Of Sen And Nonsen...

Dear Dr Sen,
Right in the beginning, let me assure you that I am as proud of your Nobel honour as any other Indian, maybe even any other Bengali. Decades ago, when it was unfashionable and wholly politically incorrect to do so, you steered your own lonely and courageous path away from an economics driven by gdp and per capita income. Even as the Chicago School reigned, both in the minds of policy-makers and the Royal Swedish Academy, you persevered as a singular voice of conscience (or, to be precise, with Mahbub-ul-Huq, one of two voices). Today, even the World Bank and the imf talk your language. You should have won the Nobel 20 years ago, right after you published your Collective Choice and Social Welfare.

It was not to be. The opinions of the economics power elite had to change, the East Asia meltdown had to happen, George Soros had to turn against free market capitalism, Tony Blair had to come to power to find in you the perfect Master of Trinity for his rebranded Britannica, the Nobel Committee had to be embarrassed by the collapse of US hedge firm Long-Term Capital Management which used the models that won Robert Merton and Myron Scholes the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1997. You could not have got the Prize earlier. Sadly, by the time you did, you had spent 15 years saying nothing new. And when you got it, you willingly made yourself a leading light of a vapid morality-statement-driven politically-correct establishment. Your triumphant tour of India only confirmed this.

Sir, no one disagrees with what you have been relentlessly saying, that education and healthcare are crucial to development. No one would argue about that, from Atal Behari Vajpayee to Rabri Devi. Now can we go beyond that a bit, take one step down from morality to reality? But there, sir, you are superbly vague. You say that democracy and a free press are crucial to the removal of inequality, but in the next breath you tell us to emulate China in the way it has tackled its social problems. As far as I know, these problems were not solved in China though democratic means or with the help of a free press. When we ask you about agricultural subsidies, whether they should be removed, you refuse to answer our questions. In June 1997, you famously said in Delhi: Let me make it clear. I'm saying nothing about agricultural subsidies. This time, people wanted to know what you thought should be done about the public sector, a burning issue and a morally difficult one if ever there was one. You evaded the questions.

Instead, you stepped back into the comforting anteroom of moral generalities: India should cut defence expenditure. Of course it should; just as humanity should become mature enough to abolish war. Can India cut defence expenditure today? Of course it cannot. But you wish to concern yourself only with those nebulous areas which are of no consequence to here and now. We don't need you to say these things, Dr Sen. We have enough politicians who have been telling us all these for five decades now.

But when we ask you to help us formulate policy, you make it clear that that is not your job. When we read your books to look for any solutions that you may have to the problems you are pinpointing, we find vague exhortations to ngos, citizens' groups and panchayats to be the engines of bottom-up development. You yourself have in the last fortnight been a victim of the confidence tricks that can be easily perpetrated within the fuzzy boundaries of these solutions, tricks no less dangerous than what the Indian state's inefficiency and corruption have done to our innumerable poor.

Yes, Dr Sen, you have been duped. The statistics that reach you across the seas about India often have little connection with the ground situation. I'll give you the example of only one state, since that is your home state, and because here you have been duped by the same leftists who viciously opposed your appointment as a 23-year-old as Head of the Economics Department of Jadavpur University. The same people who stood up in the West Bengal assembly and said that you got the post because your father was then the chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission, and your uncle the Education Secretary.

When you praised the West Bengal government for great strides in land reforms, you did so without bothering to find out what every villager knows. That the land reforms gave the till-now marginal farmers land holdings which were too small for economic agriculture; that over time, these holdings have been merged by resourceful men who have formed a whole new rich agricultural class in the state. Of course, the titles to the land holdings still belong to the small farmer, but he remains what he always was: marginal, and a poorly-paid employee of the big farmer. And today's big farmers are all yesterday's poor cpi(m) cadre.

You also praised the way West Bengal has decentralised democracy, down to the panchayat level. Dr Sen, if you bothered to cycle down 20 km from your Shantiniketan home, you would have found that this panchayat system has been marked by the decentralisation of rampant corruption, along with brutal intimidation of dissenting voices. You would have seen the palaces that panchayat-level leaders have built, and noticed the roads and health facilities and primary schools that aren't there. The people who own these palaces were at one time poor cpi(m) cadre.

By getting carried away by accolades, by not bothering to check the ground reality, by cleverly evading every issue where the moral high ground was not easy to find, and by opting to have the best of both worlds preaching without substantiating you have done yourself and your country a disservice. Two decades ago, you broke new ground in your field. Today, it's high time you told us something we don't know already.