Of Panagariya and Pappu

If Panagariya was a scion in Congress party, and someone in media got hold of his seminal paper “The Myth of Child Malnutrition in India”, the headline would have been "Panagariya Pappu says there is no child malnutrition in India.” (I have the pdf file of the paper and can share on request; anyway it is available on Google). But then Panagariya is an academic with cultural background of a commercial community, spouting ultra right wing economic theories in the domain of the dismal science and thus the darling of the baby faced urban right wing Hindu middle class.

But we can’t blame Panagariya. He says what he believes to be true.  In our new found devotion to rationality, we think that emotions and cultural influences do not and should not matter. But the fact is they do, and they do more than reason and rationality. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about a set of economic theorists in his celebrated Fooled by Randomness, “They believe in reason and rationality – that we should overcome cultural impediments on our way to become a better human race – thinking we can control our nature at will….”. The fact remains we cannot ignore the overwhelming and all pervading influence of our cultural background.  Thus Panagariya believes that child malnutrition is not an issue because that is what he has learnt from his childhood and/or has inherited as a legacy from his forefathers.

Thus Minhaz Merchant (whoever he is), writes in ET calling Amartya Sen an ayatollah of secularism, “Profs Bhagwati and Panagariya ‘rightly’ argue that economic growth, allied with welfare schemes which build productive capital assets (rather than the NAC-Sen-Dreze formula of handouts which create dependencies) is the most efficient development model for India.” Of course, if your father went to University of Berkeley in 1950 with a future head of state, (when mine was a fatherless youth in Bhagalpur with just a school degree living on one meal a day, with no decent clothes and absolutely no footwear, and rest of the country is in dire poverty) you will surely say so. You are culturally wired to do so. You do not believe your privilege as an act of randomness but rather a right.

One may say that in his paper Panagariya has established through data and reason, the thesis that he has posited. People who take that path are not aware of the academic ways. They are not aware how any term paper, dissertation or thesis is written.  Any such academic work starts with the thesis itself. In case of the work of a younger academic, the idea often comes from her guide or mentor.  In case of a senior academic like Panagariya, the idea starts within, shaped almost entirely by his own cultural influences and his past line of work, which again was chosen because of his background and his psyche. After the thesis is chosen, then goes the data and logic to substantiate it. Thus just because there is data and analysis in an academic paper does not make it unbiased and universal truth.

I agree with much of Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati’s works on trade and globalization, although he pays only lip service to ‘making the human face of globalisation more agreeable’.  I agree with his trade theories perhaps because it resonates with the fact that my father was a sailor and traveled the world and my thoughts are shaped by those stories (there goes my influence). And my own training in the normative sciences and simplistic non-science called “management studies” also shaped my beliefs to develop a liking to those theories. But that is beside the point. I note that Dr. Bhagwati was born in 1934, which makes him exactly the same age as my father. And that he went to Cambridge in the fifties. Now, I would not really like to repeat the gloomy melodrama of what my father was doing in the fifties, but I note with keen interest that in a rough biographical sketch on one IMF website ( http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/09/people.htm) Bhagwati’s family is mentioned to be ‘modest in means’. His father, in pre-independence India was a Chief Justice and they lived in the heart of glamorous-even-then city of Bombay. My grandfather, around the same time, had just left the family profession of land owning and tilling in rural Bengal, and got himself a job in some coal mine in Central India, because the income from the land was not enough to feed 8 children (just one more than the Bhagwati family), let alone sending them to colleges with names of Englishmen in big cities or even abroad.  My daughter, who goes to a school, on the tip of South Mumbai, teaching international curriculum, rightly thinks that we are poor, as most of her friends’ families have more than luxury sedans like Mercs and BMWs, most of them carry expenseive cellphones which neither me nor my wife carry or perhaps will carry and they have around 2-3 holidays abroad each year, not counting the short shopping jaunts to London or Dubai.  But living in West-Central Mumbai, paying a monthly rent that can sustain two families comfortably in an Indian village, I have no such misplaced perception. Thus, if my daughter becomes a celebrated economist like Dr. Bhagwati (no such signs within a lightyear yet) and promotes neo-classical economics while citing ‘childhood of modest means’ I will not be surprised at all. (I am not even mentioning that Bhagwati also comes from a linguistic community famous for their prowess in business and entrepreneurship, knowing that Nagar Brahmins will jump on me, although there are more Nagar business people than there are in my home state across all caste.)

Thus, my point, my friends, is very simple.  Our world views are almost totally shaped by the cultural influences that we have, our upbringing, our socio economic background etc. It is also shaped by some deep rooted biological self interest, which is not exactly the explicit variety of petty selfishness, but more reflexive responses in our overall demeanor and discourse.

We should, thus make no mistake that today’s socio-economic-political debate is just a healthy debate in a plural society.  The virtual world in India, the social media that is, populated extensively by the upper middle class urban and semi urban people from the majority community, is clearly tilting to one side. It is not a debate. It is a war call of the ‘haves’. It is the return of the vested interest, which have been vested not explicitly over a lifetime but seeped in and took roots over generations. It is very clearly the sabre rattling of the powerful for what they think is their claim. It is the assertion of the privileged of what they think is right (as Merchant pronounces in his article in ET) in the economic arena. It is the muscle flexing of the majority community in the political arena, which wishes to reclaim the middle ground lost to secularism, by attaching the prefix of pseudo to it to denigrate it thoroughly into an epithet. But I can’t blame them. It is almost biological and much deeper rooted than they can imagine and thus have no control over them.

Even after me doing an MBA (can you f****ing believe it!!!) and being in the business of money for two decades, I think some at my place of work harbours deep distrust and mild detestation towards me as I am considered an intellectual (which is a serious expletive around here), which I think largely comes from the racial association she makes, and perhaps rightly so. So when Panagariya writes child malnutrition is not an issue, but growth and trade is, we need not blame him, or look into his various degrees and papers, we just need to look into where does he come from and pardon him, as he is just another soldier in this battle being fought on many fronts.