India at Crossroads | World Leaders Forum - Columbia University | April 2, 2019
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Akeel Bigrami: The World Leaders Forum
Akeel Bigrami: was created by Lee Ballinger
Akeel Bigrami: to bring to our university
Akeel Bigrami: women and men,
Akeel Bigrami: not just with political authority,
Akeel Bigrami: but also intellectual authority,
Akeel Bigrami: to present their thoughts to us
Akeel Bigrami: without fear
Akeel Bigrami: of anything except
Akeel Bigrami: public engagement and discussion.
Akeel Bigrami: It is in that spirit
Akeel Bigrami: that Amartya Sen and Prabhat Patnaik
Akeel Bigrami: have been invited
Akeel Bigrami: to speak today at this event
Akeel Bigrami: for which we've all been keenly waiting.
Akeel Bigrami: The theme today is
Akeel Bigrami: "India at Crossroads"
Akeel Bigrami: -an apt topic,
Akeel Bigrami: since one meaning of crossroads is,
Akeel Bigrami: in my dictionary,
Akeel Bigrami: a crucial point,
Akeel Bigrami: especially when a decision is to be made
Akeel Bigrami: And as we know,
Akeel Bigrami: the General Elections in India
Akeel Bigrami: will be underway this month
Akeel Bigrami: -an election that will decide
Akeel Bigrami: whether India will continue
Akeel Bigrami: even more steeply down the path
Akeel Bigrami: of right-wing religious nationalism
Akeel Bigrami: or return to some of its past ideals
Akeel Bigrami: of secularism and economic policies
Akeel Bigrami: intended to uplift the lives
Akeel Bigrami: of poor and working people.
Akeel Bigrami: But, of course,
Akeel Bigrami: a proper concern for the decisions
Akeel Bigrami: we are about to make for the future
Akeel Bigrami: depends, widely,
Akeel Bigrami: on how we understand our past
Akeel Bigrami: and our present.
Akeel Bigrami: And so, it's really to provide
Akeel Bigrami: that analysis in depth,
Akeel Bigrami: that we've brought our two guests here.
Akeel Bigrami: I'm going to introduce our speakers
Akeel Bigrami: with much more brevity than they deserve and command.
Akeel Bigrami: This gives them as much time to speak themselves.
Akeel Bigrami: We really want to hear from them,
Akeel Bigrami: not about them.
Akeel Bigrami: They are both figures of international renown
Akeel Bigrami: with a brace of awards and prizes
Akeel Bigrami: and honorary degrees between them.
Akeel Bigrami: Amartya Sen is the Lamont professor
Akeel Bigrami: at Harvard where he teaches both
Akeel Bigrami: economics and philosophy.
Akeel Bigrami: He is a Nobel laureate in economics,
Akeel Bigrami: has been the Master of Trinity College in Cambridge,
Akeel Bigrami: as well as the Drummond Professor
Akeel Bigrami: of Political Economy at Oxford.
Akeel Bigrami: Before that, he taught at
Akeel Bigrami: Jadavpur University,
Akeel Bigrami: University of Calcutta,
Akeel Bigrami: and the Delhi School of Economics.
Akeel Bigrami: His books include
Akeel Bigrami: Collective Choice and Social Welfare,
Akeel Bigrami: Poverty and Famines,
Akeel Bigrami: Development as Freedom,
Akeel Bigrami: and, most recently, The Idea of Justice.
Akeel Bigrami: Prabhat Patnaik,
Akeel Bigrami: who went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar,
Akeel Bigrami: taught economics at Cambridge University
Akeel Bigrami: for some years before responding to a call
Akeel Bigrami: to join and help set up
Akeel Bigrami: the Center for Economic Studies
Akeel Bigrami: at the newly-formed
Akeel Bigrami: Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi,
Akeel Bigrami: nobly forsaking
Akeel Bigrami: a most promising international
Akeel Bigrami: academic career to serve his own country,
Akeel Bigrami: where he has taught ever since
Akeel Bigrami: until retiring last year.
Akeel Bigrami: His books include
Akeel Bigrami: Accumulation and Stability under Capitalism,
Akeel Bigrami: The Value of Money,
Akeel Bigrami: Retreat to Unfreedom
Akeel Bigrami: and most recently,
Akeel Bigrami: An Economic Theory of Imperialism.
Akeel Bigrami: They are both here
Akeel Bigrami: because they are,
Akeel Bigrami: as this event's nomenclature has it,
Akeel Bigrami: world leaders of human thought
Akeel Bigrami: about public life.
Akeel Bigrami: By which I mean that,
Akeel Bigrami: what makes them stand out
Akeel Bigrami: apart from the measurable
Akeel Bigrami: productions and achievements that I have just mentioned,
Akeel Bigrami: is that they believe something that most leaders
Akeel Bigrami: increasingly have ceased to believe:
Akeel Bigrami: that ideas make a difference
Akeel Bigrami: to politics and public life,
Akeel Bigrami: that it makes all the difference to politics and public life,
Akeel Bigrami: whether you put truth in the first place
Akeel Bigrami: or the second.
Akeel Bigrami: I will hand over things now to Ruchira Gupta
Akeel Bigrami: who has very kindly agreed to moderate and chair
Akeel Bigrami: the proceedings this evening.
Akeel Bigrami: Miss Gupta is a very important public figure herself,
Akeel Bigrami: a journalist and activist
Akeel Bigrami: of deep and consistent commitments
Akeel Bigrami: to women's issues.
Akeel Bigrami: She has worked over the years with the United Nations,
Akeel Bigrami: the BBC and the wide range of international newspapers
Akeel Bigrami: before she became the founder and chair
Akeel Bigrami: of the remarkable NGO called up Apne Aap,
Akeel Bigrami: whose work has been recognized with honors both
Akeel Bigrami: by the House of Lords in Britain and
Akeel Bigrami: the Clinton Foundation in this country.
Akeel Bigrami: Her scholarly writing is focused
Akeel Bigrami: mostly on human trafficking
Akeel Bigrami: and the legal and moral resources
Akeel Bigrami: with which it must be confronted.
Akeel Bigrami: Columbia is very privileged
Akeel Bigrami: to have the speakers tonight and
Akeel Bigrami: I ask you to join me in welcoming them.
[applause]
Ruchira Gupta: Good evening everyone.
Ruchira Gupta: I'm very honored to be chairing this discussion today
Ruchira Gupta: at a very critical time in India.
Ruchira Gupta: India is going to polls on the 11th of April
Ruchira Gupta: and the election results will be declared on 23rd of May.
Ruchira Gupta: In an extraordinary exercise of world momentum, there are more than 450 parties
Ruchira Gupta: which will be fighting elections this time
Ruchira Gupta: and more than 500 million people
Ruchira Gupta: who will cast their votes.
Ruchira Gupta: The unfortunate part of this great exercise
Ruchira Gupta: is that we have found that 21 million women
Ruchira Gupta: are missing from the electoral rolls this time
Ruchira Gupta: and more than 12% Muslims and Dalits.
Ruchira Gupta: These are challenges that the Election Commission
Ruchira Gupta: should have and is trying to overcome
Ruchira Gupta: but has not been able to in time for this election.
Ruchira Gupta: The other challenge that India faces,
Ruchira Gupta: as we go to polls this time,
Ruchira Gupta: is a creeping fascism,
Ruchira Gupta: which seems to have overtaken many of our institutions
Ruchira Gupta: and has also challenged the very law and order,
Ruchira Gupta: which has provided the stability and
Ruchira Gupta: been the bedrock for the growth of India.
Ruchira Gupta: It has been replaced by a vigilantism.
Ruchira Gupta: This vigilantism is influenced by right-wing
Ruchira Gupta: and outright fascist forces.
Ruchira Gupta: Its founders initiated a dialogue with Hitler
Ruchira Gupta: and then met with Mussolini in 1929.
Ruchira Gupta: They formed a group called the RSS,
Ruchira Gupta: which spawned a political party,
Ruchira Gupta: first called the Jan Sangh and now the BJP.
Ruchira Gupta: The BJP government has been in power for the last five years.
Ruchira Gupta: Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
Ruchira Gupta: this government has not just eroded our institutions,
Ruchira Gupta: but has also made the very life of individual citizens insecure,
Ruchira Gupta: especially Muslims, Dalits and women.
Ruchira Gupta: There has been rape with impunity.
Ruchira Gupta: There has been attacks on Muslims and Dalits,
Ruchira Gupta: in village after village,
Ruchira Gupta: in the name of Love Jihad and Cow-Vigilantism
(e.g.: people murdered on suspicion of eating or transporting beef).
Ruchira Gupta: There has been an erosion of our monetary systems.
Ruchira Gupta: There has been something called demonetization.
Ruchira Gupta: And I have two of the world's greatest experts who will talk about it.
Ruchira Gupta: There has been a deep agrarian crisis.
Ruchira Gupta: There has been an attack on the university system,
Ruchira Gupta: including a university where Prabhat taught-Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Ruchira Gupta: Students have been on the run-arrested falsely.
Ruchira Gupta: So, for India, there is a lot at stake in this election
Ruchira Gupta: -to keep our democracy intact,
Ruchira Gupta: to keep our institutions intact and
Ruchira Gupta: to keep our democratic norms intact.
Ruchira Gupta: This election is going to be very critical
Ruchira Gupta: in defining what India does in the coming years and
Ruchira Gupta: what India becomes in the coming years.
Ruchira Gupta: With the wisdom of Prabhat and Amartya Sen
Ruchira Gupta: who I have with us today,
Ruchira Gupta: I don't have to say more.
Ruchira Gupta: So, I would like to start by asking Professor Patnaik,
Ruchira Gupta: Prabhat, as we all call him in India
Ruchira Gupta: to speak about what his thoughts are
Ruchira Gupta: at this critical moment in our history.
Prabhat Patnaik: Thank you, Ruchira, professors and friends.
Prabhat Patnaik: It's a real pleasure and privilege for me to be here,
Prabhat Patnaik: to be part of this event and to be part of this panel,
Prabhat Patnaik: which includes Professor Amartya Sen,
Prabhat Patnaik: who apart from everything else,
Prabhat Patnaik: also happens to be my teacher in the Delhi School of Economics.
Prabhat Patnaik: He was my teacher of economics.
Prabhat Patnaik: As Ruchira said,
Prabhat Patnaik: India certainly is, currently at the crossroads,
Prabhat Patnaik: in a very obvious way.
Prabhat Patnaik: The elections, which are coming,
Prabhat Patnaik: are going to be extremely crucial.
Prabhat Patnaik: We know that, for the last five years,
Prabhat Patnaik: we have had a government that has
Prabhat Patnaik: used a combination of state terrorism and street terrorism
Prabhat Patnaik: to suppress freedom of expression.
