P Chidambaram is a highly intelligent politician. He holds the distinction of presenting the second highest number of Union budgets. Having also held other important portfolios,he has undoubtedly become one of the main pillars of the UPA government. Therefore,in listening to Chidambaram’s speech,I tried to focus not only on the numbers of revenue and spending,but also on seeing if some strong overarching philosophy guided his—and the Congress party’s—budget-making exercise. What I found was verbal sophistry.
At the beginning of his speech,the finance minister articulated his government’s oft-repeated melange of pet words. “Our goal is ‘higher growth leading to inclusive and sustainable development’. That is the mool mantra.” He then went on to say,“Growth is a necessary condition and we must unhesitatingly embrace growth as the highest goal. It is growth that will lead to inclusive development,without growth there will be neither development nor inclusiveness.”
There is a serious conceptual flaw in this argument,and Chidambaram sought to hide it beneath nice-sounding words,some of them borrowed from a rather pedestrian quote from Joseph Stiglitz,the Nobel prize-winning economist. The flaw is this: must India regard economic growth as its highest goal? If the Congress party believes so,then it must order Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in the precincts of Parliament to be dislodged from its pedestal. For,accepting economic growth as our highest national goal negates not only Mahatma’s philosophy,and India’s unique civilisational ethos,but also the basic teachings of all religions.
Economic growth is most certainly the indispensable means to achieving a larger goal,but it cannot be the goal itself,much less the highest goal. Similarly,“inclusive and sustainable development” cannot be conceived as only the desirable by-products of economic growth. Seldom does economic growth inevitably deliver inclusive and sustainable development,as Chidambaram seems to simplistically imply,against the well-documented evidence of the post-liberalisation experience of India and many other countries.
Rather,equitable and environmentally sustainable development should form the bedrock of our national goal. Even here,our understanding of India’s goal would be severely limited,and lead to grievous distortions,if we didn’t include in its definition,promotion of “justice”,“harmony” and “integral development”,three seminal concepts missing in Chidambaram’s speech—and also in the speeches of most contemporary Indian politicians,irrespective of their party affiliations. Leading thinkers in the development debate around the world are rediscovering the pivotal nature of just,fair,harmonious and all-round human development. The progressive flowering of the cultural,intellectual,artistic and spiritual potential of individuals,communities and nations living in harmony with nature is not an esoteric or a utopian ideal; rather,the purpose and pace of economic growth are to be measured against the extent of realisation of this ideal.
Sadly,the leading thinkers and doers in UPA have displayed,with support from cheerleaders in business and media,an irrational fixation for growth-as-an-end-in-itself. And when their fetish for growth as the highest goal is questioned and,when it is pointed out that their model of growth and governance has led to the widest inequities in Indian society,they have resorted to the palliative of partial,sometimes divisive,politically motivated and democratically disempowering notions of inclusive development. The Congress party,even after UPA’s nine years in office,has failed to synthesise and articulate a holistic and culturally rooted concept of India’s development.
Also missing in the finance minister’s speech is the necessary exhortation that economic growth,if it has to serve as a reliable means for achieving the larger ends of human development and national progress,must be ethically pursued. The absence of emphasis on ethics and morality in much of India’s economic and political discourse is a grave frailty in our national life today. And its ill-effects are manifesting themselves in many different ways—from the fact that only 42,800 Indians have admitted to a taxable annual income of Rs 1 crore to the related fact that we have one of the world’s most corrupt,indeed extortionist,tax collection machineries,which is a big drain on our national revenue and to which the finance minister has never addressed even a mild word of warning.
Some might say: the budget speech is not expected to throw light on the moral matrix of means and ends. Sorry. This rebuttal holds water only if the budget speech is seen no more than as a CFO’s statement. When the finance minister himself chooses to make some grandiloquent,preambular remarks about economic growth being India’s “highest goal”,these must be scrutinised for the danger inherent in this flawed philosophical outlook.
In Indian philosophy,a ‘mantra’ is a word or group of words that contain thought energy and,if uttered in the right way with the right mental-spiritual preparation,can produce an amazing transformative effect. ‘Mool Mantra’ refers to the thought power of fundamental potency. Sadly,all of us are used to using this weighty word casually. But when corrupt governments use it to cover up corruption of the fundamental concepts of human development,it becomes necessary to point out that much of India’s current woes are due to the perversion of the means and goals of life.
(sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com)
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