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I.G. Patel
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During the 21 months of the Emergency, parallel to what happened on the political front, the ideological distance separating India’s economists ceased to be a talking point. I will quote only one instance to illustrate this. In 1975-76, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the University of Sussex at Brighton. With Brighton as base, I was constantly on the move, addressing meetings, participating in protest rallies and interacting with the press, all the time running down the atrocities being perpetrated by the authoritarian regime Indira Gandhi and her son had imposed on India. On the completion of one year of the Emergency on June 26, 1976, the London Economist carried a full-page letter written by me right in the heart of the journal elaborating the economic and social evils the Emergency had been responsible for and the torture and inhumanity accompanying it. The letter created a stir in Europe as well as in the United States of America; the circulation of that particular issue of the journal was prohibited in India. Either on its own or from direct instructions from New Delhi, the Indian high commission in London prepared the draft of a protest letter strongly refuting the contents of my letter and hawked it around among Indian economists and other social scientists, then resident in Britain, for their signature. Not one — whatever his or her political beliefs — was prepared to sign it. It was finally a retired Briton, Penderel Moon, a member of the ancient Indian Civil Service who had opted to stay back in India after 1947, who came forward to the high commission’s rescue. Nehru had made him a member of the Planning Commission where he became notorious for his narrow, ultra-conservative attitude towards the problems of development faced by economies emerging from under the dark shadow of prolonged colonialism. On one occasion, P.C. Mahalanobis tore into him, ridiculed his persistently negative approach and cited him and his like as one major reason for India’s chronic under-development. Moon soon left India, joined the World Bank and by the 1960s had settled in London. The lashing he received from Mahalanobis obviously still rankled; and he jumped to accept the high commission’s invitation to defend the Emergency; his letter extolled Indira and her son’s efforts to extricate India from the obnoxious course the country had been forced to take by adhering to the Soviet-inspired designs of Mahalanobis and his associates, in which he included me.
B.K. Nehru, who was then high commissioner in London, sent me a message at Brighton asking me to have my head examined. He was always facetious in his approach to things and I could easily ignore his suggestion. I.G. Patel, too, was meanwhile out of the country and was in New York as deputy administrator of the United Nations development programme. He sent me a most affectionate letter, mentioned how concerned they all felt about my safety and wanted me to take adequate care of myself. There was a whiff of the camaraderie that was the heritage of Pandara Road.
Even in the 1980s, when I.G. was governor of the Reserve Bank of India and I was in charge of the finance portfolio in a state regime, our mutual relationship continued to be cordial enough in spite of the growing influence of neo-liberal ideas in circles that mattered in New Delhi and Mumbai. While there were one or two issues of dispute over aspects of monetary policy and management between us, this did not create any major difficulty. When in Calcutta, I.G. would invariably spend an evening in our apartment having meals together and gossiping late into the night. He, too, would have enough time for me when I was visiting Bombay. We took our professional roles as a necessary aspect of normal existence and left it at that. Later, when I was out of the state government and, with his tenure in the RBI over, I.G. had taken charge of the Ahmedabad management institute, he invited me for a lecture. We spent a whole day together, relaxing in each other’s company and reminiscing about old friends. It was just like reliving Pandara Road.
The climate changed abruptly — and, for me, most inexplicably — only in the next decade with the beginning of the era of the so-called economic liberalization. I.G., it was widely known, was the first choice of the Washington Consensus for the post of finance minister in P.V. Narasimha Rao’s government which had agreed a priori to surrender the country’s economic sovereignty to foreigners. Manmohan Singh’s opportunity came only when I.G. declined the offer. His endorsement of Manmohan’s “unleashing the human spirit” speech was categorical. Perhaps he was merely reflecting the mood of the senior civil servants who were all for the easy road to solve the country’s seemingly intractable economic difficulties. But that was only one part of the story. I.G.’s five years as director of the London School of Economics had swung his views on overall economic policy evidently towards the extreme Right. He returned to India as a starry-eyed admirer of Margaret Thatcher, whom I detested from the bottom of my heart. On the domestic front, the groundwork was already prepared by Indira Gandhi’s senior son, Rajiv Gandhi, who claimed the prime minister’s throne upon his mother’s assassination. He was overtly pro-American. India’s general economic stance became outrageously pro-capitalist and anti-Left. The final formal seal of approval on total capitulation in July 1991 was a mere formality. I was taken aback by the grievous injury these developments caused to the social relationship between erstwhile friends. The atmosphere was dramatically transformed. It could be the consequence of an emotional upsurge among the new breed of neo-liberals; they had finally succeeded — and in totality — in attaining their objective after such long years of waiting; it was a time for taking revenge. The more aggressive among the neo-liberal crowd took it for granted that those who did not agree with them were not only their personal enemies, they were the nation’s enemies as well.