Prabhat Patnaik: State tourism has been used through
Prabhat Patnaik: Acts like the UAPA- Unlawful Activities Prevention Act,
Prabhat Patnaik: the sedition laws,
Prabhat Patnaik: which are a hangover from the colonial times,
Prabhat Patnaik: under which Gandhi was incarcerated,
Prabhat Patnaik: the National Security Act and so on.
Prabhat Patnaik: Street terrorism has been inflicted through lynch mobs,
Prabhat Patnaik: through street thugs who go around
Prabhat Patnaik: interfering, terrorizing, intimidating people.
Prabhat Patnaik: Muslims and religious minorities, in general,
Prabhat Patnaik: have been made to feel that they are second-class citizens.
Prabhat Patnaik: You find a concept of jingoistic nationalism,
Prabhat Patnaik: which has nothing to do with the kind of inclusive
Prabhat Patnaik: anti-colonial nationalism of the earlier period.
Prabhat Patnaik: This jingoistic nationalism typically takes
Prabhat Patnaik: nationalism to be synonymous, not just with Hindutva,
Prabhat Patnaik: but with the leader of the current government.
Prabhat Patnaik: In fact, the day before yesterday, on Sunday,
Prabhat Patnaik: a speech was made by the Prime Minister
Prabhat Patnaik: in which he said- “anyone who abuses me is actually working for Pakistan”.
Prabhat Patnaik: So, you have a jingoistic notion of nationalism,
Prabhat Patnaik: in which anybody, who is a critical of the government
Prabhat Patnaik: is accused of being anti-national.
Prabhat Patnaik: It means that people who are critical
Prabhat Patnaik: are vilified and demonized.
Prabhat Patnaik: We have had periods earlier, for instance,
Prabhat Patnaik: during the Emergency of the 1970s
Prabhat Patnaik: in which state repression was used against critics of the government,
Prabhat Patnaik: but the owner of the critics of the government-media house owners-
Prabhat Patnaik: were never questioned.
Prabhat Patnaik: They were not portrayed as being
Prabhat Patnaik: dishonorable, traitors to the country
Prabhat Patnaik: and anti-national and such like.
Prabhat Patnaik: The closeness between the government and the corporate sector
Prabhat Patnaik: is quite unprecedented in the history of India.
Prabhat Patnaik: The current Prime Minister came for his swearing-in,
Prabhat Patnaik: on a plane owned by a rich corporate businessman.
Prabhat Patnaik: I would just like to draw a contrast here.
Prabhat Patnaik: When Jawahar Lal Nehru's wife, Kamala,
Prabhat Patnaik: was dying of tuberculosis in the 1930s in a sanatorium in Switzerland,
Prabhat Patnaik: he was short of money to visit her.
Prabhat Patnaik: G.D. Birla, who was actually a big businessman,
Prabhat Patnaik: and had helped and supported and financed the Congress in the past,
Prabhat Patnaik: offered to buy him his ticket and to finance his trip.
Prabhat Patnaik: Nehru said no.
Prabhat Patnaik: That was the distance,
Prabhat Patnaik: which the leadership tried to maintain with big business.
Prabhat Patnaik: This distance has now been totally obliterated.
Prabhat Patnaik: And it is in this context that you find,
Prabhat Patnaik: as Ruchira said, the attack on institutions,
Prabhat Patnaik: the attack on centers of learning-Jawaharlal Nehru University,
Prabhat Patnaik: Hyderabad Central University,
Prabhat Patnaik: the Pune Film Institute,
Prabhat Patnaik: the MS University Fine Arts school.
Prabhat Patnaik: In other words, the finest centers of learning
Prabhat Patnaik: and thought in the country are being destroyed.
Prabhat Patnaik: There is a general promotion of unreason,
Prabhat Patnaik: because if you have to portray for instance,
Prabhat Patnaik: past Muslim emperors as villains in some ways,
Prabhat Patnaik: in that case you have to rewrite history
Prabhat Patnaik: in a manner where evidence should not count against your position.
Prabhat Patnaik: Therefore, a certain element of destruction of thought
Prabhat Patnaik: is essential to this project.
Prabhat Patnaik: All this is, of course, an affront to the Constitution.
Prabhat Patnaik: It is a violation of the basic values of our Constitution.
Prabhat Patnaik: Consequently, the elections we are going to have now,
Prabhat Patnaik: are absolutely crucial.
Prabhat Patnaik: You see, they are crucial, not only in the sense that all, that is happening,
Prabhat Patnaik: is ethically repugnant,
Prabhat Patnaik: I think they are crucial in a deeper sense.
Prabhat Patnaik: The values of the Constitution are derived from a certain implicit social compact
Prabhat Patnaik: which underlies modern India, and that itself is being undermined.
Prabhat Patnaik: This social compact was articulated in the 1931 Karachi Congress
Prabhat Patnaik: and gained currency during the anti-colonial struggle.
Prabhat Patnaik: The Constitution is derived from it.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now anything that challenges that implicit social compact,
Prabhat Patnaik: on the basis of which modern India has been formed,
Prabhat Patnaik: is something which actually undermines
Prabhat Patnaik: the very foundations of the modern Indian nation.
Prabhat Patnaik: And if that is the case,
Prabhat Patnaik: then unless we get a different verdict in these elections,
Prabhat Patnaik: India might as well join the ranks
Prabhat Patnaik: of the so-called "failed states"
Prabhat Patnaik: where you would continue to have internal strife in a way where,
Prabhat Patnaik: the country just does not become an unpleasant place,
Prabhat Patnaik: it actually becomes an unviable country altogether.
Prabhat Patnaik: These elections are extremely crucial
Prabhat Patnaik: and, as Ruchira has said,
Prabhat Patnaik: we certainly are at the crossroads
Prabhat Patnaik: in that very clear, definite sense.
Prabhat Patnaik: But I have a feeling that
Prabhat Patnaik: we are also at crossroads in a deeper sense,
Prabhat Patnaik: and that is the following:
Prabhat Patnaik: Suppose we ask ourselves the question,
Prabhat Patnaik: if the current political regime is overthrown in the elections,
Prabhat Patnaik: would we actually have overcome the threat of fascism?
Prabhat Patnaik: And my fear is no,
Prabhat Patnaik: because I think the conjuncture that gives rise
Prabhat Patnaik: to the threat of fascism would not have disappeared.
Prabhat Patnaik: Basically, during the neoliberal period,
Prabhat Patnaik: you have had a situation where not only have
Prabhat Patnaik: inequalities increased enormously
Prabhat Patnaik: -- income and wealth inequalities --
Prabhat Patnaik: but actually hunger has increased.
Prabhat Patnaik: Absolute poverty defined in terms of nutritional intake
Prabhat Patnaik: has actually increased.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now, if that is the case for quite some time,
Prabhat Patnaik: the neoliberal economic regime continued
Prabhat Patnaik: because it continued to infuse in people
Prabhat Patnaik: the hope that all right, today you are bad,
Prabhat Patnaik: today you are not in a good position,
Prabhat Patnaik: but tomorrow you are going to get the benefits of this growth,
Prabhat Patnaik: this very high rate of GDP growth,
Prabhat Patnaik: sooner or later you're going to get the benefits of it.
Prabhat Patnaik: What has happened more recently is
Prabhat Patnaik: that the neoliberal regime, itself,
Prabhat Patnaik: has run into a kind of economic cul de sac.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now, to the extent that is the case,
Prabhat Patnaik: this promise of good days to come is something
Prabhat Patnaik: which no longer can actually persuade people.
Prabhat Patnaik: And in a situation like this,
Prabhat Patnaik: additional props are needed.
Prabhat Patnaik: And what you have in India, in my view,
Prabhat Patnaik: is a kind of prop in which there is an alliance
Prabhat Patnaik: between big business on the one hand
Prabhat Patnaik: and the Hindutva elements on the other hand.
Prabhat Patnaik: In my perception,
Prabhat Patnaik: Narendra Modi’s political role
Prabhat Patnaik: has been to bring about this alliance between big business and the Hindutva elements.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now this alliance is something which,
Prabhat Patnaik: invariably, underlies all kinds of fascism
Prabhat Patnaik: and this is the kind that we are witnessing at this moment.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now, one of the things, however,
Prabhat Patnaik: is that unless, therefore, we overcome this conjuncture,
Prabhat Patnaik: unless, in some sense, we manage to extricate the country
Prabhat Patnaik: from the kind of economic travails that it
Prabhat Patnaik: currently faces, this kind of fascist threat would continue.
Prabhat Patnaik: You may have a new government,
Prabhat Patnaik: the new government will do pretty much the same thing
Prabhat Patnaik: that previous governments have been doing.
Prabhat Patnaik: It will become unpopular and then these people
Prabhat Patnaik: will come back to power and,
Prabhat Patnaik: through all these ups and downs,
Prabhat Patnaik: they will be in and out of power.
Prabhat Patnaik: This will lead to the progressive fascisification of society
Prabhat Patnaik: and that is something which actually worries me greatly.
Prabhat Patnaik: I think the idea, therefore, that something basic needs to be done,
Prabhat Patnaik: that in some sense,
Prabhat Patnaik: the hitherto drawn boundaries of the neoliberal economic regime,
Prabhat Patnaik: have got to be transcended,
Prabhat Patnaik: is an issue which many people are feeling.
Prabhat Patnaik: And I suspect the Congress’ recent manifesto,
Prabhat Patnaik: where they're talking about Nyuntam Yojana-
Prabhat Patnaik: providing a basic minimum income to everybody-
Prabhat Patnaik: is an appreciation of the fact.
Prabhat Patnaik: But it's just not enough.
Prabhat Patnaik: I believe this idea of handing out largesse
Prabhat Patnaik: within a broadly neoliberal pattern of the economy
Prabhat Patnaik: is utterly inadequate.
Prabhat Patnaik: What is really required is a set of universal benefits,
Prabhat Patnaik: which people must acquire, as a right.
Prabhat Patnaik: A set of universal, justiciable, economic rights
Prabhat Patnaik: is something, that can actually get us out,
Prabhat Patnaik: of this particular conjuncture.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now I have made some calculations.
Prabhat Patnaik: According to which,
Prabhat Patnaik: suppose you take a minimum of five rights:
Prabhat Patnaik: right to food, right to employment,
Prabhat Patnaik: failing which there are adequate employment and unemployment benefits,
Prabhat Patnaik: right to free, quality and publicly-funded healthcare,
Prabhat Patnaik: right to free quality and publicly-funded education
Prabhat Patnaik: and the right to old age pension and disability benefits.
Prabhat Patnaik: Just take these five minimal rights.
Prabhat Patnaik: If you want to implement them,
Prabhat Patnaik: it would immediately require about 9% of the GDP.
Prabhat Patnaik: Professor Sen once said that, in India,
Prabhat Patnaik: we can get rid of poverty if we can spend 5% of the GDP.
