On Pakistan and the Theory & Practice of the Islamic State: An Excerpt from the Munir Report of 1954

On Pakistan and the Theory & Practice of the Islamic State: An Excerpt from the Munir Report of 1954

 

From REPORT of THE COURT OF INQUIRY constituted under PUNJAB ACT II OF 1954 to enquire into the PUNJAB DISTURBANCES OF 1953 “Munir Report”

 

“ISLAMIC STATE
It has been repeatedly said before us that implicit in the demand for Pakistan was the demand for an Islamic State. Some speeches of important leaders who were striving for Pakistan undoubtedly lend themselves to this construction. These leaders while referring to an Islamic State or to a State governed by Islamic laws perhaps had in their minds the pattern of a legal structure based on or mixed up with Islamic dogma, personal law, ethics and institutions. No one who has given serious thought to the introduction of a religious State in Pakistan has failed to notice the tremendous difficulties with which any such scheme must be confronted. Even Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, who must be considered to be the first thinker who conceived of the possibility of a consolidated North Western Indian Muslim State, in the course of his presidential address to the Muslim League in 1930 said:

“Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim States will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such States. The principle that each group is entitled to free development on its own lines is not inspired by any feeling of narrow communalism”.

When we come to deal with the question of responsibility we shall have the occasion to point out that the most important of the parties who are now clamouring for the enforcement of the three demands on religious grounds were all against the idea of an Islamic State. Even Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi of Jama’at-i-Islami was of the view that the form of Government in the new Muslim State, if it ever came into existence, could only be secular.

Before the Partition, the first public picture of Pakistan that the Quaid-i-Azam gave to the world was in the course of an interview in New Delhi with Mr. Doon Campbell, Reuter’s Correspondent. The Quaid-i-Azam said that the new State would be a modern democratic State, with sovereignty resting in the people and the members of the new nation having equal rights of citizenship regardless of their religion, caste or creed. When Pakistan formally appeared on the map, the Quaid-i-Azam in his memorable speech of 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, while stating the principle on which the new State was to be founded, said:—

 

“All the same, in this division it was impossible to avoid the question of minorities being in one Dominion or the other. Now that was unavoidable. There is no other solution. Now what shall we do? Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and specially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations., there will be no end to the progress you will make. “I cannot emphasise it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities—the Hindu community and the Muslim community— because even as regards Muslims you have Pathana, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on—will vanish. Indeed if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain its freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free peoples long long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time but for this (Applause). Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed— that has nothing to do with the business of the State (Hear, hear). As you know, history shows that in England conditions sometime ago were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposed against a particular class. Thank God we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State (Loud applause). The people of England in course of time had to face the realities of the situation and had to discharge the responsibilities and burdens placed upon them by the Government of their country and they went through that fire step by step. Today you might say with justice that Roman Catholics and Protestants do not exist: what exists now is that every man is a citizen, an equal citizen, of Great Britain and they are all members of the nation. “Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State”.

The Quaid-i-Azam was the founder of Pakistan and the occasion on which he thus spoke was the first landmark in the history of Pakistan. The speech was intended both for his own people including non-Muslims and the world, and its object was to define as clearly as possible the ideal to the attainment of which the new State was to devote all its energies. There are repeated references in this speech to the bitterness of the past and an appeal to forget and change the past and to bury the hatchet. The future subject of the State is to be a citizen with equal rights, privileges and obligations, irrespective of colour, caste, creed or community. The word ‘nation’ is used more than once and religion is stated to have nothing to do with the business of the State and to be merely a matter of personal faith for the individual.

 

We asked the ulama whether this conception of a State was acceptable to them and everyone of them replied in an unhesitating negative, including the Ahrar and erstwhile Congressites with whom before the Partition this conception was almost a part of their faith.

 

If Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi’s evidence correctly represents the view of Jama’at-i-Islami, a State based on this idea is the creature of the devil, and he is confirmed in this by several writings of his chief, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, the founder of the jama’at. None of the ulama can tolerate a State which is based on nationalism and all that it implies; with them millat and all that it connotes can alone be the determining factor in State activity.

 

The Quaid-i-Azam’s conception of a modern national State, it is alleged, became obsolete with the passing of the Objectives Resolution on 12th March 1949; but it has been freely admitted that this Resolution, though grandiloquent in words, phrases and clauses, is nothing but a hoax and that not only does it not contain even a semblance of the embryo of an Islamic State but its provisions, particularly those relating to fundamental rights, are directly opposed to the principles of an Islamic State.

 

 

FOUNDATIONS OF ISLAMIC STATE

What is then the Islamic State of which everybody talks but nobody thinks? Before we seek to discover an answer to this question, we must have a clear conception of the scope and function of the State.

The ulama were divided in their opinions when they were asked to cite some precedent of an Islamic State in Muslim history. Thus, though Hafiz Kifayat Husain, the Shia divine, held out as his ideal the form of Government during the Holy Prophet’s time, Maulana Daud Ghaznavi also included in his precedent the days of the Islamic Republic, of Umar bin Abdul Aziz, Salah-ud-Din Ayyubi of Damascus, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Tughlaq and Aurangzeb and the present regime in Saudi Arabia. Most of them, however, relied on the form of Government during the Islamic Republic from 632 to 661 A. D., a period of less than thirty years, though some of them also added the very short period of Umar bin Abdul Aziz.

Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni stated that the details of the ideal State would be worked out by the ulama while Master Taj-ud-Din Ansari’s confused notion of an Islamic State may be gathered from the following portion of his interrogation :—

“Q.—Were you also in the Khilafat movement ?
A.—Yes.
Q.—When did the Khilafat movement stop in India ?
A.—In 1923. This was after the Turks had declared their country to be a secular State.
Q.—If you are told that the Khilafat movement continued long after the Turks had abolished Khilafat, will that be correct?
A.—As far as I remember, the Khilafat movement finished with the abolition of the Khilafat by the Turks.
Q.—You are reported to have been a member of the Khilafat movement and having made speeches. Is it correct ?
A.—It could not be correct.
Q.—Was the Congress interested in Khilafat ?
A.— Yes.
Q.—Was Khilafat with you a matter of religious conviction or just a political movement ?
A.— It was purely a religious movement.
Q.— Did the Khilafat movement have the support of Mr Gandhi ?
A.—Yes.
Q.— What was the object of the Khilafat movement ?
A.— The Britisher was injuring the Khilafat institution in Turkey and the Musalman was aggrieved by this attitude of the Britisher.
Q.— Was not the object of the movement to resuscitate the Khilafat among the    Musalmans ?
A.—No.
Q.— Is Khilafat with you a necessary part of Muslim form of Government ?
A.—Yes.
Q.— Are you, therefore, in favour of having a Khilafat in Pakistan ?
A.—Yes.
Q.— Can there be more than one Khalifa of the Muslims ?
A.— No.
Q.— Will the Khalifa of Pakistan be the Khalifa of all the Muslims of the world ?
A.— He should be but cannot be.”

Throughout the three thousand years over which political thought extends, and such thought in its early stages cannot be separated from religion, two questions have invariably presented themselves for consideration : —

(1) what are the precise functions of the State ? and
(2) who shall control the State ?

If the true scope of the activities of the State is the welfare, temporal or spiritual or both of the individual, then the first question directly gives rise to the bigger question:

What is the object of human life and the ultimate destiny of man? On this, widely divergent views have prevailed, not at different times but at one and the same time. The pygmies of equatorial West Africa still believe that their God Komba has sent them into the forest to hunt and dance and sing. The Epicureans meant very much the same when they said that the object of human life is to drink and eat and be merry, for death denies such pleasures. The utilitarians base their institutions on the assumption that the object of human life is to experience pleasant sensations of mind and body, irrespective of what is to come hereafter. The Stoics believed in curbing and reducing all physical desires, and Diogenes found a tub good enough to live in. German philosophers think that the individual lives for the State and that therefore the object of life is service of the State in all that it might decide to undertake and achieve. Ancient Hindu philosophers believed in the logic of the fist with its natural consequence, the law of natural selection and the struggle for survival. The Semitic theory of State, whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic, has always held that the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life and that, therefore, prayer and good works are the only object of life. Greek philosophers beginning with Socrates thought that the object of human life was to engage in philosophical meditation with a view to discovering the great truths that lie in nature and that the business of the others is to feed the philosophers engaged in that undertaking.

Islam emphasises the doctrine that life in this world is not the only life given to man but that eternal life begins after the present existence comes to an end, and that the status of a human being in the next world will depend upon his beliefs and actions in this world. As the present life is not an end in itself but merely a means to an end, not only the individual but also the State, as opposed to the secular theory which bases all political and economic institutions on a disregard of their consequences on the next life, should strive for human conduct which ensures for a person better status in the next world.

According to this theory Islam is the religion which seeks to attain that object. Therefore the question immediately arises : What is Islam and who is a momin or a Muslim ? We put this question to the ulama and we shall presently refer to their answers to this question. But we cannot refrain from saying here that it was a matter of infinite regret to us that the ulama whose first duty should be to have settled views on this subject, were hopelessly disagreed among themselves.

Apart from how these learned divines have expressed themselves, we conceive of Islam as a system that covers, as every systematic religion must, the following five topics :—
(1) the dogma, namely, the essentials of belief ;
(2) the cult, namely, religious rites and observances which a person must
perform ;
(3) ethics, i. e. rules of moral conduct ;
(4) institutions, social, economic and political ; and
(5) law proper.

The essential basis of the rules on all these subjects is revelation and not reason, though both may coincide. This coincidence, however, is accidental because human reasoning may be faulty and ultimate reason is known only to God, Who sends His message to humanity through His chosen messengers for the direction and guidance of the people. One must, therefore, accept the dogma, observe the cult, follow the ethics, obey the law and establish institutions which God has revealed, though their reason may not be apparent—nay even if they be opposed to human reason. Since an error by God is an impossibility, anything that God has revealed, whether its subject be something occult or preternatural, history, finance, law, worship or something which according to human thought admits of scientific treatment as for instance, birth of man, evolution, cosmology, or astronomy, has got to be accepted as absolute truth. The test of reason is not the acid test and a denial of this amounts to a denial of the supreme wisdom and designs of Allah—it is kufr. Now God has revealed Himself from time to time to His favoured people of whom our Holy Prophet was the last. That revelation is contained in the Qur’an and covers the five topics mentioned above. The true business of a person who believes in Islam is therefore to understand, believe in and act upon that revelation. The people whom God chooses as medium for the transmission of His messages are rasuls (messengers) or nabis (prophets). Since every action or saying of a prophet is, in the case of our own Holy Prophet it certainly was, prompted by Allah, it has the same degree of inerrancy as the formal revelation itself, because prophets are ma’sum, incapable of doing or saying something which is opposed to Divine wishes. These sayings and actions are sunna having the same infallibility as the Qur’an. The record of this sunna is hadith which is to be found in several books which were compiled by Muslim scholars after long, laborious and careful research extending over several generations.

The word hadith means a record of actions or sayings of the Prophet and his companions. At first the sahaba. i. e. people who had lived in the society of the Prophet, were the best authority for a knowledge of the sunna. Later people had to be content with the communications of the tabi’un, i. e. successors, people of the first generation after the Holy Prophet who had received their information from the sahaba, and then in the following generations with the accounts of the so-called successors of the successors (tabi’ul-tabi’un), i.e. people of the second generation after the Holy Prophet, who had concerted with the successors. Marfu’ is a tradition which contains a statement about the Prophet ; mawquf, a tradition that refers only to the sayings or doings of the sahaba ; and maqtu’ a tradition which does not at most go further back than the first generation after the Holy Prophet and deals only with sayings or doings of tabi’un. In some of the ahadith the actual word of God is to be found. Any such tradition is designated Hadith-i-Qudsi or Ilahi as distinguished from an ordinary Hadith-i-Nabvi.

A very large portion of sayings ascribed to the Prophet deals with the ahkam (legal professions), religious obligations, halal and haram (what is allowed and forbidden), with ritual purity, laws regarding food and criminal and civil law. Further they deal with dogma, retribution at the Last Judgment, hell and paradise, angels, creation, revelations, the earlier prophets. Many traditions also contain edifying sayings and moral teachings by the Holy Prophet. The importance of ahadith was realised from the very beginning and they were not only committed to memory but in some cases were reduced to writing. The work of compilation of hadith began in the third century after the Hijra and the Sihah Sitta were all compiled in that century. These are the musannifs of —
(1) Al-Bukhari, died 256/870,
(2) Muslim, died 261/875,
(3) Abu Dawud, died 275/888,
(4) Al-Tirmizi, died 279/892,
(5) All Nasa’i, died 303/915, and
(6) Ibn-i-Maja, died 273/886.

According to modern laws of evidence, including our own, the ahadith are inadmissible evidence of sunna because each of them contains several links of hearsay, but as authority on law they are admissible pro prio vigore. The merit of these collections lies not so much in the fact that (as is often wrongly stated) their authors decided for the first time which of the numerous traditions in circulation were genuine and which false but rather in the fact that they brought together everything that was recognised as genuine in orthodox circles in those days.

The Shias judge hadith from their own stand-point and only consider such traditions reliable as are based on the authority of Ali and his adherents. They have, therefore, their own works on the subject and hold the following five works in particularly high esteem—
(1) Al-Kafi of Muhammad b. Yaqub Al-Kulini, died 328/939,
(2) Man La Yastahdiruhu’ul-Fakih of Muhammad b. Ali b. Babuya Al-Kummi,
died 381/991,
(3) Tahdib Al-Ahkam,
(4) Al-Istibsar Fi-Ma’khtalafa Fihi’l-Akhbar (extract from the preceding) of
Muhammad Altusi, died 459/1067, and
(5) Nahj Al-Balagha (alleged sayings of Ali) of Ali b. Tahir Al-Sharif Al-Murtaza, died 436/1044 (or of his brother Radi Al-Din Al-Baghdadi.)

After the ritual, the dogma and the most important political and social institutions had taken definite shape in the second and third centuries, there arose a certain communis opinio regarding the reliability of most transmitters of tradition and the value of their statement. The main principles of doctrine had already been established in the writings of Malik b. Anas, Al-Shafi’i and other scholars regarded as authoritative in different circles and mainly on the authority of traditional sayings of the Holy Prophet. In the long run no one dared to doubt the truth of these traditions and this almost conclusive presumption of truth has since continued to be attached to the ahadith compiled in the Sihah Sitta.

We have so far arrived at this result that any rule on any subject that may be derived from the Qur’an or the sunna of the Holy Prophet is binding on every Musalman. But since the only evidence of sunna is the hadith, the words sunna and hadith have become mixed up with, and indistinguishable from, each other with the result that the expression Qur’an and hadith is not infrequently employed where the intention is to refer to Qur’an and sunna.

At this stage another principle, equally basic, comes into operation, and that is that Islam is the final religion revealed by God, complete and exhaustive in all respects, and that God will not abrogate, detract from or add to this religion (din) any more than He will send a fresh messenger. The din having been perfected (Akmalto lakum dinokum, Sura V, verse 3), there remains no need for any new code repealing, modifying or amplifying the original code; nor for any fresh messenger or message. In this sense, therefore, prophethood ceased with the Holy Prophet and revelation stopped for ever. This is the doctrine of the cessation of wahi-i-nubuwwat.

If the proposition that Muslim dogma, ethics and institutions, etc., are all based on the doctrine of inerrancy, whether such inerrancy lies in the Qur’an, the sunna, ijma’ or ijtihad-i-mutlaq, is fully comprehended, the various deductions that follow from it will be easily understandable. As the ultimate test of truth, whether the matter be one of a ritual or political or social or economic nature, is revelation and revelation has to be gathered from the Qur’an, and the sunna carries almost the same degree of inerrancy as revelation and the only evidence of sunna is hadith, the first duty of those who desire to establish an Islamic State will be to discover the precise rule applicable to the existing circumstances whether that rule is to be found in the Qur’an or hadith. Obviously the persons most suited for the purpose would be those who have made the Qur’an and hadith their lifelong study, namely, among the Sunnies, the ulama, and among the Shias, the mujtahids who are the spokesmen of the hidden Imam, the ruler de jure divino. The function of these divines would be to engage themselves in discovering rules applicable to particular situations and they will be engaged in a task similar to that in which Greek philosophers were engaged, with only this difference that whereas the latter thought that all truth lay in nature which had merely to be discovered by individual effort, the ulama and the mujtahids will have to get at the truth that lies in the holy Book and the books of hadith.

The ulama Board which was recommended by the Basic Principles Committee was a logical recognition of this principle, and the true objection against that Board should indeed have been that the Board was too inadequate a mechanism to implement the principle which had brought that body into existence.

Ijma’ means concurrence of the mujtahids of the people, i.e., of those who have a right, in virtue of knowledge, to form a judgment of their own, after the death of the Holy Prophet. The authority of ijma’ rests on the principle of a divine protection against error and is founded on a basal tradition of the Holy Prophet, “My people will never agree in error”, reported in Ibn Maja, By this procedure points which had been in dispute were fixed, and when fixed, they became an essential part of the faith and disbelief in them an act of unbelief (kufr). The essential point to remember about ijma’ is that it represents the agreement of the mujtahids and that the agreement of the masses is especially excluded.

Thus ijma’ has not only fixed unsettled points but has changed settled doctrines of the greatest importance.

The distinction between ijma’ and ijtihad is that whereas the former is collective, the latter is individual. Ijtihad means the exerting of one’s self to the utmost degree to form an opinion in a case or as to a rule of law. This is done by applying analogy to the Qur’an and the sunna. Ijtihad did not originally involve inerrancy, its result being always zann or fallible opinion. Only combined ijtihad led to ijma, and was inerrant. But this broad ijtihad soon passed into special ijtihad of those who had a peculiar right to form judgments. When later doctors looked back to the founding of the four legal schools, they assigned to their founders an ijtihad of the first rank (ijtihad-i-mutlaq). But from time to time individuals appeared who returned to the earliest meaning of ijtihad and claimed for themselves the right to form their own opinion from first principles. One of these was the Hanbalite Ibn Taimiya (died 728). Another was Suyuti (died 911) in whom the claim to ijtihad unites with one to be the mujaddid or renewer of religion in his century. At every time there must exist at least one mujtahid, was his contention, just as in every century there must come a mujaddid.

In Shia Islam there are still absolute mujtahids because they are regarded as the spokesmen of the hidden Imam. Thus collective ijtihad leads to ijma’, and the basis of ijma’ is divine protection against error—inerrancy.

 

 

ESSENTIALS OF ISLAMIC STATE
Since the basis of Islamic law is the principle of inerrancy of revelation and of the Holy Prophet, the law to be found in the Qur’an and the sunna is above all man-made laws, and in case of conflict between the two, the latter, irrespective of its nature, must yield to the former. Thus, provided there be a rule in the Qur’an or the sunna on a matter which according to our conceptions falls within the region of Constitutional Law or International Law, the rule must be given effect to unless that rule itself permits a departure from it. Thus no distinction exists in Islamic law between Constitutional Law and other law, the whole law to be found in the Qur’an and the sunna being a part of the law of the land for Muslim subjects of the State. Similarly if there be a rule in the Qur’an or the sunna relating to the State’s relations with other States or to the relations of Muslim subjects of the State with other States or the subjects of those States, the rule will have the same superiority of sanction as any other law to be found in the Qur’an or the sunna.

Therefore if Pakistan is or is intended to be converted into an Islamic State in the true sense of the word, its Constitution must contain the following five provisions:—

(1) that all laws to be found in the Qur’an or the sunna shall be deemed to be a part of the law of the land for Muslims and shall be enforced accordingly;
(2) that unless the Constitution itself is framed by ijma’-i-ummat, namely, by the agreement of the ulama and mujtahids of acknowledged status, any provision in the Constitution which is repugnant to the Qur’an or sunna shall to the extent of the repugnancy be void;
(3) that unless the existing laws of Pakistan are adapted by ijma’-i-ummat of the kind mentioned above, any provision in the existing law which is contrary to the Qur’an or sunna shall to the extent of the repugnancy be void;
(4) that any provision in any future law which is repugnant to Qur’an or sunna shall be void;
(5) that no rule of International Law and no provision in any convention or treaty to which Pakistan is a party, which is contrary to the Qur’an or the sunna shall be binding on any Muslim in Pakistan.

 

 

SOVEREIGNTY AND DEMOCRACY IN ISLAMIC STATE
That the form of Government in Pakistan, if that form is to comply with the principles of Islam, will not be democratic is conceded by the ulama. We have already explained the doctrine of sovereignty of the Qur’an and the sunna. The Objectives Resolution rightly recognised this position when it recited that all sovereignty rests with God Almighty alone. But the authors of that Resolution misused the words ‘sovereign’ and ‘democracy’ when they recited that the Constitution to be framed was for a sovereign State in which principles of democracy as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed.

It may be that in the context in which they were used, these words could not be misunderstood by those who are well versed in Islamic principles, but both these words were borrowed from western political philosophy and in that sense they were both wrongly used in the Resolution. When it is said that a country is sovereign, the implication is that its people or any other group of persons in it are entitled to conduct the affairs of that country in any way they like and untrammelled by any considerations except those of expediency and policy. An Islamic State, however, cannot in this sense be sovereign, because it will not be competent to abrogate, repeal or do away with any law in the Qur’an or the sunna. Absolute restriction on the legislative power of a State is a restriction on the sovereignty of the people of that State and if the origin of this restriction lies elsewhere than in the will of the people, then to the extent of that restriction the sovereignty of the State and its people is necessarily taken away. In an Islamic State, sovereignty, in its essentially juristic sense, can only rest with Allah. In the same way, democracy means the rule of the demos, namely, the people, directly by them as in ancient Greece and Rome, or indirectly through chosen representatives as in modern democracies. If the power of the people in the framing of the Constitution or in the framing of the laws or in the sphere of executive action is subject to certain immutable rules, it cannot be said that they can pass any law that they like, or, in the exercise of executive functions, do whatever they like. Indeed if the legislature in an Islamic State is a sort of ijma’, the masses are expressly disqualified from taking part in it because ijma’-i-ummat in Islamic jurisprudence is restricted to ulama and mujtahids of acknowledged status and does not at all extend, as in democracy, to the populace.

 

 

OTHER INCIDENTS OF ISLAMIC STATE ACCORDING TO ULAMA

In the preceding pages we have attempted to state as clearly as we could the principles on which a religious State must be built if it is to be called an Islamic State. We now proceed to state some incidents of such State, with particular reference to the ulamas’ conception of it.

 

 

LEGISLATURE AND LEGISLATION

Legislature in its present sense is unknown to the Islamic system. The religiopolitical system which is called din-i-Islam is a complete system which contains in itself the mechanism for discovering and applying law to any situation that may arise. During the Islamic Republic there was no legislature in its modern sense and for every situation or emergency that arose law could be discovered and applied by the ulama. The law had been made and was not to be made, the only function of those entrusted with the administration of law being to discover the law for the purposes of the particular case, though when enunciated and applied it formed a precedent for others to follow. It is wholly incorrect, as has been suggested from certain quarters, that in a country like Pakistan, which consists of different communities, Muslim and non-Muslim, and where representation is allowed to non-Muslims with a right to vote on every subject that comes up, the legislature is a form of ijma’ or ijtihad, the reason being that ijtihad is not collective but only individual, and though ijma’ is collective, there is no place in it for those who are not experts in the knowledge of the law. This principle at once rules out the infidels (kuffar) whether they be people of Scriptures (ahl-i-kitab) or idolators (mushrikeen).

Since Islam is a perfect religion containing laws, express or derivable by ijma’ or ijtihad, governing the whole field of human activity, there is in it no sanction for what may, in the modern sense, be called legislation.

Questioned on this point Maulana Abul Hasanat, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan says :—

“Q.—Is the institution of legislature as distinguished from the institution of a person or body of persons entrusted with the interpretation of law, an integral part of an Islamic State?
A.—No. Our law is complete and merely requires interpretation by those who are experts in it. According to my belief no question can arise the law relating to which cannot be discovered from the Qur’an or the hadith.
Q.—Who were Sahib-ul-hall-i-wal-aqd
A.—They were the distinguished ulama of the time. These persons attained their status by reason of the knowledge of the law. They were not in any way analogous or similar to the legislature in modern democracy.”

The same view was expressed by Amir-i-Shari’at Sayyad Ata Ullah Shah Bukhari in one of his speeches reported in the ‘Azad’ of 22nd April, 1947, in the course of which he said that our din is complete and perfect and that it amounts to kufr to make more laws.

Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, however, is of the opinion that legislation in the true sense is possible in an Islamic State on matters which are not covered by the Qur’an, the sunna, or previous ijma’ and he has attempted to explain his point by reference to the institution of a body of persons whom the Holy Prophet, and after him the khulafa consulted on all matters relating to affairs of State. The question is one of some difficulty and great importance because any institution of legislature will have to be reconciled with the claim put forward by Maulana Abul Hasanat and some other religious divines that Islam is a perfect and exhaustive code wide enough to furnish an answer to any question that may arise relating to any human activity, and that it does not know of any “unoccupied field” to be filled by fresh legislation. There is no doubt that Islam enjoins consultation and that not only the Holy Prophet but also the first four caliphs and even their successors resorted to consultation with the leading men of the time, who for their knowledge of the law and piety could well be relied upon.

In the inquiry not much has been disclosed about the Majlis-i-Shura except what is contained in Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi’s written statement which he supplied to the Court at its request. That there was a body of men who were consulted is true, but whether this was a standing body and whether its advice had any legal or binding force, seems somewhat doubtful. These men were certainly not elected in the modern way, though their representative character cannot be disputed. Their advice was certainly asked ad hoc, but that they were competent to make law as the modern legislatures make laws is certainly not correct. The decisions taken by them undoubtedly served as precedents and were in the nature of ijma’, which is not legislation but the application of an existing law to a particular case. When consulted in affairs of State, their functions were truly in the nature of an advice given by a modern cabinet but such advice is not law but only a decision.

Nor can the legislature in a modern State correspond to ijma’ because as we have already pointed out, the legislature legislates while the ulama of Majlis-i-Shura who were called upon to determine what should be the decision on a particular point which was not covered by the Qur’an and the sunna, merely sought to discover and apply the law and not to promulgate the law, though the decision when taken had to be taken not only for the purposes of the particular case but for subsequent occasions as a binding precedent.

An intriguing situation might arise if the Constitution Act provided that any provision of it, if it was inconsistent with the Qur’an or the sunna, would be void, and the intra vires of a law made by the legislature were questioned before the Supreme Court on the ground that the institution of legislature itself was contrary to the Qur’an and the sunna.

POSITION OF NON-MUSLIMS

The ground on which the removal of Chaudhri Zafrullah Khan and other Ahmadis occupying key positions in the State is demanded is that the Ahmadis are non-Muslims and that therefore like zimmies in an Islamic State they are not eligible for appointment to higher offices in the State. This aspect of the demands has directly raised a question about the position of non-Muslims in Pakistan if we are to have an Islamic Constitution.

According to the leading ulama the position of non-Muslims in the Islamic State of Pakistan will be that of zimmies and they will not be full citizens of Pakistan because they will not have the same rights as Muslims They will have no voice in the making of the law, no right to administer the law and no right to hold public offices.

A full statement of this position will be found in the evidence of Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyad Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, Maulana Ahmad Ali, Mian Tufail Muhammad and Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni. Maulana Abul Hasanat on being questioned on the subject stated as follows :—

“Q.—If we were to have an Islamic State in Pakistan, what will be the position of the kuffar (non-Muslims)? Will they have a voice in the making of laws, the right of administering the law and the right to hold public offices?
A.—Their position will be that of zimmies. They will have no voice in the making of laws, no right to administer the law and no right to hold public offices.
Q.—In an Islamic State can the head of the State delegate any part of his powers to kuffar?
A.—No.”

Maulana Ahmad Ali, when questioned, said:—
“Q.—if we were to have an Islamic State in Pakistan, what will be the position of the kuffar? Will they have a hand in the making of the law, the right to administer the law and the right to hold public offices ?
A.—Their position will be that of zimmies. They will have no say in the making of law and no right to administer the law. Government may, however, permit them to hold any public office”.

Mian Tufail Muhammad stated as follows :—
“Q.—Read the article on minorities’ rights in the ‘Civil and Military Gazette’ of 13th October, 1953, and say whether it correctly represents your view of an Islamic State? (It was stated in the articles that minorities would have the same rights as Muslims).
A.—I have read this article and do not acknowledge these rights for the Christians or other non-Muslims in Pakistan if the State is founded on the ideology of the Jama’at”.

The confusion on this point in the mind of Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan, is apparent from the following: —

“Q.—Have you ever read the aforesaid speech (the speech of the Quaid-i-Azam to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11th August, 1947)?
A.—Yes, I have read that speech.
Q.—Do you still agree with the conception of Pakistan that the Quaid-i-Azam presented to the Constituent Assembly in this speech in which he said that thereafter there would be only one Pakistan nation, consisting of Muslims and non-Muslims, having equal civic rights, without any distinction of race, religion or creed and that religion would be merely a private affair of the individual ?
A.—I accept the principle that all communities, whether Muslims or non-Muslims, should have, according to their population, proper representation in the administration of the State and legislation, except that non-Muslims cannot be taken in the army or the judiciary or be appointed as Ministers or to other posts involving the reposing of confidence.
Q.—Are you suggesting that the position of non-Muslims would be that of zimmies or any better ?
A.—No. By zimmies are meant non-Muslim people of lands which have been conquered by an Islamic State, and the word is not applicable to non-Muslim minorities already living in an Islamic State. Such minorities are called mu’ahids, i.e. those people with whom some agreement has been made.
Q.—What will be their status if there is no agreement with them ?
A.—In that case such communities cannot have any rights of citizenship.
Q.—Will the non-Muslim communities inhabiting Pakistan be called by you as mu’ahids?
A.—No, not in the absence of an agreement with them. To my knowledge there is no such agreement with such communities in Pakistan.”

So, according to the evidence of this learned divine, the non-Muslims of Pakistan will neither be citizens nor will they have the status of zimmies or of mu’ahids. During the Islamic Republic, the head of the State, the khalifa, was chosen by a system of election, which was wholly different from the present system of election based on adult or any other form of popular suffrage. The oath of allegiance (ba’it) rendered to him possessed a sacramental virtue, and on his being chosen by the consensus of the people (ijma’-ul-ummat) he became the source of all channels of legitimate Government. He and he alone then was competent to rule, though he could delegate his powers to deputies and collect around him a body of men of outstanding piety and learning, called Majlis-i-Shura or Ahl-ul-Hall-i-wal-Aqd. The principal feature of this system was that the kuffar, for reasons which are too obvious and need not be stated, could not be admitted to this majlis and the power which had vested in the khalifa could not be delegated to the kuffar. The khalifa was the real head of the State, all power vesting in him and not a powerless individual like the President of a modern democratic State who is merely to sign the record of decisions taken by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. He could not appoint non-Muslims to important posts, and could give them no place either in the interpretation or the administration of the law, the making of the law by them, as already pointed out, being a legal impossibility.

This being the position, the State will have to devise some machinery by which the distinction between a Muslim and a non-Muslim may be determined and its consequences enforced. The question, therefore, whether a person is or is not a Muslim will be of fundamental importance, and it was for this reason that we asked most of the leading ulama, to give their definition of a Muslim, the point being that if the ulama of the various sects believed the Ahmadis to be kafirs, they must have been quite clear in their minds not only about the grounds of such belief but also about the definition of a Muslim because the claim that a certain person or community is not within the pale of Islam implies on the part of the claimant an exact conception of what a Muslim is. The result of this part of the inquiry, however, has been anything but satisfactory, and if considerable confusion exists in the minds of our ulama on such a simple matter, one can easily imagine what the differences on more complicated matters will be. Below we reproduce the definition of a Muslim given by each alim in his own words. This definition was asked after it had been clearly explained to each witness that he was required to give the irreducible minimum conditions which, a person must satisfy to be entitled to be called a Muslim and that the definition was to be on the principle on which a term in grammar is defined.

Here is the result : —

Maulana Abul Hasanat Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulamai-
Pakistan —
“Q.— What is the definition of a Muslim ?
A — (1) He must believe in the Unity of God.
(2) He must believe in the prophet of Islam to be a true prophet as well as in all other prophets who have preceded him,
(3) He must believe in the Holy Prophet of Islam as the last of the prophets (khatam-un-nabiyin).
(4) He must believe in the Qur’an as it was revealed by God to the Holy
Prophet of Islam.
(5) He must believe as binding on him the injunctions of the Prophet of
Islam.
(6) He must believe in the qiyamat.
Q.—Is a tarik-us-salat a Muslim ?
A.—Yes, but not a munkir-us-salat”

Maulana Ahmad Ali, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Islam, Maghribi Pakistan —
“Q.— Please define a Muslim ?
A.—A person is a Muslim if he believes (1) in the Qur’an and (2) what has been said by the prophet. Any person who possesses these two qualifications is entitled to be called a Muslim without his being required to believe in anything more or to do anything more.”

Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, Amir Jama’at-i-Islami —
“Q.—Please define a Muslim ?
A.—A person is a Muslim if he believes (1) in tauheed, (2) in all the prophets (ambiya), (3) all the books revealed by God, (4) in mala’ika (angels), and (5) yaum-ul-akhira (the Day of Judgment).
Q.—Is a mere profession of belief in these articles sufficient to entitle a man
to call himself a Musalman and to be treated as a Musalman in an Islamic State ?
A.—Yes.
Q.—If a person says that he believes in all these things, does any one have a right to question the existence of his belief ?
A.—The five requisites that I have mentioned above are fundamental and any alteration in anyone of these articles will take him out of the pale of Islam.”

Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir—
“Q.—Please define a Muslim ?
A.—I consider a man to be a Muslim if he professes his belief in the kalima, namely, La Ilaha Illalah-o-Muhammad-ur-Rasulullah, and leads a life in the footsteps of the Holy Prophet.”

Mufti Muhammad Idris, Jamia Ashrafia, Nila Gumbad, Lahore—
“Q.—Please give the definition of a Musalman ?
A.—The word ‘Musalman’ is a Persian one. There is a distinction between the word ‘Musalman’ which is a Persian word for Muslim and the word ‘momin’. It is impossible for me to give a complete definition of the word ‘momin’. I would require pages and pages to describe what a momin is. A person is a Muslim who professes to be obedient to Allah. He should believe in the Unity of God, prophethood of the ambiya and in the Day of Judgment. A person who does not believe in the azan or in the qurbani goes outside the pale of Islam. Similarly, there are a large number of other things which have been received by tavatir from our prophet. In order to be a Muslim, he must believe in all these things. It is almost impossible for me to give a complete list of such things.”

Hafiz Kifayat Hussain, Idara-i-Haquq-i-Tahaffuz-i-Shia—
“Q.—Who is a Musalman?
A.—A person is entitled to be called a Musalman if he believes in (1) tauheed, (2) nubuwwat and (3) qiyamat. These are the three fundamental beliefs which a person must profess to be called a Musalman. In regard to these three basic doctrines there is no difference between the Shias and the Sunnies. Besides the belief in these three doctrines, there are other things called ‘zarooriyat-i-din’ which a person must comply with in order to be entitled to be called a Musalman. These will take me two days to define and enumerate. But as an illustration I might state that the respect for the Holy Book, wajoob-i-nimaz, wajoob-i-roza, wajoob-i-hajj-ma’a-sharait, and other things too numerous to mention, are among the ‘zarooriyat-i-din’ ”

Maulana Abdul Hamid Badayuni, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan :
“Q.—Who is a Musalman according to you ?
A.—A person who believes in the zarooriyat-i-din is called a momin and every momin is entitled to be called a Musalman.
Q.—What are these zarooriyat-i-din ?
A.—A person who believes in the five pillars of Islam and who believes in the rasalat of our Holy Prophet fulfils the zarooriyat-i-din.
Q.—Have other actions, apart from the five arakan, anything to do with a man being a Muslim or being outside the pale of Islam?
(Note—Witness has been explained that by actions are meant those rules of moral conduct which in modern society are accepted as correct.)
A.—Certainly.
Q.—Then you will not call a person a Muslim who believes in arakan-ikhamsa and the rasalat of the prophet but who steals other peoples’ things, embezzles property entrusted to him, has an evil eye on his neighbour’s wife and is guilty of the grossest ingratitude to his benefector?
A.—Such a person, if he has the belief already indicated, will be a Muslim despite all this”.

