Prattlers are lonely people

Memoirs of public personalities, written soon after their retirement, are always an interesting read because they afford a peek into contemporary events from a perspective that is otherwise not available. They also suffer from a critical flaw. Memoirs, apart from relying on the writer's memories or his diary notes, offer only the writer's version of an event. It is always likely that the same story will have a different version when seen from another perspective.

Ashok Mitra's autobiographical account excels because he is brutally frank in revealing many aspects of public policy-making which he came to know while donning the various roles in his long career""as the chief economic advisor in the finance ministry during the 1970s, the finance minister of West Bengal for almost about a decade from 1977 and a member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha in the 1990s. At the same time, his account of the many developments in this book under review are inimitably imbued with his perspective and you are left wondering if some of those renderings could have another side to them.

Thus, one is curious to know what Manmohan Singh's response would be to Dr Mitra's charge that the finance minister under the Narasimha Rao government went back on his promise of disclosing the names of companies that had defaulted on repaying huge loans taken from public sector banks. In any way, Dr Mitra is quite harsh in his assessment of Manmohan Singh. What bothered him the most was Manmohan Singh's "lamb-like devotion to the Nehru household", his inability to tear himself away from such "worshipful frame of mind" and his timidity, which was the product of "his civil servant's mind, which many mistake as humility".

Unsparing in his criticism of people around him, Dr Mitra does not even hesitate to drag iconic figures like Satyajit Ray into controversy over why the film director refused to sign a joint appeal against the Government's excesses during the Emergency years. It is the same Satyajit Ray who, the author reveals, had designed his wedding invitation card and whose cover depicting Banalata Sen on the cover of Jibanananda Das' famous book of poems with the same name was intensely disliked by the poet. It is the same poet, we are told elsewhere in this book, who made no effort to conceal his jealousy and surprise over how Buddhadev Bose, a contemporary litterateur of equal fame and prominence, had amassed enough wealth to have managed a fixed deposit of Rs 50,000 in a bank.

In all fairness, Dr Mitra should get credit for being equally frank about himself. In what will go down as one of the most candid""and fairly accurate""self-assessments made by any public personality in recent times, the last chapter of the book says the following about Dr Mitra: "I easily fly off the handle, I have a rough, gruff way of speaking ... I have an eerie talent of alienating people. I love to be combative and to go out of my way to pick a fight. Loneliness is the only fate waiting for such a person." He nearly admits to his being the Left's mole in Indira Gandhi's government when he worked as chief economic advisor. And he strangely justifies his decision to leave the country for a year's sojourn in Sussex during the Emergency on the grounds that Jyoti Basu felt that an Ashok Mitra outside the country would be more useful than inside the country.

Dr Mitra's observation on how the World Bank and the IMF had a say in the appointment of the finance minister in 1991 is not substantiated. It is a pity that such gossip found place in an autobiographical account that had many other events recounted with considerable honesty (for instance, the role of Indira Gandhi's PMO in helping the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country and how the then East Pakistani intellectuals, economists and writers had sought refuge in Delhi""some of them staying in the author's residence in Delhi""and were later smuggled out of India on Indian passports to American and European countries so that they could mobilise international opinion against Pakistan).

The book also provides by far the most cogently argued critique of the new economic policies recently initiated by the Left Front government in West Bengal. Dr Mitra's forecast is ominous: "If we (Bengal) emulate the Centre and other states and prostrate ourselves before foreign investors, kowtow to private industrialists and pledge that we shall do their bidding, we are likely to sink into a deep morass." Dr Mitra must really be a very lonely person.

---

A Prattler's Tale
Bengal, Marxism, Governance

Ashok Mitra
Samya
Rs 595; 473 pages