Prabhat Patnaik: I would say that, even introducing these rights
Prabhat Patnaik: would require 9% of GDP.
Prabhat Patnaik: It is easy to finance,
Prabhat Patnaik: because raising finance of that order in a country that
Prabhat Patnaik: has no wealth tax, whatsoever, is extremely easy.
Prabhat Patnaik: It is by no means difficult.
Prabhat Patnaik: It would require is a reordering of the economy,
Prabhat Patnaik: reorienting of the economy to produce a whole set of goods and services
Prabhat Patnaik: to meet domestic requirements.
Prabhat Patnaik: This is not really related to ideas of export-led growth,
Prabhat Patnaik: which are so fashionable and current
Prabhat Patnaik: under the neo-liberal regime.
Prabhat Patnaik: I think underlying the immediate crossroads
Prabhat Patnaik: that we face about the election,
Prabhat Patnaik: who is going to come to power and so on,
Prabhat Patnaik: there are deeper crossroads-
Prabhat Patnaik: we either resuscitate the social compact on which modern India is founded
Prabhat Patnaik: or we would join the ranks of failed states.
Prabhat Patnaik: And I think that is a deeper crossroads
Prabhat Patnaik: that we really have to negotiate.
Prabhat Patnaik: Thank you.
Ruchira Gupta: Thank you, Prabhat.
Ruchira Gupta: He's put everything in a nutshell
Ruchira Gupta: and now, I would like Professor Sen to speak a few words.
Amartya Sen: Very difficult to speak about a subject
Amartya Sen: when everything has been put in a nutshell.
Amartya Sen: But I accept that.
Amartya Sen: Prabhat has made a fantastic presentation.
Amartya Sen: I think we have to distinguish between the different things that are going on
Amartya Sen: and why the present moment, including the election, is so important.
Amartya Sen: The country was not a very happy or just place before the Modi government came.
Amartya Sen: There were great inequalities.
Amartya Sen: What has happened is
Amartya Sen: that these inequalities have been magnified
Amartya Sen: and made into a standard part of living.
Amartya Sen: There was a certain amount of shame around the inequalities,
Amartya Sen: which seem to have somehow been eliminated
Amartya Sen: and we have to ask: why has that been so?
Amartya Sen: And it can get really dramatic,
Amartya Sen: there's no question about that.
Amartya Sen: I would take a slight, not an emendation
Amartya Sen: but, addition to what Ruchira has said
Amartya Sen: when you're talking about Dalits and Muslims.
Amartya Sen: There is also a huge category of scheduled tribes.
Amartya Sen: And in terms of the category of the deprivation,
Amartya Sen: the studies that we have done in the Pratichi Trust,
Amartya Sen: brings out that scheduled tribes,
Amartya Sen: have the worst of the deal in India,
Amartya Sen: in almost every effect, of all the marginalized groups.
Amartya Sen: The main thing to recognize is that the underdogs of society
Amartya Sen: are being treated in a terrible way.
Amartya Sen: There have been agitations and the Dalits have been organizing.
Amartya Sen: The impact of it is not very great and we have to ask why.
Amartya Sen: This is also where such issues,
Amartya Sen: which are not immediately connected with deprivation,
Amartya Sen: like freedom of speech,
Amartya Sen: use of the right to information,
Amartya Sen: et cetera come in.
Amartya Sen: It is very important to recognize that
Amartya Sen: the redressing of inequalities comes,
Amartya Sen: not only, from the actions of the underdogs,
Amartya Sen: but it also comes from people,
Amartya Sen: who belong to a different part of the society but,
Amartya Sen: who are moved by it.
Amartya Sen: And there's nothing extraordinary about that.
Amartya Sen: This whole idea that people only look after
Amartya Sen: their own interests and nothing else,
Amartya Sen: which is sometimes attributed to Marxian materialist philosophy
Amartya Sen: is neither Marx's idea, nor is it a particularly sustainable position.
Amartya Sen: Eric Hobsbawm, wrote a very wonderful article which,
Amartya Sen: alas, is not read much these days,
Amartya Sen: which came out in Marxist Quarterly in 1955.
Amartya Sen: I remember it came out,
Amartya Sen: when I was taking my exams in Cambridge.
Amartya Sen: This is about material conditions and ideas.
Amartya Sen: And it somehow has been associated with Marx
Amartya Sen: -the idea that he emphasized was the importance of material condition
Amartya Sen: and, you know, dialectical materialism and all that.
Amartya Sen: What Hobsbawm is arguing, is that,
Amartya Sen: the position here has been in Marxism and, also earlier, interestingly,
Amartya Sen: I think you can bring [Adam] Smith into it too,
Amartya Sen: is that ideas have an influence on the material conditions
Amartya Sen: and material conditions have an influence on ideas.
Amartya Sen: Now, it so happened that, Hobsbawm was not in the 19th century
Amartya Sen: when Marx was writing.
Amartya Sen: The world was full of people who were saying
Amartya Sen: that ideas influence material conditions -- Hegel,
Amartya Sen: for example, lots of them.
Amartya Sen: And, therefore, the workforce placed an importance
Amartya Sen: on material conditions and ideas.
Amartya Sen: They concentrated on that.
Amartya Sen: But Hobsbawm said the world has changed.
Amartya Sen: I have to sometimes deal with and even if I don't want to,
Amartya Sen: students ask me the rational choice theory,
Amartya Sen: that assumes that everyone pursues their own material advantage.
Amartya Sen: Now that is a gross materialism-
Amartya Sen: what Hobsbawm calls vulgar materialism.
Amartya Sen: Given that, it's very important to emphasize
Amartya Sen: the neglected part, namely, the ideas of
Amartya Sen: dramatic incremental material conditions.
Amartya Sen: In many ways, that's as important today,
Amartya Sen: in the election time, as any other.
Amartya Sen: And, which is why these things about the suppression of freedom of speech,
Amartya Sen: the suppression of facts –
Amartya Sen: I see from the New York Times that it's conceivable
Amartya Sen: that some of the war photos that were distributed about the Indian Army
Amartya Sen: driving the hell out of Pakistan,
Amartya Sen: actually are pictures which had nothing to do with it.
Amartya Sen: Sometimes, there are pictures of people dying
Amartya Sen: during drought and of starvation or even,
Amartya Sen: I'm amazed to be told, from war games.
Amartya Sen: The Pakistani attack, that was shown, was, apparently, taking place, in a little room,
Amartya Sen: where a family was playing a war game on a TV screen.
Amartya Sen: Now are these important?
Amartya Sen: They are important because the ideas that we form,
Amartya Sen: those who argue for freedom of speech,
Amartya Sen: or for not being restrained by beliefs in religion, and so on,
Amartya Sen: are doing something which has a major impact on the way
Amartya Sen: the peasants and workers and the disabled class live.
Amartya Sen: And I think, that is, the very important thing,
Amartya Sen: to recognize in this situation.
Amartya Sen: Now what is happening is,
Amartya Sen: if you look at Modi,
Amartya Sen: there are two elements in the present state of affairs.
Amartya Sen: The first one is what I will call bias and sectarianism.
Amartya Sen: It can take a religious form, like being anti-Muslim.
Amartya Sen: It can take a class form.
Amartya Sen: It can also take a caste and gender form.
Amartya Sen: Tribalism is a very big thing.
Amartya Sen: We didn't have gender in Bengali.
Amartya Sen: Not at all. We lost that.
Amartya Sen: People who lecture constantly about ancient India,
Amartya Sen: but don't like studying it should know that Sanskrit had three genders.
Amartya Sen: Around about 2,000 years ago,
Amartya Sen: there was a reversal of gender in India,
Amartya Sen: particularly the part of the inheritant,
Amartya Sen: so that "his" wife, as in English-
Amartya Sen: "his" is masculine, not "her" wife.
Amartya Sen: But the corresponding term will be "her" wife is dominated.
Amartya Sen: What happened is Hindi moved from "his" wife
Amartya Sen: to "her" wife in that period.
Amartya Sen: A lot of Bengali culture has come from the Bihar region
Amartya Sen: even though the Bengalis don't like admitting it.
Amartya Sen: Magadhi which is from the Bihar region,
Amartya Sen: started dropping gender and
Amartya Sen: Ardhamagadhi, which was the next stage, dropped it altogether.
Amartya Sen: Oriya Bengali and Assamese came out of Ardhamagadhi
Amartya Sen: and you don't have gender there either.
Amartya Sen: However, we do have this big difference between effect and diseffect.
Amartya Sen: So, you have Aap, Tum and, in Bengali, Tui.
Amartya Sen: Now if you talk with Santhals,
Amartya Sen: and I grew up with Santhals in Shantiniketan,
Amartya Sen: they always referred to you as Tui.
Amartya Sen: I wonder how?
Amartya Sen: Well, the reason is, that the only way that others talk to them is Tui
Amartya Sen: and that's the Bengali they have learned.
Amartya Sen: The reflection in their speech is very Chomskyian.
Amartya Sen: The reflect in their speech, you can guess, is how they have been addressed.
Amartya Sen: So, the complete lack of respect from them, in this, is not worrying.
Amartya Sen: Shantiniketan is a great place, where I was born and grew up.
Amartya Sen: It's difficult to make people take an interest in them,
Amartya Sen: despite the fact, that leaders like Rabindranath [Tagore]
Amartya Sen: have talked again and again on that subject.
Amartya Sen: So there is always this bias, deep bias.
Amartya Sen: And the second is what I will call magic.
Amartya Sen: And magic is very important in Modi.
Amartya Sen: Demonetization is part of the magic.
Amartya Sen: I think anyone with any kind of training in economics
Amartya Sen: would find it difficult to believe why
Amartya Sen: making it illegal to hold notes of certain kinds
Amartya Sen: would improve the performance of the people.
Amartya Sen: I mean, there was some idea that, you would catch thieves,
Amartya Sen: people who have fake money.
Amartya Sen: But if you really look through it,
Amartya Sen: you will recognize that people
Amartya Sen: don't hold black money in trade notes-
Amartya Sen: they convert it into properties like land and housing –
Amartya Sen: housing, very much.
Amartya Sen: The world we live in believes in magic.
Amartya Sen: The magic is also extended in the pictures of war toys
Amartya Sen: and the attack on Pakistan.
Amartya Sen: We are in this odd position-the country of Gandhi
Amartya Sen: is now going around claiming we actually killed many more people,
Amartya Sen: as if that would have been a tremendously good thing.
Amartya Sen: I have to say, that returning the pilot,
Amartya Sen: who fell down, was not a victory of the Indian side.
Amartya Sen: It shows, somewhat surprisingly, generosity on the part of the government defendant because,
Amartya Sen: usually, it is done at the end of the war.