Maulana Muhammad Ali Kandhalvi, Darush-Shahabia, Sialkot —
“Q.—Please define a Musalman?
A.—A person who in obedience to the commands of the prophet performs all the zarooriyat-i-din is a Musalman.
Q.—Can you define zarooriyat-i-din ?
A.—Zarooriyat-i-din are those requirements which are known to every Muslim irrespective of his religious knowledge.
Q.—Can you enumerate zarooriyat-i-din ?
A.—These are too numerous to be mentioned. I myself cannot enumerate these zarooriyat. Some of the zarooriyat-i-din may be mentioned as salat, saum, etc.”

Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi —
“Q.—Who is a Musalman?
A.—There are two kinds of Musalmans, a political (siyasi) Musalman and a real (haqiqi) Musalman. In order to be called a political Musalman, a person must:
(1) believe in the Unity of God,
(2) believe in our Holy Prophet being khatam-un-nabiyin, i.e., ‘final
authority’ in all matters relating to the life of that person,
(3) believe that all good and evil comes from Allah,
(4) believe in the Day of Judgment,
(5) believe in the Qur’an to be the last book revealed by Allah,
(6) perform the annual pilgrimage to Mecca,
(7) pay the zaka’at,
(8) say his prayers like the Musalmans,
(9) observe all apparent rules of Islami mu’ashira, and
(10) observe the fast (saum).

If a person satisfies all these conditions he is entitled to the rights of a full citizen of an Islamic State. If any one of these conditions is not satisfied, the person concerned will not be a political Musalman. (Again said) It would be enough for a person to be a Musalman if he merely professes his belief in these ten matters irrespective of whether he puts them into practice or not. In order to be a real Musalman, a person must believe in and act on all the injunctions by Allah and his prophet in the manner in which they have been enjoined upon him.
Q.—Will you say that only the real Musalman is ‘mard-i-saleh’ ?
A.—Yes.
Q.—do we understand you aright that in the case of what you have called a political (siyasi) Musalman, belief alone is necessary, while in the case of a haqiqi Musalman there must not only be belief but also action?
A.—No, you have not understood me aright. Even in the case of a political (siyasi) Musalman action is necessary but what I mean to say is that if a person does not act upon the belief that is necessary in the case of such a Musalman, he will not be outside the pale of a political (siyasi) Musalman.
Q.—If a political (siyasi) Musalman does not believe in things which you
have stated to be necessary, will you call such a person be-din ?
A.—No, I will call him merely be-amal”.

The definition by the Sadr Anjuman Ahmadiya, Rabwah, in its written statement
is that a Muslim is a person who belongs to the ummat of the Holy Prophet and professes belief in kalima-i-tayyaba.

Keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulama, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim but kafirs according to the definition of every one else.

 

 

APOSTASY

Apostasy in an Islamic State is punishable with death. On this the ulama are practically unanimous (vide the evidence of Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyad Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan, Punjab; Maulana Ahmad Ali, Sadr Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Islam, West Pakistan; Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, founder and ex-Amir-i-Jama’at-i-Islami, Pakistan; Mufti Muhammad Idris, Jami’Ashrafia, Lahore, and Member, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan; Maulana Daud Ghaznavi, President, Jami’at-i-Ahl-i-Hadith, Maghribi Pakistan; Maulana Abdul Haleem Qasimi, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Islam, Punjab; and Mr. Ibrahim Ali Chishti). According to this doctrine, Chaudhri Zafrullah Khan, if he has not inherited his present religious beliefs but has voluntarily elected to be an Ahmadi, must be put to death. And the same fate should befall Deobandis and Wahabis, including Maulana Muhammad Shafi Deobandi, Member, Board of Talimat-i-Islami attached to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, and Maulana Daud Ghaznavi, if Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyad Muhammad Ahmad Qadri or Mirza Raza Ahmad Khan Barelvi, or any one of the numerous ulama who are shown perched on every leaf of a beautiful tree in the fatwa, Ex. D. E. 14, were the head of such Islamic State. And if Maulana Muhammad Shafi Deobandi were the head of the State, he would exclude those who have pronounced Deobandis as kafirs from the pale of Islam and inflict on them the death penalty if they come within the definition of murtadd, namely, if they have changed and not inherited their religious views.

The genuineness of the fatwa, Ex. D. E. 13, by the Deobandis which says that Asna Ashari Shias are kafirs and murtadds, was questioned in the course of enquiry, but Maulana Muhammad Shafi made an inquiry on the subject from Deoband, and received from the records of that institution the copy of a fatwa signed by all the teachers of the Darul Uloom including Maulana Muhammad Shafi himself which is to the effect that those who do not believe in the sahabiyyat of Hazrat Siddiq Akbar and who are qazif of Hazrat Aisha Siddiqa and have been guilty of tehrif of Qur’an are kafirs. This opinion is also supported by Mr. Ibrahim Ali Chishti who has studied and knows his subject. He thinks the Shias are kafirs because they believe that Hazrat Ali shared the prophethood with our Holy Prophet. He refused to answer the question whether a person who being a Sunni changes his view and agrees with the Shia view would be guilty of irtidad so as to deserve the death penalty. According to the Shias all Sunnis are kafirs, and Ahl-i-Qur’an; namely, persons who consider hadith to be unreliable and therefore not binding, are unanimously kafirs and so are all independent thinkers. The net result of all this is that neither Shias nor Sunnis nor Deobandis nor Ahl-i-Hadith nor Barelvis are Muslims and any change from one view to the other must be accompanied in an Islamic State with the penalty of death if the Government of the State is in the hands of the party which considers the other party to be kafirs. And it does not require much imagination to judge of the consequences of this doctrine when it is remembered that no two ulama have agreed before us as to the definition of a Muslim. If the constituents of each of the definitions given by the ulama are given effect to, and subjected to the rule of ‘combination and permutation’ and the form of charge in the Inquisition’s sentence on Galileo is adopted mutatis mutandis as a model, the grounds on which a person may be indicted for apostasy will be too numerous to count.

In an earlier part of the report we have referred to the proscription of the ‘Ashshahab’, a pamphlet written by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani who later became Sheikh-ul-Islam-i-Pakistan. In that pamphlet the Maulana had attempted to show from the Qur’an, the sunna, the ijma’ and qayas that in Islam the punishment for apostasy (irtidad) simpliciter is death. After propounding the theological doctrine the Maulana had made in that document a statement of fact that in the time of the Caliph Siddiq-i-Akbar and the subsequent Caliphs vast areas of Arabia became repeatedly red with the blood of apostates. We are not called upon to express any opinion as to the correctness or otherwise of this doctrine but knowing that the suggestion to the Punjab Government to proscribe this pamphlet had come from the Minister for the Interior we have attempted to inquire of ourselves the reasons for Government’s taking a step which ex hypothesi amounted to condemning a doctrine which the Maulana had professed to derive from the Qur’an and the sunna. The death penalty for irtidad has implications of a far-reaching character and stamps Islam as a religion of fanatics, which punishes all independent thinking. The Qur’an again and again lays emphasis on reason and thought, advises toleration and preaches against compulsion in religious matters but the doctrine of irtidad as enunciated in this pamphlet strikes at the very root of independent thinking when it propounds the view that anyone who, being born a Muslim or having embraced Islam, attempts to think on the subject of religion with a view, if he comes to that conclusion, to choose for himself any religion he likes, has the capital penalty in store for him. With this implication Islam becomes an embodiment of complete intellectual paralysis. And the statement in the pamphlet that vast areas of Arabia were repeatedly bespattered with human blood, if true, could only lend itself to this inference that even when Islam was at the height of its splendour and held absolute sway in Arabia there were in that country a large number of people who turned away from that religion and preferred to die than to remain in that system. It must have been some such reaction of this pamphlet on the mind of the Minister for the Interior which prompted him to advise the Punjab Government to proscribe the pamphlet. Further the Minister who was himself well-versed in religious matters must have thought that the conclusion drawn by the author of the pamphlet which was principally based on the precedent mentioned in paras. 26, 27 and 28 of the Old Testament and which is only partially referred to in the Qur’an in the 54th verse of the Second Sura, could not be applicable to apostasy from Islam and that therefore the author’s opinion was in fact incorrect, there being no express text in the Qur’an for the death penalty for apostasy. On the contrary each of the two ideas, one underlying the six brief verses of Surat-ul-Kafiroon and the other the La Ikrah verse of the second Sura, has merely to be understood to reject as erroneous the view propounded in the ‘Ash-Shahab’. Each of the verses in Surat-ul-Kafiroon which contains thirty words and no verse of which exceeds six words, brings out a fundamental trait in man engrained in him since his creation while the La Ikrah verse, the relevant portion of which contains only nine words, states the rule of responsibility of the mind with a precision that cannot be surpassed. Both of these texts which are an early part of the Revelation are, individually and collectively, the foundation of that principle which human society, after centuries of conflict, hatred and bloodshed, has adopted in defining one of the most important fundamental rights of man. But our doctors would never dissociate chauvinism from Islam.

 

 

PROPAGATION OF OTHER RELIGIONS

Closely allied to the punishment for apostasy is the right of non-Muslims publicly to preach their religion. The principle which punishes an apostate with death must be applicable to public preaching of kufr and it is admitted by Maulana Abul Hasanat, Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir and Master Taj-ud-Din Ansari, though the last subordinates his opinion to the opinion of the ulama, that any faith other than Islam will not be permitted publicly to be preached in the State. And Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, as will appear from his pamphlet ‘Punishment in Islam for an apostate’, has the same views on the subject.

Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir, when questioned on this point, replied :—
“Q.—What will you do with them (Ahmadis) if you were the head of the
Pakistan State ?
A.—I would tolerate them as human beings but will not allow them the right
to preach their religion”.

The prohibition against public preaching of any non-Muslim religion must logically follow from the proposition that apostasy will be punished with death and that any attack on, or danger to Islam will be treated as treason and punished in the same way as apostasy.

JIHAD
Earlier we have pointed out that one of the doctrines on which the Musalmans and Ahmadis are at variance is that of jihad. This doctrine at once raises a host of other allied matters such as the meanings of ghazi, shahid, jihad-bis-saif, jihad fi sabili’llah, dar-ul-Islam, dar-ul-harb, hijrat, ghanima, khums and slavery, and the conflict or reconciliation of these conceptions with modern international problems such as aggression, genocide, international criminal jurisdiction, international conventions and rules of public international law.

An Islamic State is dar-ul-Islam, namely, a country where ordinances of Islam are established and which is under the rule of a Muslim sovereign. Its inhabitants are Muslims and also non-Muslims who have submitted to Muslim control and who under certain restrictions and without the possibility of full citizenship are guaranteed their lives and property by the Muslim State. They must, however, be people of Scriptures and may not be idolaters. An Islamic State is in theory perpetually at war with the neighbouring non-Muslim country, which at any time may become dar-ul-harb, in which case it is the duty of the Muslims of that country to leave it and to come over to the country of their brethren in faith. We put this aspect to Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi and reproduce his views :—

“Q.—is a country on the border of dar-ul-Islam always qua an Islamic State in the position of dar-ul-harb ?
A.—No. In the absence of an agreement to the contrary, the Islamic State will be potentially at war with the non-Muslim neighbouring country. The non-Muslim country acquires the status of dar-ul-harb only after the Islamic State declares a formal war against it”.

According to Ghias-ul-Lughat, dar-ul-harb is a country belonging to infidels which has not been subdued by Islam, and the consequences of a country becoming darul-harb are thus stated in the Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam :—

“When a country does become a dar-ul-harb, it is the duty of all Muslims to withdraw from it, and a wife who refuses to accompany her husband in this, is ipso facto divorced”.

Thus in case of a war between India and Pakistan, if the latter is an Islamic State, we must be prepared to receive forty million Muslims from across the border into Pakistan.

In fact, Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i- Pakistan, thinks that a case for hijrat already exists for the Musalmans of India. The following is his view on this subject :—
“Q.—Do yon call your migration to Pakistan as hijrat in the religious sense ?
A.—Yes”.

We shall presently point out why Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s version of the doctrine of jihad is relied on as a ground for his and his community’s kufr, but before we do that it is necessary first to state how jihad has been or is understood by the Musalmans. There are various theories about jihad which vary from the crude notion of a megalomaniac moved by religious frenzy going out armed with sword and indiscriminately slaughtering non-Muslims in the belief that if he dies in the combat he becomes a shahid and if he succeeds in killing attains the status of a ghazi, to the conception that a Musalman throughout his life is pitted against kufr, kufr here being used in the sense of evil and wrong, and that his principal activity in life is to strive by argument a where necessary by force to spread Islam until it becomes a world religion. In the latter case he fights not for any personal end but because he considers such strife as a duty and an obligation which he owes to Allah and the only recompense for which is the pleasure of Allah. The Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam contains the following brief article on djihad :—
“DJIHAD (A), holy war. The spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general. It narrowly escaped being a sixth rukn, or fundamental duty, and is indeed still so regarded by the descendants of the Kharidjis. This position was reached gradually but quickly. In the Meccan Suras of the Qur’an patience under attack is taught ; no other attitude was possible. But at Medina the right to repel attack appears, and gradually it became a prescribed duty to fight against and subdue the hostile Meccans.

Whether Muhammad himself recognised that his position implied steady and unprovoked war against the unbelieving world until it was subdued to Islam may be in doubt. Traditions are explicit on the point ; but the Qur’anic passages speak always of the unbelievers who are to be subdued as dangerous or faithless. Still, the story of his writing to the powers around him shows that such a universal position was implicit in his mind, and it certainly developed immediately after his death, when the Muslim armies advanced out of Arabia. It is now a fard ala’l-kifaya, a duty in general on all male, free, adult Muslims, sane in mind and body and having means enough to reach the Muslim army, yet not a duty necessarily incumbent on every individual but sufficiently performed when done by a certain number. So it must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam. It must be controlled or headed by a Muslim sovereign or imam. As the imam of the Shias is now invisible, they cannot have a djihad until he reappears. Further, the requirement will be met if such a sovereign makes an expedition once a year, or, even, in the later view, if he makes annual preparation for one. The people against whom the djihad is directed must first be invited to embrace Islam. On refusal they have another choice. They may submit to Muslim rule, become dhimmis (q. v.) and pay djizya and kharadj (q. v.) or fight. In the first case, their lives, families and property are assured to them, but they have a definitely inferior status, with no technical citizenship, and a standing only as protected wards. If they fight, they and their families may be enslaved and all their property seized as booty, four-fifths of which goes to the conquering army. If they embrace Islam, and it is open to them to do so even when the armies are face to face, they become part of the Muslim community with all its rights and duties. Apostates must be put to death. But if a Muslim country is invaded by unbelievers, the imam may issue a general summons calling all Muslims there to arms, and as the danger grows so may be the width of the summons until the whole Muslim world is involved. A Muslim who dies fighting in the path of Allah (fi sabil Allah) is martyr (shahid) and is assured of Paradise and of peculiar privileges there. Such a death was, in the early generations, regarded as the peculiar crown of a pious life. It is still, on occasions, a strong incitement, but when Islam ceased to conquer it lost its supreme value. Even yet, however, any war between Muslims and non-Muslims must be a djihad with its incitements and rewards. Of course, such modern movements as the so-called Mu’tazili in India and the Young Turk in Turkey reject this and endeavour to explain away its basis; but the Muslim masses still follow the unanimous voice of the canon lawyers. Islam must be completely made over before the doctrine of djihad can be eliminated”.

The generally accepted view is that the fifth verse to Sura-i-Tauba (Sura IX) abrogated the earlier verses revealed in Mecca which permitted the killing of kuffar only in self-defence. As against this the Ahmadis believe that no verso in the Qur’an was abrogated by another verse and that both sets of verses, namely, the Meccan verses and the relative verses in Sura-i-Tauba have different scopes and can stand together. This introduces the difficult controversy of nasikh and mansukh, with all its implications. It is argued on behalf of the Ahmadis that the doctrine of nasikh and mansukh is opposed to the belief in the existence of an original Scripture in Heaven, and that implicit in this doctrine is the admission that unless the verse alleged to be repealed was meant for a specific occasion and by the coming of that occasion fulfilled its purpose and thus spent itself, God did not know of the subsequent circumstances which would make the earlier verse inapplicable or lead to an undesired result.

The third result of this doctrine, it is pointed out, cuts at the very root of the claim that laws of Islam are immutable and inflexible because if changed circumstances made a new revelation necessary, any change in the circumstances subsequent to the completion of the revelation would make most of the revelation otiose or obsolete.

We are wholly incompetent to pronounce on the merits of this controversy but what has to be pointed out is the result to which the doctrine of jihad will lead if, as appears from the article in the Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam and other writings produced before us including one by Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi and another by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, it involves the spread of Islam by arms and conquest. ‘Aggression’ and ‘genocide’ are now offences against humanity for which under sentences pronounced by different International tribunals at Nuremburg and Tokio the war lords of Germany and Japan had to forfeit their lives, and there is hardly any difference between the offences of aggression and genocide on the one hand and the doctrine of spread of Islam by arms and conquest on the other. An International Convention on genocide is about to be concluded but if the view of jihad presented to us is correct, Pakistan cannot be a party to it. And while the following verses in the Mecca Suras :—

Sura II, verses 190 and 193 :190. “Fight in the Cause of God Those who fight you,
But do not transgress limits ;
For God loveth not transgressors”.
193. “And fight them on
Until there is no more
Tumult or oppression,
And there prevail
Justice and faith in God ;
But if they cease,
Let there be no hostility
Except to those
Who practise oppression”.
Sura XXII, verses 39 and 40:
39. “To those against whom
War is made, permission
Is given (to fight) because
They are wronged;— and verily,
God is most Powerful
For their aid;—”
40. “(They are) those who have
Been expelled from their homes
In defiance of right,—
(For no cause) except
That they say, ‘Our Lord
Is God.’ Did not God
Check one set of people
By means of another,
There would surely have been
Pulled down monasteries, churches,
Synagogues, and mosques, in which
The name of God is commemorated
In abundant measure. God will
Certainly aid those who
Aid His (cause);—for verily
God is Full of Strength,
Exalted in Might,
(Able to enforce His Will),”

contain in them the sublime principle which international jurists have only faintly begun to discover, we must go on preaching that aggression is the chief characteristic of Islam. The law relating to prisoners of war is another branch of Islamic law which is bound to come in conflict with International Law.

As for instance, in matters relating to the treatment of prisoners of war, we shall have to be governed by Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi’s view, assuming that view is based on the Qur’an and the sunna, which is as follows :—

“Q.—Is there a law of war in Islam?
A.—Yes.
Q.—Does it differ fundamentally from the modern International Law of war?
A.—These two systems are based on a fundamental difference.
Q.—What rights have non-Muslims who are taken prisoners of war in a jihad?
A.—The Islamic law on the point is that if the country of which these prisoners are nationals pays ransom, they will be released. An exchange of prisoners is also permitted. If neither of these alternatives is possible, the prisoners will be converted into slaves for ever. If any such person makes an offer to pay his ransom out of his own earnings, he will be permitted to collect the money necessary for the fidya (ransom).
Q.—Are you of the view that unless a Government assumes the form of an Islamic Government, any war declared by it is not a jihad?
A.—No. A war may be declared to be a jihad if it is declared by a national Government of Muslims in the legitimate interests of the State. I never expressed the opinion attributed to me in Ex. D. E. 12:—
“Raha yeh masala keh agar hukumat-i-Pakisten apni maujuda shukl-o-surat ke sath Indian Union ke sath apne mu’ahadat khatm kar-ke i’lan-i-jang bar bhi de to kya us-ki yeh jang jihad ke hukam men a-ja’egi ? Ap ne is bare men jo rae zahir ki hai woh bilkul darust hai – Jab-tak hukumat Islami nizam ko ikhtiyar kar-ke Islami nah ho jae us waqt tak us-ki kisi jang ko jihad kehna aisa hi hai jaisa kisi ghair Muslim ke Azad Kashmir ki fauj men bharti ho-kar larne ko jihad aur us-ki maut ko shahadat ka nam dediya jae – Maulana ka jo mudd’a hai woh yeh hai keh mu’ahadat ki maujudgi men to hukumat ya us-ke shehriyon ka is jang men sharik hona shar’-an ja’iz hi nahin – Agar hukumat mu’ahadat khatm kar-ke jang ka
i’lan kar-de to hukumat ki jang to jihad phir bhi nahin hogi ta-an keh hukumat Islami nah ho jae.’

(translation)

‘The question remains whether, even if the Government of Pakistan, in its present form and structure, terminates her treaties with the Indian Union and declares war against her, this war would fall under the definition of jihad? The opinion expressed by him in this behalf is quite correct. Until such time as the Government becomes Islamic by adopting the Islamic form of Government, to call any of its wars a jihad would be tantamount to describing the enlistment and fighting of a non-Muslim on the side of the Azad Kashmir forces jihad and his death martyrdom. What the Maulana means is that, in the presence of treaties, it is against Shari’at, if the Government or its people participate in such a war. If the Government terminates the treaties and declares war, even then the war started by Government would not be termed jihad unless the Government becomes Islamic’.

About the view expressed in this letter being that of Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, there is the evidence of Mian Tufail Muhammad, the writer of the letter, who states: “Ex. D. E. 12 is a photostat copy of a letter which I wrote to someone whose name I do not now remember.”

Maulana Abul Hasanat Muhammad Ahmad Qadri’s view on this point is as
follows:—
“Q.—Is there a law of war in Islam?
A.—Yes.
Q.—Does it differ in fundamentals from the present International Law?
A.—Yes.
Q.—What are the rights of a person taken prisoner in war?
A.—He can embrace Islam or ask for aman, in which case he will be treated as a musta’min. If he does not ask for aman, he would be made a slave”.
Similar is the opinion expressed by Mian Tufail Muhammad of Jam’at-i-Islami who says:—
“Q.—Is there any law of war in Islamic laws?
A.—Yes.
Q.—If that comes into conflict with International Law, which will you follow?
A.—Islamic law.
Q.—Then please state what will be the status of prisoners of war captured by your
forces?
A.—I cannot reply to this off hand. I will have to study the point.”
Of course ghanima (plunder) and khums (one-fifth) if treated as a necessary incident of
jihad will be treated by international society as a mere act of brigandage.

REACTION ON MUSLIMS OF NON-MUSLIM STATES
The ideology on which an Islamic State is desired to be founded in Pakistan must have certain consequences for the Musalmans who are living in countries under non-Muslim sovereigns.

We asked Amir-i-Shari’at Sayyad Ataullah Shah Bukhari whether a Muslim could be a faithful subject of a non-Muslim State and reproduce his answer:—
“Q.—In your opinion is a Musalman bound to obey orders of a kafir Government?
A.—It is not possible that a Musalman should be faithful citizen of a non-Muslim Government.
Q.—Will it be possible for the four crore of Indian Muslims to be faithful citizens of their State?
A—No.”

The answer is quite consistent with the ideology which has been pressed before us, but then if Pakistan is entitled to base its Constitution on religion, the same right must be conceded to other countries where Musalmans are in substantial minorities or if they constitute a preponderating majority in a country where sovereignty rests with a non-Muslim community. We, therefore, asked the various ulama whether, if non-Muslims in Pakistan were to be subjected to this discrimination in matters of citizenship, the ulama would have any objection to Muslims in other countries being subjected to a similar discrimination. Their reactions to this suggestion are reproduced below:—

Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyed Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan:—
“Q.—You will admit for the Hindus, who are in a majority in India, the right to have a Hindu religious State?
A.—Yes.
Q.—Will you have any objection if the Muslims are treated under that form of Government as malishes or shudras under the law of Manu?
A.— No.”

Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi :—
“Q.—If we have this form of Islamic Government in Pakistan, will you permit Hindus to base their Constitution on the basis of their own religion?
A—Certainly. I should have no objection even if the Muslims of India are treated in that form of Government as shudras and malishes and Manu’s laws are applied to them, depriving them of all share in the Government and the rights of a citizen. In fact such a state of affairs already exists in India.”

Amir-i-Shari’at Sayyad Ata Ullah Skak Bukhari :—
“Q.—How many crores of Muslims are there in India?
A.—Four crores.
Q.—Have you any objection to the law of Manu being applied to them according to which they will have no civil right and will be treated as malishes and shudras?
A.—I am in Pakistan and I cannot advise them.”

Mian Tufail Muhammad of Jama’at-i-Islami :—
“Q.—What is the population of Muslims in the world?
A.—Fifty crores.
Q.—If the total population of Muslims of the world is 50 crores, as you say, and the number of Muslims living in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia, Egypt, Persia, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Turkey and Iraq does not exceed 20 crores, will not the result of your ideology beto convert 30 crores of Muslims in the world into hewers of wood anddrawers of water?
A.—My ideology should not affect their position.
Q.—Even if they are subjected to discrimination on religious grounds and denied ordinary rights of citizenship ?
A.—Yes.”
This witness goes to the extent of asserting that even if a non-Muslim Government were to offer posts to Muslims in the public services of the country, it will be their duty to refuse such posts.

Ghazi Siraj-ud-Din Munir :—
“Q.—Do you want an Islamic State in Pakistan?
A.—Surely.
Q.—What will be your reaction if the neighbouring country was to found
their political system on their own religion?
A.—They can do it if they like.
Q.—Do you admit for them the right to declare that all Muslims in India, are shudras and malishes with no civil rights whatsoever?
A.—We will do our best to see that before they do it their political
sovereignty is gone. We are too strong for India. We will be strong enough to prevent India from doing this.
Q.—Is it a part of the religious obligations of Muslims to preach their religion?
A—Yes.
Q.—Is it a part of the duty of Muslims in India publicly to preach their religion?
A.—They should have that right.
Q.—What if the Indian State is founded on a religious basis and the right to preach religion is disallowed to its Muslim nationals?
A —If India makes any such law, believer in the Expansionist movement as I am, I will march on India and conquer her.”

So this is the reply to the reciprocity of discrimination on religious grounds.

Master Taj-ud-Din Ansari :—
“Q.—Would you like to have the same ideology for the four crores of Muslims in India as you are impressing upon the Muslims of
Pakistan?
A.—That ideology will not let them remain in India for one minute.
Q.—Does the ideology of a Muslim change from place to place and from time to time?
A.—No.
Q.—Then why should not the Muslims of India have the same ideology as you have?
A.—They should answer that question.”

The ideology advocated before us, if adopted by Indian Muslims, will completely
disqualify them for public offices in the State, not only in India but in other countries also which are under a non-Muslim Government. Muslims will become perpetual suspects everywhere and will not be enrolled in the army because according to this ideology, in case of war between a Muslim country and a non-Muslim country, Muslim soldiers of the non-Muslim country must either side with the Muslim country or surrender their posts.

The following is the view expressed by two divines whom we questioned on this point:—

Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyed Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President, Jami’at-ul-
Ulama-i-Pakistan :—
“Q.—What will be the duty of Muslims in India in case of war between India
and Pakistan?
A.—Their duty is obvious, namely, to side with us and not to fight against us
on behalf of India.”

Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi : —
“Q.—What will be the duty of the Muslims in India in case of war between
India and Pakistan?
A.—Their duty is obvious, and that is not to fight against Pakistan or to do
anything injurious to the safety of Pakistan.”

OTHER INCIDENTS

Other incidents of an Islamic State are that all sculpture, playing of cards, portrait
painting, photographing human beings, music, dancing, mixed acting, cinemas and
theatres will have to be closed.

Thus says Maulana Abdul Haleem Qasimi, representative of Jami’at-ul-Ulama-i-Pakistan: —

“Q.—What are your views on tashbih and tamseel ?
A.—You should ask me a concrete question.
Q.—What are your views on lahw-o-la’b?
A.—The same is my reply to this question.
Q.—What are your views about portrait painting?
A.—There is nothing against it if any such painting becomes necessary.
Q.—What about photography?
A.—My reply to it is the same as the reply regarding portrait painting.
Q.—What about sculpture as an art?
A.—It is prohibited by our religion.
Q.—Will you bring playing of cards in lohw-o-la’b?
A.—Yes, it will amount to lahw-o-la’b.
Q.—What about music and dancing?
A.—It is all forbidden by our religion.
Q.—What about drama and acting?
A —It all depends on what kind of acting you mean. If it involves immodesty
and intermixture of sexes, the Islamic law is against it.
Q.—If the State is founded on your ideals, will you make a law stopping
portrait painting, photographing of human beings, sculpture, playing
of cards, music, dancing, acting and all cinemas and theatres?
A.—Keeping in view the present form of these activities, my answer is in the affirmative.”

Maulana Abdul Haamid Badayuni considers it to be a sin (ma’siyat) on the part of
professors of anatomy to dissect dead bodies of Muslims to explain points of anatomy to the students.

The soldier or the policeman will have the right, on grounds of religion, to disobey a command by a superior authority. Maulana Abul Hasanat’s view on this is as follows :—

“I believe that if a policeman is required to do something which we consider to be contrary to our religion, it should be the duty of the policeman to disobey the authority. The same would be my answer if ‘army’ were substituted for ‘police’.

Q.—You stated yesterday that if a policeman or a soldier was required by a
superior authority to do what you considered to be contrary to religion, it would be the duty of that policeman or the soldier to disobey such authority. Will you give the policeman or the soldier the right of himself determining whether the command he is given by his superior authority is contrary to religion ?
A.—Most certainly.
Q.—Suppose there is war between Pakistan and another Muslim country and the soldier feels that Pakistan is in the wrong; and that to shoot a soldier of other country is contrary to religion. Do you think he would be justified in disobeying his commanding officer ?
A.—In such a contingency the soldier should take a fatwa of the ‘ulama’.”

We have dwelt at some length on the subject of Islamic State not because we intended to write a thesis against or in favour of such State but merely with a view to presenting a clear picture of the numerous possibilities that may in future arise if true causes of the ideological confusion which contributed to the spread and intensity of the disturbances are not precisely located. That such confusion did exist is obvious because otherwise Muslim Leaguers, whose own Government was in office, would not have risen against it; sense of loyalty and public duty would not have departed from public officials who went about like maniacs howling against their own Government and officers; respect for property and human life would not have disappeared in the common man who with no scruple or compunction began freely to indulge in loot, arson and murder; politicians would not have shirked facing the men who had installed them in their offices; and administrators would not have felt hesitant or diffident in performing what was their obvious duty. If there is one thing which has been conclusively demonstrated in this inquiry, it is that provided you can persuade the masses to believe that something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or civic sense.

Pakistan is being taken by the common man, though it is not, as an Islamic State. This belief has been encouraged by the ceaseless clamour for Islam and Islamic State that is being heard from all quarters since the establishment of Pakistan. The phantom of an Islamic State has haunted the Musalman throughout the ages and is a result of the memory of the glorious past when Islam rising like a storm from the least expected quarter of the world—wilds of Arabia—instantly enveloped the world, pulling down from their high pedestal gods who had ruled over man since the creation, uprooting centuries old institutions and superstitions and supplanting all civilisations that had been built on an enslaved humanity. What is 125 years in human history, nay in the history of a people, and yet during this brief period Islam spread from the Indus to the Atlantic and Spain, and from the borders of China to Egypt, and the sons of the desert installed themselves in all old centres of civilisation—in Ctesiphon, Damascus, Alexandria, India and all places associated with the names of the Sumerian and the Assyrian civilisations. Historians have often posed the question : what would have been the state of the world today if Muawiya’s siege of Constantinople had succeeded or if the proverbial Arab instinct for plunder had not suddenly seized the mujahids of Abdur Rahman in their fight against Charles Martel on the plains of Tours in Southern France. May be Muslims would have discovered America long before Columbus did and the entire world would have been Moslemised; may be Islam itself would have been Europeanised. It is this brilliant achievement of the Arabian nomads, the like of which the world had never seen before, that makes the Musalman of today live in the past and yearn for the return of the glory that was Islam. He finds himself standing on the crossroads, wrapped in the mantle of the past and with the dead weight of centuries on his back, frustrated and bewildered and hesitant to turn one corner or the other. The freshness and the simplicity of the faith, which gave determination to his mind and spring to his muscle, is now denied to him. He has neither the means nor the ability to conquer and there are no countries to conquer. Little does he understand that the forces, which are pitted against him, are entirely different from those against which early Islam, had to fight, and that on the clues given by his own ancestors human mind has achieved results which he cannot understand. He therefore finds himself in a state of helplessness, waiting for some one to come and help him out of this morass of uncertainty and confusion. And he will go on waiting like this without anything happening. Nothing but a bold re-orientation of Islam to separate the vital from the lifeless can preserve it as a World Idea and convert the Musalman into a citizen of the present and the future world from the archaic in congruity that he is today. It is this lack of bold and clear thinking, the inability to understand and take decisions which has brought about in Pakistan a confusion which will persist and repeatedly create situations of the kind we have been inquiring into until our leaders have a clear conception of the goal and of the means to reach it. It requires no imagination to realise that irreconcilables remain irreconcilable even if you believe or wish to the contrary. Opposing principles, if left to themselves, can only produce confusion and disorder, and the application of a neutralising agency to them can only produce a dead result. Unless, in case of conflict between two ideologies, our leaders have the desire and the ability to elect, uncertainty must continue. And as long as we rely on the hammer when a file is needed and press Islam into service to solve situations it was never intended to solve, frustration and disappointment must dog our steps. The sublime faith called Islam will live even if our leaders are not there to enforce it. It lives in the individual, in his soul and outlook, in all his relations with God and men, from the cradle to the grave, and our politicians should understand that if Divine commands cannot make or keep a man a Musalman, their statutes will not….

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Why has America’s “torture debate” yet to mention the obvious? Viz., sadism and racism.

“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
— from “Burnt Norton” by TS Eliot

Indeed humankind cannot bear very much reality! Why else, I wonder, has the “torture” debate not yet mentioned the obvious: sadism and racism? Did the perpetrators of torture experience delight or remorse or both from their activities? Delight during, remorse afterwards? Would they have experienced less delight and more remorse if the victims had not also elicited a race-feeling, a race-consciousness?  The victims after all were all “the other”, not one’s own.

One needs to be candid and not pussy-foot around if one wants to comprehend reality.

