‘India’s China obsession is silly’

Do politicians or public figures in India tend to be somewhat vague about institutionalised argument beyond just the election?

I think consensus has a role, but there is such a thing as trying to work for consensus prematurely. Consensus becomes important when there is disagreement and this disagreement is spelt out and the arguments of both sides are considered.

Consensus has a kind of ultimate role, but premature consensus could have the effect of sabotaging a creative dialectic. Democracy is about argument and that’s why it’s quite important to not seek consensus as the first thing, rather than the very last thing.

•The theme of your book and talk [at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre, on Monday, August 1] flowed, in a sense, from your lecture at the Indian History Congress in 2001: ‘History and the Enterprise of Knowledge’. There is this obsession in some quarters with ‘objective history’, which is almost an oxymoron. Or of a state-written, sanitised history.

Do you think the state should be in the business of writing history textbooks at all? Should we look for that one interpretation of history.

Looking for one interpretation of history is a mistake, and if it is done by the state as an act of state it is also a mistake. The state does have a role in supporting, financing, and providing the resources for writing Indian history.

And the state may even have a role in the absolute distortion that has been sometimes allowed — like the computerised creation of a bull as a horse in an attempt to show that the Indus Valley civilisation was in fact a Sanskritic Vedic Hindu civilisation. That was just a piece of intellectual fraud. The state may also have a role in allowing that to be rebutted.

But the idea of the state producing one great ‘objective’ version of a country’s history would be a mistake. That’s not the kind of thing that happens in history. It depends on interpretation. However, it’s not the same as saying there is no such thing as objectivity. As I tried to argue in a paper some years ago, ‘Understanding India’s Past’, the positionality of the observer is quite important. How do you see it? In which context?

There could be an official history, of course, but it must stand its ground with other histories. And sometimes unofficial ones prove much better. I remember studying the Bengal Famine of 1943. There were a lot of interesting things in the official reports, but the unofficial reports had got much closer to the truth.

The state has an important supportive role, but not in trying to shut out dialectics and arguments on grounds that we need one utterly sanitised history, fully in conformity with the state’s views.

•It’s treated almost as a given today that India is the next superpower, great power, whatever. But however large our economy beomes in absolute numbers, a whole swathe of countries, from Belgium to South Korea to Australia, will, in the foreesable future, have citizens living better lives than we will.

Yet there seems to be a constricted debate. Today if anyone says, ‘India is not really going to be a superpower in the next 10 years, let’s stop looking at bogus goals’, he’s accused of being negative. There’s no middle ground, you’re either at one end of the debate or the other.

One way to judge the progress of a country is to look at the lives of the people there — whether they are educated, well fed, get medical treatment, enjoy freedom of expression and literary creation, whether there is opportunity of creativity. That is a very different perspective from the superpower perspective. It is, to me, a much better way.

The second point is I don’t think the idea of India being a superpower can be interpreted to mean being enormously more powerful than everybody else. There is no country more powerful today than the United States, but it has run into problems in Iraq. Britain is very important, but it has problems in guaranteeing the peace of mind of Londoners. I don’t think the idea of a superpower being that you stand like Alexander with the vanquished tribes all around holds. I don’t think it ever held, and it particularly doesn’t hold now.

The third thing is, whatever increase in India’s economic position and political importance occurs will occur in the context of teamwork, with other countries that are also making progress. This intense obsession of how we can catch up with China is silly. We should take joy in the fact that a poor country like China is making progress. If I have concern it is that there is other progress I would like to see in China, in having a multi-party democracy.

I don’t take myself as looking at a rival position. This encourages too much of a ‘me versus you’ view, which is not very healthy.

The positive thing I’d say in its [the superpower rhetoric’s] favour is there’s been so much doom and pessimism about India’s future that I can understand when people would want to emphasise that India could be also important. For example, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh mentioned at the release of the book that the next few decades might be India’s decades. What he wanted to say was: we have to get over the period when we saw ourselves in a helpless position with begging bowls.

But I don’t think Manmohan would deny that that’s not the same thing as wanting a uniquely important position in the world and forgetting the well-being of citizens. And not the same thing as doing other countries down at a time when India has to get up, dust itself and move forward.

•Your book talks of how India can learn from both China’s post-reform judicious use of the market and pre-reform investment in social infrastructure. There are some who tend to interpret the 2004 election results as a negative vote on economic reforms. Manmohan Singh, as prime minister, has had much difficulty in trying to further economic reform. Do you sympathise with his predicament?

I think sympathy wouldn’t be the right word. My position on Manmohan’s understanding of political economy has been that he has been absolutely right in wanting a lot of reforms. When I argued with him earlier on, I was trying to push him in the direction of not only getting over the licence raj, but more constructive things like basic education, basic healthcare, social infrastructure. These are part of his priorities today; so really, I don’t have any great grumble. I would quite like to see him succeed.

There are all kinds of other issues, like the exact role of foreign enterprise in one sector or the other. These are in some way tactical as opposed to strategic. The Manmohan Singh government has a good vision on the need for India to play its part in a globalised world, and a vision for social infrastructure. On the details of the role of the foreign sector in retail or something else — these are ancillary questions.

