The great churning

Book review of A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

Anybody who has read B R Shenoy’s work would fiercely contest the argument there was no right-wing economic literature in India. What the reader would concede is that, despite their verity, these works have rarely been debated in academia. Shenoy, for instance, cavilled at the premise of the five year plans, which converted a savings shortage from a constraint to an additional objective, warning about the imminent inflation potential of the switch. His warning proved accurate and possibly because of it, his academic legacy was forgotten.

Subsequent generations of students heeded the risk of oblivion. If they were inclined to be right-of-centre, they took their scholarship abroad. That this hurt India was evident as a culture of economic orthodoxy took over which could only tinker at the edges even as the state hurtled from one crisis to another in each decade. Those crises extracted a price, as the authors Harsh Madhusudan and Rajeev Mantri argue in their book A New Idea of India. In their unambiguously titled chapter “Profit is not a dirty word” they note that before the economic liberalisation of 1991, “The all-powerful state acquired a deservedly terrible reputation and a belief took root that the Indian state, even if it was democratic, was incorrigibly predatory. There was little public discussion on restructuring the State and changing its focus to the provision of public goods”.

Yet this book, which has already attracted plenty of attention, is not an exposition of the battle between left- and right-wing economic thought on India’s development. Messrs Madhusudan and Mantri take the battle elsewhere, where they put to sword a raft of non-economic and political beliefs that they loosely club as “democratic consociationalism…that essentially means power-sharing between identitarian groups. A subset is confessionalism, where the primary power sharing is between religious groups, and this more than anything else defines the Nehruvian idea of India today”. Arguing quite correctly that it is the role of scholars to offer ideas rather than take those as received from leaders of political parties, they set out their version, which includes a lively interpretation of secularism, the role of the state versus society, challenges to conservatism, the role of markets, health care and even education reforms, among others.

How each of these ideas pan out will certainly decide the shape of Indian state and society, so none of the battles that the authors wage are just paper debates. For almost anyone who feels some stake in the changing schemata of India, the two authors offer a perspective that is important to study. They claim that India has always valued individual rights, a concept that is only now beginning to reassert itself in a supportive political environment.

Would their arguments strike a chord with all readers? One would argue that it is not essential. They have thrown open a debate that has rarely been acknowledged. They have also made no secret of the fact that they hew very closely to the thrust of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government. The authors interpret this identification to “a great churning going on within India’s soul…it has accelerated in recent years and what the world will see tomorrow will be decided by what Indians discuss and decide today”.

A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State
Author:  Harsh Madhusudan &Rajeev Mantri
Publisher: Westland Publications Private Limited
Pages: 262; Price: Rs 799

Hyperbole aside, there is little doubt that changes in the realm of ideas impacting the polity are taking place on a mighty scale, with little scope for reversal. While this book bats for many of those ideas it misses noticing that several of them are already standard issues. For instance, it is almost impossible to trace any significant political party that will argue that reservations should not be applicable to all higher educational institutions, agnostic of their management, religious or otherwise.

Also, since the authors have crafted the book from their articles in various publications, a common hazard for those who write extensive commentaries, there is often an overlap between the topics. There are three chapters dwelling on facets of secularism, a most necessary debate since the considerable churn in Indian society relates to this topic. But there is a lot of back and forth that could have been avoided if the authors had scoped out the debate more tightly.

Newspaper commentaries being necessarily short, often create simplifications in arguments that, when carried into a book, leave them unfinished. For instance, they offer a smart argument that “members of religious groups that find it hard to rent apartments in Mumbai and Ahmedabad would not feel like outcasts if the real estate markets were to become as competitive as the software industry”, but then leave the thread dangling. Also, it is not clear why digital transformation or the Goods and Services Tax should be a part of the debate on individual rights that they have stirred.

This is particularly so in the segments dealing with economic issues like role of markets and a deliciously named section “Market feminism and Dalit entrepreneurship”. In a book of this nature, which will have a long shelf life, this hurry to finish arguments was avoidable. The key advantage of the book, however, is the easy to read language, which is a big help considering the difficult issues they straddle. I have a buy on the book.