Amartya Sen: That's what happened in the 1971 war between Pakistan and India,
Amartya Sen: where India did have a decisive victory
Amartya Sen: and people and prisoners were repatriated after the war ended.
Amartya Sen: This happened in the middle.
Amartya Sen: But to convert that into a victory of India…
Amartya Sen: We got a pilot who was shot down.
Amartya Sen: We were afraid that he would be tortured and possibly executed,
Amartya Sen: instead, he was generously released.
Amartya Sen: I dare say there is a kind of magic in saying
Amartya Sen: this is to the glory of the present government.
Amartya Sen: I'm told that the support of the government
Amartya Sen: dramatically increased after that.
Amartya Sen: Now that is magic.
Amartya Sen: You know, I remember in my college days,
Amartya Sen: my school days, really, people would ask who are the great figures?
Amartya Sen: Some people said Gandhi ji and
Amartya Sen: some would say Tagore.
Amartya Sen: And one chap said P.C. Sircar, who was a magician.
Amartya Sen: Now, the idea of that, you see here,
Amartya Sen: is not Gandhi or Tagore,
Amartya Sen: that is P.C. Sircar.
Amartya Sen: By the way, I was a great devotee of P.C. Sircar.
Amartya Sen: I don't want to blame him,
Amartya Sen: but there is magic.
Amartya Sen: The love of magic is quite important in the election.
Amartya Sen: I think resisting magic is as important as almost anything else that's going on.
Amartya Sen: “Look at the form in which inequality takes place”,
Amartya Sen: I would say quoting Marx again in his last book written in 1875,
Amartya Sen: The Critique of the Gotha Program.
Amartya Sen: It's a very interesting book -- I really recommend people read it.
Amartya Sen: There were two ideas,
Amartya Sen: which are not what I am talking about here (separate from magic and bias),
Amartya Sen: but I will mention.
Amartya Sen: One of them is,
Amartya Sen: he is criticizing the German Workers Party for their Gotha program-
Amartya Sen: for which he is writing a critique.
Amartya Sen: The German Workers Party said all value is reduced by labor
Amartya Sen: and Marx says, what nonsense, there is labor,
Amartya Sen: but there is land and natural resources.
Amartya Sen: This is almost the first discussion of the importance
Amartya Sen: of environmental concerns in human society.
Amartya Sen: There's also a subject in which I got very involved later.
Amartya Sen: It is about identity.
Amartya Sen: And he [Marx], when he is criticizing the Workers Party,
Amartya Sen: said that they treat human beings,
Amartya Sen: only who are workers, only as workers,
Amartya Sen: but the worker is not only a worker,
Amartya Sen: he's also a human being with many, many other characteristics.
Amartya Sen: And this whole idea of forgetting everything else about the worker,
Amartya Sen: excepting the fact that he is a worker or she is a worker,
Amartya Sen: is a huge mistake.
Amartya Sen: Now that's all from a very big discussion,
Amartya Sen: in my judgment, on identity.
Amartya Sen: But, the main thrust of the work is
Amartya Sen: to make sure that people are not exploited.
Amartya Sen: Very important thing.
Amartya Sen: And, whatever they produce,
Amartya Sen: they should get it in a way that it doesn't go away to others.
Amartya Sen: And, it's not defined in the neoclassical way about factor or production,
Amartya Sen: but more like as (William) Morris does, who said Marc Bloch's way.
Amartya Sen: Marc Bloch says feudal lords lived on the labor of serfs.
Amartya Sen: That doesn't mean their feudal lord's land was unproductive.
Amartya Sen: But, somehow, labor is not comparable with owning land.
Amartya Sen: Working is not the same kind of thing as possessing land.
Amartya Sen: That goes back in Marx's writing a lot.
Amartya Sen: The Worker's Party is emphasizing that it must stop.
Amartya Sen: Now Marx actually says that is not enough.
Amartya Sen: It's his idea, or not only his idea,
Amartya Sen: but among other people, his idea.
Amartya Sen: Because, and this [is when] identities come in-the workers have needs also.
Amartya Sen: Say, for somebody who is not very productive, but he has lots of needs.
Amartya Sen: Doesn't society owe something to that person?
Amartya Sen: So, I think there are two concerns here, work and needs.
Amartya Sen: I've been very interested in Marx from my young days.
Amartya Sen: What a dedicated, detached intellectual Marx was.
Amartya Sen: The book ends with Marx saying, "So what?
Amartya Sen: They made a mistake because work is only one thing we looked at, needs is another.
Amartya Sen: Can we provide satisfaction on needs?"
Amartya Sen: And he said, "We would be able to,
Amartya Sen: but that would need a reorientation of mental attitude and,
Amartya Sen: also, much greater affluence.
Amartya Sen: Can we do it now? No, it can't be done."
Amartya Sen: So, what are we talking about, then?
Amartya Sen: Since, ultimately, you agree with the German Worker's Party.
Amartya Sen: What he is saying is that you mustn't forget that there are needs.
Amartya Sen: That's the point, which is a very important point to make.
Amartya Sen: It certainly has been used by activists
Amartya Sen: when they have this Marxist discussion of freedom.
Amartya Sen: It is wonderful discussing that we should be free
Amartya Sen: to do what we like.
Amartya Sen: We can produce. We can do industrial action
Amartya Sen: industrial action in the morning and cultivation in the afternoon.
Amartya Sen: Yeah, it is quite wonderful.
Amartya Sen: “What we need is to make it possible for me to do one thing today, another tomorrow.
Amartya Sen: To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,
Amartya Sen: rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner” said Marx.
Amartya Sen: Now, I think rearing cattle in the evening brings out what a superb urban creature Marx was.
Amartya Sen: I don't think anyone who rears cattle would choose evening as the moment to do it.
Amartya Sen: He was in very good shape when it came to criticize after dinner,
Amartya Sen: he know that very well.
Amartya Sen: What's happening? This is actually part of my memoir.
Amartya Sen: I wrote this chapter called, "What to Make of Marx."
Amartya Sen: The fact is that in the process of thinking and,
Amartya Sen: sometimes, we have exactly the idea of the way things should be solved,
Amartya Sen: he was opening up areas which are really important today.
Amartya Sen: Now today, if you look at it, it may not be that we can satisfy everyone's needs.
Amartya Sen: But we can go somewhat in that direction.
Amartya Sen: The deprivation that comes from work
Amartya Sen: and deprivation of work-either unemployment or low wages
Amartya Sen: or deprivation of needs
Amartya Sen: -- not being able to have any healthcare,
Amartya Sen: having enough food, going hungry, extraordinary how important this needs picture is.
Amartya Sen: I started the Pratichi Trust the year after I got the Nobel.
Amartya Sen: It was amazing that I got the opportunity of doing it.
Amartya Sen: It was amazing going to the schools [and seeing] how many of the children
Amartya Sen: came to the school without having eaten anything.
Amartya Sen: It is hard for them to do multiplication tables on a hungry stomach.
Amartya Sen: So, we have to look at is both needs and work.
Amartya Sen: And if there is any way in which we can say that China has done something dramatically better than India
Amartya Sen: not in democracy I'm afraid,
Amartya Sen: but when it comes to nature of poverty.
Amartya Sen: If the poor in India do not know where to go when their child is ill,
Amartya Sen: Ayushman (BJP government’s health insurance for the elderly)
Amartya Sen: is not going to help them.
Amartya Sen: Ayushman would help you if you have lived a long, long time,
Amartya Sen: and then you have an extensive operation,
Amartya Sen: which a private hospital will provide for you,
Amartya Sen: and then you take the bill and ask the government to pay.
Amartya Sen: That does nothing for the girl with the empty stomach.
Amartya Sen: So, I think the basic needs issue-
Amartya Sen: that the poor in India doesn't know where to go,
Amartya Sen: what a decent school is, where you take your child to hospital,
Amartya Sen: when you are deprived of basic social security-what to do with it.
Amartya Sen: Now, in China with all of its problems,
Amartya Sen: and there are many problems indeed, poverty does not take that form.
Amartya Sen: So, when people say that China has done better in terms of income,
Amartya Sen: yes it has, but that's not the main problem.
Amartya Sen: The main issue, and it has not always been like that,
Amartya Sen: the main issue has been to deal with the fundamental needs that human beings have,
Amartya Sen: in the way that the poor in China do not tend to suffer, except in very rare cases,
Amartya Sen: that in India, quite standardly the poor do suffer.
Amartya Sen: So, I think we have to turn our fixture to needs and work
Amartya Sen: and to the freedom of speech.
Amartya Sen: As I was trying to say, freedom of speech is central to all these things.
Amartya Sen: We (the BJP government in India) won't talk about works and needs,
Amartya Sen: we (the BJP government in India) will only talk about Ayushman Bharat
Amartya Sen: and not about what's happening to basic health care and so on.
Amartya Sen: If freedom of speech is interrupted and harshly dealt with,
Amartya Sen: I repeat again by saying it's not the case that these problems didn't exist earlier,
Amartya Sen: but these problems have become dramatically more important recently.
Amartya Sen: And I think the freedom of speech and,
Amartya Sen: I mean, earlier on there were bans on freedom of speech of various kinds.
Amartya Sen: After all, India was the first country to ban Satanic Verses.
Amartya Sen: And there are all kinds of ways freedom of speech was affected,
Amartya Sen: but it did not have the form, as it does now.
Amartya Sen: All universities are now run by RSS people who know exactly what to do.
Amartya Sen: Universities of which you will think India had reason to be proud of [that].
Amartya Sen: We also had the oldest university in the world in Nalanda.
Amartya Sen: I had the good fortune of being Chancellor
Amartya Sen: for a few years of a new university set up there,
Amartya Sen: until it became clear that no help from the government would come until I was removed.
Amartya Sen: I encouraged George Yeo from Singapore to take it on
Amartya Sen: and George Yeo was very reluctant, but I told him, you have to take it on,
Amartya Sen: because that's the only way we will get the money.
Amartya Sen: I was mistaken. George Yeo was right,
Amartya Sen: because the moment I moved away, and George Yeo came in, everything he asked for didn't happen either.
Amartya Sen: They have no respect for existing universities or for the oldest university in the world,
Amartya Sen: but they glorify the invented airplanes in the Vedas-Pushpakraj and so on.
Amartya Sen: Not Garuda-the mythological bird-flying you up and down,
Amartya Sen: because that's happened in Indonesia in the form of an airline.
Amartya Sen: The universities have been sacrificed and so have been many other things in India.
Amartya Sen: I am one of the few persons that has read all the Vedas, Vaidya Vidya and so on...
Amartya Sen: The song of creation, Mantra 10, asks the question:
Amartya Sen: Does God exist?
Amartya Sen: How do we know?
Amartya Sen: And if God existed,
Amartya Sen: and if he is still alive,
Amartya Sen: would he remember all that?
