Amartya Sen vs Jagdish Bhagwati: Pankaj Mishra weighs in

A combination of Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagawati and Pankaj Mishra would seem like a sure-fire recipe for controversy – or at least a twitter storm or two. What is perhaps most surprising about Mishra’s take on India’s best-known economists – and bitter rivals – in the New York Review of Books is the conspicuous absence of Mishraesque excess. [Read it in its entirety here >

Much of the book review of Sen’s “An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions” (co-author Jean Dreze) and Bhagwati’s “Why Growth Matters” (co-author Arvind Panagriya) traverses the now well-travelled geography of greedy elites, heartless free marketeers and long-suffering and excluded poor. But the stinging broadsides at favourite targets are few and far between, and the trademark tone of high moral dudgeon is relatively muted.

It is no mystery as to where Mishra’s sympathies lie, or who/what he despises most. But what makes Mishra’s writing almost always worthwhile is his ability to condense and explicate complex arguments and realities. Take, for instance, this section that puts forth a concise critique of a model of growth driven entirely by consumer capitalism:

Economic growth has been led by the services sector-a loose category that includes information technology, telecommunications, banking, and real estate and contributes nearly 50 percent to the GDP-rather than manufacturing, which has powered the growth of other East Asian economies. Agriculture, which still employs a majority of India’s population, remains stagnant. A small, well-educated workforce enjoys rising salaries, but there have been only very small increases in wages and productivity for people trapped in the bottom half of the dual economy: agriculture and the so-called “informal” or unorganized sector, which employ more than 90 percent of India’s labor force.

“The bulk of India’s aggregate growth,” the Cornell economist Kaushik Basu warns, “is occurring through a disproportionate rise in the incomes at the upper end of the income ladder.”… Recent corruption scandals involving the sale of billions of dollars’ worth of national resources such as mines, forests, land, water, and telecom spectrums reveal that crony capitalism and rent-seeking, rather than entrepreneurial dynamism and innovation in a free market, are the real engines of India’s economic growth.

Whatever one’s ideological sympathies, most thinking Indians will agree today that the current model of economic growth – coupled with an entirely compromised political system – is dysfunctional, lopsided and unsustainable. And if we put aside the toxic Modi versus Gandhis partisanship, most will also see that neither the Sonia-style welfare economics nor Modi’s business first model are a panacea to the nation’s ills.

While plenty has been written on the glaring inadequacies of UPA policies – see the many Firstpost critiques by R Jagannathan and Dhiraj Nayyar – Mishra rightly points out that the Gujarat model does little to address the cancer of crony capitalism:

This “collaborative capitalism,” of which Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister of Gujarat, is the most egregious exponent, consists of the state extending tax benefits to India’s largest businesses and facilitating their cheap access to national resources of oil, gas, forests, and minerals. In turn, “the disproportionate control over economic resources,” [political scientist Atul Kohli in “Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India”> writes, “enables businessmen to ‘buy’ politicians,” shape decision-making through the media, and even enter politics themselves."

A strong leader who cracks the whip to spur the growth rate ever higher does not address pressing problems of malnutrition, environmental degradation (see under: Adani Group), or literacy. Problems that won’t miraculously disappear with a wave of the “growth rate” wand.

Liberal critics like Mishra, on the other hand, loath to acknowledge certain inconvenient realities, as the fact that Gujarat’s growth has been far more “inclusive” than of other ‘socialist’ states such as Bihar – though, ironically, Nitish Kumar has delivered a higher growth rate than Modi.

What Mishra’s review unwittingly reveals is the futility of polarising ideological wars.Be it Gujarat vs Bihar or Sen vs Bhagwati, these battles of one upmanship do little to nurture an urgently required national conversation about our nation’s future course which is sorely missing.We need the best ideas, and not just the best men, to win.

You can read “Which India Matters?” by Pankaj Mishra on the New York Review of Books website .