SR

On the general theory of expertise in democracy: reflections on what emerges from the American “torture memos” today

Twenty years ago, I wrote in Philosophy of Economics (Routledge, London & New York, 1989) quoting from Solzhenitsyn’s experience:

“….the received theory of economic policy… must be silent about the appropriate role of the expert not only under conditions of tyranny (Solzhenitsyn: “The prison doctor was the interrogator’s and executioner’s right-hand man. The beaten prisoner would come to on the floor only to hear the doctor’s voice: ‘You can continue, the pulse is normal’” ); but also where the duly elected government of an open and democratic society proceeded to do things patently wrong or tyrannical (the imprisonment of the Japanese Americans). Hence Popper’s “paradox of democracy” and “tyranny of the majority”..… A theory of economic policy which both assumes a free and open society and bases itself upon a moral scepticism cannot have anything to say ultimately about the objective reasons why a free and open society may be preferred to an unfree or closed society, or about the good or bad outcomes that may be produced by the working of democratic processes…”

Today’s Washington Post reports:

“When the CIA began what it called an “increased pressure phase” with captured terrorism suspect Abu Zubaida in the summer of 2002, its first step was to limit the detainee’s human contact to just two people. One was the CIA interrogator, the other a psychologist. During the extraordinary weeks that followed, it was the psychologist who apparently played the more critical role. According to newly released Justice Department documents, the psychologist provided ideas, practical advice and even legal justification for interrogation methods that would break Abu Zubaida, physically and mentally. Extreme sleep deprivation, waterboarding, the use of insects to provoke fear — all were deemed acceptable, in part because the psychologist said so. “No severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted,” a Justice Department lawyer said in a 2002 memo explaining why waterboarding, or simulated drowning, should not be considered torture. The role of health professionals as described in the documents has prompted a renewed outcry from ethicists who say the conduct of psychologists and supervising physicians violated basic standards of their professions. Their names are among the few details censored in the long-concealed Bush administration memos released Thursday, but the documents show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation. Their presence also enabled the government to argue that the interrogations did not include torture. Most of the psychologists were contract employees of the CIA, according to intelligence officials familiar with the program. “The health professionals involved in the CIA program broke the law and shame the bedrock ethical traditions of medicine and psychology,” said Frank Donaghue, chief executive of Physicians for Human Rights, an international advocacy group made up of physicians opposed to torture. “All psychologists and physicians found to be involved in the torture of detainees must lose their license and never be allowed to practice again.” The CIA declined to comment yesterday on the role played by health professionals in the agency’s self-described “enhanced interrogation program,” which operated from 2002 to 2006 in various secret prisons overseas. “The fact remains that CIA’s detention and interrogation effort was authorized and approved by our government,” CIA Director Leon Panetta said Thursday in a statement to employees. The Obama administration and its top intelligence leaders have banned harsh interrogations while also strongly opposing investigations or penalties for employees who were following their government’s orders. The CIA dispatched personnel from its office of medical services to each secret prison and evaluated medical professionals involved in interrogations “to make sure they could stand up, psychologically handle it,” according to a former CIA official. The alleged actions of medical professionals in the secret prisons are viewed as particularly troubling by an array of groups, including the American Medical Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross. AMA policies state that physicians “must not be present when torture is used or threatened.” The guidelines allow doctors to treat detainees only “if doing so is in their [detainees’] best interest” and not merely to monitor their health “so that torture can begin or continue.” The American Psychological Association has condemned any participation by its members in interrogations involving torture, but critics of the organization faulted it for failing to censure members involved in harsh interrogations. The ICRC, which conducted the first independent interviews of CIA detainees in 2006, said the prisoners were told they would not be killed during interrogations, though one was warned that he would be brought to “the verge of death and back again,” according to a confidential ICRC report leaked to the New York Review of Books last month. “The interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics,” the ICRC report concluded….” (emphasis added)

Twenty-five years ago, the draft-manuscript that became the book Philosophy of Economics got me into much trouble in American academia. As I have said elsewhere, a gang of “inert game theorists”, similar to many (often unemployable ex-mathematicians) who had come to and still dominate what passes for academic economics in many American and European universities, did not like at all what I was saying. A handful of eminent senior economists – Frank Hahn, T W Schultz, Milton Friedman, James M Buchanan, Sidney Alexander – defended my work and but for their support over the decade 1979-1989, my book would not have seen light of day.  Eventually, I have had to battle over years in the US federal courts over it – only to find myself having to battle bribery of court officers and the suborning of perjury by government legal officers  too! (And speaking of government-paid psychologists, I was even required at one point by my corrupt opponent to undergo tests for having had the temerity of being in court at all! Fortunately for me that particular psychologist declined to participate in the nefariousness of his employer!).

I find all this poignant today as Philosophy of Economics may have, among other things, described the general theoretical problem that has been brought to light today.  I was delighted to hear from a friend in 1993 that my book had been prescribed for a course at Yale Law School and was strewn all over an alley in the bookshop.

Separately, I am also delighted to find that a person pioneering the current work is a daughter of our present PM. I have been sharply critical of Dr Singh’s economics and politics, but I have also said I have had high personal regard for him ever since 1973 when he, as a friend of my father’s, visited our then-home in Paris to advise me before I embarked on my study of economics. My salute to the ACLU’s work in this – may it be an example in defeating cases of State-tyranny in India too.

Subroto Roy,

My American years Part One 1980-90: battles for academic integrity & freedom

see revised and expanded version

My American years: Part One 1980-90: battles for academic integrity & freedom

On the Blacksburg campus February 1982, my second year in America.

I had come to Blacksburg in August 1980 thanks to a letter Professor Frank Hahn had written on my behalf to Professor James M Buchanan in January 1980.

I was in an “All But Dissertation” stage at Cambridge when I got to Blacksburg; I completed the thesis while teaching in Blacksburg, sent it from there in September 1981, and went back to Cambridge for the viva voce examination in January 1982.

Professor Buchanan and his colleagues were welcoming and I came to learn much from them about the realities of public finance and democratic politics, which I very soon applied to my work on India.

Jim Buchanan had a reputation for running very tough conferences of scholars. He invited me to one such in the Spring of 1981. We were made to work very hard indeed. One of the books prescribed is still with me, In Search of a Monetary Constitution, ed. Leland Yeager, Harvard 1962, and something I still recommend to anyone wishing to understand the classical liberal position on monetary policy. The week-long 1981 conference had one rest-day; it was spent in part at an excellent theatre in a small rural town outside Blacksburg. This photo is of Jim Buchanan on the left and Gordon Tullock on the right; in between them is Ken Minogue of the London School of Economics — who, as it happened, had been Tutor for Admissions when I became a freshman there seven years earlier.

(I must have learnt something from Jim Buchanan about running conferences because nine years later in May-June 1989 at the University of Hawaii, I made the participants of the India-perestroika and Pakistan-perestroika conferences work very hard too.)

My first rooms in America in 1980 were in the attic of 703 Gracelyn Court, where I paid $160 or $170 per month to my marvellous landlady Betty Tillman. There were many family occasions I enjoyed with her family downstairs, and her cakes, bakes and puddings all remain with me today.

A borrowed electric typewriter may be seen in the photo: the age of the personal computer was still a few years away. The Department had a stand-alone “AB-Dic” word-processor which we considered a marvel of technology; the Internet did not exist but there was some kind of Intranet between geeks in computer science and engineering departments at different universities.

It was at Gracelyn Court that this letter reached me addressed by FA Hayek himself.

Professor Buchanan had moved to Blacksburg from Charlottesville some years earlier with the Centre for Study of Public Choice that he had founded. The Centre came to be housed at the President’s House of Virginia Tech (presumably the University President himself had another residence).

I was initially a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre and at the same time a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Economics Department. I was very kindly given a magnificent office at the Centre, on the upper floor, perhaps the one on the upper right hand side in the picture. It was undoubtedly the finest room I have ever had as an office. I may have had it for a whole year, either 1980-81 or 1981-82. When Professor Buchanan and the Centre left for George Mason University in 1983, the mansion returned to being the University President’s House and my old office presumably became a fine bedroom again.

I spent the summer of 1983 at a long libertarian conference in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area in California. This is a photo from a barbecue during the conference with Professor Jean Baechler from France on the left; Leonard Liggio, who (along with Walter Grinder) had organised the conference, is at the right.

The first draft of the book that became Philosophy of Economics was written (in long hand) during that summer of 1983 in Palo Alto/Menlo Park. The initial title was “Principia Economica”, and the initial contracted publisher, the University of Chicago Press, had that title on the contract.

My principal supporter at the University of Chicago was that great American Theodore W. Schultz, then aged 81,

to whom the Press had initially sent the manuscript for review and who had recommended its prompt publication. Professor Schultz later told me to my face better what my book was about than I had realised myself, namely, it was about economics as knowledge, the epistemology of economics.

My parents came from India to visit me in California, and here we are at Yosemite.

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Also to visit were Mr and Mrs Willis C Armstrong, our family friends who had known me from infancy. This is a photo of Bill and my mother on the left, and Louise and myself on the right, taken perhaps by my father. In the third week of January 1991, during the first Gulf War, Bill and I (acting on behalf of Rajiv Gandhi) came to form an extremely tenuous bridge between the US Administration and Saddam Hussain for about 24 hours, in an attempt to get a withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait without further loss of life. In December 1991 I gave the widow of Rajiv Gandhi a small tape containing my long-distance phone conversations from America with Rajiv during that episode.

I had driven with my sheltie puppy from Blacksburg to Palo Alto  — through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona; my parents and I now drove with him back to Blacksburg from California, through Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia.  It may be a necessary though not sufficient condition to drive across America (or any other country) in order to understand it.

After a few days, we drove to New York via Pennsylvania where I became Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cornell Economics Department (on leave from being Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech). The few months at Cornell were noteworthy for the many long sessions I spent with Max Black. I shall add more about that here in due course. My parents returned to India (via Greece where my sister was) in the Autumn of 1983.

In May 1984, Indira Gandhi ruled in Delhi, and the ghost of Brezhnev was still fresh in Moscow. The era of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in America was at its height. Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India emerging from my doctoral thesis though written in Blacksburg and Ithaca in 1982-1983, came to be published by London’s Institute of Economic Affairs on May 29 as Occasional Paper No. 69, ISBN: 0-255 36169-6; its text is reproduced elsewhere here.

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It was the first critique after BR Shenoy of India’s Sovietesque economics since Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. The Times, London’s most eminent paper at the time, wrote its lead editorial comment about it on the day it was published, May 29 1984.

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It used to take several days for the library at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg to receive its copy of The Times of London and other British newspapers. I had not been told of the date of publication and did not know of what had happened in London on May 29 until perhaps June 2 — when a friend, Vasant Dave of a children’s charity, who was on campus, phoned me and congratulated me for being featured in The Times which he had just read in the University Library. “You mean they’ve reviewed it?” I asked him, “No, it’s the lead editorial.” “What?” I exclaimed. There was worse. Vasant was very soft-spoken and said “Yes, it’s titled ‘India’s Bad Example’” — which I misheard on the phone as “India’s Mad Example” 😀 Drat! I thought (or words to that effect), they must have lambasted me, as I rushed down to the Library to take a look.

The Times had said

“When Mr. Dennis Healey in the Commons recently stated that Hongkong, with one per cent of the population of India has twice India’s trade, he was making an important point about Hongkong but an equally important point about India. If Hongkong with one per cent of its population and less than 0.03 per cert of India’s land area (without even water as a natural resource) can so outpace India, there must be something terribly wrong with the way Indian governments have managed their affairs, and there is. A paper by an Indian economist published today (Pricing, Planning and Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India by Subroto Roy, IEA £1.80) shows how Asia’s largest democracy is gradually being stifled by the imposition of economic policies whose woeful effect and rhetorical unreality find their echo all over the Third World. As with many of Britain’s former imperial possessions, the rot set in long before independence. But as with most of the other former dependencies, the instrument of economic regulation and bureaucratic control set up by the British has been used decisively and expansively to consolidate a statist regime which inhibits free enterprise, minimizes economic success and consolidates the power of government in all spheres of the economy. We hear little of this side of things when India rattles the borrowing bowl or denigrates her creditors for want of further munificence. How could Indian officials explain their poor performance relative to Hongkong? Dr Roy has the answers for them. He lists the causes as a large and heavily subsidized public sector, labyrinthine control over private enterprise, forcibly depressed agricultural prices, massive import substitution, government monopoly of foreign exchange transactions, artificially overvalued currency and the extensive politicization of the labour market, not to mention the corruption which is an inevitable side effect of an economy which depends on the arbitrament of bureaucrats. The first Indian government under Nehru took its cue from Nehru’s admiration of the Soviet economy, which led him to believe that the only policy for India was socialism in which there would be “no private property except in a restricted sense and the replacement of the private profit system by a higher ideal of cooperative service.” Consequently, the Indian government has now either a full monopoly or is one of a few oligipolists in banking, insurance, railways, airlines, cement, steel, chemicals, fertilizers, ship-building, breweries, telephones and wrist-watches. No businessman can expand his operation while there is any surplus capacity anywhere in that sector. He needs government approval to modernize, alter his price-structure, or change his labour shift. It is not surprising that a recent study of those developing countries which account for most manufactured exports from the Third World shows that India’s share fell from 65 percent in 1953 to 10 per cent in 1973; nor, with the numerous restrictions on inter-state movement of grains, that India has over the years suffered more from an inability to cope with famine than during the Raj when famine drill was centrally organized and skillfully executed without restriction. Nehru’s attraction for the Soviet model has been inherited by his daughter, Mrs. Gandhi. Her policies have clearly positioned India more towards the Soviet Union than the West. The consequences of this, as Dr Roy states, is that a bias can be seen in “the antipathy and pessimism towards market institutions found among the urban public, and sympathy and optimism to be found for collectivist or statist ones.” All that India has to show for it is the delivery of thousands of tanks in exchange for bartered goods, and the erection of steel mills and other heavy industry which help to perpetuate the unfortunate obsession with industrial performance at the expense of agricultural growth and the relief of rural poverty.”…..

I felt this may have been intended to be laudatory but it was also inaccurate and had to be corrected. I replied dated June 4 which The Times published in their edition of June 16 1984:

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I was 29 when Pricing, Planning and Politics was published, I am 54 now. I do not agree with everything I said in it and find the tone a little puffed up as young men tend to be; it was also five years before my main “theoretical” work Philosophy of Economics would be published. My experience of life in the years since has also made me far less sanguine both about human nature and about America than I was then. But I am glad to find I am not embarrassed by what I said then, indeed I am pleased I said what I did in favour of classical liberalism and against statism and totalitarianism well before it became popular to do so after the Berlin Wall fell. (In India as elsewhere, former communist apparatchiks and fellow-travellers became pseudo-liberals overnight.)

The editorial itself may have been due to a conversation between Peter Bauer and William Rees-Mogg, so I later heard. The work sold 700 copies in its first month, a record for the publisher. The wife of one prominent Indian bureaucrat told me in Delhi in December 1988 it had affected her husband’s thinking drastically. A senior public finance economist told me he had been deputed at the Finance Ministry when the editorial appeared, and the Indian High Commission in London had urgently sent a copy of the editorial to the Ministry where it caused a stir. An IMF official told me years later that he saw the editorial on board a flight to India from the USA on the same day, and stopped in London to make a trip to the LSE’s bookshop to purchase a copy. Professor Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University had been a critic of aspects of Indian policy; he received a copy of the monograph in draft just before it was published and was kind enough to write I had “done an excellent job of setting out the problems afflicting our economic policies, unfortunately government-made problems!”  My great professor at Cambridge, Frank Hahn, would be kind enough to say that he thought my “critique of Development Economics was powerful not only on methodological but also on economic theory grounds” — something that has been a source of delight to me.

Siddhartha Shankar Ray told me when we first met that he had been in London when the editorial appeared and had seen it there; it affected his decision to introduce me to Rajiv Gandhi as warmly as he came to do a half dozen years later.

In the Autumn of 1984, I went, thanks to Edwin Feulner Jr of the Heritage Foundation,  to attend the Mont Pelerin Society Meetings being held at Cambridge (on “parole” from the US immigration authorities as my “green card” was being processed at the time). There I met for the first time Professor and Mrs Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman’s November 1955 memorandum to the Government of India is referred to in my monograph as “unpublished” in note 1; when I met Milton and Rose, I gave them a copy of my monograph; and requested Milton for his unpublished document; when he returned to Stanford he sent to me in Blacksburg his original 1955-56 documents on Indian planning. I published the 1955 document for the first time in May 1989 during the University of Hawaii perestroika-for-India project I was then leading, it appeared later in the 1992 volume Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by myself and WE James. (The results of the Hawaii project reached Rajiv Gandhi through my hand in September 1990, as told elsewhere here in “Rajiv Gandhi and the Origins of India’s 1991 Economic Reform”.) The 1956 document was published in November 2006 on the front page of The Statesman, the same day my obituary of Milton appeared in the inside pages.

Meanwhile, my main work within economic theory, the “Principia Economica” manuscript, was being read by the University of Chicago Press’s five or six anonymous referees. One of them pointed out my argument had been anticipated years earlier in the work of MIT’s Sidney Stuart Alexander. I had no idea of this and was surprised; of course I knew Professor Alexander’s work in balance of payments theory but not in this field. I went to visit Professor Alexander in Boston, where this photo came to be taken perhaps in late 1984:

Professor Alexander was extremely gracious, and immediately declared with great generosity that it was clear to him my arguments in “Principia Economica” had been developed entirely independently of his work. He had come at the problem from an American philosophical tradition of Dewey, I had done so from a British tradition of Wittgenstein. (CS Peirce was probably the bridge between the two.) He and I had arrived at some similar conclusions but we had done so completely independently.

Also, I was much honoured by this letter of May 1 1984 sent to Blacksburg by Professor Sir John Hicks (1904-1989), among the greatest of 20th Century economists at the time, where he acknowledged his departure in later life from the position he had taken in 1934 and 1939 on the foundations of demand theory.

He later sent me a copy of his Wealth and Welfare: Collected Essays on Economic Theory, Vol. I, MIT Press 1981, as a gift. The context of our correspondence had to do with my criticism of the young Hicks and support for the ghost of Alfred Marshall in an article “Considerations on Utility, Benevolence and Taxation” I was publishing in the journal History of Political Economy published then at Duke University. In Philosophy of Economics, I would come to say about Hicks’s letter to me “It may be a sign of the times that economists, great and small, rarely if ever disclaim their past opinions; it is therefore an especially splendid example to have a great economist like Hicks doing so in this matter.” It was reminiscent of Gottlob Frege’s response to Russell’s paradox; Philosophy of Economics described Frege’s “Letter to Russell”, 1902 (Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel, pp. 126-128) as “a document which must remain one of the most noble in all of modern scholarship; a fact recorded in Russell’s letter to Heijenoort.”

In Blacksburg, by the Summer and Fall of 1984 I was under attack following the arrival of what I considered “a gang of inert game theorists” — my theoretical manuscript had blown a permanent hole through what passes by the name of “social choice theory”, and they did not like it. Nor did they like the fact that I seemed to them to be a “conservative”/classical liberal Indian and my applied work on India’s economy seemed to their academic agenda an irrelevance. This is myself at the height of that attack in January 1985:

Professor Schultz at the University of Chicago came to my rescue and at his recommendation I was appointed Visiting Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

I declined, without thanks, the offer of another year at Virginia Tech.

On my last day in Blacksburg, a graduate student whom I had helped when she had been assaulted by a senior professor, cooked a meal before I started the drive West across the country. This is a photo from that meal:

In Provo, I gratefully found refuge at the excellent Economics Department led at the time by Professor Larry Wimmer.

It was at Provo that I first had a personal computer on my desk (an IBM as may be seen) and what a delight that was (no matter the noises that it made).  I recall being struck by the fact a colleague possessed the incredible luxury of a portable personal computer (no one else did) which he could take home with him.   It looked like an enormous briefcase but was apparently the technology-leader at the time.  (Laptops seem not to have been invented as of 1985).

In October 1985, Professor Frank Hahn very kindly wrote to Larry Wimmer revising his 1980 opinion of my work now that the PhD was done, the India-work had led to The Times editorial and the theoretical work was proceeding well.

I had applied for a permanent position at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and had been interviewed positively at the American Economic Association meetings (in New York) in December 1985 by the department chairman Professor Fred C. Hung. At Provo, Dr James Moncur of the Manoa Department was visiting. Jim became a friend and recommended me to his colleagues in Manoa.

Professor Hung appointed me to that department as a “senior” Assistant Professor on tenure-track beginning September 1986. I had bargained for a rank of “Associate Professor” but was told the advertisement did not allow it; instead I was assured of being an early candidate for promotion and tenure subject to my book “Principia Economica” being accepted for publication. (The contract with the University of Chicago Press had become frayed.)

Hawaii was simply a superb place (though expensive).

Professor James Buchanan won the Economics “Nobel” in 1986 and I was asked by the Manoa Department to help raise its profile by inviting him to deliver a set of lectures, which he did excellently well in March 1988 to the University as well as the Honolulu community at large. Here he is at my 850 sq ft small condominium at Punahou Towers, 1621 Dole Street:

In August 1988, my manuscript “Principia Economica” was finally accepted for publication by Routledge of London and New York under the title Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason In Economic Inquiry. The contract with University of Chicago Press had fallen through and the manuscript was being read by Yale University Press and a few others but Routledge came through with the first concrete offer. I was delighted and these photos were taken in the Economics Department at Manoa by a colleague in September 1988 as the publisher needed them.

Milton and Rose Friedman came to Honolulu on a private holiday perhaps in January 1989; they had years earlier spent a sabbatical year at the Department.

Here is a luncheon that was arranged in their honour. They had in the Fall of 1988 been on their famous visit to China, and as I recall that was the main subject of discussion on the occasion.

Milton phoned me in my Manoa office and invited me to meet him and Rose at their hotel for a chat; we had met first at the 1984 Mont Pelerin meetings and he wished to know me better. I was honoured and turned up dutifully and we talked for perhaps an hour. I recall making a strong recommendation that he write his memoirs, especially so that the rumours and innuendo surrounding eg the Chile episode could be cleared up; I also said a “Collected Works” would be a great idea; when Milton and Rose published their memoirs Two Lucky People (Chicago 1998) I wondered if my first suggestion had come to be taken; as to the second, he wrote to me years later saying he felt no Collected Works were necessary.

From 1986 onwards, I had been requested by the University of Hawaii to lead a project with William E James on the political economy of “South Asia” .I had said there was no such place, that “South Asia” was a US State Department abstraction but there were India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and Afghanistan etc. Sister projects on India and Pakistan had been sponsored by the University, and in 1989 important conferences had been planned by myself and James in May for India and in June for Pakistan.

I was determined to publish for the first time Milton’s 1955 memorandum on India which the Government of India had suppressed or ignored at the time. At the hotel-meeting, I told Milton that and requested him to come to the India-conference in May; Milton and Rose said they would think about it, and later confirmed he would come for the first two days.

This is a photo of the initial luncheon at the home of the University President on May 21 1989. Milton and India’s Ambassador to the USA at the time were both garlanded with Hawaiian leis. The first photo was one of a joke from Milton as I recall which had everyone laughing.

There was no equivalent photo of the distinguished scholars who gathered for the Pakistan conference a month later.

The reason was that from February 1989 onwards I had become the victim of a most vicious racist defamation, engineered within the Economics Department at Manoa by a senior professor as a way to derail me before my expected Promotion and Tenure application in the Fall. All my extra time went to battling that though somehow I managed to teach some monetary economics well enough in 1989-1990 for a Japanese student to insist on being photographed with me and the book we had studied.

I was being seen by two or three temporarily powerful characters on the Manoa campus as an Uppity Indian who must be brought down. This time I decided to fight back — and what a saga came to unfold! It took me into the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii and then the Ninth Circuit and upto the United States Supreme Court, not once but twice.

Milton Friedman and Theodore Schultz stood valiantly among my witnesses — first writing to the University’s authorities and later deposing in federal court.

Unfortunately, government lawyers, far from wanting to uphold and respect the laws of the United States, chose to deliberately violate them — compromising a judge, suborning demonstrable perjury and then brazenly purchasing my hired attorney (and getting caught doing it). Since September 2007, the State of Hawaii’s attorneys have been invited by me to return to the federal court and apologise for their unlawful behaviour as they are required by law to do.

They had not expected me to survive their illegalities but I did: I kept going.

Philosophy of Economics was published in London and New York in September 1989

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The hardback quickly sold out on its own steam and the book went into paperback in 1991, and I was delighted to learn from a friend that it had been prescribed for a course at Yale Law School and was strewn along an alley in the bookshop:

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The sister-volumes on India and Pakistan emerging from the University of Hawaii project led by myself and James were published in 1992 and 1993 in India, Pakistan, Britain and the United States.

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As described elsewhere, the manuscript of the India-volume contributed to the origins of India’s 1991 economic reform during my encounter with Rajiv Gandhi in his last months; the Pakistan-volume came to contribute to the origins of the Pakistan-India peace process. The Indian publisher who had promised paperback volumes of both books reneged under leftwing pressure in Delhi; he has since passed away and James and I still await the University of Hawaii’s permission to publish both volumes freely on the Internet as copyright rests with the University President.

In 2004 from Britain, I wrote to the 9/11 Commission stating that it was possible that had the vicious illegalities against me not occurred at Manoa starting in 1989, we may have gone on after India and Pakistan to study Afghanistan, and come up with a pre-emptive academic analysis a decade before September 11 2001.

To be continued in Part Two.

Pakistani expansionism: India and the world need to beware of “Non-Resident Pakistanis” ruled by Rahmat Ali’s ghost

The Government of Pakistan is said to be due to release its initial report on the involvement of Pakistanis in the Mumbai massacres.  It is reportedly expected that the G o P will partly if not mainly or wholly attribute responsibility for the planning of the massacres to expatriate  Pakistanis  in other countries, perhaps in Europe and Britain.  If so, a fact the Government of India might find prudent to recall is that the Government of Pakistan in bygone decades did deny citizenship to Rahmat Ali himself    (who invented the acronym “P, A, K, I, S, T, A, N” ) and even deported him back to Britain from where he had carried out his vituperative and bigoted campaign against Hindus.

Rahmat Ali’s British grave has become a site of pilgrimage for expatriate Pakistani extremists and his ignorant hate-filled ideology from the 1930s has been inspiring their modern manifestos.  I said this in an article published in Karachi’s Dawn newspaper in 2005, which also pointed to Iqbal and Jinnah’s disdain for Rahmat Ali’s views (see “Iqbal and Jinnah vs Rahmat Ali” republished here).  American nationals and  British subjects of Pakistani origin inspired by Rahmat Ali’s  ghost are spreading theories of Pakistani territorial expansionism at the cost of the destruction of the Indian Republic and many other countries.

The fact that at one such website recently I myself, presumably because of my Hindu name and Indian nationality, have been referred to as a “monkey- or donkey-worshipper” 😀  may speak to the somewhat  rabid nature of such ideologies.  (Drat! And there I was expecting some elementary Pakistani courtesy and acknowledgment let alone gratitude for having created, at great personal cost at an American university twenty years ago, the volume with WE James titled Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s with its mundane chapters on agriculture, macroeconomics, education etc!)

Incidentally, British newspapers are reporting today that America’s  CIA has been deeply concerned about British subjects of Pakistani origin being a source of international terrorism. It may be pertinent to recall  that terrorism in India’s Punjab had much support among numerous Sikh expatriates and immigrants in North America and Britain, and the same kind of thing may be true of Tamil expatriates from  Sri Lanka.  Being isolated and alienated as immigrants in a foreign country may lead to psychological conditions that contribute to such phenomena, whereby political and other events in the faraway country-of-origin take on exaggerated proportions in an individual’s mental make-up.   Certainly Rahmat Ali himself was a rather tragic lonely figure who wasted his own potential to properly contribute to Pakistan’s political history  through his own self-blinding hatred of Hindus.

SR

Habeas Corpus: a captured terrorist mass-murderer tells a magistrate he is not being mistreated by Indian police

A youth who had been a petty thief in Multan, was induced by Pakistan’s terrorist masterminds to  train to  become a mass murderer with an assault rifle and grenades in the Mumbai massacres last week.  He was shot and arrested by India’s police and is now in custody.  He has already been produced before a magistrate who asked him if he was being mistreated, to which he said he was not. This redounds to India’s credit in view of the vast (and yes, probably racist) mistreatment over years of those held e.g. at Guantanamo Bay.  (The argument that the US Constitution and the laws associated with habeas corpus did not apply to the US Government because Guantanamo Bay was not American territory, was always specious.)

Become a US Supreme Court Justice! (Explorations in the Rule of Law in America) Preface

For almost two decades, Since the summer of 1988 when *Philosophy of Economics* got accepted for publication, I have found myself in a saga exploring the Rule of Law, the nature of justice and freedom, and the nature of racial animosity and xenophobia in the United States. Judge it here for yourself. There are 10 pdf files in a password protected post of the same name. Please send me an email identifying yourself and offering any reason, including curiosity, that you may have to want to examine the matter.

Files 1 and 2 marked SCOTUS are the front-matter and Petition for Writ of Mandamus as received by Circuit Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States in February 1996. Files 3 to 10 constitute the Appendix of Record giving the rulings of the US District Court for the District of Hawaii and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, including especially in File 8 the “after-discovered” evidence of how my attorney had been covertly purchased by my opponent. An example of perjured trial testimony is contained in File 2. In September 2007, I asked my opponent — the Government of one of the 50 States — to voluntarily admit its wrongdoings to the present Chief Judge of the US District Court as is required by law. Government lawyers should, after all, try to act lawfully.

For the files with the evidence please see https://independentindian.com/2008/11/09/become-a-us-supreme-court-justice-explorations-in-the-rule-of-law-in-america/

 

Would not a few million new immigrants solve America’s mortgage crisis?

Author’s note: March 21 2009:  I am glad to see there is new interest in America in this short note I published here back in October.   No American or other Western economist concerned with the financial crisis has apparently said the same thing.  One factor causing this may be that much of what has been made to pass of as “economic research” in American academic economics departments in the last several decades has effectively amounted to being waste-paper.

America was at its best when it was open to mass immigration, and America is at its worst when it treats immigrants with racism and worse (for seeming “uppity”).

All those bad mortgages and foreclosures could vanish within a year or two by playing the demographic card and inviting in a few million new immigrants into the United States.  They would pour in from China, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, South America,  South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Israel, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,  India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and yes, Pakistan too, and more.  They would happily buy up all those empty houses and apartments, even in all those desolate  dismal locations.  If the USA’s housing supply curve has moved so far to the right that the equilibrium price has gone to near zero, the surest way to raise the equilibrium price would be by causing a  new wave of  immigration leading to a new demand curve arising at a higher level.   But yes, nativist feelings of racism towards the outsider or the newcomer would have to be controlled  especially in employment — racists after all are often rather “sub-prime” themselves and hence unable to accept characters who may be “prime” or at least less “sub-prime” from foreign immigrant communities.   Restoring a worldwide idea of an American dream fuelled by mass immigration may be the surest way for the American economy to restore itself.

Subroto Roy, Kolkata, India

American Politics: Obama-Clinton Contest Affects the World

American Politics
Contest Between Obama And Clinton Affects The World

by Subroto Roy

First published in The Statesman, Editorial Page Special Article, March 11 2008

In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War and protests about it, the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago was marked by bloodshed and rioting. The sitting (Democrat) President, Lyndon Johnson, had taken moral responsibility for the war and declined to run for re-election. His widely-respected Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, was chosen in traditional “smoke-filled rooms” by party elders during the Convention. But the public had witnessed the Convention’s violence, and Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon. In the next election in 1972, Democrats banned party elders from any role and allowed the nominee to emerge solely from state-by-state primary elections. The result was the anti-war candidate George McGovern, who lost 49 out of 50 States to the incumbent Nixon.

Denver Convention

This year’s Democratic Party Convention in Denver in August may be the first to return to “smoke-filled rooms” (figuratively of course, given the absence of public smoking in modern America especially among “politically correct” Democrats). Almost 800 party elders, consisting of senators, congressional representatives, party functionaries etc, known as “superdelegates” may have to break the near dead heat tie among “primary delegates” who have committed to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama after state-by-state elections.

It was not supposed to have been like this. A year ago Mrs Clinton had seemed an unstoppable favourite not only in the Democratic race but the overall Presidential race too, so much so that the incumbent Bush-Cheney Administration was dropping hints it would not mind seeing a new Clinton Administration taking over its foreign wars. (Mrs Clinton’s husband had become a friend of former President GHW Bush, President Bush’s father, in some relatively rare American nepotism at the top.)

Mrs Clinton had been so confident of being confirmed by now she spent her energy trying to show herself one of the boys, who could be Commander-in-Chief of the world’s largest military and who had voted in favour of Bush’s Iraq war. The idea seemed to be she would show herself just as tough as the Republicans and yet because she was female she would win in November 2008 by reminding women of her gender. Her support among middle-aged white women has remained solid and seems unshakeable but her strategy of being the presumptive anointed “pseudo-incumbent” has failed.

Mr Obama, attracting younger better-educated Democrats as well as the crucial set of cross-party independents and floating Republicans, besides African-Americans like himself, has taken ground Mrs Clinton left undefended; she has been painted by him as Republican-Lite, the archetypal Washington-insider, and a war-monger. Mrs Clinton has indeed recorded the largest contributions of any candidate from America’s “military industrial complex” of weapons’ manufacturers.

Mr Obama went into the recent Ohio and Texas primaries having narrowed large leads against him, and though he lost both has retained a lead in the delegate count. Last weekend he won Wyoming and is likely to win Mississippi — states normally remote in the political landscape but which have acquired significance to “momentum” now. It is expected that even after the major state Pennsylvania votes next month (likely in favour of Mrs Clinton) the contest will not end. A joint ticket could become unstoppable and has been hinted at by the Clintons. But Mr Obama has no reason to be an understudy because if he is not himself the Presidential candidate, it may be better to wait for the 2012 contest than be brushed by the Clinton negatives.

Republicans have surprisingly quickly agreed upon Arizona’s elderly senator John McCain as their candidate out of a raucous field. The single anti-war Republican candidate, Ron Paul, fizzled out. Mr McCain, like his main rivals Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, has been overtly jingoistic, strongly backed the Bush wars and has identified “radical Islamic extremism” as an American enemy. Mr McCain was a POW of the North Vietnamese decades ago and underwent torture, something he has not let anyone forget. His remark that America under him may fight “100 years” in Middle East wars, as well as President Bush’s endorsement of him, may put off a country that has been turning against war and is increasingly anxious about macroeconomics and international trade again.

Mr McCain may have to wait to see who emerges from among the Democrats before he announces his Vice-Presidential running-mate. Usual “ticket-balancing” considerations point to a young conservative or a senior woman or black political figure for obvious reasons.

Thus the Democratic Party leadership now unexpectedly finds itself in a crucial role in the next weeks and months. A raucous divisive Convention in August on the 1968 pattern will leave the Republicans gloating. Current controversy has to do with Michigan and Florida; both held unauthorized primaries ahead of time and were punished by the leadership in not being recognized. Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama both agreed not to campaign there. Will Michigan and Florida “delegates” be recognized and “seated” in Denver? Should they be split equally between the two candidates? Should there be a “do-over” primary via the mail in each now that the race has become heated, and if so, who will pay for it?

The crucial question for the Democratic Party is to decide who may defeat Mr McCain. Mr Obama’s youth, race and Muslim middle name Hussein, will undoubtedly be used by the Republicans to attack him. Mrs Clinton carries a lot of baggage from her husband’s time: there was an unpleasant air of sleaze and mendacity during the entire eight years of Bill’s rule in Washington DC and voters will be wary to allow a re-run of the same. (The 22nd Constitutional Amendment forbids more than eight years for any President, and the idea is novel and untested that a First Lady can run on her own to get around that.)

Israel policy
Mrs Clinton’s foreign and military policy will be quite close to Mr McCain’s in its aggressiveness. Mr Obama opposed the Iraq war and is certain to keep playing that trump-card against both. Mr Obama’s foreign policy “weakness” has to do with being perceived by the pro-Israeli lobby as not hardline enough. He has said clearly he is pro-Israel and strongly so and that he found Israel’s own debate “much more open” than the American one. Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain both pass the “Likud test” with flying colours; Mr Obama’s statement that being pro-Israel is not identical with being “pro-Likud” may mean he does not.

