Amartya Sen

London, June 21: Amartya Sen has urged public debate to focus more on the central issues of social justice in India in an interview to The Telegraph to coincide with a Confederation of Indian Industry summit in London tomorrow.

The conference agenda, ‘Managing Global Crisis’, is intended to boost foreign investment, especially from the UK, and thereby help boost the Indian economy in areas such as infrastructure development.

While making it clear he did not wish to be seen as being repeatedly critical of the Left, Sen made the point: “I am on record as saying I was disappointed with the Left for not focussing on issues that are central issues of social justice and focussing much more on India’s sovereignty and that kind of question.”

The Nobel Prize-winning economist has, incidentally, had an honorary degree conferred on him by Cambridge University at a ceremony where Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and his wife, Melinda, and the Aga Khan were among nine others who were also similarly honoured.

Sen was described in the citation in Latin as “Indum disputationis” — “the argumentative Indian”.

In his politest way, he certainly appears to have picked an argument with the Left.

Sen being conferred the honorary degree by Cambridge University

He referred back to last year’s Hiren Mukherjee Memorial Lecture, ‘The Demands of Social Justice’, to the Lok Sabha, and took the Left to task for “neglecting such issues as hunger and illiteracy and focussing on such issues as the Indo-US nuclear deal which is not a central issue for social justice in India — no matter whether it was a good or bad contract”.

He added, however: “We should not turn it again and again on the Left… everybody had played up the fact and even Prakash (Karat) was asked what does he think of my criticism of them and so on. It is not worth going back through (all that) again.”

He emphasised: “We have to think much more about why India continues to have one of the largest ratios of hunger, not merely not just the absolute number of hungry, under-nourished people in the world – we have more than any other country in the world in absolute numbers – but proportionately also higher than most other states, including the African countries. Our level of literacy has gone up but there are still big gaps to fill there.”

He wondered “why isn’t there an absolute explosion in the fact the country has more hungry, under-nourished people than any other country in the world?”

He went on: “The basic medical care and health services have huge gaps and neglect so these are the issues of justice. We can expand the education scheme, we can expand the healthcare thing, we can continue with land reform. There is a lot of revenue around and one could use it for these purposes.”

He also expressed serious worries about caste divisions, “increasingly between the lower castes themselves rather than just between high and low castes. When you are low caste and happen also to be poor and a woman, you stand very little chance.”

Although he acknowledges many industrialists are philanthropic, Sen does not consider it is their principal responsibility to bring about social justice. “Their main job is not that. The main thing is whether the government and Opposition and political parties and the media are concentrating on the right issues. So these are the issues to discuss – I don’t see them much discussed in the papers. Whenever I see my name, I never see myself quoted on that.”

Sen, who is staying at Trinity College on one of his regular trips back from Harvard, has just finished proof-reading his new book, The Idea of Justice, which will be out next month.

“I don’t want people to think it is another book on India and on Indian injustice,” he clarified. “It is a philosophy book and it is not really about India, though there are a few references to India in passing. It is a book on the theory of justice and my target audience is philosophy professors and students and teachers across the world.”