For me the decade that followed was one of the unhappiest for a single but all-important reason. Over the years, I had continued to be extraordinarily fond of I.G. In my view, the two sharpest minds I have come across were I.G.’s and Amartya Sen’s. Amartya applied his intellectual prowess for scaling scholastic peaks one after another. I.G. chose otherwise and disappeared in the maze of economic administration, enjoying the company of smart and clever civil servants and bureaucrats all over the world. That did not erode his intellectual brilliance though. Besides, he had rich and genuine human qualities that made it impossible to resist being drawn towards him.
The post-July 1991 developments took my breath away, specifically because I feared it tore I.G. away from me. It all happened because I had been unwavering in my opposition to economic liberalization and kept pouring scorn on the There Is No Alternative school of neo-liberals. My column in the Economic and Political Weekly was so consistently and overtly anti-liberalization that those on the other side of the battlefield felt greatly offended. It became their holy cause to kill the column. They must have applied pressures on Krishnaraj, the editor of the EPW, to stop my free-ranging romping about. Krishnaraj remained unbaffled. In desperation, the column’s ill-wishers made an organized attempt to bombard the editor with a fusillade of letters week after week — which Krishnaraj faithfully published — accusing the column of nefarious intentions and demanding its closure. What stunned me was to find a letter signed by I.G. himself in this jungle of correspondence. It was unbelievable reading; it accused Krishnaraj of showing undue favours to me by giving me so much space in the journal. It was impossible for me to associate this kind of pettiness with I.G.’s civility and generous character. I had little doubt he was cajoled into appending his signature to the letter by some elements surrounding him and he was unable to extricate himself from their claustrophobic presence. The editor remained unmoved. My column continued. Krishnaraj told me, rather sheepishly, that it was, surveys suggested, by far the widest read thing in the EPW.
This could not be the end of a friendship which got structured over half a century. I refused to accept the very idea. I had not met I.G. for years and was keen to have a session with him to sort things out. An opportunity came when both of us were at Tissur to attend a three-day discussion session organized by K.N. Raj’s students and admirers to honour him for his work and achievements. I was shocked to see I.G. He was visibly ill, very ill, hobbling around with great difficulty with the help of a walking stick and suffering from constant breathing trouble. We met. There was some initial awkwardness, for that EPW letter must have been an ugly memory for both of us. But tension eased when I cracked a joke which he seemingly appreciated. But the conversation proceeded rather haltingly and there was no Pandara Road redux. Suddenly it struck me that I.G. was not only physically weak, he was also suffering from intense loneliness. He had the usual crowd of sycophants and hangers-on around him, but none to confide in or lean on. His intimate friends from Cambridge and Pandara Road either were dead or had grown distant for diverse reasons. My heart went out to him. I wanted to have a long session with him and draw him out. What a pity, that was not to be. Because of the precarious state of his health, he had to leave a day ahead of the scheduled date for the end of the conference.
Next year, while visiting the US, he felt grievously unwell and was admitted to a New York hospital. The family had, very thoughtfully, arranged to let me know every day how he was responding to treatment. The news was not cheerful. When the end came, the news reached me within an hour. I sobbed in silence; my wife let me.
Some relationships transcend the ideological barrier: at least that is how I look at the problem. And I believe my friendship with I.G. Patel did scale that barrier.
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