The Democratic Party will have to figure out in its decision between Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama where America’s voters in November 2008 are swinging on the issue of fighting aggressive wars. The other vital issue will be protectionism in international trade ~ some “superdelegates” have already started to demand pledges about trade-policies to “save American jobs”. The world will be affected by who wins between Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama along two important dimensions, viz., whether America will be more likely as a result to (a) launch new wars; (b) become more protectionist in trade.

 

China’s India Aggression (2007)

China’s India Aggression

German Historians Discover Logic Behind Communist Military Strategy

by

Subroto Roy

First published in The Statesman, Editorial Page Special Article, Nov 5 2007

There are four main aspects to the China-Tibet-India problem over the last century, some of which are only now becoming apparent. The first is historical prior to the 1949 Communist takeover, in which the British, Tibetans and Kuomintang were participants in background discussion and events. The second is historical too, namely, the appeasement by Nehru and his diplomats of the Mao-Zhou Communists and betrayal of normal Tibetan and Indian interests in the period 1949-1959. The third is political, to do with reaction, confusion and conflict among Indian Communists leading to the CPI/CPI-M split in response to Communist attacks upon Tibet and India. The fourth is military, to do with the 1962 war itself, the nature of the surprise Chinese attack and Indian defeat.

Chinese claims

A 1954 Beijing publication not only claimed Tibet but alleged vast areas of Asia to be Chinese: Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, NEFA (Arunachal), Assam, the Andaman Islands, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya, Singapore, Thailand, Indo-China, the Sulu Islands, the Ryukyus, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), the whole of East Turkestan (Sinkiang), Kazakhstan, Siberia west of the Amur River, maritime provinces east of the Amur down to Vladivostok, and Sakhalin (viz., Coral Bell in FS Northedge (ed) Foreign Policies of the Powers, 1973).

America’s CIA reported in a secret 1962 analysis, declassified in May 2007, that the Left faction of India’s Communists had been repeating what Mao Zedong said to Ajoy Ghosh: “that Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan, and NEFA are provinces peopled by the same race, that China had a historic right to these territories, that the McMahon line was not valid, and that the Indian government’s raising of ‘the bogey of Chinese aggression’ had resulted from its realisation that Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and India would be deeply affected by the social and economic revolution in Tibet” (CIA The Indian Communist Party and the Sino-Soviet Dispute, Feb 1962, page 76). Referring to Chinese designs on Mongolia, Kruschev’s USSR condemned its fellow-Communists: “… The true schemes of the Chinese leaders (are) obvious. They are permeated through and through with great-power chauvinism and hegemonism”, Pravda 2 Sep 1964, quoted by Bell, op.cit.

China’s 1962 India war was rationally consistent with carrying out precisely such an expansionist policy in Sinkiang and Tibet. As the German historians Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund have stated most succinctly, the NEFA conflict was merely a deliberate diversionary tactic which has worked brilliantly for decades:

“The consolidation of the Chinese hold on Tibet, as well as on other areas of Central Asia… (required military infrastructure) to maintain it and a ring road was constructed which led from China to Tibet and from there via the Karakorum Range to Sinkiang and Mongolia and then back to China. At a crucial point some Indian territory (Aksai Chin) obstructed this connection. Beyond Aksai Chin was the terrible desert, Takla Makan, which was a major obstacle. Faced with the dilemma of violating Indian territory or getting stuck in the desert, the Chinese opted for the first course and quietly built a road through Aksai Chin. In the meantime, they provoked incidents on the northeastern border so as to divert attention from their real aims. They also published maps which showed the border in Assam at the foot of the mountains rather than on the watershed. The watershed line had been settled by the McMahon border commission, which had also included a Chinese delegate who initialled the protocol, although it was not subsequently ratified by the Chinese government. Actually, there was no disagreement about the watershed line at that time when debate was focused on a different line, supposed to divide Tibet into an Inner and Outer Tibet on the same pattern as Inner and Outer Mongolia. Inner Tibet was to be under Chinese influence and Outer Tibet under British influence. But Communist China made use of the fact that the agreement had not been ratified and accused India of clinging to the imperialist heritage with regard to the Himalayan boundary. This harping on the legal position in the northeast was a tactical move made in order to build up a bargaining position with regard to Aksai Chin where the Chinese could not raise similar claims… Finally, a border war broke out in October 1962. It was a typical demonstration war conducted with great finesse by the Chinese. They completely perplexed the Indian generals by pushing a whole division through the mountains down to the valley of Assam and withdrawing it again as quickly as it had come. The Indian strategic concept of defending the Himalayan boundary by cutting off the supply lines of the enemy if it ventured too far beyond the border could not be put into operation: the Chinese were gone before the supply lines could be cut. But why did they do this? They wanted to divert attention from their moves in the northwest, where they did reach the Karakorum Pass in a swift offensive and did not withdraw as they had done in the east.” (History of India, 1998, pp 321-322).

Chinese casualties were some 1,460 dead, 1,697 wounded, Indian casualties some 3,128 dead, 3,968 captured, 548 wounded, each as reported by itself. JK Galbraith, the friendliest and fairest observer India may have hoped for, found our Army populated by “tragically old-fashioned” peacetime generals full of bluster, while brave soldiers under them remained woefully ill-equipped and came to be outgunned and out-manoeuvred.

Mao Zedong’s racist reference to the people populating NEFA being of Chinese origin was misguided, even nonsensical. On such a basis, China might claim Japan or Korea next, as might West Africa claim sovereignty over North and South American blacks or Mongolia over Turks and Afghans. NEFA’s five administrative divisions ~ Kameng, Subansiri, Siang, Lohit and Tirap ~ are populated by indigenous animistic tribes including the Momba, Mishmi, Abor, Miri, Dafla and Aka, each with defined areas. The 1883 Survey of India showed these areas administered de facto by British India from Assam. The 1908 Edinburgh Geographical Institute’s map by JG Bartholomew showed most of the same to be part of Bhutan, a British Indian protectorate, as did earlier 18th Century maps.

 

 

Less than legitimate

Communist China’s claims of sovereignty over NEFA (Arunachal) in any case derive from its claims of sovereignty over Tibet. Britain, India and other nations guided by international law have allowed that Lhasa, though long independent, may acknowledge Chinese suzerainty ~ but only subject to the condition of traditional autonomy. The 1907 Anglo-Russian Treaty stipulated Tibet would be dealt with officially through China, leading to the Henry McMahon Commission of 1914 which followed the normal international cartographic practise of the watershed defining the boundary in NEFA. That came to be generally followed by British and Indian maps of NEFA since. The CIA’s official 1959 map of the region concurred and the United States Government explicitly instructed Galbraith, its New Delhi Ambassador during the 1962 war, that the American position was the same as the British and Indian. There appears to be no record of any serious Chinese cartography of the region ever ~ Chinese maps prior to 1935 agreeing with the British Indian position but disputing it afterwards, placing Tibet’s boundary along the margin of the Assam plain. China was ravaged by war, civil war and revolutionary excesses during much of the 20th Century and hardly had well-preserved national archives at a time when its own capital and central government was changing several times.

China’s Communists, being themselves in political power for decades somewhat less than legitimately as a one-party dictatorship, have been loath to admit all such inconvenient facts, and instead continue in their hegemonic mode. A new liberal democratic China guided by law on the Taiwan pattern may have to be awaited before this conflict comes to be resolved.

See also https://independentindian.com/2009/09/19/my-ten-articles-on-china-tibet-xinjiang-taiwan-in-relation-to-india/

On the US Presidential Elections 2008

US election ’08:

America’s Presidential Campaign Seems Destined To Be Focussed On Iraq

By Subroto Roy

First published in The Statesman,

Editorial Page, Special Article, June 1 2007

Like baseball and American football, it is not easy to comprehend modern American politics from the outside world. The very idea that most American voters are either “Democrat” or “Republican” throughout or over much of their lives is itself a little odd. In an ordinary social or job-environment, a single Republican in a group of Democrats will feel uncomfortable as will a single Democrat in a group of Republicans.

Typically, each is in favour of some and against other specific “issues”, or, more accurately, specific political slogans. A Republican may be typically in favour of “free enterprise”, “limited government”, “a strong military”, and “family values”. A Democrat may be typically in favour of a woman’s “right to choose” (whether or not to abort a foetus), “gun control”, “universal health care” and tolerance of diversity. Republicans typically charge Democrats with being tax-raisers, profligate spenders of public money, soft on defence and crime, promoters of homosexual rights and generally daffy-headed hippies. Democrats typically charge Republicans with being stooges of the rich, oppressors of middle and working classes, proto-fascists and jingoists, and lunatic religious fundamentalists.

The mood is vicious, and in small social gatherings (even between husband and wife) tempers flare and can only subside by reference to some other neutral subject such as sports or by making a joke. Comedy is a major forum of political discussion and means of tension-release.

Greasy pole of power

A typical politician may rise from being an elected local official to running for the State legislature and thence running to be State Governor or a US Senator from the State, and thence either make a bid for the White House perhaps or fade away as a senior statesman. George W Bush was Governor of Texas, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Ronald Reagan of California, Jimmy Carter of Georgia. George Bush Sr became Reagan’s Vice President after being a Texas legislator, head of the CIA and UN Ambassador. Gerald Ford went from House Speaker to Vice President and then President due to collapse of the Nixon Presidency. Richard Nixon himself was Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President and before that an abrasive Senator from California. Eisenhower was not a politician but a retired soldier, the war-hero who led the Allies to victory, and became perhaps the most popular and competent of all modern US Presidents.

In a nutshell, American politics is about the reputations of individuals acquired along the way, which then their friends and allied interest groups seek to publicly enhance and their enemies seek to publicly destroy as they try to climb the greasy pole of political power. The media, especially television in the last fifty years, becomes pivotal, as each side tries to ferret out and expose publicly any dirty deeds of the other, or failing that, at least create a monstrous image based on a voting record in the public domain.

As the 2008 Presidential Election approaches, both major parties will witness ruthless slug-fests as candidates for the party’s nomination battle one another to see who is the last man/ woman standing. That person then gets to choose a Vice Presidential candidate, and the two form the “ticket” which will fight the other party’s ticket. This inter-party contest for the White House (and hence some 4,000 executive jobs in Washington DC for four years) has been compared by astute American observers to a nationwide popularity contest. It is certainly not the most reliable method in the 21st Century by which to find the wisest government of the world’s strongest (and perhaps most aggressive) military power.

The Iraq war has come to wholly dominate America’s current political debate. The number of American soldiers dead in Iraq is now well over 3,400 and climbing quickly; the number seriously wounded by roadside bombs etc is in the tens of thousands.

Among the Democrats, the perpetually ambitious Mrs Hilary Clinton is hard-pressed to explain how she, as Senator from New York State and someone with experience of her husband’s Presidency, backed his Republican successor’s jingoism and chose to be blind to all the official mendacity. She is unable to explain herself. Her rivals include Senator Barack Obama ~ the son of a black Kenyan graduate student in Hawaii and a white woman from Kansas, which, in American terms, brands him as black. He is a Harvard-trained lawyer married to a Harvard-trained lawyer, and though there is glamour and excitement in his candidacy as a young freshman Senator who voted against the Iraq war, it is inevitable many whites will see him as being a black man while at least some blacks will see him as being not black enough in not having been seared by the history of black people in America. His enemies have been already delighted to suggest he is Muslim with a middle name “Hussein” and that Obama rhymes with Osama. Such prejudices may be too much to overcome. The Democrats also include John Edwards of South Carolina, who was John Kerry’s running-mate in 2004, and who presently gains from being neither female nor black. It is not impossible once these and others like Governor Bill Richardson and Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd have bruised one another sufficiently, a heavyweight old candidate joins the Democratic race like Al Gore (who likely had beaten Bush in 2000). But Gore is now facing a personal obesity problem.
The leading Republican contenders are trying to outdo each other on harshness towards alleged terrorists trying to attack America (something which can simply mask racial and religious prejudices and sadism). Arizona Senator John McCain’s claim to fame is that he many years ago was a POW who suffered under the North Vietnamese. He was once seen as a reasonable politician but his outright support for Bush’s aggressiveness abroad goes against the 70% of voters who today think Bush has been dead wrong. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani made his name by apparent efficiency and compassion during the 9/11 attacks. He now seems to see his task as one of outdoing McCain’s jingoism. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has positioned himself to seem the most “standard” candidate around; but he is a member of the Christian sect known as the Mormons, prejudice against whom remains deep in the country and Romney may eventually face the same uphill task as Obama.

New shoots of life

Surprise factors have been upstart anti-War candidates. Mike Gravel, a principled former Senator from Alaska, forced his fellow-Democrats to face up to their hypocrisy over Iraq and war in general. But Gravel is the longest of long shots, and lacks the power of any of the Democratic special interest groups on his side. Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul is the dark horse in the entire field at the moment. He is staunchly libertarian or “classical liberal” on principle, believes in a wholly non-interventionist American foreign policy, consistently voted against the Iraq war and has never voted in favour of raising taxes. He is the runaway favourite of the Internet where America’s real political discussion is increasingly taking place, and his grassroots support among both Republicans and Democrats opposed to the Iraq war is swelling fast. An obstetric surgeon by profession, Paul, at age 71, has been and remains married only once (an American rarity), and may well appeal to all sides of the political and economic spectra although his technical monetary economics is weak. What his emergence does show is how American democracy is yet able to spring healthy shoots of new life from within a decaying morass.

Correction : In my previous article “On Indian Nationhood”, it was said Independence came “forty years” after Montagu-Chelmsford when it was thirty years. The error is regretted. I had meant the Morley-Minto period of 1906-1908.

Mob Violence and Psychology (2006)

Mob Violence and Psychology

Mob violence remains a monthly occurrence in modern India; it gives the lie to our claims of political maturity and democratic development.

By SUBROTO ROY

First published in The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page Special Article

December 10 2006

Mob violence certainly signals collapse of the Rule of Law and absence of normal political conversation and decision-making. Mob violence in modern India remains a monthly occurrence: a child is killed by a speeding bus, the driver if he is caught is thrashed to death by a mob of onlookers and the bus burnt down; a factory closes and workers go on a rampage; a statue or political personality or religious figure is perceived to have been insulted or desecrated, and crowds take to the streets to burn vehicles and cause mayhem; a procession is said to be insulted, and rival mobs go to battle with one another. (In fact, elected legislators in Parliament and State Assemblies frequently conflate mob behaviour like slogan-shouting with political conversation itself, carrying into the House the political methods they have learned to employ outside it. And contrary to what our legislators may suppose, they do need to be constantly lectured to by the general citizenry whose paid servants they are supposed to be).

Such may be relatively simple cases to describe or diagnose. More complex cases include the deliberate burning alive of Graham Staines and his two young sons by a mob in 1999 as they slept in their vehicle in rural Orissa, or countless deeds of similar savagery during Partition and the innumerable other riots we have seen in the history of our supposedly tolerant and non-violent culture.

We are not unique in our propensity for evil. French women knitted and gossiped watching the guillotine do its bloody work during the Jacobin terror. Long before them, as the Catholic scholar Eamon Duffy reports in Faith of our fathers, Pope Gregory IX in 1233 had initiated the “Inquisition”: two anonymous witnesses could cause any person to be arrested as a heretic, tortured and then burnt alive. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII endorsed “witches” to be burnt, causing “deaths of countless thousands of harmless or eccentric women over the next 300 years. In all, as many as 25,000 people, most of them women may have been burnt as witches in Germany” alone. American history has seen countless cases of mob violence, from witch-burnings and other religious violence to cold-blooded lynching on trees of individual black men by white mobs, black mobs looting inner cities, street clashes between political groups etc. Soviet Russia and Maoist China saw systematic ideologically driven violence by Party cadres and “Red Guards” against countless individuals ~ forced to confess to imaginary misdeeds, then assaulted or shot. Nazi Germany, Czarist Russia and many other countries saw mobs attacking, dispossessing or killing individual Jews and innumerable others, again in systematic ideologically motivated pogroms. Indeed as Hannah Arendt and others have noted, the similarities between totalitarian regimes as outwardly different as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia or Communist China included the ideologically driven targeting of identifiable small minorities for systematic violence by majorities in power. Even Tony Blair’s supposedly Cool Britannia today, besides having the most notorious soccer hooligans in the world, is also a place where no individual, non-white or white, will pass a drunken mob of adolescent school-children on the streets on a Friday night without trepidation.

Every case of mob violence is different; yet what could be common is a temporary, if deliberate, suspension of the normal human sense of responsibility on part of a mob’s individual members. Reason and responsibility return if at all only after the evil has been accomplished ~ whether it is killing or assaulting someone or destroying something ~ and it can be accompanied by a sense of remorse and regret. Even where mob tyranny has been systematic, long-term, ideologically-driven and state-sponsored, as with the Inquisition or French Revolution or Nazi, Soviet or Chinese terrors, future generations look back at the past misdeeds of their ancestors and say: “That was wrong, very wrong, it should never have happened”. Moral learning does take place at some time or other, even if it is long after the evil has occurred. It is as if, when sobriety and rationality return, an individual participant in a mob realises and recognises himself/herself to have revealed a baser ignoble side which is shameful.

“Sometimes a society acts as if all power lay in the hands of the most babyish and animal members, and sometimes as if all power lay in the hands of strict old men, and sometimes it acts more as a whole ~ mostly when there’s a war on. Sometimes a man is not himself and acts as if a babyish or cunning animal had gained control ~ that’s the id ~ sometimes as if an exacting parent, a sarcastic schoolmaster, or an implacable deity possessed him ~ that’s the super-ego. Sometimes a man is more himself and acts more as a whole, a new whole which is not a combination but a synthesis of the id and the super-ego. Some are constantly at the mercy of the id, some are slaves to the super- ego, and in some first one and then the other gains an unhappy victory in a continual struggle, and in some conflict and control have vanished into cooperation…” Such was the description the Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom gave in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, when he translated into normal idiomatic language some of the difficult technical findings and theories of the mind propounded by Sigmund Freud in the previous half-century.

When the mob forms itself, its members individually choose to suppress their normal rational personalities and sense of adult responsibility, and permit instead their cunning animal or babyish instincts to take over and reign supreme within themselves. It must be a collective decision even if silently taken: for one person to behave in such a manner would look identifiably stupid and criminal but for him/her to do so in a group where everyone has simultaneously decided to abandon reason (whether spontaneously or shouting slogans together) allows the loss of individual responsibility to become hidden in the mass, and the collective to take on features of a hydra-headed monster, capable of the vilest deeds without the slightest self-doubt. The victim of their violence or abuse will often be an individual who stands out in some way ~ perhaps by natural or social attributes or even by heroic deeds: indeed Freud suggested that primitive tribes sometimes engaged in parricide and regicide, cannibalising their individual heroes in the belief that by consuming something of the hero’s remains those attributes might magically reappear in themselves.

In modern India, the presence of mob violence on a monthly basis somewhere or other in the country gives the lie to our claims of maturity of our political and democratic development. Those posing as our political leaders may make as many foreign trips and wooden prepared speeches on TV as they wish to, but their actual cowardice is manifest in having failed to address the real disjunction that exists in this country between political interests and political preferences at the grassroots on the one hand, and the lack of serious parliamentary conversation addressing these within our representative institutions on the other. The reliance by the Executive on often brutal police or paramilitary forces reflects failure of the Legislative and Judicial branches of our Government, as well as a lack of balance between them arising from our political and constitutional immaturity.

Racism New and Old (2006)

Racism New and Old

Subroto Roy

Editorial page, The Statesman September 8, 2006

When Iraqi Sunni terrorists killed 11 Pakistani and three Indian Shia pilgrims on the same bus to Karbala the other day, they did not check passports or wait to hear discourses from their victims about the validity of Jinnah’s Two-Nations Theory or the RSS’s views on Akhand Bharat and Bharat-Mata. All Indians and Pakistanis of whatever religion are pretty much “Hindis” to the average Arab. If Pakistanis (much to their own chagrin) are indistinguishable from Indians in many Arab eyes, Hindus and Sikhs are (much to their own chagrin) indistinguishable from Muslims in many North American and British eyes. Matthai Chakko Kuruvila, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Religion Writer (and whose own splendid ethnicity may appear obvious to us from his name), reports Paul Silverstein, an American anthropologist, saying “Muslims are the new Jews… They are the object of a series of stereotypes, caricatures and fears which are not based in a reality and are independent of a person’s experience with Muslims.” Kuruvila says: “The Muslim caricature has ensnared Hindus, Mexicans and others” across the USA “with violence, suspicion and slurs”, giving new form to America’s “age-old dance around racial identity”.

Assimilation

The subcontinent’s Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and others are from pretty much similar racial populations, so when we wish to distinguish ourselves from one another as we tend to do on the subcontinent, we wear turbans, beards, long hair, veils, bindis etc ~ symbols about which the average New Jersey “dot-buster” or British “Paki-basher” cares not a hoot. London last year even saw Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian electrician on his way to work in the morning, pinned down by an elite squad of Britain’s much-vaunted policemen and receive seven bullets point-blank in the back of his skull ~ merely for having “looked Asian”.

Subcontinental immigrant families in the West experience a defining moment when the wife first bobs her long hair and takes to wearing slacks, skirts or even shorts, just so she can leave home and assimilate better in the workplace or shopping mall. The saris, salwars and real jewellery are kept for the weekends when she meets people who will understand her as herself, namely, her friends and kith and kin in the immigrant community. When salwar or sari-clad women start fake-kissing one another in Western-style greeting at those weekends, the alternation of their identities (and confusion in their self-knowledge) may have become complete. A limiting point of such attempts at assimilation is reached perhaps when an Asian woman becomes a BBC or CNN newsreader, reading what she has been told to yet still narcissistically indulging in the extent of her external transformation.

Muslim-Hindu differences of religious and cultural beliefs and practices between racially similar peoples may be contrasted with the main fault-lines that have existed in Western societies in recent centuries: fault-lines of race and colour between European and African, and of race and religion between Jew and Gentile.

An eminent American legal scholar once said African slavery had been “the living lie” in America’s official heritage of democracy and individual freedom. Black America took one hundred years from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King Jr., to begin to overcome the impossible odds against it. Sports, music, show-biz and the arts were obvious arenas for public demonstration of individual genius. Athletes like Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Arthur Ashe, musicians like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt, “in-your-face” satirists like Sammy Davis Jr, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy upto and including modern rapsters and many thousands of others demonstrated that Black America was not going away anywhere, certainly not returning to Liberia, was going to stay in and permanently alter American life and culture, and wondered if anyone thought otherwise. The degree of assimilation into non-black cultures would be a matter of personal choice, not social or economic compulsion. During the Bush invasion of Iraq, Harry Belafonte re-ignited an old controversy when he referred to his fellow West Indian and perfectly assimilated Colin Powell in context of the “plantation slave”/”house slave” dichotomy: plantation slaves were externally oppressed but felt free within while house slaves had more comforts but were docile compradors inside their souls.

Immigrant communities from the subcontinent have had their share of the same. It has been all too easy for young people to reach academic highs in New Delhi or Kolkata only to escape to obscure corners of America and lead docile subservient unfulfilling lives forever afterwards, in exchange for material and ultimately meaningless rewards. It might be called the Madhuri Dixit Phenomenon of being transformed from celebrity-status in India to becoming a complete unknown in America.

Jewish-Gentile divide

The Jewish-Gentile divide in Western civilisation has been more insidious and damaging to mankind, and potentially remains so as the anger it generates has been transferred onto modern Muslims instead. At its unspoken roots is the frank Jewish theological assessment that Jesus of Nazareth was at most a wise and honest rabbi, not Christ Immanent ~ a veracious blow that seems to remove the corner-stone of all European culture and civilisation. The length of mutual recriminations and miscomprehensions as well as self-deceptions and cruelties over the millennia that have resulted on both sides, remains endless. On the Christian side there has been the vile persecution of Jews for centuries. On the Jewish side, there has arisen the vast myth that today’s Israel has something to do with the ancient Hebrews, when contemporary Jews likely descend mostly from the conversion to Judaism of the Khazar Khanate in the second half of the 9th Century (see e.g. Paul Meerts, “Assessing Khazaria”, International Institute for Asian Studies July 2004). In between Jewish and Christian self-deceptions and mutual misunderstandings has arisen Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and also Anti-Zionism (many thoughtful Jews having opposed the creation of Israel). As George Eliot, Hannah Arendt and many others noticed, the assimilation of 19th Century Jews into elite society in Vienna or London was only permitted where some exceptional individual genius was displayed, most prominently perhaps in case of Benjamin Disraeli who became Victoria’s Prime Minister. Even that acceptance of assimilated “exceptional” Jews came to disintegrate into the horrors of the 20th Century, from which we are yet to recover. Modern American foreign policy has been partly driven by the East and West Coasts’ understanding or misunderstanding of that history.

Iran’s Nationalism (2006)

IRAN’S NATIONALISM

 

Is America close to breaking its pledged word?

  First published in The Statesman Editorial Page, 6 April 2006

 

by

 

Subroto Roy

 

 

Ayatollah Khomeini was the Ho Chi Minh of Iran. Ho was both a communist and a Vietnamese nationalist, but America’s Presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon failed to see the latter. Khomeini was both a devout Shia Muslim and an Iranian nationalist yet America’s Presidents from Carter to W. Bush refused to see his Revolution being as much about Iranian nationalism as about creating an Islamic Republic. As a general rule, Western countries allow for nationalism among other Western countries but not among non-Western countries. Immanuel Kant’s dictum of treating everyone as an end in himself/herself and not as a means towards one’s own ends, is applied in intra-Western international relations but often not when the West deals with others. But Indians did not have to be communists to sympathise with Vietnam’s struggle against first France and then America, and Indians do not have to be Shia Muslims to sympathise with Iran’s struggle against an impending Anglo-American aggression. The opaque Manmohan- Montek deal-making with America on behalf of India’s people may need to be set aside in such a context — while it might benefit several dozen businesses on both sides and several hundred bureaucrats may become even fatter with bribes, it may have next to nothing to do with any dimension of India’s national interests.

 

 

US pledge 1981, policy 2006

 

On January 19 1981, the Government of the United States signed what came to be called the Algiers Accord, the first point of which stated: “Non-Intervention in Iranian Affairs: The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” This was part of a comprehensive truce between Khomeini’s Iran and the USA in regard to the war-like conditions then prevailing between them. That pledge now seems about to be broken. British newspapers reported on April 2 2006 that the Blair Government is holding “secret talks” with its own Chief of Defence Staff, Chief of Defence Intelligence and others to discuss “an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear bomb… if Tehran’s leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.” This is despite the British foreign minister saying last month “that a military attack against Iran was ‘inconceivable’”. America’s “National Security Strategy” dated March 16 2006 states the policy clearly: “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran. For almost 20 years, the Iranian regime hid many of its key nuclear efforts from the international community. Yet the regime continues to claim that it does not seek to develop nuclear weapons. The Iranian regime’s true intentions are clearly revealed by the regime’s refusal to negotiate in good faith; its refusal to come into compliance with its international obligations by providing the IAEA access to nuclear sites and resolving troubling questions; and the aggressive statements of its President calling for Israel to ‘be wiped off the face of the earth’. The United States has joined with our EU partners and Russia to pressure Iran to meet its international obligations and provide objective guarantees that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes. This diplomatic effort must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided. As important as are these nuclear issues, the United States has broader concerns regarding Iran. The Iranian regime sponsors terrorism; threatens Israel; seeks to thwart Middle East peace; disrupts democracy in Iraq; and denies the aspirations of its people for freedom. The nuclear issue and our other concerns can ultimately be resolved only if the Iranian regime makes the strategic decision to change these policies, open up its political system, and afford freedom to its people. This is the ultimate goal of U.S. policy. In the interim, we will continue to take all necessary measures to protect our national and economic security against the adverse effects of their bad conduct. The problems lie with the illicit behavior and dangerous ambition of the Iranian regime, not the legitimate aspirations and interests of the Iranian people. Our strategy is to block the threats posed by the regime while expanding our engagement and outreach to the people the regime is oppressing.“

 

 

 

Attack scenario

 

In one scenario, America will make a surprise cruise-missile attack on Iranian buildings “suspected” of producing biological weapons. If the Iranians respond in any way other than total submission, it will be sufficient to launch a major bombing of Iran’s military facilities using B-2 bombers based in Diego Garcia, England and other American bases, possibly using nuclear “earth penetrating” weapons to attack underground facilities. Of course it is not impossible the British and Americans are merely setting up a bluff to scare the Iranians into complying without a fight, but the existence of aggressive war plans and preparations cannot be doubted.

 

Now it is possible the Americans will say they are not bound by the pledge made in the Algiers Accord in January 1981 to not intervene in Iran’s affairs. In breach of all diplomatic law, 66 Americans had been taken captive by Iranians seizing the American Embassy on November 4 1979. Six others escaped with the help of the Canadian and Swedish embassies. Of the 66, 13 women and black Americans were released two weeks later; one man was released due to ill-health in July 1980. The remaining 52 including two women and one black American were released on January 20 1981 by the terms of the Algiers Accord just before Ronald Reagan took over as President of the United States. Eight American military personnel were killed on April 25 1980 in a failed attempt to rescue them. The official designations of the 52 (who had been held captive for 444 days) included 10 military attachés; 6 “communications and electronics specialists”; 8 political and administrative officers, and 12 diplomatic/consular staff. In addition there were 12 guards and 4 others. Even if the US Embassy in Tehran was a den of spies as the Iranians claimed, the Revolutionary Government could have ordered them all to leave and to have ended diplomatic relations in accordance with international law. What explained Iranians’ anger for them to have violated international law so brazenly? That was the age before terrorism, and nor was Iran a player in the conflict between Israel and the Arabs.

 

Iran’s anger stemmed from having felt being used by Britain, America and Soviet Russia for half a century before the 1979 Khomeini Revolution – from having been merely means towards their ends in violation of the Kantian dictum. It was almost as if Britain and America had said to Iran and the entire Middle East, “We invented the internal combustion engine and the automobile which uses it, and we also discovered the petroleum that runs it; the mere fact you happen to sit on this petroleum does not make you own it; we own it too and we will take it by force whenever necessary.” During the Cold War, the USSR followed suit, and now after the Cold War has ended, the new Russia is a Western ally in the same kind of attempted domination over non-Western countries like Iran (or Pakistan and India, who get sold a lot of useless weapons to fight each other with).

 

 

 

Mossadeq the democrat

 

Specifically, if the January 1981 Algiers Accord was signed by the USA under duress, the Iranians could say that Iran had been cheated into signing the 25 year agreement of September 1954 with an international oil consortium led by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Iran would receive 50% profit on all Iranian oil exported, after paying the AIOC ₤25 million in compensation for having nationalised it in 1951 under the democratic government of Mohammad Mossadeq which had broken off diplomatic relations with Britain. Mossadeq was overthrown by an Anglo-American coup détat in August 1953, and replaced by the compliant General Fazlollah Zahedi and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Arthur Millspaugh, an American invited by the Iranians to help their public finances, once wrote: “Persia cannot be left to herself, even if the Russians were to keep their hands off politically. …Persia has never yet proved its capacity for independent self-government.” Millspaugh’s 1925 book titled America’s Task in Persia seems to have remained the handbook of Western policy towards Iran. Khomeini’s Revolution was its antithesis.

Diplomatic Wisdom (2006)

DIPLOMATIC WISDOM

by Subroto Roy

Editorial page, The Statesman, January 31 2006

 

Indian diplomacy has, almost accidentally, shown some wisdom. The King of Saudi Arabia should have been long ago invited to be Chief Guest on Republic Day. His Majesty immediately reciprocated with the most gracious words possible: “I consider myself to be in my second homeland. The relationship between India and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an historic one, we have been old friends and, God willing, this visit will renew these historic ties”. Indeed the King should be invited to make a full State visit in the near future travelling all over India, including Srinagar Valley ; where Khruschev and Bulganin went in 1955!

 

India has the second largest population of Muslim believers in the world after Indonesia, and it is only right the Keeper of the Holy Places of Islam should see for himself that India is indeed dar-ul-aman, not the dar-ul-harb that the propaganda of the Pakistanis and their terroristic protégés have made it out to be in Saudi and Gulf power circles.

 

Kalam and the King

The Vajpayee Government deserves a little credit for the present success, because it was they who caused the fact that His Majesty Faisal Ibn Abdullah Ibn Muhammad Al-Saud was hosted by an Indian rocket scientist born in a Muslim family in an impecunious fishing village of Tamil Nadu. The King and his princes would not have failed to feel the poignancy in that. India is also the second largest country of Shiá Islam after Iran, and Ayatollah Khatami was Chief Guest a few years ago when he was President of Iran. It has been argued in these columns (“Solving Kashmir”, The Statesman, December 1-3, 2005) that the solution to J&K requires Indian diplomacy with Iran and Afghanistan as well ; which, incidentally, will make the hollowness of Pakistan’s claims in J&K most obvious.

 

Now the President of the United States is due to visit India shortly. George W Bush is the third Republican President to come to India after Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. His predecessor Bill Clinton came as a single man at the end of his second term, on holiday from a rocky marriage, to dance with Rajasthani women and indulge his love of Indian food. Before Clinton in 2000, the last American President to visit was Jimmy Carter in 1978, who gave a stirring speech to Parliament about democracy after Morarji Desai had defeated Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. George Bush, also in his second term, will come to India amid controversy.

 

“You’re a good man”, Bush condescendingly said to Manmohan Singh in Washington, half-remembering that morning’s intelligence briefing memo. Had our PM been more experienced of the world he could have replied equally loudly: “Thanks, you’re not so bad yourself. Let’s chop some wood next time”. It is almost definite there will be no agreement on the nuclear collaboration deal, and that the dispute erupting over Iran may have enlarged itself. Platitudes will be exchanged but the fact that the President has chosen to combine his visit to India with a visit to his buddies in the Pakistani Government will not go unnoticed in the MEA.

 

“Balance of power” has been the motif of Anglo-American foreign policy in Asia at least ever since the Arabs were induced to revolt against the Turks by Allenby and Lawrence, followed by pitting Iran and the Arabs against each other. The same goes for India and Pakistan. Also, our rather uncouth Communists have vowed to make their presence felt in street-protests and boycotts of Parliament when Bush comes.

 

FDR & Martin Luther King Jr

In this tense atmosphere, where the summit may actually falter rather badly on substance, Manmohan Singh will need to make some important symbolic gestures. Going to meet the Saudi King at the airport was an appropriate gesture. Clinton had expected the Indian PM to meet him too, and was visibly disappointed to land in the middle of the night only amidst the lights of the TV cameras. The Bushes should be met at the airport by our PM and his spouse. The President is our honoured guest and guests are to be treated like gods.

 

In the same vein, four boulevards across India’s largest cities deserve to be named after four American heroes: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Dwight D. Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln. The first two were Democrats, the latter two Republicans.

 

Naming a boulevard in New Delhi after FDR would belatedly acknowledge his small, spontaneous yet critical and principled role in support of Indian independence that, shockingly, remains unrecognised in India. Britain could not expect American support against German and Japanese imperialism while expecting the Americans not to support Indian aspirations for national freedom. India’s own academic historians, mostly under influence of either Communist or RSS methodologies, have failed even to produce objective biographies of major national leaders, let aside candid accounts of British rule, the development of the Indian nation-state, the Transfer of Power or Partition.

 

The same intellectual sloppiness has extended to economics too, and underlies the gross misunderstanding of India’s monetary and fiscal histories as was outlined recently in these columns. It has required a young American scholar, Dinyar Patel, writing in an official American Government publication to outline Roosevelt’s role during India’s independence (Span, March 2005).