Amartya Sen: How does he remember?
Amartya Sen: And so on.
Amartya Sen: That's in the Vedas.
Amartya Sen: There's also the first discussion in Rig Vedas
Amartya Sen: about gambling and the dilemma of the gambler,
Amartya Sen: who is irresistibly drawn to it,
Amartya Sen: what the Greeks would call weakness of the will.
Amartya Sen: They discuss a lot of it
Amartya Sen: and discuss it in the Vedas quite brilliantly.
Amartya Sen: But instead of that, the RSS will say mathematics
Amartya Sen: happened dramatically in India from Aryabhatt onward.
Amartya Sen: We have to accept, that the impulse that came from
Amartya Sen: the influence of Babylon and Greece, made a big difference.
Amartya Sen: A dramatic difference.
Amartya Sen: And then, of course, the Arabs were the great exponent of Indian mathematics.
Amartya Sen: All this was going on.
Amartya Sen: To not understand that
Amartya Sen: and to think of India as a kind of self-made creature
Amartya Sen: germinating like a gram on the ground alone.
Amartya Sen: That is magic.
Amartya Sen: We have to get rid of,
Amartya Sen: not only of the bias,
Amartya Sen: but also the magic.
Amartya Sen: Thank you.
[audience clapping]
Ruchira Gupta: Thank you Doctor Sen.
Ruchira Gupta: So, what it at stake here?
Ruchira Gupta: Both of you have talked about the immediate
Ruchira Gupta: and also taken us on a journey through time.
Ruchira Gupta: What are we looking forward to and what can happen?
Ruchira Gupta: Both professors have spoken about basic needs as human rights
Ruchira Gupta: and how we need to concentrate on that.
Ruchira Gupta: If India moves more towards fascism,
Ruchira Gupta: can a government which is not inclusive essentially, in its thought, can it deliver these basic needs?
Ruchira Gupta: Especially based on the track record of the last five years
Ruchira Gupta: in which the welfare state was being dismantled very fast.
Ruchira Gupta: Professor Sen, you spoke about freedom of speech.
Ruchira Gupta: That is based on freedom of thought.
Ruchira Gupta: Can a fascist mindset, which is closing down universities
Ruchira Gupta: and changing history, rewriting textbooks that we study-
Ruchira Gupta: geography, history, everything-
Ruchira Gupta: can that change the way we think or stop us from thinking all together?
Ruchira Gupta: What does this mean? What does it imply?
Ruchira Gupta: What's coming up in this election? Prabhat?
Prabhat Patnaik: You know, one of the things I think Professor Sen said
Prabhat Patnaik: that, you know, that inequality, of course, existed before.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now, the inequality has been increasing.
Prabhat Patnaik: As a matter of fact, I think, poverty and hunger,
Prabhat Patnaik: poverty defined in terms of hunger and nutritional norms has been increasing.
Prabhat Patnaik: But one of the things which has happened in the more recent period is,
Prabhat Patnaik: if you make a calculation, you know, I mean, that is an enormous peasant protest at this moment,
Prabhat Patnaik: all over the country.
Prabhat Patnaik: The peasantry has been a neglected sector,
Prabhat Patnaik: a neglected group in the last several years.
Prabhat Patnaik: Ever since the neo-liberal policies came,
Prabhat Patnaik: the kind of state support the peasantry used to get, has dwindled.
Prabhat Patnaik: But if you look particularly at the last few years,
Prabhat Patnaik: then I made a calculation, that suppose you take 2013-14 as your starting point,
Prabhat Patnaik: and you look at the incomes generated in the entire agricultural sector,
Prabhat Patnaik: the total incomes of everybody engaged in it, then,
Prabhat Patnaik: in real terms, per capita income in the agricultural sector has not increased at all.
Prabhat Patnaik: It has actually marginally decreased.
Prabhat Patnaik: If we take the latest year for which we have figures, 2016-17,
Prabhat Patnaik: we will see half the country's population is still agriculture dependent.
Prabhat Patnaik: So you have a situation where, of course,
Prabhat Patnaik: the last few years have been particularly bad and I think,
Prabhat Patnaik: which is the reason why we haven't peasantry sides and so on earlier,
Prabhat Patnaik: but now you are beginning to have the kind of peasant assertion
Prabhat Patnaik: in which I see a lot of hope.
Prabhat Patnaik: I mean, I think the more the discourse shifts away
Prabhat Patnaik: from Hindutva and Pakistan and so on,
Prabhat Patnaik: towards issues of peasant conditions of life towards issues of unemployment and so on,
Prabhat Patnaik: the more, in fact, people will begin to assert themselves in the election,
Prabhat Patnaik: and thereafter, as citizens.
Prabhat Patnaik: But the more they actually start talking about Hindutva and Pakistan,
Prabhat Patnaik: the more they become victims of the magic that Professor Sen was talking about.
Prabhat Patnaik: On this magic. I want to recollect
Prabhat Patnaik: an occasion after demonetization,
Prabhat Patnaik: everybody had great difficulties because you had absolutely no cash
Prabhat Patnaik: and so you went and queued up at four o'clock in the morning
Prabhat Patnaik: to go and queue up outside the banks and so on.
Prabhat Patnaik: And it was extremely inconvenient
Prabhat Patnaik: and people simply could not believe
Prabhat Patnaik: that anything as distressing as this could be inflicted upon them
Prabhat Patnaik: without very good reasons.
Prabhat Patnaik: As a result, the more you faced hardships, the more you thought,
Prabhat Patnaik: what a wonderful government we have,
Prabhat Patnaik: they don't actually show any fear in inflicting this hardship on me.
Prabhat Patnaik: And that just shows how committed they are to the good of the country.
Prabhat Patnaik: So that's the kind of magic, you know,
Prabhat Patnaik: that you, you do something, you do something pretty ruthlessly-
Prabhat Patnaik: shock and awe.
Prabhat Patnaik: And as a result, the more, you know, put shock and awe into people
Prabhat Patnaik: for a while obviously because, now, that has worn off, but for a while,
Prabhat Patnaik: it actually can have this kind of magical impact
Prabhat Patnaik: that Professor Sen and was talking about.
Prabhat Patnaik: But I think I see a great deal of hope in the emergence of if you like, secular,
Prabhat Patnaik: these worldly protests, you know, on material issues and issues of peasant life.
Ruchira Gupta: Professor Sen, you know, also, you spoke about magic
Ruchira Gupta: and magic is so essential to fascism.
Amartya Sen: Magic is essential to?
Ruchira Gupta: Fascism.
Ruchira Gupta: Hitler also used notions of mysticism.
Ruchira Gupta: The Nazis spoke about the great Nordic person,
Ruchira Gupta: who was of a superior race that would rule the world.
Ruchira Gupta: He spoke about a past which did not exist
Ruchira Gupta: and promised a future which could never be.
Ruchira Gupta: He incited people to create the ‘other’ and towards violence.
Ruchira Gupta: It was all about exclusion.
Ruchira Gupta: So, what's at stake here, really in this election,
Ruchira Gupta: is that, what approach do we choose in India?
Ruchira Gupta: The politics of inclusion or the politics of exclusion?
Ruchira Gupta: What do you feel?
Ruchira Gupta: Can this magic that is associated with the present ruling party-
Ruchira Gupta: from the kind of clothes the prime minister wears with the turbans and all of that,
Ruchira Gupta: the kind of slogans he uses, the kind of campaigns he runs
Ruchira Gupta: that are full of the symbolic aesthetics of blood and orange,
Ruchira Gupta: how is it going to play out? And what really is at stake then?
Ruchira Gupta: And what should India be doing now?
Ruchira Gupta: I've asked you four questions in one.
Amartya Sen: We have to articulate these concerns.
Amartya Sen: There's a kind of old wisdom saying that just speaking about something
Amartya Sen: does not make a difference.
Amartya Sen: The fact is it does make a difference,
Amartya Sen: because you have to appreciate what is going on,
Amartya Sen: and not be shy about mentioning it.
Amartya Sen: You mentioned about magic being important for fascism.
Amartya Sen: You're doing something on fascism, aren't you?
Amartya Sen: But you see, when the Fascist party was originally
Amartya Sen: expanding in Italy in 1921-22,
Amartya Sen: there's a nice story, which my late wife Emma's family told me.
Amartya Sen: Her father was in the resistance and he was killed by Mussolini
Amartya Sen: two days before the Americans came to Rome.
Amartya Sen: So, there was a lot of stories about fascists.
Amartya Sen: One of my favorites is about a fascist recruiter
Amartya Sen: who tried to recruit a villager to fascism
Amartya Sen: and he said, "you know, you should be a fascist,
Amartya Sen: because we are doing lots of things.
Amartya Sen: This area used to be full of malaria. That's all gone.
Amartya Sen: The trains are running on time, the municipality is working beautifully.
Amartya Sen: Why shouldn't you want to join?"
Amartya Sen: And he says, "Really I can't join the fascists."
Amartya Sen: "Why not?"
Amartya Sen: He gives this lame reply,
Amartya Sen: "Well it is not only that I am a socialist,
Amartya Sen: but my father was a socialist. My grandfather was a socialist.
Amartya Sen: How could I possibly join the fascist party?"
Amartya Sen: To which the fascist recruiter says,
Amartya Sen: "What kind of a nonsensical argument is this?
Amartya Sen: If your father had been a mother and grandfather had been a mother,
Amartya Sen: what would you have done then?"
Amartya Sen: To which the villager replies,
Amartya Sen: "Well then, of course, I would have joined the fascist party."
[audience laughs]
Amartya Sen: So that thought was in his mind, but he was not articulating it.
Amartya Sen: I think we have to articulate it a bit more.
Amartya Sen: I think the suppression of the media is a very important reason.
Amartya Sen: The media situation isn't as bad in India as it is in some other countries,
Amartya Sen: but it is bad in the sense that there's a lot more that can be done.
Amartya Sen: A lot more, fake news comes out with stories which are just not true.
Amartya Sen: And I think we have to capture it in the,
Amartya Sen: you know, we talk about material conditions and ideas
Amartya Sen: in the realm of ideas and speech and exchanges as to what has gone wrong.
Amartya Sen: And I think there's a lot of scope they go for that
Amartya Sen: even now we have it within two days of election.
Amartya Sen: But, well-articulated story could make a big difference
Amartya Sen: and we know that controlling the media is not a guarantee.
Amartya Sen: I mean, I think Erdogan is learning about it
Amartya Sen: in a hard way in Turkey today and we could learn too.
Amartya Sen: The fact is that the BJP has 20 times the wealth that Congress has.
Amartya Sen: So it can't, not to mention the communist party has,
Amartya Sen: but the fact is that's where we are and the issue is what can we do despite that.
