Students and faculty of the Delhi
School of Economics can never forget Professor
Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri or MDC. A dashing figure, MDC
was a teacher who made those interested in the
subject clearly understand the core instead of
overloading intuitive proofs with mathematical
minutiae. He was also a master of some brilliant bon
mots uttered in an inimitable style with an accent
that was simultaneously Sylhet and Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
One of MDC’s classic one-liners delivered at the end
of a development economics course went something
like this: “Look, at the end of the day, the basic
difference between Bagicha Singh Minhas’ and Amit
Bhaduri’s approach to development is that one was
born in Hoshiarpur, Punjab while the other in
Chittagong, Bangladesh.”
The line came back to me as I waded through the
‘great spat’ between Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind
Panagariya on the one hand, and Amartya Sen on the
other — a quarrel in which Bhagwati has been
staggeringly acerbic and catty.
Bhagwati and Panagariya have had their intellectual
differences with Sen for a long time. On this
occasion, it was triggered by a review of Sen and
Jean Drèze’s new book, An Uncertain Glory: India and
its Contradictions in The Economist. Upset by the
reviewer’s claim that Drèze and Sen advocate going
“much further” than focusing only on the traditional
levers of economic growth, Bhagwati and Panagariya
engaged in hard words. To quote: “The truth of the
matter is that Mr. Sen has belatedly learnt to give
lip service to growth, which he has long excoriated
as a fetish… he continues to assert that
redistribution has led to rapid growth in Asia, a
proposition that has no basis in reality and puts
the cart before the horse” [The Economist, 13 July
2013, Letters]. Incidentally, the tone of this
letter is positively courteous compared to an
article of Bhagwati’s published in the Mint on 24
July 2013 [‘Why Amartya Sen is wrong’].
There is no doubt about the difference in
development emphasis between Bhagwati (and
Panagariya) and Sen (plus Drèze). Coming as he does
from a solid, middle-class Gujarati background of
Bombay and having been a trade theorist at the MIT,
Bhagwati has always laid primary importance to
eradication of industrial and import licensing,
trade, tariff and labour market reforms as key
drivers of growth. Truthfully, he hasn’t focused
much on social, political or economic inequalities,
poverty, health and such issues. However, if asked
to link the two, he will claim that “Growth has made
redistribution feasible, not the other way round”.
To me, Bhagwati is akin to the commercially
responsible Dutch burghers who created the Holland
brilliantly described by Simon Schama in his
classic, The Embarrassment of Riches.
Born in Santiniketan and educated in Dhaka,
Presidency College, Calcutta followed by a long
stint at Cambridge where he did his second B.A. and
Ph.D, Sen has always had a left-leaning, social
conscience dominating bias in his research. If his
numerous works on hunger, famine, illiteracy,
inequality and injustice are not evidence enough,
read his classic social choice theory piece, ‘The
Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal’ [Journal of
Political Economy, 1970] to understand where Sen
comes from.
Sen believes that his primary academic task is to
focus on a more just society; and he believes that
states which strive to construct such a polity also
generate tail winds for sustained economic growth.
To Sen, therefore, while conferring meaningful
political, economic, social and educational rights
upon those who need these the most may not
immediately ‘create’ growth, these certainly
‘support’ growth in a more maintainable manner
vis-à-vis nations with large and growing
inequalities. MDC is so right. How you are fashioned
determines what you write.
Academics is about debate. Bhagwati and Panagariya
have every right to critique Sen’s work. Many have,
including I on Sen’s work on the Bengal famine [see
‘The Bengal Famine of 1943: Re-Examining the Data’
in the Indian Economic and Social History Review,
1990]. But there is a method to criticism.
Unfortunately, in this instance, Bhagwati has gone
way over the top. Perhaps the eluded Nobel Prize now
rankles too much.
Published: Business World, August 2013