Why is there distrust for the market in India’s political milieuIJ Are Indians genetically pro-leftIJ
India is a complex country, and Indians are complicated. They love money but abhor others celebrating it in public. They would go an extra mile and break an avoidable regulation to have a penny or two more, but never miss an opportunity to look down upon those who make a profession or livelihood out of it. No wonder, the country often witnesses competitive politics over who the true ‘socialist’ is, though many would not want to be called thus following the collapse of the ‘Only Fatherland’ in the early 1990s.
So, when the Aam Aadmi Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal, riding primarily on the support of the young and educated, the biggest beneficiaries of liberalisation in the country, decided to ban FDI in retail and distribute freebies in the name of the common man, it further vindicated the enigma called India. The AAP, however, is not an exception. The BJP, which had a good reformist record during the NDA regime, chickened out and started opposing FDI in retail once it was thrown out of power in 2004. And then there’s the Congress-led UPA Government, which has in the name of reforms introduced a job scheme that distorts labour market and breeds corruption, and a Food Security Bill that puts economy on its head.
In the process, these political parties have ignored the obvious. Writes Gurcharan Das in his book India Grows at Night: “In the quarter century of high growth, the middle class in India quadrupled to almost 300 million people. By 2022, half of India’s 1.3 billion people will be middle class based on these trends.” He then quotes the late economist Suresh Tendulkar to say that one per cent of the country’s poor have been climbing out of poverty each year since the mid-1980s. The truth, therefore, is: The market economy works as much for the poor as it does for the rich.
The riddle doesn’t stop with political parties. look at the paradox called Manmohan Singh. Hailed by many as the ‘father’ of India’s liberalisation story, he is ironically the same person who in the 1970s openly tom-tommed the ‘garibi hatao’ slogan, besides helping Indira Gandhi devise an exorbitantly high tax regime wherein someone like JRD Tata had to sell some property annually to pay his taxes which were higher than his income! Singh’s commitment to socialism — statism to be precise — was such that in the mid-1980s, if former Union Home Secretary CG Somiah’s memoirs The Honest Always Stand Alone is to be believed, he was rebuked by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi for pursuing regressive ‘pro-poor’ policies.
Why is there so much distrust for the market in India’s political milieuIJ Is it that we Indians are genetically pro-leftIJ Arshia Sattar’s book, The Mouse Merchant, has answers for these questions. It tells us the stories from our ancient past that unabashedly celebrate money, the foremost being the tale of a young man who builds a fortune with a dead mouse! “Employing extraordinary entrepreneurial skills, the young man sells the mouse as cat food, the proceeds of which he invests to buy food that he sells to loggers, receiving logs from them as payment; in the manner, he goes on to build a fortune in timber.”
The mouse merchant isn’t a unique phenomenon, however. The Panchatantra tells about four Brahmin friends whose sole aim was “to make money”. The fundamental message coming out of these stories — from as diverse tomes as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to the Kathasaritsagara and the Mricchakatika — is that “a man is better dead than poor”. The Panchatantra goes to the extent of telling us six ways of acquiring wealth: By begging, serving kings, farming, teaching, moneylending and trade. After reviewing each of these vocations, it says that “trade is best suited for the acquisition of wealth because it provides the maximum autonomy to an individual”.
As for the rulers, they had the assigned roles too. In the story of Kirtisena, from the Kathasaritsagara, we are told that the dharma of a ruler is to ensure security and levy moderate taxes. “King Vasudatta is a virtuous man and he wanders through the forests, protecting them. He levies low tolls and punishes thieves and bandits himself.” Sattar also mentions a line from the Ramayana which points to the ruler’s duty to create good infrastructure in order to attract commerce. The kings would never participate in trade and commerce, and merely act like the “hidden hands” of capitalism. And it worked well. So much so that Roman writer Pliny would call India “the sink of the world’s precious metal”.
So, it’s a myth to believe that we Indians were historically other-worldly or anti-commerce. We were always worldly and loved the smell of money and were one of the best traders of those times. However, unlike our modern-day rulers, the kings of the past never tried to become traders themselves; they were mere facilitators. It was under the influence of Marxism that we began to distrust the market; we were made to believe that the bourgeois trader was an exploiter and could not be relied upon. With no faith in the trading class, the state had to take up its task for the people. In the end, what we got was the mai-baap government with unbridled corruption and the stifling ‘licence Quota Raj’.
It’s not that people don’t reward growth-based politics. In fact, subsidy no longer guarantees electoral successes anymore. Had it not been the case, the Congress would not have lost Rajasthan so badly, and many incumbent governments would not have come back to power with a thumping majority. The problem lies with the political class which continues to ignore these obvious signs and believe that freebies are enough to win elections. The UPA will get the same message this year, but will the political class learn any lesson from it is the big question.