Amartya Sen: And this has happened again and again,
Amartya Sen: whether it's in Vietnam in a big way or in Greece at the loss of all of the military.
Amartya Sen: That had happened when they, when people weigh or place importance
Amartya Sen: in material possession and have succeeded in winning their way.
Amartya Sen: So we have to think of that.
Amartya Sen: And, magic is very important.
Amartya Sen: You're right.
Amartya Sen: And that's why I brought it in.
Amartya Sen: And one of the ways to challenge is to challenge the magic that is being presented.
Amartya Sen: I think the Ayushman, healthcare being a universal health care
Amartya Sen: is an attempt at a rather, extraordinary kind of magical thought
Amartya Sen: because it doesn't even touch these people.
Amartya Sen: It has got nothing to offer to people who don't have a primary health care.
Amartya Sen: If there's something to offer,
Amartya Sen: it will need an expensive operation and go to a private hospital and get paid.
Amartya Sen: Yeah, I said that in a speech rather like this I think
Amartya Sen: and then I think they had the Ayushman say that much of them doesn't understand it.
Amartya Sen: He doesn't understand because I'll find is not only to do this, but also to do the other.
Amartya Sen: Now here we run into a major thought and I'm afraid it applies even
Amartya Sen: to my concern about spending so much money
Amartya Sen: on cash rather than healthcare and education.
Amartya Sen: The idea that we will do both,
Amartya Sen: I mean it's a thought that a non-economist can easily have,
Amartya Sen: but for an economist, you have to recognize that you will spend more on something,
Amartya Sen: [meaning] you have less to spend on other things.
Amartya Sen: So that to say is they're not contradicted.
Amartya Sen: We can do both.
Amartya Sen: Everything is contradicted with a fixed budget
Amartya Sen: and everything is considered, even if it's not a fixed budget,
Amartya Sen: but not a very easily relaxable budget.
Amartya Sen: So I think we have to argue for the right thing.
Amartya Sen: The previous government didn't, has to be said,
Amartya Sen: that the Congress government could have spent much more on basic health care than it did,
Amartya Sen: on basic education than it did.
Amartya Sen: India has become, India has a greater reliance on private health care
Amartya Sen: at the lowest level than any other country in the world
Amartya Sen: with the exception of Pakistan, not even Bangladesh, by the way,
Amartya Sen: but the fact is that they are dependent on private healthcare
Amartya Sen: because there isn't public health care
Amartya Sen: and you have to depend on private health care [when] you don't have anything else to go by.
Amartya Sen: So I think, agitation, I still think that in this election
Amartya Sen: we have had far less on the lack of health care and education and social security
Amartya Sen: and some of this is a very good thing to spend your time on
Amartya Sen: because the one thing that you got the Modi Government in India in your grip
Amartya Sen: and that may or may not be the case,
Amartya Sen: but they could have been a lot more on other things in the election.
Ruchira Gupta: That part is the magic part.
Amartya Sen: It is the magic part.
Prabhat Patnaik: You know, one of the things which actually surprises me
Prabhat Patnaik: is that the kind of support that this kind of magic or this kind of fascism
Prabhat Patnaik: commands among the educated middle classes in India.
Prabhat Patnaik: That's, that's quite remarkable because, many of them,
Prabhat Patnaik: I'm not talking about universities like mine and so on
Prabhat Patnaik: where there is a lot of protests,
Prabhat Patnaik: but I think large numbers of people are actually taken in by this
Prabhat Patnaik: and were great supporters of Modi, particularly the education people,
Prabhat Patnaik: you know, it is quite surprising.
Ruchira Gupta: Yeah. It's the desire for the strong man,
Ruchira Gupta: you know, which is promoting this toxic masculinity.
Prabhat Patnaik: Additionally, I suppose it may also derive from the basic caste-based mindset
Prabhat Patnaik: where you are a kind of privileged person unless it's very clear that the,
Prabhat Patnaik: that the middle class has done remarkably well
Prabhat Patnaik: in the recent period of neoliberalism.
Prabhat Patnaik: I'll give you an example.
Prabhat Patnaik: When I joined Jawaharlal Nehru University ages ago in 1973,
Prabhat Patnaik: the income I had, the basic income I had was 700 rupees a month.
Prabhat Patnaik: Today if somebody joins at the same level that I had,
Prabhat Patnaik: that person would get 50,000 rupees a month, many believe.
rabhat Patnaik: So it has increased 70 times.
Amartya Sen: At that time I was your teacher, I got 1,200 rupees.
Prabhat Patnaik: And then you went to full professor and I joined as reader associate.
Prabhat Patnaik: But you look at the peasant, for instance, that time 1973,
Prabhat Patnaik: the procurement price of wheat was around 75 rupees per quintile and raise 1500 rupees per quintile.
Prabhat Patnaik: So [increased] to 20 [times].
Amartya Sen: Yes. That is adjusted.
Amartya Sen: Basically, I think we are a privileged class.
Prabhat Patnaik: But not most privileged in India among the middle classes.
Prabhat Patnaik: They are at the lower end.
Amartya Sen: I agree, but I think I've always saw some grain of truth in that statement
Amartya Sen: that they're basically two classes in India: the rich and the poor.
Amartya Sen: And I think we fall, as you know, rather lowly rich.
Ruchira Gupta: I'd like to open up the floor to questions.
Ruchira Gupta: So if anyone has, there are two mics on both sides
Ruchira Gupta: and there's somebody standing there already.
Ruchira Gupta: So why don't you start?
Q&A #1: I would actually like to make a comment and a) I have a question after that.
Q&A #1: I'm someone from the educated middle class from India, from Mumbai.
Q&A #1: 2014 was largely a reaction to the recurrent corruption of scams in the Congress government
Q&A #1: and was not about caste-based superiority or the desire for a strong man.
Q&A #1: It was largely because people were fed up with the corrupt regime.
Q&A #1: My question is how big a role does this rapid increase
Q&A #1: in Indian population play in the overall poverty?
Q&A #1: Because in the end the resources are limited and the population keeps on growing,
Q&A #1: so there is going to be someone who is left out.
Amartya Sen: So, this is a problem of the population growing part.
Q&A #1: Pardon?
Amartya Sen: It is a population problem.
Q&A #1: I mean, how big of a problem is it?
Q&A #1: Like I recognize that there is a problem, but how big of a problem is it?
Ruchira Gupta: Should we take two or three questions together and then we can ask?
Amartya Sen: Actually I don't like that because as I go old, my memory...
Amartya Sen: Let's have a brief discussion of each.
Ruchira Gupta: There's six people, seven people who want to ask questions.
Amartya Sen: Prabhat, do you want to take a shot?
Prabhat Patnaik: Well just two comments on each of your remarks.
Prabhat Patnaik: Corruption, corrupt regime. Yes, I, I agree with you,
Prabhat Patnaik: but the point is in 2014 there were all kinds of issues.
Prabhat Patnaik: Certainly one of the issues was that the government was throwing money at the Dalits
Prabhat Patnaik: through the NREGS and so on.
Prabhat Patnaik: That was a clear factor.
Prabhat Patnaik: This business about appealing to kind of upper caste prejudice
Prabhat Patnaik: against what is in India, sometimes referred to as populism,
Prabhat Patnaik: was certainly one factor.
Prabhat Patnaik: I'm not saying it's the only one.
Prabhat Patnaik: Resource and population.
Prabhat Patnaik: Population growth in India is, let's say, one and a half percent per annum now it has come down
Prabhat Patnaik: and the GDP growth that the government has been talking about ad nauseam is 7%,
Prabhat Patnaik: so how can population growth be the cause of poverty when
Prabhat Patnaik: per capita income is rising at 5.5% percent per annum.
Prabhat Patnaik: So obviously it is to do with factors of distribution and so on. Which are social problems.
Amartya Sen: I would add, that the studies that we did, including (Catherine) Guio, Mamta Murthi, etc
Amartya Sen: brings out that the biggest factor in reducing birth rate
Amartya Sen: is women's education and women's health care.
Amartya Sen: There isn't a real conflict between these.
Amartya Sen: I agree with Prabhat that population isn't the main problem.
Amartya Sen: On the other hand, to the extent it is,
Amartya Sen: You can deal with it in ways that makes the lives of women much easier and better.
Q&A #1: Thank you.
Q&A #2: I'm also part of this educated middle class that is deeply supportive
Q&A #2: of the current government and I'm happy to go into why
Q&A #2: at another point and time.
Q&A #2: It's definitely not toxic masculinity.
Q&A #2: You talked a lot about these basic economic rights
Q&A #2: and drew some parallels to China.
Q&A #2: So I'm curious, would you be on board with a government similar to the one in China,
Q&A #2: if it were able to provide these basic economic rights?
Amartya Sen: Yeah. It's like saying that if you admire the national health service
Amartya Sen: which came in Britain in 1948, would you like to be in a state, like a war-devastated economy?
Amartya Sen: And trade unions, not yet in a position to emerge at all?
Amartya Sen: You know, you have to ask, has China been able to do this
Amartya Sen: because of the lack of democratic amendment? Is that your view?
Q&A #2: Is that my view? Partially, yes.
Amartya Sen: As a member of an educated middle-class family, how would you say that has come about?
Q&A #2: So I would say they've been allowed to take decisions based on purely rationality
Q&A #2: and not based on, like you spoke about, you know, popular opinion and so.
Amartya Sen: Not a popular opinion against education and health care.
Q&A #2: Definitely not. Education and healthcare are part of the basic rights that you mentioned.
Amartya Sen: But then, why should the absence of popular opinion and democracy help?
Q&A #2: Because, as you mentioned, a lot of people seem, most people seem to be motivated by self-interest.
Q&A #2: So, if everyone is going to vote based on yes..
Amartya Sen: I said, what a huge mistake that is, that is committed.
Amartya Sen: That is a real reversal.
Amartya Sen: If I say that, in the part of the literature on nationality,
Amartya Sen: the mistake is often cultivated that people are motivated by self-interest.
Amartya Sen: And then you say, well you said
Amartya Sen: people are motivated by self-interest?
Q&A #2: No, I must've misheard you.
Q&A #2: I personally believe that there is a large proportion of people who are motivated by self-interest.
Q&A #2: And if that is the case, if you were to buy that argument.
Amartya Sen: And they are motivated only by self-interest?
Q&A #2: Only by self-interest is different from being motivated largely by self-interest.
Amartya Sen: That's what I'm asking.
Q&A #2: And I do believe that people make a lot of decisions based off the self-interest
Q&A #2: part of their thinking, which is not to claim that everybody only acts in self-interest,
Q&A #2: but that there is a large part of your decision making
Q&A #2: that is influenced by self-interest.
Q&A #2: And when you're not as a member of an educated middle-class,
Q&A #2: you are not personally experiencing a lot of the downsides
Q&A #2: that a large majority of the population in India does.