 

Where FDR helped India’s struggle for freedom, Martin Luther King Jr adopted India’s method to lead America’s blacks (“Negroes” and “coloureds” as they were then called) to freedom within their own country. MK Gandhi had corresponded with Tolstoy after beginning his campaign of passive resistance to unjust South African laws, and he read Henry Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience when he was already in jail for that very same offence. Many years later, the young Alabama preacher put to use Gandhi’s example of courageous peaceful defiance of injustice in his own sweet land of liberty. On receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 1964, King said: “Non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilisation and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that non-violence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation”. Of course, King like Gandhi would have been appalled by the religious, colour, caste and racial prejudices of contemporary Indians, Pakistanis etc today, and naming a boulevard in King’s name may do more for our own moral well-being than anything else.

 

Eisenhower and Lincoln

As for Dwight Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln, the former may well be seen in later centuries as the greatest of 20th Century American Presidents as the latter was of the 19th. Though they had nothing to do with India, naming boulevards after them would remind Indians of the existence of great men in world history.

Jyoti Basu’s Communists once named streets in Kolkata after Lenin and Ho Chi Minh, and still pay annual obeisance at Lenin’s statue with clenched fists and garlands. Ho Chi Minh was a great nationalist and may have deserved an Indian street but it was a cheap and gratuitous insult by the Communists to name the very street on which the American Consulate stood after the Vietnamese leader who was then their enemy. The Americans were mature enough at the time to ignore it and not pull out their Consulate from Kolkata — the very same Consulate that is so highly in demand with Basu’s successor, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

Under influence of the well-known academic apologists for Communist China, Bhattacharjee has been recently extolling the virtues of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai too – apparently ignorant of the 40 million Chinese that Mao killed and apparently forgiving Zhou’s hatred of and perfidy against India. Before any further such nonsense occurs, we should name roads after FDR, King, Eisenhower and Lincoln, and the time to do it would be when George W. Bush makes his visit.

Iqbal & Jinnah vs Rahmat Ali in Pakistan’s creation

Iqbal & Jinnah vs Rahmat Ali in Pakistan’s Creation

By Dr Subroto Roy

First published in Dawn (Karachi) Encounter September 3, 2005

MUHAMMAD IQBAL (1877-1938) was the poetic and spiritual genius who (at least in the 20th Century) inspired the notion of a Muslim homeland in northwestern India. His seminal 1930 presidential speech to the Muslim League in Allahabad laid the foundation stone of the new country that was yet to be. He said “I would like to see the Punjab, Northwest Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Self-government within the British Empire or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North West Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims at least of Northwest India…”.

Iqbal did not see such a Muslim state being theocratic and certainly not one filled with anti-Hindu bigotry:

“A community which is inspired by feelings of ill-will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities… Yet I love the communal group which is the source of my life and my behaviour… Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim states will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such states… I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam. For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power, for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and the spirit of modern times”.

Now such a Muslim country as conceived by Muhammad lqbal — and which, as it happens, constitutes more or less the territory of present-day Pakistan other than East Punjab— did not necessarily have to receive the name it did come to receive. It might have been named “Dar-e-Islami-Hind” or the “Indus Islamic Republic” or “Indic Islamabad” or “The Republic of North-Western India” or some other such appropriate appellation — even “Iqbalistan” perhaps or some name deriving from Iqbal’s notion of “khudi” which he had developed from his admiration as a young man for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nor did Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) himself, the explicit and acknowledged political founder of the new country, use the appellation that it did come to have, not even when he introduced the Lahore Resolution in the 1940 meeting of the Muslim League which aimed to implement Iqbal’s idea. It was Iqbal who persuaded Jinnah to return to India from England, where Jinnah had settled in a law practice again after his first stint in Indian politics, and in 1934 Jinnah had done so when elected to the Central Legislative Assembly in a reserved seat for Bombay Muslims.

By 1938 Jinnah had declared his permanent opinion: “Congress leaders may shout as much as they like that the Congress is a national body. But … (the) Congress is nothing but a Hindu body”. Finally, at the Lahore session of the Muslim League in 1940, Jinnah introduced the idea: “That geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign”.

Who had seconded Jinnah’s Lahore Resolution? It had been Sikander Hyat Khan, leader of the Punjab Muslims, and Fazlul Haq, leader of the Bengal Muslim peasantry. Jinnah as of 1940 had been most conspicuously a leader of Muslims only in the Muslim-minority provinces of British India, and clearly had felt it necessary to demonstrate that in proposing the Lahore Resolution he had the support of the two leaders of the two largest Muslim-majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal.

Sikander Hyat Khan had been due to become Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in Bombay in 1936 when instead he returned to Punjab to lead the Unionist Party of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu landlords in 1937. “The Sikander-Jinnah pact stipulated that the Unionist Party of the Punjab, led by Sikander, would retain full autonomy of the affairs of the province.” Fazlul Haq would later conceive with Sarat Bose (elder brother of Subhash Bose) of a Muslim majority “United Bengal” in an attempt to keep Calcutta out of the new India, a notion which would have Jinnah’s backing but otherwise would not get anywhere. Support for the Lahore Resolution among the Muslims of the princely states like Jammu and Kashmir or Hyderabad was conspicuous by its absence. Neither were they mentioned in Iqbal’s seminal 1930 speech nor in Jinnah’s 1940 Lahore Resolution backed by Sikander Hyat Khan and Fazlul Haq. What has been called the “Paradox of Kashmir” is that prior to 1947 Jammu and Kashmir did not seem to appear in any discussion whatsoever, and yet it has consumed almost all discussion ever since.

To this must be added now another newly understood dimension having to do with the conceptualization and foundation of the new country not only by lqbal the poet and Jinnah the politician, but by the third and upstart founder of Pakistan: its young radical Islamist ideologue, Chowdhury Rahmat Ali (1895-1951).

Official Pakistan has venerated Iqbal and accorded Jinnah due honour and respect but has apparently treated Rahmat Ali as the lunatic uncle who has needed to be locked up secretly in the attic. Yet Rahmat Ali’s impact on the creation of Pakistan and events in the subcontinent equalled those of his two better educated, more respectable and eminent compatriots — and may yet come to exceed them (not necessarily salubriously).

Rahmat Ali was born in a village in Hoshiarpur district of Punjab in 1895, making him almost 20 years younger than Iqbal and Jinnah. He matriculated from Jullunder and graduated in 1919 from Islamia College, Lahore. About 1931, having “accumulated some money as a legal advisor to a Baluchi landlord”, he arrived in England and took admission in Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

By way of studies, Rahmat Ali may have passed a set of Part I exams but not perhaps the Part  II. There does not seem to be any record of him attending the Inns of Court or of being called to the Bar, though he styled himself “Barrister at Law” in his writings. According to the obituary he received in the Emmanuel College Magazine of 1950-51, “he made Cambridge his home, shifting a little unhappily from lodging to lodging, and using, perhaps rather more than was proper, the College as an accommodation address.”

Interviews with his landlady and housekeeper-secretary, conducted by Dr Taufiq Shelley in 1970-71, yielded that Rahmat Ali was a devout pious Muslim who along with a few compatriots had been secretly and secretively very active as a pamphleteer from England creating and spreading among India’s Muslims a radical Islamist ideology for Pakistan, even founding something called the “Pakistan National Liberation Movement”.

Rahmat Ali was inspired by Iqbal’s 1930 call for a Muslim state in northwest India but felt Iqbal had been too vague and was disappointed that Iqbal had not pressed the issue at the Third Round Table Conference. In 1933, apparently on the top floor of a London bus, Rahmat Ali invented for Iqbal’s imagined political entity the name “PAKSTAN”, the P standing for his native Punjab, the A for Afghania, K for Kashmir, S for Sind, and the STAN allegedly doubling up for Balochistan.

Rahmat Ali sought a meeting with Jinnah in London, met him and pressed the name ‘Pakstan’ upon him as a possible nomenclature. “Jinnah disliked Rahmat Ali’s ideas and avoided meeting him”. Jinnah pointed out to Rahmat Ali he had failed to consider the other Muslim majority province, Bengal, as well as Muslim minority regions.

At this, Rahmat Ali produced a general scheme of Muslim domination all over the subcontinent: there would be “Pakistan” in the northwest including Kashmir, Delhi and Agra; “Bangistan” in Bengal; “Osmanistan” in Hyderabad; “Siddiquistan” in Bundelhand and Malwa; “Faruqistan” in Bihar and Orissa; “Haideristan” in UP; “Muinistan” in Rajasthan; “Maplistan” in Kerala; and even “Safiistan” in “Western Ceylon” and “Nasaristan” in “Eastern Ceylon”, etc. The map deriving from such a crank view of history was published by Rahmat Ali in 1934 and came to be widely circulated in his pamphleteering among Indian Muslims at the time.

Rahmat Ali was vituperative in his bigotry against Hindus, referring to the Indian nationalist movement as a “British-Banya alliance” presumably in reference to MK Gandhi’s caste. He even declined to refer to an “India” as having ever existed at all and instead personally renamed the entire subcontinent as “Dinia”, and the oceans and the seas around India as the “Pakian Sea”, the “Osmanian Sea” etc. He urged Sikhs to rise up against the Hindus in a “Sikhistan” (and might have interacted with Master Tara Singh), and indeed urged all of India’s peoples who were not Hindus to rise up in war against Hindus. Given the obscurity of the facts of his life before his arrival at Emmanuel College, what experiences may have led him to such extreme bigotry towards Hindus are not known.

When in 1947 a new but “moth-eaten” country had come to be named with the word he had coined on a London bus more than a dozen years earlier, and was a country which had two “wings” after a partition — the more populous “East Pakistan” and the more arrogant “West Pakistan” — Rahmat Ali turned his wrath from England upon its new government. He condemned Jinnah as being treacherous, and then newly re-interpreted his letters P, A, K, I, S, T, A, N to now refer to Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Iran, Sindh, Tukharistan (sic), Afghanistan, and Balochistan.

The word “pak” coincidentally meant pure in Arabic, so Rahmat Ali began to speak of Muslim believers anywhere as being the “Pak” i.e. “the pure” people, and of how the national destiny of the new Pakistan should be to liberate “Pak” people everywhere, including the new India, and create a “Pak Commonwealth of Nations” stretching from Arabia to the Indies. The map he now drew placed the word “Punjab” over Jammu & Kashmir. Thus as of 1947 or so, Rahmat Ali’s crank view of history led to an Asia dominated by a “Pak” empire: However, when Rahmat Ali landed in the new country whose name had been invented by him, he was apparently placed under arrest and deported back to England immediately. In a previous visit to Sikander Hyat’s Punjab, he had been apparently assaulted. He had not been invited to the promulgation of the Lahore Resolution, which, even though it did not refer to his name Pakistan, came to be called the Pakistan Resolution.

Shunned by the officialdom of the new country which now carried the name he had invented, Rahmat Ali died in poverty and obscurity in England during an influenza epidemic in 1951; the Master of Emmanuel College paid for his funeral and was later reimbursed for this by the Government of Pakistan.

In recent years Rahmat Ali has been undergoing a restoration, and his grave at Cambridge has become a site of pilgrimage today for Pakistan’s Islamist ideologues, while his maps, writings and rantings have been reprinted in, e.g., The Nation newspaper in Pakistan as recently as February 2005.

At best, Rahmat Ali may be described as a pious and devout Muslim who was a sincere and ardent Islamist ideologue. At worst he was a deeply bigoted crank and a reactionary Muslim imperialist. His views on Hindus are not far in the level of their depravity from the views of the author of Mein Kampf on the Jews — and ironically the author of Mein Kampf had been a model for a few Hindu authors at the time who wrote with equal bigotry about the Muslims of India.

Indeed Rahmat Ali’s views against Hindus may be classified with those of other bigoted views at the time such as those against Jews or against Muslims, which may all well have been examples or models or counterfoils for one another in the crank fringes of rival ideological movements at the time.

The anti-Hindu bigotry of Rahmat Ali’s views would explain why they were anathema to Jinnah, the secular-minded constitutionalist. Like other Muslim nationalists of his time such as Attaturk, Nasser, Mossadeq or even Saud himself, Jinnah would have been embarrassed to be promoting a reactionary Islamic imperialism in that modernising era that was the middle of the 20th century.

Dr Roy along with WE James created the book Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s (Sage, Delhi, OUP, Karachi 1992). His most recent book is one edited with John Clarke, Margaret Thatcher’s Revolution: How it Happend and What it Meant (Continuum, London & New York 2005, 2006).

A General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism (2001)

A General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism with Special Reference to September 11

Subroto Roy

This was a keynote address to the Council of Asian Liberals & Democrats meeting on November 16 2001, Manila, Philippines, and was published in Singapore in 2002, Alan Smith, James Gomez & Uwe Johannen (Eds.) September 11 & Political Freedom: Asian Perspectives. It was republished in the West on January 26 2004 on the University of Buckingham website, when the author was Wincott Visiting Professor of Economics there. It came to be followed a few months later by a public lecture at the University, titled “Science, Religion, Art and the Necessity of Freedom: Reason’s Response to Islamism” which has also been published here.

1. Globalization Through a Wide-Angle Lens
2. Suicide, Terrorism & Political Protest
3. Science, Religion, Art, and the Necessity of Freedom
4. Asia’s Modern Dilemmas: Named Social Life or Anonymous Markets
5. September 11: the Collapse of the Global Conversation
6. Envoi

Synopsis: The world after September 11 2001 has seemed a very bewildering place — as if all liberal notions of universal reason, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law since the Enlightenment have been proven a lie overnight, deserving only to be flushed away in the face of a resurgence of ancient savageries. One aim of this essay is to show this would be too hasty an assessment; another is to provide a general theory of “globalization”, a notion which often has seemed lost for meaning.

1. Globalization Through a Wide-Angle Lens
The perpetrators of September 11 subjectively acted in the name of Islam. It would have surprised them to know of the great respect with which the religious experience of Prophet Muhammad (572-632 AD) had been treated in the English language by Carlyle in 1842:

“The great Mystery of Existence… glared in upon (Muhammad), with its terrors, with its splendours; no hearsays could hide that unspeakable fact, ‘Here am I!’. Such sincerity… has in very truth something of divine. The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart. Men do and must listen to that as nothing else; all else is wind in comparison.” 1

Carlyle told the story of Muhammad once not abiding by his own severe faith when he wept for an early disciple saying “You see a friend weeping over his friend”; and of how, when the young beautiful Ayesha tried to make him compare her favourably to his deceased wife and first disciple the widow Khadija, Muhammad had denied her:

“She believed in me when none else would believe. In the whole world I had but one friend and she was that!”

Carlyle suggested the simple humanity and humility of Muhammad’s life and example, and even an intersection between Islamic belief and modern science (“a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart”). He quoted Goethe: “If this be Islam, do we not all live in Islam?”, suggesting there might be something of universal import in Muhammad’s message well beyond specifically Muslim ontological beliefs.
In general, the life or words of a spiritual leader of mankind like Muhammad, Christ, or Buddha, as indeed of discoverers of the physical world like Darwin or Einstein, or explorers of secular human nature like Aristotle, Adam Smith or Karl Marx, may be laid claim to by all of us whether we are explicit adherents, disciples or admirers or not. No private property rights may be attached upon their legacies, but rather these remain open to be discussed freely and reasonably by everyone.

A second example is more proximate. It is of M. K. Gandhi the Indian sitting in South Africa reflecting on the Christian ideas of Thoreau the American and Tolstoy the Russian, synthesizing these with Hindu-Jain notions of “ahimsa” or “non-hatred” into a technique of political action to be applied eventually to end British rule in India; then transferred a decade after Gandhi’s assassination to the U. S. Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr, and later, after King’s assassination, back to Nelson Mandela languishing in prison, who ends apartheid and brings in its place a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in South Africa.2
Construing globalization to mean merely Westernization of the East has been a commonplace error, leading to a narrow cramped perspective and reflecting ignorance of both East and West. There are countless examples of the Easternization of the West including the exportation of Judaism and Christianity, and of Indian and Arab mathematics and astronomy in the Middle Ages. There have been and will be countless cross-fertilizations between East and West, let aside the subtle influences of Africa and other cultures and continents on art, music, dance, sports and beliefs around the world. In general, whenever an idea, practice, institution or artifact transmits itself from its origin elsewhere, we have a little piece of globalization taking place. The speed and volume of such transmissions may have vastly increased in recent decades thanks to the growth of modern transport and communications but that is not to say some of the most important transmissions have not already taken place or may not yet take place. Ours like every generation may be biased in favour of its own importance.

2. Suicide, Terrorism & Political Protest
Global transmissions can be as soft and salubrious as Americans learning to enjoy football which is not American football. But they can be grim and desperate too — like the transfer of “suicide bombing” techniques from Sri Lanka’s civil war to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; or the idea of schoolboys firing automatic weapons germinating from A Clockwork Orange to actuality thirty years later in an American or a German school.

In fact the Thoreau-Tolstoy-Gandhi techniques of civil disobedience or a hunger-strike inflicting pain or sacrifice on oneself to show an adversary his folly, slide naturally to a limit of suicide as political protest — as when the Buddhist Superior Thich Quang Duc, protesting religious persecution by Diem’s regime in South Vietnam, immolated himself on June 2 1963, soon to be followed by other Buddhist monks and nuns, leading to the end of the Diem regime and start of the American war in Vietnam. Six years and half a world away, Jan Palach, on January 19 1969, immolated himself in Wenceslas Square protesting the apathy of his countrymen to the Soviet invasion that had ended the Prague Spring. Suicide as political protest still abides by the Socratic injunction that it would be better to suffer wrong than to wrong others.3

Terrorism by suicide killing crosses that line — over into a world of utilitarian calculation on the part of the perpetrator that his or her suicide as political protest would be inadequate, and must be accompanied by causing death among the perceived adversary as well.

Gandhi, King and Mandela each had conservative, accommodative currents on one side, as well as radical dissident or parallel terrorist offshoots on the other, and we will return to ask why no non-violent political movement seems identifiable of which September 11 was the violent terrorist offshoot.

Where political protest is absent from the motivation, and killing the adversary becomes the aim with suicide merely the means, as with Japan’s kamikaze pilots, we have passed into a realm of international war between organized authorities in contrast with mere terrorism against some organized authority. A suicide-killer may of course subjectively believe himself/herself to be making a political protest though his/her principals may see him/her as an instrument of war.

Also, if it is correct to distinguish between kamikaze pilots and the perpetrators of September 11 by absence and presence of political protest in their motivation, terrorism typically arises as rebellion against some organized authority, and is to be contrasted precisely with war between organized authorities. “State terrorism” can then only refer to an organized authority being repressive to the point of using its power to cause terror, physical or mental, upon a people or individuals under its control. “State-sponsored” terrorism would be something else again, where an organized authority assists a terroristic rebellion against some other organized authority, amounting effectively to an undeclared international war.4

3. Science, Religion, Art, and the Necessity of Freedom
The question arises whether anything in human nature or society may be identified to help analyse, explain or predict the myriad transmissions of globalization taking place, whether salubrious or not. If such a theory claims to be “general”, it will need to be wide enough to try to explain the motivation for modern terrorism and September 11 2001 in particular.

We could start with the observable fact there is and has been only one human species, no matter how infinitely variegated its specimens across space and time. All have a capacity to reason as well as a capacity to feel a range of emotions in their experience of the world, something we share to an extent with other forms of life as well. And every human society, in trying to ascertain what is good for itself, finds need to reason together about how its members may be best able to survive, grow, reproduce and flourish. This process of common reasoning and reflection vitally requires freedom of inquiry and expression of different points of view. The lone voice in dissent needs to be heard or at least not suppressed just in case it is the right voice counselling against a course which might lead to catastrophe for all. To reason together implies a true or right answer exists to be found, and the enterprise of truth-seeking thus requires freedom as a logical necessity. It takes guts to be a lone dissenter, and all societies have typically praised and encouraged the virtues of courage and integrity, and poured shame on cowardice, treachery or sycophancy. Similarly, since society is a going concern, justice and fairplay in the working of its institutions is praised and sought after while corruption, fraud or other venality is condemned and punished.

A flourishing society may be viewed as one advancing in its scientific knowledge, its artistic achievements, and its religious or philosophical consciousness. Each of these dimensions needs to be in appropriate balance in relation to the others during the process of social and economic growth, and each has a necessity for its own aspect of freedom.

Science is our public knowledge regardless of culture or nationality gained of ourselves as members of the world and the Universe, and has been the most important common adversary of all religions. Who or what is homo sapiens relative to other living species? What is the difference between plants and animals? What constitutes a living organism? What is the structure of a benzene ring or a carbon atom or any atom or subatomic particle? What is light, sound, gravity? What can we say about black holes or white dwarfs? When did life begin on Earth and when is it likely to end? Are we alone in the Universe in being the only form of self-conscious life? Such questions have been asked and attempted to be answered in their own way by all peoples of the world, whether they are primitive tribes in hidden forests or sophisticated rocket scientists in hidden laboratories. Our best common understanding of them constitutes the state of scientific knowledge at a given time.
At the bar of reason, all religions lose to science wherever they try to compete on science’s home grounds, namely, the natural or physical world. If a religious belief happens to imply a material object can be in two places at the same time, that something can be made out of nothing, that the Sun and planets go around the Earth, that if you offer a sacrifice the rains will be on time, then it is destined to be falsified by experience. Science has done a lot of its work in the last few centuries, while the religions pre-date this expansion so their physical premises may have remained those of the science understood in their time. In all questions where religions try to take on the laws of scientific understanding head on, they do and must lose, and numerous factual claims made by all religions will disappear in the fierce and unforgiving heat of the crucible of scientific reasoning and evidence.
With the enormous growth of science, some scientists have gone to the limit of declaring no religious belief can possibly survive — that we are after all made up of dust and atoms alone, that there is no real difference between a mechanical talking doll and a gurgling baby who has just discovered her hands and feet.

Yet reasonable religious belief, action and experience does exist and may need to make its presence felt. Religion may not battle science and expect to win on science’s home ground but can and does win where science has nothing and can have nothing to say. It has been reasonable everywhere for men or women faced with death or personal tragedy to turn to religion for strength, courage or comfort. Such would be a point where religion offers something to life on which science has nothing of interest to say. These include the ultimate questions of life or death or the “Mystery of Existence” itself, in Carlyle’s term.

In fact the ultra-scientific prejudice fails ultimately to be reasonable enough, and is open to a joint and decisive counter-attack by both the religious believer and the artist. Modern science has well established that our small planet orbits an unexceptional member of an unexceptional galaxy. Copernicus by this started the era of modern science and began the end of the grip on Western culture of astrology, which was based on a geocentric Ptolomaic worldview (many Asian cultures like India and perhaps China still remain in that grip).

Yet the pre-modern geocentrism contained a subtle truth which has formed the foundation of both art and religion: to the best of scientific knowledge to this day, Earth is the centre of the Universe inasmuch as it is only here that reason and intelligence and consciousness have come to exist, that there is such a thing as the power to think and the power to love.5

We are, as far as anyone knows, quite alone in having the ability to understand ourselves and to be conscious of our own existence. The great galaxies, black holes and white dwarfs are all very impressive, but none of them is aware of its own existence or capable of the thought or love of any human baby or for that matter the commonest street dog.

What responsibility arises for human beings because of the existence of this consciousness? That is the common and reasonable question addressed by both religion and art, on which science is and must remain silent. We may come to know through science that life has existed for x million years and is likely to be extinguished in y million more years, but we do not know why it arose at all, or what responsibility devolves on those beings, namely ourselves, who have consciousness and reason to comprehend their own existence in the Universe.
D. H. Lawrence meant to raise this when he said the novel was a greater invention than Galileo’s telescope. Great painters, composers, or other artists can be imagined saying something similar. Art is the expression of life, and human cultures, like plants, may be fresh and vigourous with life or decadent and doomed to death. The society which both recognizes and comprehends its own artistic traditions through reasonable evaluation while encouraging new shoots of artistic creativity, will be one with a vibrant cultural life; the society incapable of evaluating its own art self- critically enough will be likely also to kill new creativity from within itself, and become vulnerable to a merger or takeover.

Science, religion and art each vitally requires freedom in order to thrive. In art, the function of reason arises in critical evaluation of literature, paintings, cinema, drama, music, dance, architecture and other aspects of aesthetics. Swimming against a full tide of majority opinion here often may be the right thing to do. The critic F. R. Leavis spoke of the importance of there being an educated public to maintain serious cultural standards; he meant that the freedom to be vigourously critical, often against shallow entrenched coterie opinions, may be the only safeguard preventing artistic or cultural standards from collapse. In science, the activity of reasoning whether in public with one another or privately within oneself, dispels scientific illusions (like astrology) and so enlarges the area occupied by a common empirical understanding. Freedom is logically necessary here to keep potential avenues towards the truth open; it extends also to protecting through tolerance those factual beliefs which may be manifestly false — it may be a crime to steal or commit murder but it is not a crime to hold erroneous factual beliefs about the world as such (e.g. astrology is wrong because Copernicus is right, but it would be illiberal to jail people for believing in astrology.) Such a need for freedom of belief and experience, as well as the tolerance of dissent, becomes most obvious in religion, where the stupendous task facing all human beings is of attempting to unravel the “Mystery of Existence”. The scope of these ontological questions, unanswered and unanswerable by science, is so vast it would be only wise to allow the widest search for answers to take place, across all possible sources and religious faiths, wherever the possibility of an insight into any of these subtle truths may arise. Perhaps that is why some solitary thinkers have sought to experience all the great religions in their own lifetimes, sometimes by deliberate conversion from one faith to the next.

A flourishing society, then, would be one which grows along the three planes of science, religion and art under conditions of freedom. And such a notion may be measured at different scales of social life. It starts with the family as the author of Anna Karenina knew in its famous opening sentence: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. It could then move to flourishing tribes, neighborhoods or local communities, to flourishing towns, provinces, or whole nations. At any of these levels, the flourishing society is one which inhales deeply the fresh air of natural science, and so sees its knowledge of the material world grow by leaps and bounds; it encourages religious and philosophical discussions and tolerance so does not fail to comprehend its own purpose of being; and it lives creatively and self-critically in trying to improve the expressiveness of its artistic achievements. Such a society would be self-confident enough to thrive in a world of global transmissions of ideas, practices, institutions and artifacts. Even if it was small in economic size or power relative to others, it would not be fearful of its own capacity to absorb what is valuable or to reject what is worthless from the rest of the world. To absorb what is valuable from outside is to supercede what may be less valuable at home; to reject what is worthless from outside is to appreciate what may be worthwhile at home. Both require faculties of critical and self-critical judgement, and the flourishing society will be one which possesses these qualities and exercises them with confidence.

4. Asia’s Modern Dilemmas: Named Social Life or Anonymous Markets
Actual societies, whether small like families or large like nations, in East or West, now or in the past, typically display these qualities in relative balance, excess, or shortage.6 Broadly speaking, throughout the vast span of Asia, there has been unstinting admiration over the last two hundred years for the contribution of the modern West to art, architecture and the growth of scientific knowledge. Where it has come to be known and applied, there has been admiration for liberal Western political thought; while ancient Asian nations which hastily imported ideologies like fascism and communism have lived to regret it. Western political morality at its finest derives from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that rational beings recognise one another’s autonomy and treat one another as ends in themselves, not as means towards each other’s ends. 7 We see this in action today in for example the cordial relations between the USA and Canada, or between North America and Europe, or in recent attempts at European integration.

Asian nationalists in the 20th Century struggled to try to establish individual autonomous national identities, as the West had done in the 18th and 19th centuries. Asian nationalism represented an unwillingness to be treated as mere means towards the ends of Western nations, something we still see today when country B is used to counter A, then C used to counter B, then D used to counter C, etc in the old imperial manner of divide and rule This remains a serious problem of international relations but is something Asia can resolve independently by seeking to create for herself free societies which flourish in science, religion and the arts which would then be robust, self-confident and autonomous enough to decline to be used as means towards others’ ends. Furthermore, Asian societies in some respects all resemble one another and pre-modern Western societies more than they do the contemporary West. These pre-modern societies were ones in which a person was identified by rights and obligations flowing from the place he or she came to occupy through inheritance or brave achievement, and centred around the loyalty of friendship and kinship, as well as fidelity of the household. The relationships between the sexes, between generations, between friends, all these across Asia today may still perhaps resemble one another and the pre-modern West more than they do some trends in the contemporary West. History and identity continue to predominate our cultures in Asia: everyone is someone’s son or daughter, someone’s brother or sister or friend or relative, everyone is from some place and is of some age; and every deed has a history to it which everyone knows about or wants to talk about.

In contrast, the modern Western financial economics which the present author teaches his students, describes a world of anonymous “efficient markets” with no memory; where anyone can thrive as long as he or she brings something of value to trade; where all information needed to determine prices tomorrow is contained in today’s prices and events; where nothing from yesterday is necessary to determine anything in the future; where the actual direction of price-change is random and cannot be consistently foretold, so we cannot in general make any prediction which will lead to profit without risk. We are to imagine a large number of players in such a market, each with only a tiny bit of market-power itself, and none able to move the terms of trade on its own. Each of these players then, according to the textbooks, seizes every chance to improve his or her own position regardless of all else, he or she will “buy low” and “sell high” whatever and whenever possible, until price differences between identical assets vanish and no extra profit remains to be squeezed out from anything. Such briefly is the pure theory of the efficient market economy which one teaches as an economist. One tells one’s students it is a good thing, and it is to be found, if anywhere in the best international financial markets, and that what globalization refers to is the whole world becoming like one big efficient marketplace.8

Yet, privately, Asia may have watched with dismay the near-collapse of family and social life which has sometimes accompanied the modern prosperity and technological advancement. The war in Vietnam brought obvious physical destruction to parts of Asia but may also have had more subtle corrosive long-term effects on the social fabric of the West. If there has been something liberal and humane about Western politics while Asian politics have been cruel and oppressive, there may also be something stable and chaste about traditional Asian family life while modern Western societies have sometimes seemed vapid and dissolute. Specifically, if it is fair to say there has been too little autonomy experienced by women and children in many Asian societies, it may be fair as well to observe a surfeit of choices may have arisen in some Western societies, greater than many women and children there may privately wish for. How does a society find its right balance on the question of the autonomy, modesty and protection of family life and other social relationships? The divorce courts of the ultra-modern world are places of deep misery for everyone except the lawyers involved in the trade, and as some Asian leaders have observed, something the globalization of Asia could well seek to avoid. Thus the dilemma faced by many Asians today may be how to absorb the efficiency of markets and sound governance of liberal political institutions, without the kind of private social collapse that seems to have occurred in many ultramodern societies, nor the kind of loss of political sovereignty against which Asian nationalists had struggled during the age of imperialism. We may now see how far this brief but general theory of globalization may be applied in explaining the bewildering events of September 11 2001.

5. September 11 : the Collapse of the Global Conversation
Words are also deeds while deeds may also convey meaning.9 The words and deeds of the perpetrators of September 11 2001, and of the nation-states organized against them since that date, are both components of a complex and subtle global conversation taking place as to the direction of our common future.
In earlier times, Gandhi, King and Mandela each led successful non-violent political protests of “non-white” peoples against “white” organized authorities. Their protests assumed a level of tolerance arising out of mutual respect between rebel and authority. None was a totalitarian revolutionary out to destroy his adversary in toto but rather each intended to preserve and nurture many aspects of the existing order. Each had first become the master of the (Christian?) political idiom of his adversary and was willing and able to employ this idiom to demonstrate the selfcontradiction of his opponent, who was typically faced with a charge of hypocrisy, of maintaining both x and its contrary ~x and so becoming devoid of meaning. Such political conversations of words and deeds required time and patience, and the movements of Gandhi, King and Mandela each took decades to fructify during the 20th Century. They had more conservative accommodative currents on one side, and more impatient radical terroristic offshoots on the other.

All such aspects seem absent from September 11 and its aftermath, which seems at first sight sui generis. No patient non-violent political protest movement can be identified of which September 11 was a violent terroristic offshoot or parallel. Tolerance has not merely vanished but been replaced by panic, mutual fear and hatred. Violence appears as the first and not last recourse of political discussion. The high speed of the modern world almost demands a winner to be declared instantly in conflicts with subtle and unobvious roots, and the only way to seem to win at speed is by perpetrating the largest or most dramatic amount of violence or cruelty. The world after September 11 2001 has seemed a very bewildering place — as if all liberal notions of universal reason, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law since the Enlightenment have been proven a lie overnight, deserving only to be flushed away in face of a resurgence of ancient savageries.

But this would be too hasty an assessment. The global conversation clearly collapsed very badly from the time of e.g. Carlyle’s effort in 1842 to understand Islam’s legacy to the point of September 11 2001 being carried out against the United States or Western civilisation in general in Islam’s name. Even so, the universal liberal virtues of patience, tolerance and common reasoning can still find use here — in identifying possible deep, long-term historical factors which may have accumulated or congregated together to cause such a crime to take place.
One such historical factor has been technological and economic: the invention and immense use of the internal combustion engine throughout the 20th Century, coupled with discovery of petroleum beneath the sands of Arabia — all of which has made the material prosperity of the modern West depend, in the current state of technology, on this link not becoming ruptured. A second and independent factor has been the history of Christian Europe’s alternating persecution and emancipation of the Jewish people, which leads in due course to the Balfour declaration of 1919 and, following the Nazi Holocaust, to the creation of modern Israel among the Arabic- speaking peoples. The history between Christianity and Judaism is one in which the Arabic-speaking peoples were largely passive bystanders. Indeed, they may have been almost passive bystanders in creation of their own nation-states as well — for a third historical factor must be the lack of robust development of modern political and economic institutions among them, with mechanisms of political expression and accountability often having remained backward perhaps more so than in many other parts of Asia.

The end of World War I saw not only Balfour’s declaration but also Kitchener, Allenby and T. E. Lawrence literally designing or inventing new nationstates from areas on a desert-map:

“Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to … carry that ninety percent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest…. In ten words, (Allenby) gave his approval to my having impertinently imposed Arab Governments… upon the chaos of victory…”

“(The secret Arab societies) were pro-Arab only, willing to fight for nothing but Arab independence; and they could see no advantage in supporting the Allies rather than the Turks, since they did not believe our assurances that we would leave them free. Indeed, many of them preferred an Arabia united by Turkey in miserable subjection, to an Arabia divided up and slothful under the easier control of several European powers in spheres of influence.” 10

Beginning with the Allied-induced Arab revolt against the Turks, the classic imperial doctrine of “balance of powers” or “divide and rule” has seemed to continue to be applied in rather more subtle diplomatic form up until the present: with post-Mossadeq Iran against any incipient Arab nationalism, then with Iraq against post-Revolutionary Iran, then against Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991. It is only during and after the Gulf War that Osama Bin Laden, as a totalitarian revolutionary, arose as an adversary of the West.

Throughout these decades, little or no spontaneous cosmopolitan political conversation seems to have occurred from which a mature, sustained indigenous Arab or other Muslim nationalism may have arisen as the basis for nation-states, as had done e.g. with Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Vietnamese nationalism.11

From 1919 to 1945, the global conversation became preoccupied with other matters, and from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, with yet other matters again. While the three long-term factors unfolded themselves through these turbulent decades, the natural vibrant free conversation vitally necessary for the political life of any people continued for the Arabic-speaking peoples to remain mostly stifled, dormant, inchoate or abortive. Expectedly enough, whatever little current it had turned inward to the insular austere roots of a faith of the desert:

“The Beduin of the desert…found himself indubitably free…. In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he became near God…. The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great…. This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being…. This faith of the desert was impossible in the towns…” 12

But this attempt to return inevitably became something reactionary in the late 20th Century. Finding the Beduin and the original deserts of Arabia transformed over the intervening decades, it could only try to recreate itself among the Pashtoon in the barrenness of Afghanistan, and led to the bizarre scenes of the Taliban attempting to destroy televisions and cassette-tapes in the name of Islam.