Now I’m not taking the view that the Left should necessarily support the Manmohan government on everything. The purpose of a democracy is to present your perspective, rather than, as we discussed earlier, prematurely seek agreement. But as a member of the coalition, the Left also has a responsibiliy in making sure that it does not undermine the bigger, more strategic issues that make Manmohan such a great leader. Along with Sonia Gandhi, especially considering the wonderful part she played in winning the election by focusing on the fortunes of the poor, the rural poor, and the plight of the minorities and wanting a secular state.

I think this the big vision, and the Left does agree primarily with it. It is a question of the fine line of making their detailed points on the tactical issues, insisting on being heard, but at the same time not undermining the coalition’s broader agenda. That’s the challenge the Left faces.

The challenge for the media is that when the Left expresses disagreement, it is not right necessarily to interpret that, as media often does, as a tremendous, severe strain. That’s part of democratic politics.

•Probably the biggest social sector intervention planned by this government is the Employment Guarantee Scheme. It has some people ecstatic and some people very worried. I know you don’t advise governments, but would you say the outlay is well spent? Or would you rather spend it in areas such as healthcare and primary education?

It’s a difficult subject to comment on. Employment guarantee could be an extremely important part of the poverty-removal programme. Employment is often the only source of income for some of the least fortunate in the economy. And employment guarantee has played a fairly important part in Maharashtra.

On the other side, of course, is the question of resource distribution between competing goals, including basic education and basic healthcare. They are in a dreadful state and do require money and social infrastructure. It’s a question of balancing.

I haven’t studied the present stage of the debate sufficiently, but it’s clear to me that the original, rather ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme has been cut down severely. There are some issues I would like to comment on. One of them is whether, in addition to giving employment to those who are seeking it, you ought to check what their level of income is.

In a sense this goes against the employment guarantee logic — which is to say that, since the wages are not terribly high, only those who need employment will seek it. You don’t need a further guarantee to make sure they are also poor.

So for not just the equity of the arrangement but also the efficiency, it should be possible to do it in terms of self-selection, as often happens in famine relief — you offer employment to anyone who will come and work, but you have to work. If you’re willing to do a hard day’s work to get that wage, you must need it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.

Now that is the logic of the employment guarantee approach. To add the income clause seems to raise issues about the basic rationale of that approach.

Maybe those who want to do it are looking for a poverty-based thing rather than an employment-based thing. I don’t know enough … But just as a general economist, it seemed to me that the employment self-selection mode was itself sufficiently discriminatory in favour of the poor.

•Your book emphasises India’s ‘heritage of heterodoxy’. Now there’s a line on page 165, which goes: ‘If the disaffected Arab activist today is induced to take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritisation of religion has certainly played a big part in that interpretational enclosure.’

You’ve travelled extensively in Bangladesh and know Pakistan well. Would you say, in the manner of the ‘disaffected Arab activist’, our shared ‘heritage of heterodoxy’ is not always appreciated enough in Pakistan and Bangladesh?

The situation is quite complex in both countries. Bangladesh has had a much greater role for Islamic fundamentalists recently than earlier. And in that the systematic attempt, often with money from abroad, in having rather single-minded madrassas as well as directing politics towards Islamic parties has had a part.

But secular forces in Bangladesh are very strong, the Bengali identity is very strong. It doesn’t compete with religion because there’s no reason why you can’t read Bengali literature and listen to Bengali music and still be a good Muslim.

There’s a real debate going on there. Pratham Alo is a very secular newspaper and is also the most read paper in Bangladesh. So I don’t take the view that secularists have lost the battle in Bangladesh, very far from it.

Pakistan is a harder case, because it began with a kind of Islamic identity as the constitutive idea of Pakistan … with some tension, which has been brought up in the Indian papers in the context of the remarks of [L.K.] Advani.

Advani did make the remark, I believe correctly, that Jinnah did say that once Pakistan has been formed it should not have religious politics. In any case, he was not particularly religious himself. He wanted what he thought to be a better deal for Muslims. Whether that was secured better in Pakistan or would have been secured better by staying on in India remains an issue. Ayesha Jalal’s book The Sole Spokesman points out that it wasn’t clear to Jinnah himself when he sought that separation.

I think Advani has raised an interesting and important issue and even though Advani’s politics and mine are totally different, I have to take what he says to be a constructive contribution to India’s engagement with the understandings that go behind Pakistani politics.

But the big thing that’s happened in Pakistan recently is the expansion of secular society in the mode of not only the West but also India or Japan. A sort of ‘globalist, secularist’ position is quite common. The newespapers have become dramatically more independent, producing quite a departure from Muslim orthodoxy.

That has gone hand in hand, of course, with the expansion of extremist Islamic politics. There is a debate at a much more raw level than in Bangladesh, because Bangladesh isn’t the factory of terrorism in a way that Pakistan has allowed itself to be.

But many people have been very courageous in Pakistan in standing up — and they might often be good Muslims themselves — to religious politics. They want Pakistan to be a respectable member of the comity of nations, in the 21st century rather than thousands of years earlier. There is a lot to admire in what these very broad-minded, determined people are trying to do.

So I don’t take a very pessimistic view of either country but I do recognise Pakistan has a bigger problem to handle than Bangladesh.

•Let’s hope there are enough Argumentative Pakistanis!

(Laughs) I think there are a lot of Argumentative Pakistanis. That is a tradition we share.