Q&A #2: You tend to start taking more decisions based on self-interest.
Q&A #2: And that's where I feel and again,
Q&A #2: I'm not trying to draw causality between fascism and a developing economy that's not in any....
Amartya Sen: But there's some link between this and the China argument, right?
Q&A #2: So there, I again, difference between causality and correlation. I'm curious.
Amartya Sen: No, no. This has nothing to do with causality and correlation.
Amartya Sen: This is definitely reflective of the problem. But you are not addressing that.
Q&A #2: I'm sorry, can you repeat?
Amartya Sen: Causality and correlation is a very big distinction,
Amartya Sen: which anyone who is doing either statistics or the social sciences should be aware of.
Amartya Sen: I didn't detect anything in your argument where that has turned out to be a critical factor.
Q&A #2: Okay.
Amartya Sen: Well it's a criticism for you, don't say okay.
Q&A #2: No, I understand.
Ruchira Gupta: Ok. can we go to another question because I think you've taken up a lot of time, so
Ruchira Gupta: we can just go to the next question. Yes.
Q&A #3: Hi. Good evening. My question is directed towards Doctor Sen.
Q&A #3: Firstly, congratulations on being awarded the Bodley Medal by Oxford recently.
Amartya Sen: Thank you.
Q&A #3: So one of the big news in India, currently, is about the minimum income guarantee
Q&A #3: by the Congress party in the manifesto which it claims is based upon your theory of the poverty index.
Q&A #3: My obvious thought towards it goes in the direction that it's more of a populist sop.
Q&A #3: It might be a way to sway the lower income people towards voting for the Congress party,
Q&A #3: but what do you think, how big an impact will it have in generating
Q&A #3: public opinion in favor of the party?
Q&A #3: And how is it actually able to facilitate this considering
Q&A #3: the current scenario in India?
Amartya Sen: I think that's an excellent question.
Amartya Sen: Indeed we have to ask again, obviously,
Amartya Sen: it will have a positive impact in that,
Amartya Sen: for the reason that the earlier gentleman was talking about self-interest and so on.
Amartya Sen: You get some money, in a way, the easy way.
Amartya Sen: You maybe in favor it for this.
Amartya Sen: But its total impact has to be examined.
Amartya Sen: Now, I think this is very important.
Amartya Sen: I think they either, as I understand your position,
Amartya Sen: there are two things.
Amartya Sen: One is to ask these critical questions which you are doing excellently.
Amartya Sen: And the other is that, by and large,
Amartya Sen: I would like Congress, better than BJP in this election.
Amartya Sen: But that doesn't mean I have nothing,
Amartya Sen: no criticism to offer to the Congress' position.
Amartya Sen: So, that's all and we agree.
Ruchira Gupta: Thank you. Thank you. All right.
Q&A #4: I'm a member of the middle class who is definitely not a supporter of Narendra Modi government.
Q&A #4: And there are definitely some of us.
Q&A #4: As someone who did his undergraduate in Delhi University,
Q&A #4: I witnessed firsthand what happened at Jawaharlal Nehru University and what happened at Ramjas (University)
Q&A #4: I can speak a lot about what that did happen at those universities,
Q&A #4: but my question is more on the new political power we're seeing
Q&A #4: among the peasant class and among the Dalit class,
Q&A #4: among the long marches we are seeing as well as the recent incidents
Q&A #4: at Bhima Koregaon and the reassertion of Dalit identity.
Q&A #4: I just want to see your views on whether you think that the governments,
Q&A #4: not just the BJP goverments, [that] fundamentally underestimate
Q&A #4: the perception of the rule of order and the idea that they (Peasants and Dalits)
Q&A #4: do not have an idea of what's going on or can they (Dalits and marginalized)
Q&A #4: actually ever be a legitimate political force?
Q&A #4: Do you think that this particular underestimation of Dalit and peasant power
Q&A #4: can pay a large part in influencing at least the results of the
Q&A #4: rural parts of the country during this particular election?
Ruchira Gupta: Do you want to answer first?
Prabhat Patnaik: Well, I hope it would have a major impact on the elections.
Prabhat Patnaik: But the point is we must realize that the last time
Prabhat Patnaik: you had such big peasant mobilizations was when a man called Mahendra Singh Tikait
Prabhat Patnaik: used to organize big peasant rallies.
Prabhat Patnaik: That was in the '70s, a very long time ago.
Prabhat Patnaik: You hear of peasant suicides, but you don't hear of peasant protests.
Prabhat Patnaik: The revival of peasant resistance is a very new thing,
Prabhat Patnaik: and in a sense, feeds into the kind of revival of politics that you are seeing now.
Prabhat Patnaik: I think throughout the last several decades,
Prabhat Patnaik: there really was much more of identity politics of various kinds,
Prabhat Patnaik: but not really this kind of mass revival of mass protests,
Prabhat Patnaik: irrespective of identities.
Prabhat Patnaik: I hope it has an impact.
Prabhat Patnaik: This is the kind of thing which actually worries the government.
Prabhat Patnaik: The moment there is a terrorist action of some kind, they heave a sigh of relief,
Prabhat Patnaik: because the discourse shifts to Pakistan etc.
Prabhat Patnaik: But the moment you have, once more, talking of these kinds of issues
Prabhat Patnaik: they begin to get worried.
Prabhat Patnaik: I think peasant protests are a very important issue in this election
Prabhat Patnaik: and were a very important reason for the loss, by the BJP,
Prabhat Patnaik: of the central Indian states in the last Assembly elections.
Prabhat Patnaik: I think if that carries over to the Parliament elections,
Prabhat Patnaik: then, of course, there will be a very substantial loss for them.
Ruchira Gupta: Thanks.
Q&A #5: Good evening panel. My question is more on the tactical side.
Q&A #5: Given the talks that we just had, how should a voter decide what to choose?
Q&A #5: What decisions should be made when they go to the voting panel?
Q&A #5: And, lastly, does it merely boil down to the lesser of the two evils?
Amartya Sen: Merely boil down to what?
Ruchira Gupta: Choosing the lesser of the two evils.
Q&A #5: I mean, both the parties have been accused of various things and that's it. Thank you.
Amartya Sen: I think quite often it is, actually, the lesser of the two evils.
Amartya Sen: In the sense that, you know, it's really
Amartya Sen: how we see these things because,
Amartya Sen: when, someone is doing some good, but a lot of bad,
Amartya Sen: you could say that evil is too strong a word,
Amartya Sen: I think, and it's too deep in religiosity for me to be able to use to easily.
Amartya Sen: But lesser of two bad things.
Amartya Sen: That's what it is.
Amartya Sen: That's what choice is about.
Amartya Sen: More of good things, less of bad things.
Amartya Sen: So, nothing surprising ends up being lesser of bad things.
Amartya Sen: And you won't get a person who is exactly, [what you vote for].
Amartya Sen: You may find someone who you like voting for.
Amartya Sen: I mean, for many years, my favorite candidate,
Amartya Sen: my representative in Shantiketan was someone
Amartya Sen: who was elected as Speaker of the Lok Sabha by the Congress and the Communist party.
Amartya Sen: For very different reasons.
Amartya Sen: That was the former Speaker of the Indian Assembly.
Amartya Sen: He was a communist and stood for the communist party.
Ruchira Gupta: Somnath Chatterjee.
Amartya Sen: Somnath Chatterjee. Sorry, I didn't mention his name.
Amartya Sen: Somnath Chatterjee.
Amartya Sen: And that was, of course, disliked from my Congress friends.
Amartya Sen: But then the communist expelled Somnath
Amartya Sen: on grounds of not being partisan: I have to say,
Amartya Sen: I have got somebody here who is more involved in the Communist party than I am-
Amartya Sen: its a complete misunderstanding of the role of a speaker.
Amartya Sen: Once you are a speaker, you cannot pursue the interests
Amartya Sen: and take the (whip) of one of the parties which got you elected.
Amartya Sen: On that ground, to chastise him is a mistake.
Amartya Sen: You know, there's always scope of misunderstanding.
Amartya Sen: I was very pleased that my candidate was attacked by everyone.
Amartya Sen: But, I think you're right. I think we have to recognize that good and bad don't mix.
Amartya Sen: When this gentleman said he is against Modi,
Amartya Sen: I would like him to also count,
Amartya Sen: I think the count brings out quite clearly,
Amartya Sen: that at this time, Modi's bad influences are much stronger than his good influences.
Amartya Sen: Is that as bad as North Korea?
Amartya Sen: No, I don't think it is. All right.
Ruchira Gupta: I think I would vote along the lines of choosing an approach
Ruchira Gupta: and thinking of whose approach is going to help me more.
Ruchira Gupta: Do I want freedom of speech?
Ruchira Gupta: Do I want freedom of association?
Ruchira Gupta: Do I want to be able to go to a university and study freely of all the textbooks,
Ruchira Gupta: which are full of facts and not full of mythology?
Ruchira Gupta: Do I want to have a love marriage across caste or religion?
Ruchira Gupta: Do I want people who are poorer than me to have at least basic food,
Ruchira Gupta: a free education and healthcare?
Ruchira Gupta: I would choose, whoever, supports this approach
Ruchira Gupta: rather than thinking about the lesser of two evils.
Ruchira Gupta: I would not think about the leaders that, you know,
Ruchira Gupta: is it this leader versus that leader?
Ruchira Gupta: Because, ultimately, it's going to be through consensus
Ruchira Gupta: and hopefully a parliamentary democracy will prevail.
Ruchira Gupta: And, so, people will come to some consensus together.
Ruchira Gupta: I would look for the approach and vote for the right approach.
[audience clapping]
Prabhat Patnaik: I think, of course, one should choose the lesson of the two evils,
Prabhat Patnaik: but I think looking at it as simply greater or lesser of two evils,
Prabhat Patnaik: underestimates, understates the seriousness that currently the Indian polity is facing.
Prabhat Patnaik: Because as Ruchira said, we actually are having a threat of fascism.
Prabhat Patnaik: We are having a situation where students in JNUniversity
Prabhat Patnaik: are charged with sedition.
Prabhat Patnaik: We have people who are civil rights activists who are in jail,
Prabhat Patnaik: in solitary confinement at this moment.
Prabhat Patnaik: All kinds of trumped up charges.
Prabhat Patnaik: This is very serious.
Prabhat Patnaik: That being the case, my approach would be to vote for the person
Prabhat Patnaik: who you think is the strongest to defeat the BJP.
Q&A #5: That was really crystal clear. Thank you.
Q&A #6: Professors, thank you so much for your talk. That was very insightful.
Q&A #6: I just have a question. When the elections are around the corner,
Q&A #6: there's the general sentiment in the government to shy away from
Q&A #6: quantitative argumentation and head towards a lot of emotional debate and rhetoric.
