His understanding of libertarianism’s inadequacies were crystallised on a spring night, last year in Tahrir Square. There is footage on YouTube of Das appearing exhilarated by the energy in the square, addressing the massed revolutionaries (aka ordinary Egyptians) from a podium about the lessons of Indian democracy. “It made me consider India anew,” he says now, “understand the success of Indian democracy.” In Cairo, he was asked at a conference how to keep generals out of politics, a question that “we had moved beyond in India”. But faced with an expectant audience in Tahrir Square, it came to him, “off the cuff”, that while “democracy entails many things — elections, liberty, equality”, the most important and “the hardest thing to achieve in practice is ‘the rule of law’ and the idea that no one is above it.”
“Where the State is desperately needed,” Das writes — referring to “basic needs, security, law and order, education, health and drinking water” — “it performs appallingly. Where it is not needed, it is hyperactive in tying the citizen in miles of red tape and harassing him through the ‘inspector raj’.” Das wants to change the Indian State’s ‘habits of the heart’. For instance, he says that India “spends a decent amount on education, but look at the dismal statistics: we can get 97 percent of kids into school but studies show that one out of four teachers doesn’t show up for work and 50 percent of those who do show up don’t do their job.” Quoting the Annual Status of Education Report, Das writes “[e]ven as the famed Indian Institutes of Technology have acquired a global reputation, less than half the children in the fifth grade in India can do second grade reading and maths”.
“If you pay a bribe,” Das explains, his even tone at odds with his voluble hand gestures, “to get a job as a teacher, you feel you can’t be touched, that it’s a job for life. You’ve paid for it.” In the chapter ‘Confronting Corruption’, he offers cautious support for Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, suggesting a “lean Lokpal focussed only on the big fish” would be a positive development. He also describes Kejriwal as having “illiberal tendencies”. He doesn’t elaborate except to express distaste for and suspicion of “street revolutions,” a little at odds with the evocation of Tahrir Square as his book’s birthplace.
Ideologically, there is little question where Das stands. Economic growth is a panacea. He places the emphasis on “equality of opportunity” even if society remains unequal. To wit, he is against quotas for jobs and universities but believes 25 percent of places at, say, Doon School should be reserved for the children of the poor. “At this stage in India’s evolution,” he says, “the priority is economic growth, lifting people out of poverty. We should not be obsessed with equality of result.” Instead, Das calls for manageable reform, a scaling down of ambition that seems to contradict his call for strong government until you see that by ‘strong government’ Das means a government that “does few things but does them effectively.” So still pretty libertarian then.
He launches into a long defence of Walmart, not because he thinks Walmart is a shining knight, but because the alternative, he claims, is worse, the injustice against the farmer greater: “The current system of arhatias and highly politicised mandis helps neither the farmer nor the consumer. At 4:1, our food ratio, the price from farm to fork is the highest in the world.” When I bring up the history of colonialism in connection to Western capitalism, he tells me to “put aside the narrative of victimhood, capitalism is our best revenge. The free market and democracy are universal.” India Grows at Night can be a bit glib, short on rigour but there can be no doubt about Das’ desire to see Indians lifted out of poverty.
“We are certainly on the path towards becoming a middle income country,” he says. It only needs the government to put its foot on the accelerator.
Shougat Dasgupta is a Literary Editor with Tehelka.
shougat@tehelka.com
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