6. Envoi
The crimes of September 11 2001 were ones of perverse terroristic political protest, akin on a global scale to the adolescent youth in angry frustration who kills his schoolmates and his teachers with an automatic weapon. But they were not something inexplicable or sui generis. They represented a final collapse of the centuries-old cosmopolitan conversation with Islam, while at the same time it was an incoherent cry of a stifled people trying to return to the austere faith of the desert. Words are also deeds, and deeds may also be language. What September 11 has demonstrated is that even while the information we have about one another and ourselves has increased exponentially in recent years, our mutual comprehension of one another and ourselves may well have grossly deteriorated in quality.

Reversing such atrophy in our self-knowledge and mutual comprehension requires, in the opinion of the present author, the encouragement of all societies of all sizes to flourish in their scientific knowledge, their religious and philosophical consciousness and self-discovery, and their artistic expressiveness under conditions of freedom. Ultra-modern societies like some in North America or Europe may then perhaps become more reflective during their pursuit of material advancement and prosperity, while ancient societies like those in Asia or elsewhere may perhaps become less fearful of their capacity to engage in the transition between tradition and modernity, indeed, may even affect the direction or speed of change in a positive manner.

To use a metaphor of Otto Neurath, we are as if sailors on a ship, who, even while sailing on the water, have to change the old planks of the ship with new planks one by one. In due course of time, all the planks get changed one at a time, but at no time has there not been a ship existing in the process — at no time need we have lost our history or our identity.

© Subroto Roy, November 16 2001; January 26 2004

1 Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, London 1842.
2 In fact, “Gandhi’s correspondence with Tolstoy… only started after passive resistance had begun, and he only read Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience when he was in prison for that very offence”. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power,Indian Politics 1915-1922, Cambridge University Press 1972.
3 Cf. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Princeton, 1961, Gorgias 474b, 483a, b.Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Thinking, pp. 181-182, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971
4 Applying this to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the precise question would be
how far the present Palestinian authority may be objectively considered the organized authority of a nation-state: if it is, then Palestinian suicide-killings are acts of war; if it is not, they are acts of terrorism. The rhetoric on each side
5 Finding water or even primitive life elsewhere will not change this.
6 For example, the relatively new nation-states created upon the ancient societies of the Indian subcontinent to which the present author belongs, apparently display a surfeit of religiosity combined with a shortage of rational scientific growth, including the sciences of governance and economics. Despite the examples of solitary thinkers from Kabir and Nanak to Gandhi, the political and economic benefits of social tolerance still seem badly understood in the subcontinent. Equally, the mechanism of holding those in power accountable for their actions or omissions in the public domain has often remained extremely backward. A mature grasp of the division between the private and public spheres may also have been absent in Asia; the distinction between private and public property is often fuzzy or opaque; the phenomena of corruption and pollution are then easily explained as mirror-images of one another: corruption is the transmutation of something valuable from the public domain into private property; pollution is the expulsion of private waste into the public domain. Each is likely to be found with the other.
7 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. H. J. Paton, Oxford
8 The contrast between “named” and “anonymous” societies occurred to the
author on the basis of the theoretical work of Professor Frank Hahn of Cambridge University, Cf. Equilibrium and Macroeconomics, MIT 1984.
9 This was emphasized by the late Cambridge philosopher Renford Bambrough, “Thought, word and deed”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol.
LIV, 1980, pp. 105-117.
10 T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph, 1926, Doubleday 1935, pp. 649, 659; pp. 46-47
11 The most may have been Attaturk’s Turkey, M. A. Jinnah’s creation of a Pakistan separate from India, and Algeria’s independence from France — all distant from the fulcrum of Arabia. In case of Pakistan, it was Hitler’s invasion of Poland that led the British, in something of a panic, to begin on September 3 1939 to treat Jinnah’s Muslim League on par with Gandhi ‘s Indian National Congress. The 1937 provincial election results had shown little support for Pakistan in the areas which today constitute that country. Cf. F. Robinson, “Origins” in Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by William E. James & Subroto Roy, Hawaii MS 1989, Sage 1992, Karachi OUP 1993.
12 Seven Pillars of Wisdom, pp. 40-41

Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India (1984)

Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India Subroto Roy

First published on May 29 1984 as Occasional Paper No. 69 of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London

Preface March 2007

A quarter century has passed since my 1982 doctoral thesis at Cambridge University under Frank Hahn, examined by Christopher Bliss and Terence Hutchison, and titled “On liberty and economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India.” I wrote what follows shortly afterwards in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Ithaca, New York, and it was published on May 29 1984 in London by the Institute of Economic Affairs as Occasional Paper No. 69, ISBN: 0-255 36169-6. The day it was published it turned out to be the subject of the main editorial of The Times, then London’s leading newspaper. (I learnt later this had been due to Peter Bauer, and also that 700 copies sold in the first month, a record for the publisher.) The Times editorial though laudatory was misleading, and I had to clarify the contents of the monograph in a letter published on June 16 1984; both documents are available elsewhere at this site.

This work was the first explicit critique of post-Mahalanobis Indian economic thought from a classical liberal perspective since B. R. Shenoy’s initial criticism decades previously. I was 29 when it was published, I am 52 now. I do not agree with everything I wrote back then and find the tone a little puffed up as young men tend to be; it was five years before publication of my main “theoretical” work Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry (Routledge: London & New York, 1989, also now republished here). My experience of life in the years since has also made me far less sanguine both about human nature and about America than I was then. But I am glad to find I am not embarrassed by what I said as a young man, indeed I am pleased I said what I did in favour of classical liberalism and against statism and totalitarianism well before it became popular to do so after the Berlin Wall fell. (In India as elsewhere, former communist apparatchiks and fellow-travellers became pseudo-liberals overnight.)

The famous November 1955 Milton Friedman memorandum is referred to herein for the first time as “unpublished” in note 1; I was to meet Milton and Rose Friedman at the Mont Pelerin Society meetings held at Cambridge later that year, where I gave them a copy of this monograph; when Milton returned to Stanford he sent to me in Blacksburg his original 1955-56 documents on Indian planning. I published the 1955 document for the first time in May 1989 during the University of Hawaii perestroika-for-India project that I was then leading, it appeared later in the 1992 volume Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by myself and WE James. The results of the Hawaii project reached Rajiv Gandhi through my hand in September 1990, as told elsewhere in “Rajiv Gandhi and the Origins of India’s 1991 Economic Reform”. The 1956 document was published in November 2006 on the front page of The Statesman, on the same day my obituary of Milton appeared in the inside pages (both are republished here too).

It is apparent from this monograph that I knew almost nothing then about Pakistan or Islam; that has changed as may be seen especially from the other book I created with WE James at the University of Hawaii, Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, as well as my more recent work on Pakistan and Islam. It is of course impossible to understand India without understanding Pakistan and vice versa.

In general, this monograph had to do with India’s microeconomics and theory of value and resource allocation while my latest work – “India’s Macroeconomics”, “Fiscal Instability”, “India’s Trade and Payments”, “Our Policy Process”, “Fallacious Finance”, “The Dream Team: A Critique” . “Against Quackery”, “Growth & Government Delusion” etc – has to do with India’s macroeconomics and monetary and fiscal theory and policy. Part of the criticism of “distorted incentives” prevailing in Indira Gandhi’s India may still be relevant to India today, while the discussion of ethnic problems, agriculture, the “public choice” factors that stymie Indian progress, misgovernance etc will almost certainly be found so.

Pricing, Planning and Politics:

A Study of Economic Distortions in India

First published on May 29 1984 as Occasional Paper No. 69 of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London

“The economic laws which operate in India are the same as in other countries of the world; the causes which lead to wealth among other nations lead to prosperity in India; the causes which impoverish other nations impoverish the people of India. Therefore, the line of enquiry which the economist will pursue in respect of India is the same which he adopts in inquiring into the wealth or poverty of other nations.” Romesh Chunder Dutt, 1906, The Economic History of India

“Satyameva Jayathe” (“Let truth be victorious”), Motto of the Indian Republic

I. INTRODUCTION

IN THE last 15 years, considerable evidence has accumulated to suggest that the most important policies pursued by successive governments of independent India have not been conducive to economic development, and have indeed gone against some of the most basic lessons that political economy has to offer. Forewarnings of the present predicament of India had come from a few economists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but their arguments were either ignored or maligned as dogmatic and motivated by`ideology’.[1] My thesis in this Occasional Paper will be that, if the basic and commonsensical lessons of political economy had been acknowledged early on in the history of the Indian Republic, we might have found today a much more prosperous economy and a much healthier body politic than is the case.

To argue this, it is first necessary to describe an economy where the pursuit of the individual good by rational agents is conducted within some set of orderly political institutions which is conducive to both civil peace and sustained mass prosperity. Accordingly, Part I of this short Paper begins by describing the broad and familiar features of what may be called a neo-classical or liberal model, and then proceeds briefly to contrast it with a model in which individual incentives and public institutions have been distorted from their efficient characterizations.

The practical question that arises is: Where in practice have independent India’s policies led most conspicuously to distorted incentives and institutions? This will be the subject of Part III. Part II places the discussion in context by briefly describing a few relevant aspects of the political history of the Indian Republic.

I have argued elsewhere that every normative proposal for action is, in principle, open to question and criticism on the logical and factual grounds upon which it is founded. Whenever two people disagree about what ought to be done, it will be found either that at least one of them has made a mistake of logic or that they are also in disagreement about the facts of the case.[2] In Part IV, a tentative manifesto for political and economic reform in India is proposed, and I hope these proposals too will be subjected to critical scrutiny on the positive grounds upon which I shall seek to establish them.

Part I: Theory

2. EFFICIENT INCENTIVES AND INSTITUTIONS

A `FACT’ may be understood as the opposite of that which could have been the case but is not. A basic fact of the study of men and society – one which was acknowledged first by Aristotle and then, very importantly, by Adam Smith, and which has been emphasized in modern times by Friedrich Hayek – is that, while we are able to study and speak of the nature of human decision and action in general terms, we do not and cannot have a knowledge of how particular actions are moved by particular causes and circumstances.[3]

We might certainly know, for instance, that every household in an economy views some horizons, wants to fulfill some aspirations, and faces some constraints. But if we were asked to specify what all these characteristics happened to be as a matter of fact at any one moment, we would certainly not be able to do so. Men are concerned almost wholly with (and are experts at) living their own lives as best they can – foraging for food, shelter and work, celebrating weddings and births, rearing children, and mourning deaths. For the most part, they are neither interested in, nor competent at judging, what others happen to be doing in their private lives. Neither benevolence nor envy extends much beyond a man’s immediate vicinity, and, certainly, neither can extend to people he does not know or come to know of in the course of a lifetime.

This fact is also acknowledged in modern microeconomics, when it is said that, for the individual agent to be able to make decisions and act upon them, it is sufficient for him to know (besides his own desires, abilities and constraints) only of the relative prices prevailing locally of the goods and skills he wishes to trade.`Efficient incentive’ defined We might then provisionally define an `efficient incentive’ as a set of relative prices and wages such that, when economic agents act upon them, three conditions are fulfilled:(i) the difference between the total demand for and the total supply of every good and skill is zero; (ii) every consumer succeeds in trading the amounts of different goods that he desires, and so obtains the highest utility he can within the constraint of his budget; (iii) every private enterprise maximizes the difference between its total revenues and total costs, that is, its profits. [4]

Rational action, however, occurs within a particular institutional context. Which action is rational and which is not will depend on what institutions there are and how well or poorly they function. As both classical liberals and Marxists argue, the neo-Walrasian tradition in modern economics – as exemplified by the Arrow-Debreu model – is practically devoid of any explicit institutional description, and so may best be regarded as a useful but grossly incomplete metaphor in the economist’s inquiry.

The institutions most relevant to economic activity are those of government. We might therefore add a fourth condition to characterize an efficient economy, namely, that government institutions work in such a way as to allocate tax revenues towards providing public goods in the amounts desired by citizens. This must be an institutional assumption implicit in the general equilibrium construction, without which it would be impossible to see the sense of that model.

The question that follows is how we are to ascertain the composition of the set of public goods to be provided. As is commonly known, this seems to confront the economist with numerous conceptual and practical problems. I propose here to circumvent all the typical difficulties of how to discover and combine individual preferences for public goods, or how to prevent free-riders, and to take a somewhat different route.

Functions of civil government: protection, public goods, education

To answer the question `What should be public goods first and foremost? I suggest we look for the kind of answer Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham or J. S. Mill might have given to a related but different question : `What should be the functions of government in a large civil society, regardless of whether or not it is constituted democratically?’ This was the relevant question before the modern era of mass democracy. And it is still interesting because, first, it probably remains the appropriate question for the many countries today which either do not have democratic governments or do not have long histories of democracy, and, secondly, because the kinds of answer given by classical authors were very similar to those we might expect from individual citizens in modern democracies as well.

The most important practical functions of civil government include defence against external aggression, the dispensing of civil and criminal justice, the protection of life, property and trade – broadly, the Rule of Law – and the pursuit of a judicious foreign policy. All are different aspects of the same broad objective of ensuring the survival of the community and the security of individual life.

Yet no pretext has been more common than that an imminent danger to the security of the community requires the government to take despotic measures. The guarantee by a civil government of the freedom of inquiry, discourse, criticism, and historical research should take precedence, therefore, even over ensuring security and survival, for it is probably the only final check there can be on whether what a government says is or is not in fact the case. Where this freedom is forcibly denied, or where it exists but people are too apathetic, ignorant or busy with their daily lives to exercise it, public life soon becomes self deceptive and absurd, with propaganda taking the place of discourse, and pretensions and appearances diverging more and more from attainments and reality. Wherever the questions `What is true?’ or `What is the case?’ are not asked frequently enough, there will be fewer and fewer correct answers as to what the case happens to be.[5]
After collective and individual security, the functions of government include the building of dams, embankments, bridges and canals, the provision of roads and fresh water, and so on – activities which, as Adam Smith put it, “. . . though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it, therefore, cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.” [6]

Each may be more or less a “pure” public good in the modern sense :“that each individual’s consumption of such a good leads to no subtraction from any other individual’s consumption of that good”.[7]

Such a list could be extended to include activities as diverse as: the prevention of soil erosion; the public finance of school education, and’ of measures of basic public health such as vaccinations against contagious diseases; the issuing of currency; sewage disposal; population censuses; the standardization of weights and measures; and so on. It is unnecessary to be more specific here since some people will find even this list controversial. Dogmatists will deny the need for free inquiry; pacifists will dispute that defence is a public good; communists will protest against the public protection of private property; `anarcho-capitalists’ will contest the public dispensation of justice; and so on. To these critics, I would offer merely the following short and incomplete reply.

First, a sound argument can be made that what functions civil government should have can be ascertained, without prejudice, by reasonable citizens, though which particular functions these are may well vary according to circumstances. Secondly, if we could spend time in thoughtful and leisured conversation with every citizen of a large community, it might be predicted – as a matter of cold, empirical fact – that practically everyone would agree with the suggestion that the first destinations of tax revenues should indeed be activities like defence, civil protection and the Rule of Law, the provision of roads, and so on. If such a prediction is correct, my thesis is plainly much more democratic than it might appear to modern economists, though I shall later claim that an objective defence of democratic institutions can be made on quite different grounds as well.

If there is a clear family resemblance between classical liberal authors – from Smith and Mill through to Hayek, Robbins, Friedman, Buchanan, Bauer and many others – it has to do, not so much with the denunciation of government activity in the market-place, as with the recognition of the existence of certain duties of government outside it, the fulfillment of which are indispensable to civil life, let alone the pursuit of economic prosperity. Their protest is at the high opportunity cost of the alternatives foregone.

This raises the question of how we might tell whether government is working well or badly in a particular country at a particular time, or, generally, how we might tell whether different public goods are provided in too small or large amounts. For present purposes it will again be sufficient to suggest a very rough and common sense way of proceeding: let us look first, and think second.

For example, the Iran-Iraq war has clearly been a perfect public bad as far as the ordinary citizenry in either country are concerned. Similarly, if there happen to be millions of cases queuing outside the courts waiting to be heard, or if crime is rampant and police protection ineffective, that may constitute prima facie evidence that too few public resources have been devoted to civil order and justice. Or, if heavy rainfall annually causes landslides in the hills and floods in the plains, devastating crops and leaving innumerable citizens destitute, that also might prompt us to ask whether sufficient public resources have gone towards precautions against such havoc. And so on.[8]

Which goods happen to be public goods depends on the circumstances and the level of government being discussed. For similar circumstances and levels, similar goods will most likely be public goods in different countries. The state ordinarily consists not only of the national government but also of several provincial governments and a myriad of local governments. In particular, a premise of the liberal state would be that public goods should in fact be provided by various levels of government, financed through taxes paid respectively at those levels. The citizen is a taxpayer at a variety of levels, and accordingly public goods are due to be provided at a variety of levels. Just as the national government may not usurp the power to tax for, or spend money on, a public good which is best provided by a provincial government to the citizens of a province, so a provincial government may not tax for, or spend on, a public good best provided by a local government to the citizens of a locality.

The broad principle involved has two aspects: first, a recognition that knowledge of particular circumstances – and hence the ability to act – is infinitesimally dispersed within a population; and, secondly, as direct and visible a matching as possible of the benefits a citizen receives from a particular public good with the taxes he pays towards it, thereby perhaps reducing his incentive to be a free rider on the contributions of others.8Uncertainty and ignoranceProvisionally, therefore, efficient incentives may be thought to consist of a set of market-clearing relative prices and wages, occurring within an institutional context in which the basic and indispensable functions of government have been adequately performed at a variety of appropriate levels.

Such a definition would still be seriously incomplete in one major respect. For we must now recognise: (i) that history is unique and irretrievable, that the present consists only of the fleeting moment, and that the future, by its very nature, cannot be fully known; (ii) that such a thing as human freedom exists; and (iii) that, as a consequence, uncertainty and ignorance are ubiquitous.

Some of the uncertainty derives from the unfolding of natural events (like the rains) over which man has little or no control. The rest derives from the fact that the individual is a free agent who is affected by the actions of others but who cannot predict those actions completely because they too are free agents like himself. Game theory would have had no appeal for the economist if the existence of human freedom had not been a fact. It is this which makes it impossible to read everything in another person’s mind and thus makes it impossible to predict everything he might do. The lasting contribution of Keynesian economics could be its emphasis that such uncertainty and ignorance are important to the economist’s inquiry.

Mathematical economists have been saying for several years that what is required if we are to be realistic are models which reflect the sequential character of actual decision-making and account for the past being immutable and the future uncertain.[9] However, they have proceeded to write even more complex mathematics than we already have – disregarding Aristotle’s advice not to seek more precision from the subject of an inquiry than it may be capable of yielding.[10] My question is the more mundane one of what becomes of the classical liberals’ concept of efficient incentives and institutions in a dynamic world. I shall answer it too in a pedestrian way.

The single overwhelming reason why uncertainty and ignorance are relevant to the economist’s descriptions is that they make real the possibility of mistakes by economic agents. To extend the previous discussion to a dynamic context, what we can do is to ask which institutions are most likely to reduce or mitigate the social consequences of mistaken decisions, whether made by private agents or by those in public office. And it is here that the classical liberals advocate two important institutional features: competition and the decentralisation of decision-making.

The major value of democratic institutions over authoritarian ones is that they encourage these two principles to be put into effect. Because, in a large economy, particular knowledge is infinitesimally dispersed, it may be better for adjustments to a multitude of variables to be made continuously in response to changing circumstances by a vast number of small economic agents, rather than for adjustments to a few variables to be made at political intervals by a small group of very powerful agents. The concentration of power to make major decisions among a few fallible men is a much more ominous prospect than the distribution of power in small amounts among a large number of fallible men. It is much more dangerous for a monopoly of ideas to be claimed about where the political good of a country lies than for there to be free and open competition among such ideas at the bar of reason.

D. H. Robertson put it well when he warned “that all the eggs should not be in the same basket – that in this highly uncertain world the fortunes of a whole trade, or a whole area, should not depend on the foresight and judgement of a single centre of decision”.[11] The presumption in favour of democratic institutions is that they reduce the potential damage from wrong political decisions damage which can be rationally expected in an uncertain world.[12] Elections, in the liberal understanding, are then not so much the means to promote the interests of one’s confederates as to remove from office without bloodshed rulers who fail to do what they are entrusted with, and to replace them by those from whom better is expected. Economic efficiency in an uncertain worldThe economic notion of efficient incentives is also modified by uncertainty and ignorance. In the theory, a set of prices is market clearing only relative to unchanging preferences, resources and technologies. In a dynamic world, however, demand and supply functions are themselves changing and the notion of efficient incentives must accordingly be adapted to one in which relative prices move in the direction of the excess demand: that is, if the parameters change so that the total demand for a good or skill comes to exceed the total supply, we should want to see its relative price rising (and, conversely, if total supply exceeds total demand, we should want to see its relative price falling). During such a process of adjustment, many people may suffer very considerable hardship – something which reasonable Keynesians do well to emphasise.

If changing preferences, resources or technologies cause the demand for a product to diminish, we should want to see the firms which manufacture it either entering different markets, or improving its quality by technological innovation, or lowering prices. Similarly, we should want to see workers in these firms whether blue- or white-collar – who have skills specific to a product whose price is falling either increasing their productivity or retraining themselves in different skills more specific to the manufacture of goods whose prices are rising. Numerous enterprises can go bankrupt, and numerous workers can find themselves unable to sell the skills they possess, if they fail to adapt quickly enough to changing market conditions. The more specialised the product and the more specific the skill, the more hardship there may be. There could well be orthodox Keynesian consequences whereby laid-off workers reduce their consumption expenditures and firms on the verge of bankruptcy reduce their investment expenditures, leading to lower incomes for others, and thus to lower expenditures by them too, and so on. An anti-Keynesian who denied the existence of such hardship would be closed to the facts. He might also not be doing his own theory justice: for it is not unreasonable to argue that, while adjustments are inevitable in an uncertain world, the classical response of prices moving in the direction of excess demand probably minimises the hardship in the transition from one equilibrium to the next.

In a dynamic world, therefore, in which supply and demand functions are shifting continually and unpredictably (though probably incrementally, and not drastically), efficient incentives are better thought of as relative prices which are not stagnant but which are moving – and moving quickly – in the direction of excess demand. It should, in general, be continually profitable at the margin for firms and workers to be innovating technologically and improving productivity. As everyone knows from experience, the principle goad to such activity is fair and free competition. If a job or contract is sought badly enough, and if better quality or lower price are known to be the only criteria of selection, the expected outcome is a differentiation and improvement by competitors of the individual quality or price of what is sold.

In broad summary, the liberal understanding of how material well-being can be improved rests on the assumption that the basic functions of civil government are performed satisfactorily. Government provides the backdrop of civil order and protection necessary for private citizens freely and fairly to conduct their own lives and their transactions with one another. It is a theory which acknowledges a fundamental fact in the study of society, namely, that the individual household : (a) most commonly defines its own horizons; (b) knows the particular opportunities available to it to produce, trade and consume; (c) recognises the particular constraints which prevent it from doing all that it may desire; and(d) perceives how these opportunities and constraints may be changing. Where, as in the liberal picture, there are large numbers of producers and consumers, sellers and buyers – each family acting more or less independently – the efforts of one family do not directly make for other than its own success, while at the same time the repercussions of its mistakes are felt by itself and do not reverberate throughout the whole community. Such has been, as I see it, the American secret to mass prosperity.

3. DISTORTED INCENTIVES AND INSTITUTIONS

DISTORTED INCENTIVES are the logical opposites of efficient ones. Relative prices and wages send distorted signals to individual economic agents when they do not move in the direction of excess demand, so that there is no general tendency for markets to clear. A long-run or endemic excess demand for a good reveals itself in rationing, queueing and black markets. The price at which trade nominally takes place is too low and shows no tendency to move upwards.

Conversely, in a product market, a long-run or endemic excess supply reveals itself in surpluses and spoilages. In a labour market, it reveals itself, on the one hand, in armies of tenured employees who have no incentive to improve productivity, and, on the other hand, in lines of involuntarily or disguised unemployed who cannot sell all the skill they possess and have to settle for selling their less-specialised ones. The price at which trade nominally takes place is too high and shows no tendency to move downwards. In practical terms, firms do not find it profitable to be continually entering new markets or improving quality or enhancing technology or reducing price in order to attract and retain customers. Farmers in particular may face output and input prices which make technological improvements unprofitable.

In politics, distorted incentives are ones which make it profitable for politicians and government officials to be corruptible and taxpayers to be evasive. Because corruption is not penalised and honesty not rewarded, the pursuit of private interest may make it rational to be corrupt and irrational to be honest.

Individualism and statism

A neo-classical economic model like the one outlined above presupposes among citizens a political attitude of individualism. This may be defined as a condition in which citizens have the idea (a) that it is the individual household itself which is principally responsible for improvements in its own well-being, and (b) that government merely “is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection and security of the people …”, and that government officials are merely the citizens’ “trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.” [13]

Its logical opposite may be called an attitude of statism – defined as prevailing when various classes of citizens have the idea that it is government which is and should be principally responsible for improvements in individual and public well-being. A good sense in which `power’ can be defined in political and economic contexts is as “the capacity to restrict the choices open to other men”.[14] An attitude of statism entails a willingness, or at least an acquiescence, on the part of citizens to relinquish to those in government, with little or no questioning, the power to make decisions which may affect their lives intimately. At the same time, responsibility for relapses or lack of progress in individual well-being is also thought to be the consequence of governmental and not private decision-making. Whereas individualism is a self-assertive attitude, statism is a self abnegating one. For those in government to have a statist mentality is the same as saying they are paternalistic, that is, making the presumption that the citizen is often incapable of judging for himself what is for his own good.

The suggestion that government should have the principal responsibility for improvements in individual and collective economic well-being – in the sense that the collectivity can and should satisfy the material aspirations of every individual – appears straightaway to be self contradictory. An individual can have enough difficulty trying to articulate his own horizons, aspirations and constraints, let alone trying to do the same for others. For a politician (or economist) to claim (or imply) not only that he knows(or can know) the relevant characteristics of everyone at once, but also that he knows how to ameliorate the condition of humanity at a stroke, as if by magic, would have been considered ridiculous in more candid times than ours. If we understand `collective effort’ to mean the sum of individual labours engaged in a common pursuit or endeavour, then for the collectivity to try materially to satisfy every individual would amount to imposing a duty on everyone to try materially to satisfy everyone else – an absurd state of affairs, flying in the face of the fact that most people most of the time do not wish to, or cannot, cope with much else except their private lives.

Exhorting government directly to improve the material wellbeing of `the people’ cannot mean what it seems to because it cannot refer to literally all the people but only to some of them perhaps only a majority, or only the well-organised. That the state is endogenous to the polity implies that no government has resources of its own out of which to disburse the amounts a politician may promise or an economist recommend. To fulfil new promises, given an initial condition of budgetary equilibrium, a government is only able either to print more fiat money or to tax the resources of individual citizens more heavily. Leaving aside the first alternative, fulfillment of the exhortation amounts to using public institutions to transfer resources from some people in order to keep promises made to others.

When the attitude spreads that, in politics, one man’s gain is another man’s loss, and where political control is to be had by winning majorities in elections, the citizen comes to face a perverse incentive to try to coalesce with more and more others in the hope of capturing the public revenues in his favour – instead of thinking critically about the nature of the political good as the institutions of democracy require him to. Political power becomes less dispersed, and the size of the polity diminishes in the sense that it comes to have fewer and fewer constituent agents, each of which is a larger and larger coalition of like-minded confederates intent on acquiring control for its own benefit.

Perhaps the worst consequence of a general attitude of statism, however, is that the basic, commonsensical functions of government are obscured, ignored, and neglected. Instead of requiring politicians and government officials to fulfill these functions, a citizenry allows its public agents to become brokers and entrepreneurs – trading not only in the products of government controlled industries but also in an array of positions of power and privilege, all in the name of directing a common endeavour to help the poor. The state places itself at every profitable opportunity between private citizens who might otherwise have conducted their transactions themselves perfectly well. The result is that governments do, or try to do, what either does not need to be done or ought not to be done by government, while they neglect that which only governments can do and which therefore they ought to be doing.

Part II: History

4. INDIVIDUALISM AND STATISM IN INDIA

AN ATTITUDE of statism has probably been present in India since Mughal times at least. If anything, it spread during the British period since the raison d’être of British rule in India would have vanished without paternalism (as in the course of time it did) and the existence of British rule was the raison d’être of the nationalist movement. Paternalism towards India was espoused even by those Englishmen known for their liberal views at home. Thomas Macaulay, for instance, declared to the House of Commons in 1833: “It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future stage, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.”[15]

Less than a hundred years later, in 1930-31, the Indian National Congress – to the considerable chagrin of the British Government – resolved to bring about an independent India in which every citizen would have the right to free speech, to profess and practise his faith freely, and to move and practise his profession anywhere in the country. There would be universal adult suffrage and no-one would be unjustly deprived of his liberty or have his property entered, sequestered or confiscated. In particular, all citizens in the future republic would be `equal before the law, irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex’, and no disability would attach`to any citizen by reason of his or her religion, caste, creed or sex, in regard to public employment, office of power or honour, and in the exercise of any trade or calling’.[16]

These resolutions were made in the thick of the battle for independence, and underscored the fundamental argument of the nationalists that, in spite of the infinitely diverse characteristics of the inhabitants of the sub-continent, a free and secular India was possible in which all would be ruled by a common law. That argument had been in contradistinction to the frequent taunt from British Conservatives that an
India without Britain would disintegrate in internecine bloodshed, and also to the later `two nations’ theory of the Muslim League which led eventually to the creation of
Pakistan. With the departure of the British and the Pakistanis, in 1950 the Constitution of the first Indian Republic was finally able to bring into force the idea of secularity which had inspired the nationalist cause. Thus, among the Fundamental Rights established by the Constitution, Article 14 provided that the state `shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of
India’. Articles 15.1, 15.2, 16.1, 16.2 and 29.2 went on to prohibit discrimination on the arbitrary grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth in matters of public employment or access to publicly-funded education.

The century between Macaulay and the resolutions for independence was by far the most important to the country’s intellectual history since earliest antiquity. While it took its turbulent course, long severed since the time of the early Greeks – came to be re-established. The common interest and the common contribution became one of admiring and learning from Europe and from India’s own past what there was to be admired and learnt, whilst forsaking and resisting what was self contradictory or base. The maxim for a century might have been : learn the good and let the evil be buried in history. As Tagore wrote :`The lamp of Europe is still burning; we must rekindle our old and extinguished lamp at that flame and start again on the road of time. We must fulfill the purpose of our connection with the English. This is the task we face in the building up of a great India.’[17]

The ideal aspired to was swaraj, or `self rule’. It literally meant not only a government of India by Indians accountable to Indians, but also the governance of the individual by himself. Not only was the country to be sovereign vis-à-vis other states; its individual citizens were to be free vis-à-vis each other and equal before its laws. Swaraj meant, in other words, a condition of political autonomy where the citizen constrained his own free actions so as not to harm others, and where the Rule of Law would protect him when he acted autonomously and resist him when he did not. Given a backdrop of civil order, the infinite number of ways to individual happiness and prosperity in an infinitely diverse sub-continent could then be pursued. Statism all pervading

An attitude of statism, however, has pervaded all public discourse in independent India, and has been reinforced by the social and economic policies pursued by successive governments.

In the first place, a ghost from earlier controversies with the British was to remain in the 1950 Constitution. Immediately after the provisions establishing equality before the law and equality of opportunity in public employment and publicly funded education, the following caveats appeared. Article 15.3 said that the state could make “any special provision for women and children”; and then, of more significance, Article 15.4 allowed the state to make “any special provisions for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes”.

Article 16.4 allowed it to make “any provision for the reservation of appointments or posts in favour of any backward class of citizens which, in the opinion of the State, is not adequately represented in the services under the State.” Lastly, Article 335 said that “the claims of the members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes shall be taken into consideration, consistently with the maintenance of efficiency of administration, in the making of appointments to services and posts [under the State] . . .” Who was to decide who was `backward’ and who was not, or which group was to be `scheduled’ and which not? Article 341.1 said that `The President may . . . by public notification specify the castes, races or tribes which shall for the purposes of this Constitution be deemed to be Scheduled Castes’, and Article 341.2 added that `Parliament may by law include in or exclude from the list of Scheduled Castes specified under 341.1 any caste, race or tribe or part of or any group within any caste, race or tribe . . .’ Articles 342.1 and 342.2 said the same for the Scheduled Tribes.

Subsequently, two Presidential Orders named no fewer than 1,181 different groups in the country as `Scheduled Castes’ and more than 583 other groups as `Scheduled Tribes’. Roughly a sixth of the population thus came to be termed `backward’ by executive decree and were segregated by statute from the rest of the citizenry.

The direct precursor of these provisions was the `Communal Award’ by the British Government in 1932, who had taken it to be their duty “to safeguard what we believe to be the right of Depressed Classes to a fair proportion in Legislatures ”.[18] (`Depressed Classes’ was the official name for those misleadingly called `untouchables’ outside the Hindu fold.)

The complex customs of the Hindus call for endogamy and commensality among members of the same caste, thus making anyone outside a caste somewhat `untouchable’ for its members. In marriage and dining habits, many orthodox Hindus would hold foreigners, Muslims, and even Hindus of other castes at the same distance as those formally classified as `Depressed Classes’. Indeed, non-Hindus in India -including the British often maintained social protocols that were equally as strict.

No serious Indian historian would doubt that members of the `Depressed Classes’ had been oppressed and had suffered countless indignities throughout Indian history at the hands of so-called`caste Hindus’. At various times, persecution had led to mass conversions to the more secular faiths. But the ancient wrongs of the Hindu practices had to do not so much with the lack of physical contact in personal life which the word `untouchability’ connotes for Indian society has always consisted of a myriad of voluntarily segregated groups – but rather with open and obvious inequities such as the denial of equal access to temples, public wells, baths and schools.

Gandhi, who by his personal example probably did more for the cause of the `Depressed Classes’ than anyone else, protested against the Communal Award with one of his most famous fasts. Privately, he suspected that `…the communal question [was] being brought deliberately to the forefront and magnified by the government because they did not intend to part with power’.[19] Publicly, he argued that the pernicious consequence would be a further exacerbation of the apartheid under which the `Depressed Classes’ had suffered for so long, when the important thing was for their right to be within the Hindu fold to be acknowledged by `caste’ Hindus.[20]

The Fundamental Rights in the 1950 Constitution establishing the equality of all citizens before the law evidently had the 1930-31 resolutions as their precursors; while Article17 – which specifically declared `untouchability’ to be `abolished’ and its practice `forbidden’ – was part of Gandhi’s legacy, placing those who had for centuries been denigrated and persecuted on exactly the same footing in the eyes of the laws of the Republic as their denigrators and persecutors. The subsequent clauses authorizing the state to discriminate in favour of `Scheduled Castes’, and allowing it to define by executive decree who was to be so called, were evidently the remnants of the Communal Award of 1932. Discrimination by the state was initially to last for a period of 10 years only. It has, however, been extended three times -for another 10 years on each occasion – and so continues to the present day. We shall examine a few of the consequences in Part III.‘A socialistic pattern of society’As for economic policy, while the original 1950 Constitution had ambiguously stated certain ends – such as that government was `to strive to promote the welfare of the people’ – it made no mention at all of any specific economic institutions, statist or liberal, which the new Republic was to nurture as means towards those ends. In spite of this omission, successive governments have explicitly avowed their espousal of` socialism’ as the means to the good and prosperous society.

