Reality-check

It`s political economy, stupid

                                                        

“Out of the mouth of babes …” the deepest truths are spoken, as the Bible says, meaning of course that profound truths may spring from the most unlikeliest sources. Although the image is a bit inapt but the Union Law Minister of India, Salman Khurshid, has recently performed as one such fabled babe and has uttered a deep truth of our times for India and indeed the world. And like most such babes he has been largely ignored.

He was reflecting on the prevailing intellectual atmosphere in India these days when the people, the media, and more directly the judiciary are besieged by cases of huge corruption in high places. Big fishes in the form of politicians, corporate honchos, bureaucrats, etc are in jail being tried for serious crimes involving policy-rigging, black money siphoning, bribery, and loot of national resources. The good Minister speaking to the media sent a public message to India`s judiciary saying that while trying the law in these cases the judiciary needs to understand the “political economy” of the country.

The Indian Express of October 10 and some other newspapers quoted him in full. “What will affect the functioning is if other institutions do not understand the kind of political economy we are faced with today: what is needed to encourage growth and investment? If you lock up top businessmen, will investments come?”

This was shocking. While it is very true, as babes` words usually are, nobody worthwhile in the country let alone a cabinet minister lets slip such deep truths. Our Minister is a well-read man, with readings beyond curriculum and professional needs, but he is still green politically. He has not yet grasped that the Congress Party does not have, indeed never had even in the glory days of MK Gandhi, a culture of open intellectual dialogue. When asked further in order to check out if it was an unconscious profundity, the good Minister clarified: “Each of the three wings – judiciary, legislature, and executive – has to understand the political economy and respond to it. The judiciary cannot be immune to the demands of society in changing times.”

It couldn`t be clearer. Manmohan Singh has been mumbling away for twenty years to convey and yet not convey the same thing. Khurshid has made it crystal clear. Note the “three wings” who need to “understand” the message. Manmohan is shuffling into the sunset, while Khurshid is a rising star and a potential member of Rahul Gandhi`s cabinet.

The establishment including the hyperactive media has been stunned into utter silence although this is more explosive than – indeed it is a Bhashya, an exegesis of – Radia Tapes. It is the unspoken and unspeakable Brahmasutra of Manmohanism. Since the last bit of the Minister`s message was directed at the judiciary it made some lofty ritual noise about its omniscience, and then the whole bomb has been quietly buried. Judiciary has been in current crosshairs because lately it has become too embarrassing for it to calibrate the Law as usual for benefitting the rich and the powerful. In one or two cases it has had to behave as if laws actually apply equally to all. The Cat now let out of the bag is this: “top businessmen” who are being unwisely “locked up”.

No praise is enough for the wise Minister. His language speaks volumes, reveals recondite truths and hidden waters. Note the “changing times” and “today” when there is a different political economy in throne which the old-fashioned judiciary, still smitten with mid-20th century constitutional pieties, has not yet perhaps registered well; “today” is the current times of Manmohanist “reforms”. Even the throwaway phrase “locked up” lays bare the sad underlying reality of India`s judicial system -- that even in the 21st century it remains fundamentally about locking up people, not justice. Ask Kanimozhi, Amar Singh, or Raja. But these are trifling insights.

Let us come to “top businessmen”. Underneath all the hocus focus of Manmohanism about Reforms, Liberalization, Rising India etc, it is simply a smokescreen to hand over by conscious  policy of government, the nation, its people and its future to top businessmen. The ruling belief is, and Manmohan is its presiding prophet, that only top businessmen can take the nation forward, now that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx have manifestly failed.

Whether this belief is true, or whether it is a superstition of fatigued old men is not our concern here. How this belief affects functioning of democracy is also a concern we are side- stepping at the moment. What we must instead note is that the Law Minister has cut through the whole cant and hypocrisy and laid bare the governing philosophy. It is a huge clarification. From 1991-92, it is all about top businessmen.  The whole artfulness of governance is to actually do this while pretending that it is about farmers, dalits, women, youth, environment, and such like. The bold Minister has revealed the true truth! We should be grateful to him.

One would expect that the nation, the cable-TV panelists, the Indias against Corruption, and the political parties would sit up and create a furore. There should have been school-children with candles at India Gate. Stars should have run along the Marine Drive. From Chambers of Industry and Commerce to Chaiwallas at roadsides, people should have been agitatedly discoursing about it: Hey, it is all about top businessmen. Geddit!  But this has not happened. There has scarcely been a ripple in the public domain. Except in blogs like this.

Why? Because the truth is very uncomfortable indeed. It upsets the whole artfully manufactured consent and unbearably unmasks the spuriousness of the ruling mythology.

Wait.  All this is only half the story. 

Our able Minister has gone much farther. He has upturned carefully laid global paving stones and unbottled a major genie which has been desperately bottled away for over a century by global corporate economists wittingly and by lay economists unwittingly. He has spoken out the banished words: political economy.

This utterance of the learned Minister is a Big Story, and it is of world-wide scale. It concerns the biggest delusion in the 20th century, both of the Right and of the Left. 