Q&A #6: Sometimes, honestly, its a pain to watch.
Q&A #6: What kind of impact does that have on education for the youth of India?
Q&A #6: After all, education is not only what happens in the schools,
Q&A #6: but it's also this kind of exposure they have to argumentation in the government.
Q&A #6: That has a knock on impact on the country generally.
Q&A #6: So what do you think is your message to the youth, first of all.
Q&A #6: And do you think that this significantly impacts their education?
Amartya Sen: I think this is Prabhat’s question.
Prabhat Patnaik: Have you ever heard the Indian Parliament debates or read any of their reports?
Prabhat Patnaik: They're pretty good, you know.
Q&A #6: The debates, yes. Certainly, I'm not criticizing the debate at all. I'm just saying...
Prabhat Patnaik: You see what actually happens.
Prabhat Patnaik: If suppose we want to raise an issue,
Prabhat Patnaik: unless you stage a walk out or walk into the well, and so on,
Prabhat Patnaik: the media doesn't take it seriously.
Prabhat Patnaik: As a result, they often do this kind of thing, which is more drama.
Prabhat Patnaik: But when you have serious discussions, you have some excellent presentation.
Amartya Sen: I agree with that.
Prabhat Patnaik: And, likewise, the Parliament reports are wonderful, you know,
Prabhat Patnaik: on all kinds of issues, intellectual property rights and so on.
Prabhat Patnaik: Very good. You know, genetically modified crops.
Prabhat Patnaik: The parliamentary committee reports are absolutely first rate.
Prabhat Patnaik: So, I think we must kind of, you know, cherish that.
Prabhat Patnaik: I mean, I think I'm not in favor of debunking the Parliament.
Prabhat Patnaik: Then, the other thing about the youth of India,
Prabhat Patnaik: I mean I think, I think the youth has to be really concerned
Prabhat Patnaik: about what is happening to the ordinary people.
Prabhat Patnaik: I think the conditions of life of the ordinary people,
Prabhat Patnaik: is something which, is not really sufficiently appreciated by the youth,
Prabhat Patnaik: particularly in universities and so on.
Prabhat Patnaik: I think that should be.
Prabhat Patnaik: I mean, for instance, there is an emphasis on career.
Prabhat Patnaik: Okay. And if that is the case, then you simply have no time.
Prabhat Patnaik: I mean, you know, if you're a student, you simply have no time to look around,
Prabhat Patnaik: to know what's happening starting from school days.
Prabhat Patnaik: I know people in Delhi who shed tears because their child,
Prabhat Patnaik: son or daughter in the school of final exam has got only 99%.
Prabhat Patnaik: Now you see that being the case, there is this enormous push towards career
Prabhat Patnaik: and I think that doesn't leave the youth enough breathing space
Prabhat Patnaik: to look at society and what's happening around you that must be overcome.
Ruchira Gupta: One last question.
Q&A #7: Hi, good evening. Thank you for being here.
Q&A #7: So I'm from West Bengal, I'm still scarred by the way we shooed Tata away.
Q&A #7: My question is, the whole lack of emphasis on manufacturing sector overall in the country
Q&A #7: is really disappointing and, honestly, scary.
Q&A #7: We've been promised labor reforms for years
Q&A #7: by the Congresses and the BJP.
Q&A #7: We haven't seen the sight of it.
Q&A #7: We've been promised privatization of loss-making units for years now.
Q&A #7: Again, there is no mention of this in the manifesto as well.
Q&A #7: Is it possible to achieve equal economic growth
Q&A #7: leaving out manufacturing sector and ignoring it altogether?
Ruchira Gupta: Two experts.
Amartya Sen: I think the extraordinarily disappointing performance of the manufacturing sector
Amartya Sen: is a major drawback for India.
Amartya Sen: It is a drawback that is not recognized very clearly
Amartya Sen: when you are just going by the money amount generated.
Amartya Sen: The financial sector can generate easily huge amounts of money
Amartya Sen: in a way that manufacturing cannot.
Amartya Sen: And I think there used to be a mistake at an earlier stage in 18-19th century,
Amartya Sen: where we will describe the non-manufacturing, nonagricultural sector as unproductive labor.
Amartya Sen: That was a mistake because productive work is done
Amartya Sen: through services and education and healthcare
Amartya Sen: that I was stating come out of the service sector.
Amartya Sen: On the other hand, and I'm not going to give any ground
Amartya Sen: for switching focus, especially on education and health care
Amartya Sen: as a major neglected field in India.
Amartya Sen: But along with that, what has happened to the Indian manufacturing
Amartya Sen: is a question that has not been, I think adequately addressed at all.
Amartya Sen: And this is where I think without us calling magic
Amartya Sen: had a part because the numbers look so magically good
Amartya Sen: that this generates that much income and so on.
Amartya Sen: As one of my colleagues told me that, you know,
Amartya Sen: he was filling up his income tax form, which people do in this the season
Amartya Sen: and he said he had calculated and it come to the conclusion
Amartya Sen: that any time spent on filing your income tax report generates
Amartya Sen: much more income than any other way of spending your labor.
Amartya Sen: And that may well be correct.
Amartya Sen: On the other hand, you're right,
Amartya Sen: manufacturing is neglected and very importantly,
Amartya Sen: [it is] very important that we change that.
Prabhat Patnaik: You know, I mean I agree with that you're absolutely right about manufacturing
Prabhat Patnaik: being one of the weak sectors in the (rules) performance.
Prabhat Patnaik: Just two comments I want to make.
Prabhat Patnaik: There is not an iota of evidence that manufacturing sectors growth
Prabhat Patnaik: is held up because of the absence of labor market flexibility.
Prabhat Patnaik: Not an iota of evidence.
Prabhat Patnaik: That is something which is drummed up
Prabhat Patnaik: by all kinds of neoliberal economist,
Prabhat Patnaik: but they're really not an iota of evidence.
Prabhat Patnaik: The second thing I'd like to see is that when we talk about manufacturing,
Prabhat Patnaik: you're talking only about large scale manufacturing.
Prabhat Patnaik: As a matter of fact, in India, there is [a] substantial small scale manufacturing sector,
Prabhat Patnaik: which is actually getting demolished because of demonetization
Prabhat Patnaik: and GST and so on, which is happening.
Prabhat Patnaik: So the government [is] actually killing that sector and that needs to be protected.
Amartya Sen: I agree with that.
Amartya Sen: If I may come back to the China [versus] India contrast,
Amartya Sen: the reason China can produce anything, I haven't looked at it.
Amartya Sen: I (vetted), made in China- almost anything.
Amartya Sen: And Indians can make pharmaceuticals, information technology.
Amartya Sen: And for some reason, this was true, about four years ago, it may have changed now, motor parts.
Amartya Sen: As opposed to 20,000 things that the Chinese can do.
Amartya Sen: Why? Because of literacy, because of the able to read instructions,
Amartya Sen: because of being able to follow, to have quality control by following instructions.
Amartya Sen: So there is a reason why the manufacturing sector,
Amartya Sen: which demands much greater use of school education than,
Amartya Sen: say, agriculture does is not getting the attention and the success that they deserve.
Amartya Sen: So it's not a mystery and there is a connection between
Amartya Sen: these services education, healthcare and manufacturing fallout.
Amartya Sen: There is a connection.
Amartya Sen: But I also agree with Prabhat that small scale production and also a lot to comment and
Amartya Sen: in Bangladesh's success for example, has been made on cotton textile and so on.
Amartya Sen: So I think, these are complex pictures to look at.
Amartya Sen: But you're drawing attention to something very important.
Ruchira Gupta: Thanks.
Ruchira Gupta: Do we have time for more questions?
Ruchira Gupta: No, we don't have time for one more questions. I'm sorry.
Amartya Sen: But this gentlemen had been standing there for a long time.
Q&A #8: I have a question, you know. The topic is called "India at crossroads"
Q&A #8: The democracy is at crossroads all over the world.
Q&A #8: All over the world. U.S. or India.
Q&A #8: But this elections will decide because
Q&A #8: Baba Ambedkar graduated from Columbia.
The constitution is in a crisis in India and second question is...
Amartya Sen: Sorry, I didn't get the first question.
Ruchira Gupta: Is the constitution in a crisis?
Q&A #8: Indian constitution in a crisis.
Q&A #8: Second question is: Doctor Manmohan Singh versus Modi.
Q&A #8: Manmohan Singh is an economist, he knew the negative impact of demonetization and GST.
Q&A #8: This demonetization hurt small business people and small farmers, small households, wives.
Q&A #8: This is a worrying situation. All our economists, you should address this.
Ruchira Gupta: The demonetization affects small scale industry...
Amartya Sen: Demonetization effects negatively small scale industry...
Q&A #8: Is it good for India or bad for India?
Prabhat Patnaik: Of course, bad for India.
Prabhat Patnaik: I mean, by now, everybody says that even the Reserve Bank's own data that,
Prabhat Patnaik: you know, the whole idea behind demonetization is that if the currency notes get killed,
Prabhat Patnaik: as it were, then you can thereby reduce the liability of the central bank
Prabhat Patnaik: And that being the case, that much money is what is available to the government
Prabhat Patnaik: and the government can distribute it among the poor.
Prabhat Patnaik: But it turns out that 99.3% of the demonetized currency came back to the banking system.
Prabhat Patnaik: So it has no impact as far as the black economies concern
Prabhat Patnaik: as far as raising the resources for the government is concerned.
Prabhat Patnaik: But it simply created massive disruption
Prabhat Patnaik: as well as the people were concerned, including small business, as you see
Q&A #8: Most of the Indian educators, people are thinking of that
Q&A #8: demonetization is good for the country,
Q&A #8: but as intellectuals, you should give a good message.
Q&A #8: Demonetization has messed up peasants, the common man.
Amartya Sen: Where are you reading that demonization is good?
Amartya Sen: You're reading it somewhere? You're not or you are?
Amartya Sen: I thought there was a lot of jubilant war crimes at one stage, but they have died down.
Q&A #8: Because, you know, people in the village. My mom, she lost 5,000 rupees or 10,000 rupees.
Prabhat Patnaik: I'm so sorry.
Q&A #8: She couldn't even cash it.
Q&A #8: My mom is 80 years old. She said, my money is paper.
Ruchira Gupta: We have to wrap up. I'm really sorry.
Ruchira Gupta: Thank you so much.
[audience clapping]
Ruchira Gupta: All the questions from the audience.
Ruchira Gupta: Professor Bilgrami, Professor Patnaik, and Professor Sen,
Ruchira Gupta: for taking out the time at this critical moment in India's history to have this discussion.
Ruchira Gupta: There's a lot at stake and I believe,
Ruchira Gupta: as someone of my generation,
Ruchira Gupta: that literally what is at stake
Ruchira Gupta: is the choice between fascism and no fascism.