For instance, a “socialistic pattern of society where the principal means of production are under social ownership or control” was declared to be a national objective at the ruling Congress Party’s convention in 1955; and, in 1976, the notorious 42nd Amendment purported to change the very description of the country in the preamble to the original Constitution from the sober `Sovereign, Democratic Republic’ to the awkward `Sovereign, Secular, Socialist Democratic Republic’. It is an open and important issue of constitutional practice whether a temporary majoritarian government can change the legal description of a republic so fundamentally that it necessarily begs every question now and in the future about the efficacy of socialism as the route to mass prosperity.[21]

Even so, `socialism’ is a vague and equivocal word, meaning different things to different people. Briefly, what happened in the Indian context seems to have been that the Nationalist Government explicitly took upon itself the responsibility of becoming the prime mover of the economic growth of the country. This was in addition to its other fundamental and urgent political responsibilities at the time, namely, to establish peace and civil order in the aftermath of a bloody partition, re-settle several million destitute refugees, integrate into the Republic the numerous principalities and fiefdoms run by the princes and potentates, re-draw provincial boundaries on a sensible linguistic criterion, and generally educate people about their rights and responsibilities as individual citizens in a new and democratic republic.

In a poor country which had just ended a long period of alien rule, it was understandable, if in advisable, that a nationalist government led by cultured, educated men among unlettered masses should take upon itself the responsibility for economic growth. Part of the nationalists’ critique of British rule had been precisely that it had worked to the considerable detriment of the Indian economy. And, certainly, whatever the exact calculation of the benefits and costs of the British presence in India, while there had been obvious benefits, there had also been obvious costs such as iniquitous taxes and overt racial discrimination in employment. [22]Thus, when the nationalists practically swore themselves to provide better government for the economy, it was certainly a very praiseworthy aim; 1947 would indeed be the year of India’s `tryst with destiny’.

Better government not necessarily more government
What the Nehru Government came to believe, however, was that better government for the economy necessarily meant more government activity in the economy. A similar nationalist government led by cultured, educated men among an unlettered public had chosen differently in 1776 at Philadelphia, but the times and circumstances were very different. The Indian nationalists, and most especially Prime Minister Nehru, had just witnessed what they took to be, on the one hand, the collapse of the market economy in the Great Depression and, on the other, the rapid growth to greatness of Bolshevik Russia. In his presidential address to the Congress in 1936, for instance, Nehru spoke of the immediate past in these terms: `Everywhere conflicts grew, and a great depression overwhelmed the world and there was a progressive deterioration, everywhere except in the wide flung Soviet territories of the USSR, where, in marked contrast with the rest of the world, astonishing progress was made in every direction . . .’ Thus, it seemed to him, there was`. . . no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation, and the subjection of the Indian people except through Socialism”. Socialism meant, inter alia, ` the ending of private property, except in a restricted sense, and ttte repla emenr of the ,private profit system by a higher ideal of co-operative service. It means ultimately a change in our instincts and habits and desires. In short, it means a new civilisation, radically different from the present capitalist order. Some glimpse we can have of this new civilisation in the territories of the USSR. Much has happened there which has pained me greatly and with which I disagree, but I look upon that great and fascinating unfolding of anew order and a new civilisation as the most promising feature of our dismal age. If the future is full of hope it is largely because of Soviet Russia and what it has done, and I am convinced that, if some world catastrophe does not intervene, this new civilisation will spread to other lands and put an end to the wars and conflicts on which capitalism feeds’.[23]
Equally as certain and deep as his admiration for the liberal values of the West was Nehru’s evident misunderstanding of the causes and consequences of Stalin’s Russia. The political and economic history of India in the past 30 years cannot be understood without regard to her most powerful leader’s ambivalence about the nature of the political and economic good.
By the mid-1950s, many of India’s other prominent statesmen had died or retired from public life, and there was hardly a public figure of’ stature left (with the exception of Rajagopalachari) to challenge Nehru’s socialist vision of the country’s future. Moreover, men who were ostensibly `expert economists’, but whose writings revealed no knowledge of prices or markets or the concept of feasibility, were encouraged to endorse and embellish this vision, which they did without hesitation in the secure knowledge that they were shielded from critics by the intellectual patronage of a charismatic and elected leader.[24]
The choice between alternative models of mass economic prosperity must have seemed quite clear at the time. The cold fact did not, however, vanish that one of the oldest objective lessons of political economy has been that more government is not necessarily better government. It is to the consequences of ignoring this lesson that we now turn.

Part III: Practice
ECONOMIC POLICIES IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

INDIA TODAY is a bizarre maze of distorted incentives, which I (and no doubt others) have found very difficult to untangle and understand. I shall, however, list and discuss the most significant of them as methodically as I can.

(i) Industry
The Indian Government has declared a large `public sector’ in commerce and industry to be a national objective. Towards this end, it has therefore progressively acquired numerous enterprises, large and small, so that it now has either a full monopoly in an industry or is one of a few oligopolists. These industries range from banking, insurance, railways, airlines, cement, steel, chemicals, fertilisers and ship-building to making beer, soft drinks, telephones and wrist-watches. There are no explicit penalties for indefinite loss-making; indeed, bankrupt private enterprises have often been nationalised to serve politicians’ ends. And, certainly, there has been no general rule of marginal-cost pricing. In public utilities, like electricity generation and distribution or city buses and trams, prices appear to be well below marginal cost, leading to severe rationing and queueing. Sudden stoppages of electricity for hours at a time and monumental congestion on buses and trams have become endemic facts of life for millions of urban Indians.
At the same time, private industry in India has been made to face labyrinthine controls. The government has continually exhorted private firms to work in the `national interest’ – which means accepting the constraints of centralised planning. It has left no doubt that, while there is a `role’ for the min the growth of the economy, they exist at the sufferance of government and had better realise it, otherwise the dark forces of revolution which have so far been kept at bay will inevitably sweep them away altogether, as happened in Russia and China.
The constraints imposed on the operation of a private business are legion, and would make a businessman from the West or Far East reach for a psychiatrist or a pistol. An entrepreneur may not enter numerous industries without government approval of the `technical’ viability of his project; once it is approved, he cannot find credit except from a government bank; and he cannot buy raw materials and machinery of the highest quality at the lowest price since, if they are produced in India, he will be denied a licence to import better and/or cheaper foreign substitutes. The onus is on him to satisfy the government that no production occurs within India of the input he requires; only then will an import licence conceivably be granted, subject to periodic review by the government. He may be compelled to export a specified proportion of his output as a condition for the renewal of his import licence, which therefore places him at a disadvantage with foreign buyers who, of course, are aware of this restraint. He may be unable to compete internationally because the rupee is priced above its likely equilibrium and some of the inputs he uses are high-cost, low-quality domestic substitutes. As a result, he may be compelled practically to dump his output abroad at whatever price it will fetch.

The entrepreneur’s factory may be subject to random cuts in electricity for hours at a time. He may require government approval before he can increase his fixed capacity, modernise his plant, change a product-line, or even change the number of labour shifts. He may face minimum-wage and stringent unfair dismissal laws on the one hand, and price controls on the other. If he fails to meet credit obligations to the nationalised banks, he may be penalised by the appointment of one or more government directors to his board – a form of `creeping’ nationalisation. Further, he may be subjected to a constant threat of full nationalisation as and when the government decides that his industry should be in the public sector in the interests of national planning.[25]

The consequence of all these controls has been a monumental distortion of incentives away from encouraging private firms to try to attract customers by improving technology and quality or reducing prices towards encouraging them to concentrate on `rent-seeking’, in the term made familiar by Professors Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan.[26]

As Anne Krueger says in her excellent study of the automobile ancillary industry, the very notion of entrepreneurial efficiency changes in such circumstances: `Under conditions in India, the most important problem confronting entrepreneurs is that of assuring that production will continue. The combined effects of import licensing and investment licensing give virtually every firm a monopoly or quasi-monopoly position. The entrepreneur who is most successful in getting licences of greater value and/or in getting licences more quickly than his fellow producers will have higher profits. `The producer who does not compete successfully for licences cannot produce at all, no matter how skilled he is in achieving engineering efficiency, unless he enters the “open market” and pays a premium to the successful licence applicant for some materials . . . Successful entrepreneurs are therefore those who are best at obtaining the greatest number of licences most expeditiously . . .’ [27]

Moreover, firms which are low-cost and efficient (in the free market sense) and which are successful at rent-seeking as high-cost, inefficient firms may still not be able to compete the latter out of business because government will not usually allow a particular firm to expand – regardless of its efficiency – if there is excess capacity in the industry of which it is a part. High-cost firms can thereby rationally count on staying in business simply by maintaining significant excess capacity.

(ii) Foreign trade
The Government of India has always claimed that foreign exchange is a `scarce’ resource which must be rationed by fiat in the national interest. The total foreign-exchange revenue (at an exchange rate which was fixed until 1971 and has since been on a managed `peg’) has been allocated in the following order of priorities: first, to meet foreign debt repayments and government expenditures in the conduct of foreign policy, such as the maintenance of embassies (G1); secondly, to pay for imports of defence equipment, food, fertilisers and petroleum (G2); thirdly, to meet ear-marked payments for the imported inputs of public sector industries so that they may achieve projected production targets (G3); fourthly, to pay for the imported inputs of private sector firms which are
successful in obtaining import licences (P1); and, lastly, to satisfy the demands of the public at large for purposes such as travel abroad (P2).
Foreign exchange is `scarce’ in India, or elsewhere, in precisely the same sense that rice or petrol or cloth is scarce. Just as there exists some positive price for rice, petrol or cloth which, at any moment, will match total supplies with total demands, so there exists some positive price for rupees relative to dollars which, at any moment, will match the transaction and asset demands of Indians for dollars with the transaction and asset demands of foreigners for rupees. Underlying that market-clearing price would be (a) the demands of Indians for foreign goods whose f.o.b. prices were lower than those of domestic substitutes, and, similarly, the demands of foreigners for goods in which India has had a comparative advantage; and (b) the expectations of Indians and foreigners about the future purchasing power of the rupee relative to the dollar, using as a proxy, say, the difference between interest rates in India and abroad.

A free market in foreign exchange would first have encouraged India’s traditional exports, like jute manufactures and textiles, and then (if the positive theory of international trade is broadly correct)progressively encouraged the export of other non traditional goods which used India’s relatively inexpensive labour relatively intensively and thereby enabled Indian entrepreneurs to compete successfully in foreign markets. At the same time, capital flows into and out of India would have given the monetary authorities an incentive to keep domestic interest rates in line with the real opportunity cost of forgoing consumption in favour of savings.

Thus, the case against a free market in foreign exchange has always been, to say the least, far from obvious.[28] But even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the presumed superiority of rationing, the elementary theory of optimisation which underlies the so-called theory of `planning’ dictates that the government should allocate dollars between alternative uses such that the marginal dollar yields the same increase in social utility in any use. The Indian Government, however, appears to have allocated foreign exchange simply on the basis of giving a higher priority to its own foreign expenditures (categories Gl, G2 and G3) than to private foreign expenditures (categories Pl and P2). That is to say, regardless of how much social utility might have been derived from a particular increase in private-sector imports, it would not be considered until after the government had met all its own expenditures abroad.[29]
Jagdish Bhagwati and T. N. Srinivasan put it as follows : `The allocation of foreign exchange among alternative claimants and users in a direct control system . . .would presumably be with reference to a well-defined set of principles and criteria based on a system of priorities. In point of fact, however, there seem to have been few such criteria, if any, followed in practice.’[30]
With respect to imported inputs for private- and public-sector industries, a rule of `essentiality’ (that is, the input must be technically `essential’ to the production process) and a rule of `indigenous availability’(that is, there must be absolutely no domestically-produced physical substitutes, regardless of cost and quality)seem to have been followed. But, as Bhagwati and Srinivasan report, `. . . the sheer weight of numbers made any meaningful listing of priorities extremely difficult. The problem was Orwellian: all industries had priority and how was each sponsoring authority to argue that some industries had more priority than others? It is not surprising, therefore, that the agencies involved in determining allocations by industry fell back on vague notions of “fairness”, implying pro rata allocations with reference to capacity installed or employment, or shares defined by past import allocations or similar rules of thumb’. [31]

Clearly, in abjuring the free market and claiming a monopoly over foreign-exchange transactions, government planners have accepted certain premises as unquestionable: (a) that government sponsored industrialisation is the best means to mass prosperity; (b) that a policy of indefinite import-substitution is the best means to industrialisation; and (c) that such a policy requires all foreign expenditures by government to take precedence over all private foreign expenditures. The trade and foreign-exchange policies pursued cannot be understood except by reference to domestic economic policies and, in particular, to the view held about the proper functions of government in and out of the market-place.

In addition to a plethora of controls, tariffs and outright bans on imports, there have been erratic policies, subsidising the export of `new’, non-traditional manufactures like engineering goods, and taxing- and even banning – the export of goods in which India has traditionally enjoyed a comparative advantage.[32]

Moreover, the rupee has been continuously over-valued. From 1949 to 1959, the official exchange rate of Rs. 4.76 to the US dollar was, on average, 12..3 percent above the black-market rate, a figure which rose to 61 per cent between 1960 and 1965. From 1966 to 1970, the devalued official rate of Rs. 7.50 to the dollar was above the black-market rate by an average of 47.6 per cent, while from 1971 onwards the managed-peg rate has been above the black-market rate by an average of 24.3 per cent.[33]

Simple economics suggests that a free-market equilibrium rate would be somewhere between the black-market and official rates. An official exchange rate for the rupee fixed above that warranted by underlying relative demands for Indian and foreign goods, as well as by relative degrees of confidence in the rupee and the dollar, subsidises imports at the expense of exports. By discriminating in favour of its own foreign expenditures and against those of the private sector, the government has been the principal beneficiary of an over-valued rupee. If capital-intensive goods are the main imports and labour-intensive ones the main exports, an over-valued rupee further distorts incentives so as to favour the use of capital-intensive production processes over labour intensive ones – in a country with a demonstrable abundance of relatively inexpensive labour!
With an eye to India, Krueger has argued the general issue in these terms:`Subsidies can make any industry an export industry, even one that would not produce at all in an efficient allocation. Similarly, taxes can be levied on an industry that has comparative advantage which will penalize it enough to render domestic production entirely unprofitable. When taxes and subsidies are used, therefore, it is possible not only to distort the structure of production, but to distort it so much that the “wrong” commodities are exported.”[34]

The Indian Government’s planners have had the idea of forcibly effecting a reversal in the comparative advantage of the country, as if by magic overnight. The hope might have been that a forced pace of industrialisation would somehow allow economies of scale to be reaped and thus soon make Indian industrial goods competitive enough in international markets to be the country’s principal source of foreign exchange, displacing traditional manufactures like jute and textiles. In practice, however, as the evidence given by Bela Balassa
and other economists demonstrates, such a policy has not succeeded to date and is most unlikely ever to do so.
India’s import bill has risen continuously, most drastically after the 1973-74 quadrupling of petroleum prices; non-traditional manufactures have hardly been able to compete successfully in foreign markets; and the traditional exports of jute and textiles have suffered very severe setbacks. Balassa contrasts the consequences of the freer, outward-looking trade policies of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan with those of the inward-looking, controlled regime of India as part of a study of 11 countries(including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Israel and Yugoslavia) which, along with Hong Kong, account for most of the manufactured exports of developing countries. India’s share of the total manufactured exports of these countries has fallen steadily from 65.4 per cent in 1953 to 50.7 per cent in1960, to 31.2 per
cent in 1966 and to a mere 10.3 per cent in 1973. The proportion exported of India’s total manufactured output fell from 9.7 per cent in 1960 to 9.4 per cent in 1966 and to 8.6 per cent in1973. In contrast, during the same two periods, the proportion of manufactured output exported rose from1 to 14 to 41 per cent in South Korea, from 11 to 20 to 43 per cent in Singapore, and from 9 to 19 to 50 per cent in Taiwan.[35]
Balassa cogently argues that the adverse effects of a sudden change in external factors, such as the quadrupling of petroleum prices in 1973-74 or the 1974-75 Western recession, were absorbed much more easily by developing countries with large foreign-trade sectors than by those like India with relatively small ones: `Outward orientation is associated with high export and import shares that permit reduction in non-essential imports without serious adverse effects on the functioning of the economy. By contrast, continued inward orientation involves limiting imports to an unavoidable minimum, so that any further reduction will impose a considerable cost in terms of growth. Furthermore, the greater flexibility of the national economies of countries pursuing an outward-oriented strategy, under which firms learn to live with foreign competition, makes it possible to change the product composition of exports in response to changes in world market conditions, whereas inward orientation entails establishing a more rigid economic structure.’[36]
In other words, if imports are both high in total value and diverse in composition, a rise in the relative price of a particular import for which home demand is relatively inelastic (like petroleum and its products) can be accommodated by a substitution of expenditure towards it and away from inessential imports for which demand is relatively elastic. A similar argument had typically been advanced by advocates of import-substitution when they maintained that the exports of a small country should be diverse and not concentrated on only a few goods since a decline in world prices would otherwise lead to serious falls in export revenues. This suggests that both critics and advocates of import substitution might agree that, for a country which is a price-taker in world markets, the encouragement of a large foreign-trade sector is a way of diversifying the risk of adverse effects from changes in world prices. The question remains as to whether the positive theory of trade is correct in saying that the encouragement of comparative advantage is superior to import-substitution as a means of achieving a large foreign sector. From the contrasting experiences of, say, South Korea on the one hand and India on the other, the answer seems overwhelmingly to be that it is.

(iii) Agriculture
The Indian Government has instituted a multiple-pricing system for the major food-grains, especially rice and wheat. Farmers are compelled to sell a specified fraction of their output to the government, at a price fixed by the government which is significantly lower than that warranted by underlying supply and demand conditions. Farmers may sell the remainder of their output freely. The quantities the government acquires in this way, plus any it imports (imports being subsidised by the over-valuation of the exchange rate), are sold by ration at lower than free-market prices in the so-called `fair-price’ shops – which happen to be mainly in urban areas. Urban consumers may purchase part of their requirements from such shops and the remainder on the open market at higher prices. Astute middle-class urban housewives know that rationed grain is often of poorer quality than that sold on the open market. Accordingly, the former often constitutes part of the wages of the domestic servants of the urban household, while the family consumes the latter. Insofar as this is true, it suggests that farmers distinguish quality much better than do government officials, and that they use this advantage somewhat to partition their output into low- and high-quality, selling the first under compulsion to the government and the second on the open market.
While such is the general food policy of India, the compulsory procurement of grains and their distribution to the ration-shops is implemented by individual State governments and not by the Union Government. There have usually been numerous restrictions on inter-State movements of grain, so the States do not form a full customs union; instead, the Union Government tries to be a central clearing-house, matching the desired imports of one State with the desired exports of another.[37]

Economic effects of ban on futures contracts
Furthermore, futures contracts in grains have been banned by law, in the belief that futures trading is conducive to speculation and that speculation is undesirable. A futures contract in grain consists simply of a promise by a seller to deliver an amount of grain to a buyer at some specified date in the future in return for payment at a price agreed today. The seller’s incentive to enter into the contract is the guarantee of a certain sale, and the availability of funds now; the buyer’s incentive is the guarantee of a certain price for future deliveries. The contract may be entered into because buyer and seller have different expectations about what the spot price will be in the future. The buyer minimises his expected costs and the seller maximises his expected revenues; both are able to balance their budgets inter-temporally. Even if they have the same expectations about future spot prices, buyer and seller may still find it mutually profitable to enter into a futures contract as a way of insuring against risk. Forbidding such contracts by decree thus forces more risk onto both buyer and seller than they would normally be prepared to carry, and also induces them to balance their accounts in each period rather than it inter-temporally. Alternative kinds of credit markets become it relatively more lucrative, with the potential seller and buyer of futures wheat respectively borrowing and lending more than they would otherwise have done.[38]
The government has also expressed its determination to keep prices in ration-shops low. It has accordingly stockpiled large inventories of grain, apparently regardless of the costs of storage and spoilage or the alternative of holding larger foreign-exchange reserves to permit increased imports when necessary.

The ostensible, declared objective of all such policies has been to ensure that the poor do not suffer severe adverse income effects from sudden rises in the price of food resulting (it has been thought) from the contingencies of rainfall and the actions of speculative traders. It is, however, an open secret that the policies have really been a means of (a) taxing farmers, who pay a smaller percentage of their income in direct and indirect taxes than do urban dwellers, and (b) subsidising urban consumers, who broadly comprise the industrial working class and the middle in classes.
At the same time, however, the government and its advisers — after the considerable hesitation recorded by David Hopper [39]- have also accepted that the best long-run prospects for increasing agricultural productivity lie in modernising traditional farming techniques. Given the outstanding results of the Green Revolution in wheat, they could hardly have arrived at any other conclusion. The problem from the government’s point of view has been, as a sympathetic economist puts it “…how to procure a sufficient quantity of food grains at reasonable prices without jeopardising the farmers’ incentives to produce more”.[40]

Thus, while taxing farmers de facto on their output, on the one hand, the government has tried, on the other, to promote the use of modern inputs by subsidizing them both directly and through low-interest loans from the banks for such investment.
Distortions of incentives in agriculture
The distortions of efficient incentives caused by such policies are not difficult to see. First, the low output prices of wheat and rice have, in effect, been discriminatory taxes on wheat. As Edward Schuh remarks, these discourage the production of `. . . the very crops that policy-makers believe the vulnerable groups should have greater access to . . .’[41]

Vasant Sukhatme and Theodore Schultz have argued that, even between wheat and rice, there has been severe discrimination in favour of the former. At the official over-valued exchange rate, the price of domestic wheat has been significantly higher than imported, while at open-market rates for the rupee, the domestic price approximated the import price. For rice, however, the domestic price has been consistently below the import price. Sukhatme estimated that the dead weight loss in welfare from the under pricing of rice amounted to 8.5 per cent of total agricultural income in 1967-68 and to 2.2 per cent in 1970-71. He also calculated effective rates of protection, which were strongly negative for rice whether at official or open-market exchange rates and positive for wheat at the official exchange rate. Both he and Schultz conclude that the discrimination against rice has been a major factor in explaining the absence of a Green Revolution in rice on the scale of that in wheat.[42]
Secondly, the main beneficiaries of government subsidies for modern inputs have evidently been not the many small farmers but the fewer relatively large ones. As Gilbert Brown reports :`Large-scale farmers buy most subsidised inputs. Poorer farmers usually lack the money to buy adequate amounts of fertiliser and pesticides, and are commonly unable to get credit except at near-prohibitive rates of often 60% to 100% per year. Even in countries with subsidised bank credit for agriculture, rich farmers get most of the credit because of legal or administrative restrictions and/ or through open or disguised bribery. Credit and subsidy programmes for tractors, tube wells and other fixed investments also go mostly to the largest and richest farmers . . .Water is also a subsidised input . . . The farmers who receive this subsidised water generally have substantially higher incomes (because of the water) than farmers without access to public irrigation. Thus, claims that water should be subsidised to help small farmers misses the point that most farmers with irrigation have higher incomes than those who do not.’[43]
Brown argues that subsidies for inputs have been made necessary only to offset the forced depression of output prices. Moreover, the social benefit from subsidising inputs is limited to when the input is first introduced: ‘Once the benefits and technique of using the input are widely known, however, the continuation of such subsidies serves largely to increase the benefit-cost ratio of using the input . . .’.
Whether it is better to continue with artificially low input and output prices or to adjust towards a free market in both must take into account that the subsidies have encouraged more capital-intensity in production, and also that the `. . . low prices of certain inputs, particularly water, are often associated with widespread waste and inefficient use of the resource’.[44]
Thirdly, the farmer who is too small to find investment in storage facilities profitable may also consider it not worth his while to hold any of his output for sale on the open market. He will then sell it all to the government – at a below-market price.
A general conclusion would seem to be that, if the combined effect of input subsidies and forced grain sales to government has been a net subsidy to agriculture, then it has been a progressive subsidy; whereas if the combined effect has been a net tax on agriculture, then it has been a regressive tax. The Marxists may be quite right to protest that what gains there have been in agriculture have accrued to the relatively larger farmers, while smaller peasants and farmers are becoming landless labourers in growing numbers as a result of bankruptcy (that is, there has been increasing `rural proletarianisation’, to use the Marxists’ picturesque phrase). But if this is true, the cause can be traced unambiguously to the Indian Government’s belief – vociferously shared by the Marxists – that the way towards the declared objective of helping the poor is by extensive interference in the price system. Besides, the industrial working class demonstrably benefits from low food prices, so the honest Marxist must face up to being torn by divided loyalties between the rural and the urban proletariats.

Srinivasan put it as follows in a 1974 survey article :`The public distribution system with respect to foodgrains . . . operated to the benefit of all those living in metropolitan cities and other large urban concentrations while all others, including rich and poor in relatively small urban and almost all rural areas, did not benefit at all. When one recalls that the rural population includes the most abject among the poor, namely landless workers, the inequity of the system becomes glaring. And in urban areas, the existence of the system and the fact that the ration is often inadequate provides incentives for a household to falsify the data on its size and age composition given to the rationing authorities, as well as to create bogus or ghost ration-cards, not to speak of the corruption of the personnel manning the rationing administration.’[45]

The history of the extensive control of agriculture – which has included a partial government monopsony, forcibly-depressed output prices, inter-State restrictions on grain movements, and urban ration-shops – can be traced to the last years of British rule, as an attempt to bolster the popularity of the imperial regime. [46] The continuation and reinforcement of statism in agriculture in independent India has evidently rested on certain premises, namely, that the private market would be grossly inefficient and would be dominated by a few traders continually reaping large speculative profits, with both the small farmer and the ordinary consumer suffering in consequence.

Uma Lele’s fine study of the private grain trade, however, shows the real picture to be quite different. She found that the trade was highly competitive, that individual traders were rational agents (given the constraints of technology and government policy), that location price differences closely reflected transport costs, and that temporal price differences closely reflected storage costs. She argued that, while there was considerable scope for government activity, it should be in the form, not of interfering in the competitive market, but rather of encouraging the market to work – by, for example, disseminating relevant information such as crop forecasts, standardising weights and measures, constructing or improving roads and encouraging efficiency in the market for the transport of grain, etc.[47]

The evident neglect of such findings as these, and the continued application of policies inimical to competition and the free market, suggest that successive governments of independent India have been hardly more concerned for the rural poor – whether as farmer or consumer – and hardly less concerned with bolstering their popularity in the urban areas than were the British.

(iv) Employment
An obvious consequence of the economic policies described above has been the distortion of the individual citizen’s calculation of the expected benefits and costs of living and working in urban areas compared with the rural countryside. The forced depression of output prices in agriculture and the plethora of foreign-trade policies which discriminate against agriculture certainly seem to have artificially depressed the expected incomes of farmers. At the same time, a large `public sector’ in industry, plus the array of foreign-trade policies which have protected private industry, plus the indirect subsidisation of food sold in urban ration-shops certainly seem to have artificially raised expected urban incomes. Predictably, the reaction has been a vast and continuing net migration from the villages to the towns and cities, even after adjusting for the seasonal nature of agriculture. This drift has been the subject of much inquiry and discussion by development economists.[48] I propose to set it aside and examine instead a different aspect of employment policy which has not received nearly as much attention, namely, the consequences of putting into effect the clauses in the 1950 Indian Constitution mentioned above which authorised discrimination in employment and public education in favour of the `Scheduled’ castes and tribes, as well as other policies which discriminate on grounds of ethnic origin.

The consequences have been similar in several respects to those in America of `affirmative action’ towards so-called `racial minorities’, and it will be useful to draw out the analogy a little. As Thomas Sowell has cogently argued in recent years, the racial composition of contemporary American society is a complex mosaic, and no-one can say with certainty how it has come to be what it is today. In such circumstances, for the government to try to isolate a single contingent characteristic like `race’, partition society on the basis of census data according to this characteristic, and then construct public policies accordingly, is to introduce an enormous arbitrariness into economic life. By merely defining a group by reference to a single contingent characteristic, which all its members seem to possess, the intrinsic complexity of the individual person is lost or overlooked. Two members of the same race may be very different from each other in every relevant characteristic (income, education, political preference, and so on), and indeed resemble members of other races more closely in them. A policy which introduces a citizen’s race as a relevant factor in the assignment of jobs or college places partitions the citizenry into vague groups : members of groups who are very different from members of other groups in characteristics other than race rarely competing with each other anyway, while the burden and beneficence of the state’s policies fall on members of groups who are not very different from members of other groups in characteristics other than race: `. . . costs are borne disproportionately by those members of the general population who meet those standards with the least margin and are therefore most likely to be the ones displaced to make room for minority applicants. Those who meet the standards by the widest margin are not directly affected – that is, pay no costs. They are hired, admitted or promoted as if blacks did not exist. People from families with the most general ability to pay also have the most ability to pay for the kind of education and training that makes such performance possible. The costs of special standards are paid by those who do not. Among the black population, those most likely to benefit from the lower standards are those closest to meeting the normal standards. It is essentially an implicit transfer of wealth among people least different in non-racial characteristics. For the white population it is a regressively graduated tax in kind, imposed on those who are rising but not on those already on top.’[49]
At the same time, there is, in effect, a progressively graduated subsidy for members of the `minority’ group in favour of those who are already closest to meeting the general standards. Those in the mainstream of each group are largely unaffected; it is at the margins of competition that the bitterness caused by such policies will be felt and will manifest itself. It would seem that the situation in India – where the racial mosaic is if anything more complex than in America – is somewhat analogous. In recent years there has been civil tension and violence in the streets as poor Muslims, `caste’ Hindus, Sikhs and others have protested at being edged out of jobs and promotions by equally poor, or wealthier, members of the `Scheduled Castes’. In March-April 1981, for instance, there was widespread civil tension and violence in Gujarat over the reservation of places in the State’s medical colleges. A quarter of these places were statutorily reserved for members of the `Scheduled Castes’, with any not taken up by qualified candidates from these groups accruing to them in the future, thereby rapidly excluding from general competition as many as half the total number of places.[50]

The cruel paradox is that, while the position of many members (perhaps the vast majority) of the `Scheduled Castes’ vis-à-vis `caste’ Hindus remains one of degradation and persecution – quite regardless of the constitutional guarantees of equality in the eyes of the law – the relatively few who have succeeded in taking advantage of the discriminatory statutes have aroused the indignation of those who have not -causing even more animosity towards the `Scheduled Castes’ in general. One commentator observes the emergence of a `new elite’ among the `Scheduled Castes’ which `ceases to identify with its caste brethren’; while, at the same time, the law on equality `is so widely flouted precisely because the Scheduled Castes have not the means or courage to seek its protection . . .’ He concludes :`Contrived gestures such as are now popular will either not benefit [the Scheduled Castes] . . . or will do so only by further lowering already deplorable academic and administrative standards’. [51]
Moreover, when all government posts are advertised with a caveat that 10 or 15 per cent of themare reserved for members of the `Scheduled Castes’ and `Scheduled Tribes’, there is a considerable incentive for people to persuade Parliament to declare them as being such. And that also has happened. Discrimination in employment on the ground of caste has not been the only kind of discrimination practised by the Indian state. In what may be the most thorough study currently available on the origins, consequences and legal history of official discrimination in India, Weiner, Katzenstein and Rao have described the plethora of policies pursued by the central and state governments which have used not caste but ethnic origin as a criterion for public employment (with the private sector also often being `encouraged’ to follow suit) :`Preferences are given to those who belong to the “local” community, with “local” understood as referring to the numerically dominant linguistic group in the locality.’ [52] The authors conclude that what is emerging in India is`. . . a government-regulated labour market in which various ethnic groups are given a reserved share of that market. Competition for employment is thus not among all Indians, but within specified linguistic, caste, and tribal groups.`. . . various ethnic groups, therefore, fight politically for a share of that labour market. The major political struggles are often over who should get reservations, how the boundaries of the ethnic groups should be defined, and how large their share should be. There are also political struggles over whether there should be reservations in both education and employment, in private as well as in public employment, and in promotions as well as hiring. The preferential policies themselves have thus stimulated various ethnic groups to assert their “rights” to reservations.’[53]

It is not difficult to understand the general economic argument against discrimination on grounds such as caste or ethnic origin. If a private employer indulges a personal preference to hire only people of an kind A when there are more able or better qualified candidates of other ethnic kinds B, C, D, . . . ,available, and if the product of his firm is subject to competition in the market from other enterprises which do not discriminate on criteria which are irrelevant to economic efficiency, we may confidently expect the discriminating employer’s product to become uncompetitive and his profits to fall. The best and most obvious example of this would be in the professional sports industry in the USA : a `whites-only’ basketball or football team would be immediately vanquished on the games-field into bankruptcy. If government pursues employment policies which discriminate according to economically irrational criteria such as caste or ethnic origin, or if it forces all private firms to do likewise, there will certainly be inefficiency resulting in a loss of real aggregate output in the economy. In the terms of modern economics, a vector of total outputs which would be feasible given the parameters of the economy, and which would leave everyone either better off or at least no worse off, would not be achieved. In sum, the consequence of direct and widespread government interference in the labour market in India appears to have been, not only a disregard for the principle of equality before the law for every citizen (in a nascent republic of immensely diverse peoples), but also a loss of real output and an enormous `politicisation’ of economic life whereby individual success becomes increasingly tied to political power and increasingly removed from personal merit, enterprise and effort. In addition, the composition of occupations in the economy has been indirectly distorted by the set of industrial, agricultural and foreign-trade policies pursued by successive governments.

