West Bengal polls: Meet Ashok Lahiri, a catholic thinker in Hindutva's camp

He’s among the first set of psephologists India has had and has predicted victories and defeats of many in many elections. But can Ashok Lahiri, 70, former chief economic advisor, public policy analyst, economist and statistician, ensure his own victory in the West Bengal Assembly elections?

He is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate from north Bengal — Balurghat, in South Dinajpur district. He was dropped from Alipurduar because the party felt the local claimant and BJP General Secretary Suman Kanjilal had a point when he and other BJP supporters protested Lahiri’s candidature. Lahiri didn’t really help his case when he told reporters with disarming innocence and (maybe unintended) honesty that he had visited Alipurduar as a boy, reinforcing Kanjilal’s assertion that the constituency didn’t want an “outsider” to represent it.

Big mistake.

If the BJP actually gets to form a government, Lahiri’s name is at the top of several BJP lists for the post of finance minister. Alipurduar’s loss is Balurghat’s gain.

In West Bengal today, if there is a region safest for the BJP, it is north Bengal, comprising Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar, Coochbehar, North Dinajpur and South Dinajpur districts. Together the region contributes 54 assembly seats in the 294-member Legislative Assembly. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP won seven out of the eight seats in North Bengal.

But is Lahiri really such an “outsider”? Not at all, says Omkar Goswami, childhood friend, student, colleague and member of the Lahiri family fish-buying team (an important rite of passage in that part of the world). “Ashok is a Bengali boy,” he asserts. Lahiri belongs to a middle class family and was taught all the values that come with the upbringing: Deference to culture and religion; an acute consciousness of being a Hindu but always with tolerance of other communities; and a healthy but not slavish respect for money. He began life, like most famous sons of Bengal, at Presidency College, joined the Delhi School of Economics to research and teach and later joined Delhi University as a reader.

In the 1980s, economic liberalisation was some years away. But somewhere, the government was feeling its tentative way through a more modern India. Some of the best Indian brains had gone abroad, but elected to return to India and were waiting patiently for something in the system to give. The Policy Group — a set of Indian intellectuals deeply committed to India but dismayed at the smugness and insularity of the bureaucracy — offered intervention in policy. Thus arose the first wave of the tide of consultancy and think-tank-ism. Prannoy Roy led the team of which Lahiri was an important member, and built the largest macro-econometric model of the Indian economy. The team offered policy advice to government and business alike. Computers were new to India; but this team knew the value of the resource.  Whether it was analysing elections or predicting the outcome of a macro-policy intervention — they could do it with polish and elan.

But this phase didn’t last long. Psephology drew Roy to found New Delhi Television (NDTV). It began with the iconic The World This Week, the programme that marked the first private sector production of programmes on Doordarshan. When NDTV was up and running, the Policy Group concurred that Roy must get more air time than the other members of the team. Lahiri didn’t agree. He opted out and left India, to earn some money. He did not intend to stay away for so long. But the IMF and World Bank kept him away for nearly a decade. Unlike others, the thought of settling abroad never occurred to him.

His friends say Lahiri was never a socialist and always tended to veer to the right. Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Sukhamoy Chakr­a­v­a­r­ty and others were arguably more original in their thinking. But Lahiri came close. “If they were at 10, he was at 7… Ashok hides his capabilities quite a lot,” says a friend, “and he doesn’t throw his weight around at all”.

When he returned home, it was to the directorship of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. When asked how a man who had advised the Manmohan Singh government became a Vidhan Sabha candidate of the BJP, a senior party leader said irritably: “Lekin unko CEA banaya to Vajpayeeji ne tha”. From 2002 to 2007, he served as chief economic advisor, first to Jaswant Singh and then to P Chidambaram. This was a tribute to the catholicity of his thought. This was followed by a stint at the ADB. In 2014, he is thought to have contributed to the manifesto of the BJP, though this is unconfirmed.

For economists engaged in public policy, the “where were you when the lights went out” moment is the 2016 demonetisation. Lahiri criticised the mess demonetisation left behind but equivocated on the move itself (“time will tell”…).

For a BJP which is trying to whitewash its image in Bengal as a party comprising largely lumpens imported from the Trina­mool Congress, Lahiri is a valuable face. He speaks faultless Bangla and his Hindi is excellent. If it can’t make a man like him win, the party should just curl up and die.