The other day, I happened to be chatting with a boy just into an engineering college. He was telling me of his puzzlement at some barefaced action of his college authorities which was against the stated college and national policy as also against natural logic, but which tended to favour some rich students. He is not a naïve boy; he is generally aware of how things are; he sees films, reads newspapers. What was really puzzling him was how his whitehaired professors whom he still respects and trusts as father figures could allow such a gross thing to happen. I did not have the heart to tell him that he was stepping onto the long road of life in a world managed by otherwise respect-worthy whitehaired men, in which a series of such puzzlements makes up what is called adulthood and that this bewilderment will only grow bigger not lesser till he too becomes a whitehaired man crisscrossed by lifelong compulsions of such contradictions; that oddly, against all logic, political economy trumps all other cards.

This is an enormous truth. For more than a century it has been propagated that Modern Times have arrived in human evolution and that societies now live or ought to live by something called Rule of Law. And what is Law? It is elaborations of a moral consensus about justice. Well, a more careful look will also tell that these notions and their elaborations are older and actually date back to the famous turnaround in human civilization about the time of Descartes, Galileo, Shakespeare and that bunch which abandoned religious dogma as moorings of society and embraced Reason as the guiding principle.

Various Charters, Bills of Rights, Declarations, Constitutions, etc have been since written-up by well meaning whitehaired men from time to time 

saying that all are equal, free, and cherishable, etc regardless of class, race, creed, caste, language, and such by-now-tattered onesided pieties we fill up our children’s innocent minds with. But the fact is that the devil has not been banished along with god. Even in Modern Times, it is still here, as political power-structures, which permeate the very fabric of societies and distort and cancel out all other imperatives. 

Even the French revolution which had equality, liberty and fraternity as its slogan and which was the first political attempt towards modernity was eventually  tamed, subverted and refracted away by political inequalities – “reformed”, in today’s language, which has ironic echoes of the medieval European Reformation. Other revolutions which followed and attempted political modernization also met the same fate. Even leftist revolutions of the 20th Century which had class-consciousness as their central creed have had a scarcely different fate. The devil is in deeper details, it seems -- the adroit devil of political economy.

As our clear-tongued Minister blurted out, you may have the finest and noblest of Constitutions, Charters, Laws, Rights, and suchlike but if these infringe the existing hierarchies of political power then these will have to bend and retreat. Political power prevails over loftiest ideals. Period. 

There is also an aspect of academic wishfulness or pigheadedness involved. Till about a century back – around the times of Keynes-- what is today called economics was in fact called “political economy” all over the world. It was an accurate and honest name.  At that time, all intellectual disciplines including political economy envied and copied physics, the hardest of sciences, which was at its peak form, enjoying the prestige and name of Classical Mechanics. Einstein had not yet happened, let alone Quantum uncertainties. The Newtonian scientific ideal of a “clockwork universe” had been achieved. Everything was governed by a quadratic equation of real numbers covering the universe from infinite past to infinite future. It was an Exact Science. By 1906 of course Einstein changed all that, and by 1936, quantum physics came and blew it all up. Physics became and remains today something resembling a self-doubting probabilistic planchette. But “economists” who were imitating physics have continued in their classical folly. They still believe there is a thing called “pure” economics or economics governed only by “economic” factors.  Having moved on while physics today is perhaps about to see its next paradigmatic revolution, the unbudgeing economists remain steadfast in their unchanging Newtonian world. Ironical really, seeing that unlike physics they never even had a working classical mechanics; probably imitations of glory are harder to shed than glory itself.

And it is of course no coincidence that this hoax of “economics” nicely suits the ruling political matrices because it perpetuates the myth that they are not “interfering” in the “scientific” play of economic forces. It gives the business tycoons a bogus moral high horse to ask for economics to be “delinked” from politics when the going is good for them. Having banished the truthful idea of political economy from textbooks and practical discourse there are unwitting or diehard Platonists who even today yearn for some “pure” economics. There is even an elaborate Nobel-prized metaworld of subsects of these, like “monetarists”, “econometrists”, “behaviourists”, etc who have their little carpeted seasons from time to time and proclaim their little findings by holding different parts of an unseen elephant. Of these some yankees are just plain cussed, and proudly cling to “economics” as an exercise in patriotism, like still maintaining European discards like the mile, the gallon, the pound, the Fahrenheit. The phrase may have been censored but the tiniest of real scratches, like Obama`s initial tax proposals, brings out the hidden scorpions of political economy all too quickly.

This is what our erudite Minister is telling the world actually, although one can be sure he is standing on the other side. The Occupy movement of USA, the striking workers of European nations, the Anna Hazares of all countries should pay heed and profit from it. More people should pick up the sutra he has unearthed. All “economics” textbooks should be rewritten, all university departments should be renamed, all public discourse should be rephrased and rediscovered, in the revealing light he has shed as a babe.

Otherwise he will simply be told to shut up. Probably that has already happened. He has since gone rather quiet on that theme. Pity.