6. THE MALFUNCTIONING OF GOVERNMENT

IT MIGHT be thought that a large and flabby `public sector’ in industry and commerce, labyrinthine controls on private industry, a government monopoly of foreign-exchange dealings, the overvaluation of the currency, indefinite import-substitution, forcibly depressed output and input prices in agriculture, enormous politicization of the labour market, disregard for equality before the law, and distortion of the composition of occupations would constitute a sufficient catalogue of symptoms of grave illness in the political economy of a nation. Sadly, however, there are in modern India other symptoms too which I can mention only briefly here.
An opinion frequently encountered among urban Indians (as well as among the majority of Western development economists) is that government control over the size of the population is a necessary condition for economic development, and indeed that it is the failure of government to do this that has dissipated the economic growth that would otherwise have resulted from the economic policies pursued. The urban Indian witnesses the hovels and shanty-towns inhabited by migrant families from the countryside attracted by the policies discussed previously, and he experiences the resulting congestion. So does the Western development economist when he ventures out of his hotel into the city streets. Very often, that is his only personal experience of the legendary `poor masses’ of India. It is understandable that such princely discomfiture should lead him to the opinion that the poor are mindless in their breeding habits and that they must be persuaded, bullied or compelled to change. If this opinion were true, it would seem to point to a neat and simple solution to many of the woes of poor countries, and India in particular. But if the opinion is false and yet widely believed, it would cause governments to be, as it were, barking up the wrong tree.
It is, however, far from established, and certainly not at all obvious, that demographic control is either necessary or desirable in India or elsewhere. In the first place, when the rate of infant mortality is known and experienced by rural people to be high, there will be mare births than there would have been otherwise. Secondly, it is perfectly clear that children are an investment good in traditional societies such as those of rural India. Even young children are a source of family income, either directly by working outside the home or indirectly by working at domestic chores and thereby releasing adult members of the family for outside work. For a child to be absent from primary school or to drop out within a few years is not necessarily truancy; it may be the outcome of a rational economic calculation about where his time may be better spent towards increasing the household’s income. Furthermore, in traditional societies adult children are the principal source of support for elderly and retired parents.
To know of the existence of artificial measures of contraception certainly enlarges the alternatives open to a couple. Assuming that such knowledge is not in itself a cause of unhappiness (as it can be if there are conflicting religious commitments), a couple may certainly be better off with that knowledge because of their ability to control the number and timing of their children. The couple might also have fewer children – though there is no necessary or causal connection between a knowledge of contraception and the number of children born to a couple. Rational calculation may produce the same number of children as the caprice of nature, the implication being that in general there is no causal connection between the availability of contraceptives and the rate of growth of the population. The value of a public policy which encourages the use of artificial contraception is not so much that it reduces the number of births as that it may allow couples more control over their own lives. Whether or not artificial contraception should be publicly subsidised is quite another question.
The Indian Government has expended considerable resources in propagating and subsidizing artificial birth control. The results appear to have been, at best, indifferent (coupled as birth control has been with indirect incentives for large families and, at worst, cruel – as when frenetic zeal spilled over into demands for, and the implementation of, compulsory sterilisation. For this author, however, the important consideration would seem to be not so much the exact costs and benefits of the demographic policies pursued as the critical acknowledgement that they have little or nothing to do with the fundamental causes of mass economic development.[54]
It remains a stark paradox that, with a general literacy rate of perhaps 30 per cent [NB: In 2007, this has grown to 73% for males and 48% for females] India still produces the third largest absolute number of science and engineering graduates in the world. This reflects the lopsidedness of the educational system, continued from British times, in which higher education is enormously subsidised relative to primary education. In addition, entry into the civil services requires a college or university education, which in turn requires a good private secondary school education, which in turn requires a good preparatory school education. Strenuously competing to enter prep. school, with the help of outside tutoring, is the unhappy fate of many a five- or six-year-old in the towns and cities, followed by strenuous competition in secondary school, college and university, and finally at the doorstep of government (or a foreign university).
A job in government – any job in government – has carried prestige since Mughal times. In addition to the prestige and the obvious benefits of tenure where ether `decent’ jobs are scarce, there has been in recent times the inner satisfaction from a belief that a person can truly do his best for his country only by being in government. Tens of thousands of youths spend significant personal resources (such as whole years in cramming schools) to compete for a few annual openings in government. It is only to be expected that the competent, ambitious, patriotic youth who succeeds will mature into a respected mandarin with an unshakeable conviction in the good his government has done for the masses, and in the further good yet in prospect.
Failure to anticipate monsoon damage and disarray of the judicial system
The most serious examples of the malfunctioning of civil government in India are probably the failure to take feasible public precautions against the monsoons and the disarray of the judicial system. Official estimates, for instance, of the damage caused by flooding to homes, crops and public utilities in a few weeks of July-August 1981 alone amounted to over Rs 1 billion, with 10.8 million people `affected’, 35,000 head of cattle lost, and 195,000 homes damaged. The full magnitude of the devastation which annually visits vast areas can be understood perhaps only by those in rural India, although the towns and cities also regularly suffer considerable chaos. [55] [NB 2007: Monsoon prediction appears far better today than it was when these words were written.]
As for the disarray of the judicial system, The Statesman lamented in July 1980:`The simplest matter takes an inordinate amount of time, remedies seldom being available to those without means or influence. Of the more than 16,000 cases pending in the Supreme Court, about 5,000 were introduced more than five years ago; while nearly 16,000 of the backlog of more than 600,000 cases in our high courts have been hanging fire for over a decade. Allahabad is the worst offender but there are about 75,000 uncleared cases in the Calcutta High Court in addition to well over a million in West Bengal’s lower courts.”[56] Such a state of affairs has been caused not only by lazy and corrupt policemen, court clerks and lawyers, but also by the paucity of judges and magistrates. In addition, however,`. . . a vast volume of laws provokes endless litigation as much because of poor drafting which leads to disputes over interpretation as because they appear to violate particular rights and privileges. Land legislation offers an example of radical zeal running away with legal good sense, giving rise to thousands of suits against the Government . . .’ [57] When governments determinedly do what they need not or should not do, it may be expected that they will fail to do what civil government positively should be doing. In a sentence, that has been the tragedy of modern India.

Part IV : Reform
A LIBERAL AGENDA

IT WILL by now have become evident to the reader from the descriptions and arguments given above that, in the judgement of the present author, only a set of radical changes in policy can put the Indian economy on a path to higher mass prosperity within a free and healthy body politic. I shall therefore put forward a tentative manifesto for reform, adding some predictions about which classes of citizens would be most likely to support or oppose a particular proposal. The scope and intention of such a manifesto should be made clear at the outset. As Aristotle taught, a set of actions which are the means towards certain ends may themselves be the ends towards which other prior means have to be taken.[58]
The ultimate ends of economic advice in India are to seek to bring about mass prosperity under conditions of individual freedom. The proposals I which follow are to be construed as means towards those ultimate ends. But they also constitute a set of intermediate ends, and their implementation would require further judgement about the best means towards achieving them. In economic policy, for instance, a firm but gradual phasing-in over a period of three or four years may be the best way to minimise the hardships entailed by the adjustment. For reasons which will become clear, however, I shall not here try to answer the question as to how the proposals might best be implemented.

(a) Effects of foreign policy on the domestic economy
It will be useful to begin with a short and very incomplete consideration of foreign policy insofar as it may bear upon domestic economic policies. It is a settled fact of international politics that, while there is no obvious connection between a nation’s economic and political institutions and the choice of strategic allies it faces, people’s subjective perceptions and opinions of the social arrangements in a foreign country can be deeply influenced by whether that country is seen as a potential ally or adversary. A related and equally settled fact is that war, or the fear of war, can make for the most incongruous of bed-fellows. In contemporary India, it is quite evident that the antipathy and pessimism towards market institutions found among the urban public, and the sympathy and optimism to be found for collectivist or statist ones, has been caused to a very significant extent by the perception that the United States is relatively hostile towards India while the Soviet Union is relatively friendly. This was not always so. The official affection between the United States and India in the early years of the Republic was grounded in sincerity and goodwill. The roots of its demise are probably to be found in the split between the Soviet Union and China in the late 1950s which, in a short period of time, made the latter a valuable strategically for the United States against the former. By the early 1970s, the spectre of a joint military threat to India from a totalitarian China and a militarist Pakistan – and especially a threat which it was perceived democratic America would do little or nothing to thwart – made it prudent for democratic India to become the virtual ally of totalitarian Russia.
Such a configuration on the international chess-board need not have been detrimental to India’s economic development. It is possible to imagine a liberal state allied to a totalitarian one for strategic reasons, yet maintaining liberal economic policies domestically and internationally. In practice[58], however, the extent of `economic collaboration’, bilateral trading arrangements, `joint ventures’, barter agreements, `cultural exchanges’, and the like into which the Indian Government has entered with the Soviet bloc, appears significantly to exceed what it has achieved with the Western powers. In particular, Soviet arms have in recent years been purchased more often and then manufactured under licence. This too need not have been economically detrimental if the Soviet products had in practice been competitive on international markets in terms of price and quality. As is common knowledge, however, this is often not so. It therefore appears that part of the price India has had to pay for the strategic support of the Soviet Union has been the foisting on her of low-quality, high-priced Soviet goods, whether arms or steel mills or technical know-how. At the same time, for reasons which are partly historical and partly related to these considerations, direct foreign investment by private Western firms has been treated with, at best, coolness and, at worst, open hostility.

A change in India’s foreign policy
If the economic liberalisation that will be proposed here for India is to be effective, a truly independent yet prudent foreign policy may be required to accompany it. A change in the present strategic configuration – in which the United States is perceived in India to be virtually the ally of both China and Pakistan, while India is perceived in the United States to be virtually the ally of the Soviet Union – is unlikely until and unless the United States finds it in her best interests in the region to distance herself from China and Pakistan, which is unlikely to happen without a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and China. A drastic alternative way for India to reduce her dependence upon the Soviet Union would be the kind of divorce Egypt effected some years ago, followed by an alliance with the Western powers. This might, however, undermine once more the independence of foreign policy and be perceived in India as a move from the devil to the deep sea. The prudent remaining alternative would appear to be an earnest and vigorous pursuit of serious no-war pacts with Pakistan and China, combined with an appropriately small independent nuclear deterrent. It seems to the author that the reasons which commend this course are closely analogous to those offered by the present American and British governments for pursuing serious no-war negotiations with the Soviet bloc whilst simultaneously improving the Western nuclear deterrent.
(b) Liberalisation of foreign trade
Not only would the truly independent foreign policy proposed in the preceding paragraph allow India to distance herself from the Soviet Union; it would probably also prompt the Western powers to end the intergovernmental transfers which go by the name of `foreign aid’. For reasons that Peter Bauer has emphasised over many years, an end to such transfers might be a boon in disguise for India.[59] In particular, it would require the government to seek to balance the foreign-exchange accounts without becoming obligated to the Western powers, and this in turn would require a major economic transformation from a closed and protectionist economy to an open one which harnessed India’s comparative advantages.
An initial liberalisation of foreign trade, involving a transition from quotas to tariffs, would probably be supported by private industry as a whole. It would, however, be opposed by incumbent politicians and government officials since it would dissipate the rents they receive under the closed regime. A subsequent reduction in tariffs, a withdrawal of export subsidies, and the free floating of the rupee would be opposed by those private firms (and their labour unions) which would be uncompetitive internationally – probably those in `non-traditional’ industries. The measures would, however, be supported by ordinary consumers, by private firms in traditional industries like jute manufactures and textiles, and particularly by farmers.
Once private industry became subject to the strict discipline of international competition again, there would be no reason whatsoever for government-imposed internal controls which were not conducive to free and fair competition among firms for the consumer’s rupee. The repeal of the plethora of licensing policies would dissipate the large rents attached to the controls under the present regime. Since these rents are paid by private industry and received, directly or indirectly, by incumbent politicians and government officials, the former could be expected to welcome repeal and the latter to oppose it vigorously.

(c) Privatisation of `public-sector’ industries
At the same time, for the so-called `public-sector’ industries to face international competition, when they are currently monopolists or oligopolists, would demand such an improvement in economic discipline as probably to require the shares of most of them to be sold on the open market, with marginal-cost pricing imposed on the remainder. There is no economic reason why the Government of India shouldbe engaged in commercial or merchant banking and insurance, or in industries from steel, machine-tools, ship-building and fertilisers to wrist-watches, hotels and beer. Nor is there any cogent reason why it should be a major producer, let alone a monopolist, in the road, rail, air and sea transport industries. Large-scale privatisation would be supported by private citizens in general, and would also draw out the reputedly vast private funds which circulate in the untaxable underground economy. But such measures would probably be opposed vigorously by the government officials who currently manage these industries, aswell as by the public-sector labour unions.

(d) Free-market pricing in agriculture
With the repudiation of the mistaken premise that government sponsored industrialisation is the best means to mass economic development, the free-market pricing of agricultural outputs and the removal of all controls that are not conducive to free competition among farmers should follow. This would be welcomed by all farmers and perhaps by the rural population in general. It could also be expected to provide much encouragement to the technological transformation of traditional agriculture. The abolition of ration-shops in urban areas would be opposed by the industrial working class, by the urban middle classes in general, and by government officials and employees engaged in the present regime of public distribution. Further, farmers, especially relatively large ones, might be expected to oppose the concomitant free-market pricing of agricultural inputs, including credit and fertilisers, as would those government employees presently charged with distributing these inputs.
The ending of the distortions in agricultural output and input prices would establish a conclusive case for uniform systems of taxation in the economy, and especially for income from agriculture to be treated on a par with income from other occupations. These systems could locally include direct subsidies to those (whether in rural or urban areas) who are unable to provide any income for themselves, such as the insane and the severely disabled – all of whom are currently cared for, if at all, by private charity, and none of whom, strangely enough, appears to enter the moral calculations of socialist and Marxist economists.

(e) Tax revenues for public goods
The first and most important destination of tax revenues, whether raised centrally, provincially or locally, must be the provision of public goods – central, provincial and local. In an earlier section, we have seen what kinds of goods these should be. Among the most urgent in India are more effective precautions against the monsoons and improvements in the efficiency of the systems of civil and criminal justice. The former might include measures to prevent soil erosion and the building of better dams, embankments, canals and roads. Such programmes would be likely to command practically unanimous support in the localities in which they were implemented.
Reforms of the judicial system might include raising the salaries of judges and policemen, as well as the penalties for their misconduct; improving the training and morale of the police, with the object of increasing public confidence in them (especially in the villages); and expanding the number of courts, at least temporarily until the monumental backlog of cases has been reduced and brought under control. A general reduction in the political and administrative direction of economic life would lead to fewer lawsuits being brought against the government itself, and thus provide further relief for the judiciary. Widespread prison reform may also be required if the reports are true that a large proportion of those held prisoner for a number of years have yet to be brought to trial, and that potential prosecution witnesses, if they are poor and uneducated, are themselves sometimes kept in jail until a case comes to court. Such reforms would command the support of everyone except criminals, capricious litigants and corrupt or incompetent members of the police and judiciary, none of which groups, it must be supposed, comprises apolitical constituency.

Together with improvements in the system of justice, the principle of equality before the law would have to be taken seriously. This would require the dispensation of justice by the state to be, as it were, a process blind to the infinitely diverse caste and ethnic characteristics of the citizenry, which in turn would imply the repeal of all laws – whether central, provincial or local – permitting governmental authorities to discriminate in favour of a particular politically-specified caste or ethnic group. Merely to have written `equality before the law’ into the Constitution without really believing it either possible or desirable is to allow the mutual caste and ethnic bigotry of private citizens to be exploited for political ends. That innumerable members of a caste, or religious or ethnic community have suffered at the hands of another, and that members of the `Scheduled Castes’ in particular have been victims of enormous cruelty, should not prevent acknowledgement of the sober fact that the past is irretrievable, or that it is similar cruelty in the present and future against any citizen at the hands of any other, or the state, that the declaration of Fundamental Rights was intended to prevent.

(f) Other reforms
Other proposals could also be suggested : the introduction of vouchers for primary and secondary education; a serious assessment of the benefits from and costs of subsidies to higher education; an end to the government monopoly of radio and television; a revision of government pay-scales to make them competitive with the private sector, together with equivalent reductions in non pecuniary benefits; a decentralisation of public spending decisions from New Delhi to the State capitals and from there to the districts; and so on. However, it is hardly necessary to go further, since even a limited liberal agenda would appear doomed to be still-born.
Incumbent politicians, government officials, and the public sector unions in general would vigorously oppose any reduction in government intervention in the economy for fear of losing the rents and sinecures of the status quo. Indeed, professional politicians in general could be expected to be averse to any lessening of the politicisation of economic life.
In other countries, a political party proposing such a reduction in government intervention would usually enjoy the backing of private industry. In India, however, private industry in general would probably see it in its own interest to support only the reduction of internal controls, whilst vigorously opposing reductions in the neo-mercantilist external controls. In July 1981, for example, I asked a prominent industrialist to imagine first a free-market regime at home : `That would be very welcome indeed’, he replied enthusiastically. I then asked him to imagine a policy of free trade : `That would wipe us out’, he replied gravely. His answers indicate very well what is perhaps the single most important feature of the equilibrium that has emerged in India: by accepting without significant protest the constraints and costs imposed upon it by the government and its `planners’, the private corporate sector has traded the freedom of enterprise for mercantilist monopoly profits in the home market.
When Indian Marxists rail about collusion between the `national bourgeoisie’ (that is, the governmental class) and the `comprador bourgeoisie’ (that is, the private sector), they make a cogent point as old as Adam Smith’s critique of mercantilism.[60] But, again, they fail to see that the fortunes of the industrial working-class have also risen with those of the private and public industries that have gained from the present regime. Moreover, a large proportion of industrial workers and blue-collar government employees are migrants with families left behind in rural areas; these rural families might also oppose reductions in the transfers currently received by their migrant relatives. Finally, while joining other farmers in welcoming a free market in grain, the politically influential larger farmers could be expected to oppose the direct taxation of agricultural incomes and the elimination of subsidies for inputs.

Who is left who would gain from the kinds of reforms proposed here? Only the ordinary citizen qua consumer, the rural poor and the residuum of severely disabled citizens unable to create any income for themselves. None of these has been or is likely to become an effective political force.

India’s `unhappy equilibrium’
The economy of the first Indian Republic has tended towards a broad and increasingly unhappy equilibrium. Distortions of efficient relative prices and wages lead to both substitution and income effects. Those who lose from one distortion rationally seek another from which they may gain; those who lose from the second seek a third; and so on ad infinitum until a maze of distorted incentives are in place and a60Adam Smith, host of income transfers are in progress – sometimes offsetting losses, sometimes not. Tullock has emphasised that the problem is not only that there are dead-weight losses in welfare, but also that people are led `. . . to employ resources in attempting to obtain or prevent such transfers.’[61] In modern India, the waste of productive resources put to the pursuit of such transfers has been incalculable. The reforms pro-posed here would cut through the maze of distorted incentives and institutions all at once – for which very reason it seems unlikely they can come to be implemented.

The economic significance of a political attitude of individualism is that it clearly recognises the relationship between individual effort and reward, and the relationship between cause and consequence generally. An attitude of statism obscures or obliterates this relationship. In republican India, statism has pervaded all public discourse and prompted most public policy. Successive groups of politicians and government officials seem never to have recognised the fundamental nature of those functions of government which are the indispensable prerequisites of civil peace and mass prosperity. Nor have they understood that it is no part of government’s agenda to be the driving force to mass prosperity, and that this can come (if it will) only from innumerable individual efforts in the pursuit of private rewards. This is not at all to say that those in government have been ill-intentioned. On the contrary, they may have sincerely sought the public good whilst introducing a Leviathan government into the market-place and neglecting the proper duties of government outside it. As Bauer has remarked in a related context :`Their financial benefits may appear to be fortuitous, as if Adam Smith’s invisible hand were to work in reverse, so that those who sought the public good achieve what was no part of their intention, namely personal prosperity.’[62] It is indeed possible that the basic fact of human nature that individual households every where ordinarily know most about, and are only concerned with, their own well-being has never been acknowledged in modern India. The simple secret of a stable and prosperous polity is to create institutions which harness the universal pursuit of individual self interest, and not ones which pretend that men are selfless saints. A polity where this fact is acknowledged would not have to depend for the viability of its institutions on mere exhortation, as the institutions of the Indian Republic seem perpetually fated to do, even while the competitive pursuit of self interest is everywhere manifest.

The logic of economic reasoning and the adducement of economic evidence have in the past had little effect in India because the distribution of gains and losses from the policies pursued has been closely matched by the distribution of effective political power. This distribution seems most likely to continue, and so the prospects of significant and sustained endogenous reform seem, to this author at least, very small. Changes in external constraints seem to be the only likely source of a major disturbance to the equilibrium, and there can be no guarantee that the results will be for the better. This is a sad and troubling conclusion to come to, for a citizen of India or anyone else who has loved the country. It places this author in the paradoxical position of believing his arguments to be broadly correct – while hoping they are not.

ENDNOTES (The original monograph in 1984 had footnotes, which have had to be transformed since pages, in this new HTML age, no longer have to be linear as in a book nor have to be turned in order to be read).

[1] The early studies notably include: B. R. Shenoy, `A note of dissent’, Papers relating to the formulation of the Second Five-Year Plan, Government of India Planning Commission, Delhi, 1955; Indian Planning and Economic Development, Asia Publishing, Bombay, 1963, especially pp. 17-53; P. T. Bauer, Indian Economic Policy and Development, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1961; M. Friedman, unpublished memorandum to the Government of India, November 1955 (referred to in Bauer, op. cit., p. 59 ff.); and, some years later, Sudha Shenoy, India : Progress or Poverty?, Research Monograph 27, Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1971. Some of the most relevant contemporary studies are: B. Balassa, `Reforming the system of incentives in World Development, 3 (1975), pp. 365-82; `Export incentives and export performance in developing countries: a comparative analysis’, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 114 (1978), pp. 24-61; The process of industrial development and alternative development strategies, Essays in International Finance No. 141, Princeton University, 1980; J. N. Bhagwati & P. Desai, India: Planning for Industrialisation, OECD, Paris : Oxford University Press, 1970; `Socialism and Indian Economic Policy’, World Development, 3 (1975), pp. 213-21; J. N. Bhagwati & T. N. Srinivasan, Foreign-trade Regimes and Economic Development: India, National Bureau of Economic Research, New York, 1975; Anne O. Krueger, `Indian planning experience’, in T. Morgan et al. (eds.), Readings in Economic Development, Wadsworth, California, 1963, pp. 403-20; `The political economy of the rent-American Economic Review, 64 (June 1974); The Benefits and Costs of Import-Substitution in India : a Microeconomic Study, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1975; Growth, distortions and patterns of trade among many countries, Studies in International Finance, Princeton University, 1977; Uma Lele, Food grain marketing in India : private performance and public policy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1971; T. W. Schultz (ed.), Distortions in agricultural incentives, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1978; V. Sukhatme, “The utilization of high-yielding rice and wheat varieties in India: an economic assessment”, University of Chicago PhD thesis, 1977.

[2] S. Roy, “On liberty and economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India”, University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 1982a, Chapters I and II; “Knowledge and freedom in economic theory: Parts I and II”, Centre for Study of Public Choice, Virginia Tech, working papers, 1982b. My epistemological arguments have closely followed those of Renford Bambrough, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979.

[3] Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, Random House, New York, 1941. We read: `. . . the whole account of matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely, as we said at the very beginning that the accounts we demand must be in accordance with the subject matter; matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account being of this nature, this account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or precept but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation.’ (1,104a2-a9.)`. . . we do not deliberate even about all human affairs; for instance, no Spartan deliberates about the best constitution for the Scythians. For none of these things can be brought about by our own efforts. We deliberate about things that are in our power and can be done.’ (1,112a28-30.) Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations(1776), eds. R. H. Campbell et al., Liberty Classics, Indianapolis, 1981. We read: `What is the species of domestick industry which his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in hislocal situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him.’ (Book IV. ii. 10, p. 456.) In modern times, Friedrich Hayek has always kept this fact in the foreground of his thinking. In his Individualism and Economic Order, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1949, we read, for example, of `. . . the constitutional limitation of man’s knowledge and interests, the fact the he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows . . .’ (p. 14.) The individual agent has a `special knowledge of circumstances of the; thus `. . . practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active co-operation.’ (p. 80.)

[4] The mathematical economist will recognise these three conditions as the characteristics which define a multi-market general equilibrium in the Arrow-Debreu model: Gerard Debreu, Theory of Value, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1959; K. J. Arrow and F. H. Hahn, General Competitive Analysis, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1971.

[5] This argument is discussed further in Roy (1982a), pp. 96-107, pp. 133-43.

[6] Adam Smith, op. cit., Book V. i. c., p. 723.

[7] P. A. Samuelson, `A pure theory of public expenditures’, Review of Economics & Statistics, 36, 1954,reprinted in K. J. Arrow & T. Scitovsky (eds.), Readings in Welfare Economics, R. D. Irwin, Homewood, Ill., 1969.

[8] The idea I have in the background is of some implicit public goods function endorsed more or less unanimously by citizens – but not necessarily by those with political power – with commonsense dictating the elements it should contain. Thus Let U = U (π1, π2 , …, πn) be such a function with δU/δπi > 0, δ2U/δπi2 < 0 i=1,2,…,n, where πi = 1,2,…n, is a lateral index of a public good or service like defence, civil protection, roads, dams, or the finance of basic education. Each of these is “produced” by an expenditure of public resources: πi = πi (τi ), δπi/δτi > 0, δ2πi /δτi2 < 0 i=1,2,…,k, Σ i=1,2,…,n τi = τ* where τ* is the total level of public resources available (whether by taxation or borrowing). An efficient condition, i.e., one in which given public resources are efficiently allocated among alternative public goods or services, would be δU/δπi/ δπi/δτi = δU/δπj / δπj/δτj for every i,j = 1,2,. .,n. So, if the marginal tax-rupee was put towards the production of any public good, the increase in social utility should be the same; otherwise we would find an excess supply of some public goods (e.g. bureaucrats) and an excess demand for others (e.g. courts, dams, police protection, etc.).

[9] Two examples are F. H. Hahn, On the notion of equilibrium in economics : an inaugural lecture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973, and J. M. Grandmont, “Temporary general equilibrium theory : a survey”, Econometrica, vol. 46, 1977.

[10] Aristotle, op. cit., 1,094b12-1,094b27

[11] D. H. Robertson, `The Economic Outlook’, in his Utility and All That, Allen & Unwin, London, 1952, pp.51-52.

[12] Karl Popper made a similar point in The Open Society and its Enemies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1950, when he suggested that Plato’s question `who should rule?’ should be discarded for the question:`How can we so organise political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too muchdamage?’ (p. 120). There is relevant discussion by Renford Bambrough in `Plato’s modern friends and enemies’, Philosophy, 37, 1962, reprinted in R.Bambrough (ed.), Plato, Popper and Politics : some contributions to a modern controversy, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1967. I have discussed the relationship of expertise to democracy in Roy (1982a), pp 80-95.

[13] Virginia Bill of Rights, 1776, in The Constitution of the United States, ed. E. C. Smith, Barnes & Noble, New York, 1979, p. 21.

[14] P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, p. 72, n. 2. The term `statism’ suggested itself to the author after he read M. R. Masani, “Post-Sanjay outlook: where salvation does not lie” The Statesman, 9 July 1980.

[15]G. M. Young (ed.), Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, London: Macmillan, 1952, p. 718. Some 20 years later, in Considerations on Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton (London: J. M. Dent), J. S. Mill claimed that rule by`a superior people . . . is often of the greatest advantage to a people, carrying them rapidly through several stages of progress’ (Ch. IV, p. 224). Ironically, a few years ago a distinguished retired member of the Indian civil service (who happens to be a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize) used very similar words in a newspaper article – in defence of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan!

[16] Resolution of the Indian National Congress, August 1931, reprinted in B. N. Pandey (ed.), The IndianNationalist Movement : 1885-1947, Macmillan, London, 1979, p. 67.

[17] S. Radhakrishnan, The philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan, London, 1918, p. 232. For an excellent account of the intercourse between ancient India and ancient Greece, H. G. Rawlinson, `Early contacts between India and Europe’, in A. L. Basham (ed.), A Cultural History of India, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. For excellent accounts of the growth of liberalism in India in the l9th and carly 20th centuries : Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism : Competition and Collaboration in the later l9th Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971, Chs. 1, 3-6; J. R. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977; Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politicsand Indian Nationalism,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973, Ch. 1.

[18] Ramsay Macdonald’s letter to M. K. Gandhi, 8 September 1932, reprinted in Pandey (ed.), op. cit., p. 74.

[19] Devdas Gandhi’s letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, 2 October 1931, reprinted in Pandey (ed.), op. cit., p. 71

[20] Gandhi’s protest succeeded to the extent that the Award itself was superseded; and in unusual, euphoric displays of fraternity, `caste’ Hindus threw open temples to members of the `Depressed Classes’ and embraced them with
garlands. The compromise Pact which replaced the Communal Award removed separate electorates but still guaranteed special political representation for some years following the agreement. For an account of Gandhi’ s position on the Communal Award, Judith M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 313-21.

[21] For an eminent lawyer’s commentary, N. A. Palkhivala, The Light of the Constitution, Forum of Free Enterprise, Bombay, 1976.

[22] There is reason to think the Mughals before the British had done no better and had probably done much worse. T. Raychaudhuri, `The State and the Economy: the Mughal Empire’, in T. Raychaudhuri & I. Habib (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. I, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982.

[23] V. B. Singh (ed.), Nehru on Socialism, Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications Division, Delhi, 1977, pp. 56-57, 67.

[24] `Draft recommendations for the formulation of the Second Five Year Mahalanobis;`The Second Five-Year Plan – A tentative framework’, drafted by the economic ministries; and a `Memorandum’ written by a panel of prominent Indian economists – all contained in Papers relating to the formulation of the SecondFive Year Plan, Government of India: Planning Commission, 1955 – were the principal influences on the actual Second Plan. No significant understanding of markets, prices or the concept of feasibility is evident on the part of any of the authors. Shenoy’s lonely dissent has already been noted (note 1).

[25] The best descriptions of Indian industrial policy are still to be found in Bhagwati and Desai (1970), op. cit. Also C. Wadhwa, `New Industrial Licensing Policy: An Appraisal’, in C. Wadhwa (ed.), Some problems of India’seconomic policy, Tata-McGraw Hill, Delhi, 1977, pp. 290-324.

[26] Gordon Tullock is generally credited with introducing the notion of rent-seeking in `The welfare costs of tariffs, monopolies and theft’, Western Economic, Journal, 5 (June 1967), while Krueger (1974), op. cit., introduced the term itself. The collection edited by J. M. Buchanan et al., Toward a theory of the rent-seeking society, Texas A&M Press, College Station, 1980, contains reprints of both papers as well as other studies.

[27] Krueger (1975), op. cit., p. 108 ff.

[28] The classic argument for a free market is in M. Friedman, `The case for flexible exchange rates’, in his Essays in Positive Economics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1953, pp. 157-203. Also V. S. Vartikar,Commercial policy and economic development in India, Praeger, New York, 1969, based on his PhD at Wayne State University; and D. Lal, A liberal international economic order : the international monetary system and economic development, Essays in International Finance No. 139, Princeton University, October 1980.

[29] An additive sub-utility function might be defined within each set of categories UG= ∑ ai vi (Gi) a1 ≥ a2 ≥ a3, ∑ ai= 1UP= ∑ bj wj (Pj) b1 ≥ b2 ∑ bj= 1where the vi (.) and the wj (.) are further sub-utility functions defined on each category, etc. None of these has ever been spelt out by the Indian Government and certainly no amount of UP has seemed substitutable for an iota of UG.

[30] Bhagwati and Srinivasan, op. cit., p. 38.

[31] Ibid.,p. 38

[32] In 1980, for example, exports of pig-iron and of sheep- and goat-meat were banned; an export duty on jute manufactures was imposed on 18 February and lifted on 8 September. (Annual Report on Exchange Controls, International Monetary Fund, 1981, pp. 205-13.) The Import and Export Policy (April 1982, March 1983)announced by the Commerce Ministry reported the banning of exports of cane, paraffin wax, mustard and rape-seedoil, and `certain
wild-life items’, including lizards and robins. An embargo on the export of CTC (cut, tear and curl) tea was announced by the Ministry of Commerce on 24December 1983. CTC is high-quality tea which accounts for about three-quarters of India’s tea exports. The ban followed a doubling of domestic prices over the previous year, compulsory registration of tea dealers holding more than 1,000 kg. to prevent hoarding, and agreement by manufacturers to reduce their profit margins and cut prices ofpackaged tea by about 20 per cent (Financial Times, 14 December 1983). The Indian Government apparently feared that the supply of tea for the domestic market was going to run out (The Times, 5 January 1984). The effect of thesemeasures is artificially to depress prices in the domestic market whilst raising them overseas (The Economist, 14 January 1984).

[33] Pick’s Currency Year-book, various editions

[34] Krueger (1977), op. cit., pp. 27-28.

[35] Balassa (1978), op. cit., p. 39; Balassa (1980), op. cit., p. 16.

[36] Ibid.,p. 22.

[37] Short surveys of the relevant practices can be found in Lele, op. cit.,Appendix 1, pp. 225-37, and Sukhatme, op. cit., pp. 29-37. Also Gilbert Brown, `Agricultural pricing policies in developing countries’, and G. E.Schuh, `Approaches to “basic needs” and to “equity” that distort incentives in agriculture’, in Schultz (ed.), op. cit.,pp. 84-113 and pp. 307-27 respectively.

[38] Theoretical economists have long recognised that a fundamental flaw in, for example, the Arrow-Debreu model is its assumption that all conceivable futures contracts are practicable. The longest futures price actually quoted at
the Chicago Board of Trade, however, would be for silver, at about two years; for grains, the longest would be only about three months. Since the natural market outcome is a far-cry from the theory, the Indian Government’s fears about the effects of speculation appear to be much exaggerated. To see the risk-dispersing character of a futures contract, let us suppose that both buyer and seller place a probability of one-half on prices being either in 8 or 2; if they are risk-averse, they may prefer to trade at a certain futures price of 5 now, rather than wait for the future to unfold.

[39] David Hopper, `Distortions of agricultural development resulting from Government prohibitions,’ Schultz (ed.), op. cit., p. 69 ff.

[40] K. Prasad, `Foodgrains policy 1966-1976′, in Wadhwa (ed.), op. cit., p.479.

[41] Schultz (ed.), op. cit., p. 309.

[42] Sukhatme, op. cit., pp. 74-86; T. W. Schultz, `On the economics and politics of agriculture’, in Schultz(ed.), op. cit., p. 15 ff.

[43] Schultz (ed.), op. cit., pp. 92-93.

[44] Ibid.,p. 95.

[45] T. N. Srinivasan, `Income Distribution: A survey of policy-aspects’, in Wadhwa (ed.), op. cit., p. 265. That the small farmer may not find it profitable to invest in storage, and that (if it has been taxed) agriculture has been taxed regressively, are also remarked upon by Srinivasan.

[46] Lele, op. cit., p. 2, where reference is made to Sir Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1954.

[47] Lele, op. cit., pp. 214-24

[48] For example, M. Todaro, `A model of labor migration and urban unemployment in less developed countries’, American Economic Review, March 1969, 59, pp. 138-48; J. P. Harris & M. Todaro, `Migration,unemployment and development: a two-sector analysis’, American Economic Review, March 1970 60, pp. 126-42.The best paper known to the author is by Jerome Rothenberg, `On the economics of internal migration’, Working Paper No. 189, Dept. of Economics, MIT, July 1976.

[49] Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, New York, 1980, pp. 268-69.

[50] `The logic of protection’, The Statesman, Editorial, 19 March 1981; also the Editorial, `Danger of caste ethnic

[51] S. K. Datta Ray, `Backlash to protection: fancy gifts ignore real reform’, The Statesman Weekly, 21 March 1981.

[52]M. Weiner, M. F. Katzenstein, K.V.N. Rao, India’s preferential policies : migrants, the middle classes and ethnic equality, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, pp. 16-17.

[53] Ibid. p. 5

[54] P. T. Bauer, `Population explosion: myths and realities’, in Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, pp. 42-65, contains some of the clearest arguments known to the author about this question; also M. Weiner, India at the Polls : the Parliamentary Election of 1977, American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC, 1978, pp. 35-39.

[55] 10 8 million people affected by floods’, The Statesman Weekly, 22 August 1981; also `Down the drain’, Editorial in The Statesman, 8 July 1981.

[56] Justice with speed’, Editorial in The Statesman, Calcutta and New Delhi, 21 July, 1980

[57] Aristotle, op. cit., 1,094a1-1, 094b11.

[58] There are few thorough studies known to the author that are relevant. One such is Asha L. Dattar, India’s Economic Relations with the USSR and Eastern Europe 1953-1969, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972.

[59] Bauer (1981) op. cit. Chapters 5 & 6.

[60]. Adam Smith op cit Book IV; also B. Baysinger et al.,`Mercantilism as a rent-seeking society’, in Buchanan et al (eds) op. cit. pp. 235-68.

[61] G. Tullock in Buchanan et al. (eds.), op. cit., p. 48.

[62] Bauer (1981), op. cit., p. 144.