The Idea of Trusting People

Other than Shakespeare, Tolstoy could be the most quoted man in history. Like the Bard, he has generously given us many memorable one-liners. At the end of War and Peace he tells us that ‘All Great Ideas are Simple.’ In an essay he explains that learned men refuse to see the truth because they have conceived complex ideas of their own. This is as true of Economics as of any other discipline. Our Nobel laureates, even the most humane like Amartiya Sen, rarely refer back to Marx’s simple idea that economic value arises from human labour. It seems to be self evident and yet at the same time too simple to explain the complex processes of boom and bust, of growth and stagnation. The powerful market, sometimes a force for the good, sometimes a loose cannon, has caught the imagination of experts, and all focus is vested on trying to discipline this energy.

But some of our greatest minds have seen a kind of self-expanding magic in ‘labour.’ Voltaire at the end of Candide advises us to tend our garden; Garibaldi after securing political victory retired to the island of Carrera with a bag of seed corn; Tolstoy needed to set his hand to the plough every day; and Gandhi to milk his goat. These were not acts of tokenism, like the elite taking up Swachh Bharat photo ops, but a way of changing oneself to help understand what needs to be done in the country at large. Labour produces not only economic value but an attitude with economic dimensions, which can distinguish between what is needed to be done, and what is not, leading to a lifestyle that rediscovers the creative core of humanity in labour. Consumption is only one of the means, along with meditation, love, laughter, exercise, and art to reach that core.

The Prime Minster recently bemoaned on television that manual labour is not respected in India. And yet, the economic advisors who are likely to advise him are all gurus of the market, like Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. Now Arvind Subramanian has been Chief Economic Adviser to work in tandem with Raghuram Rajan at the RBI, and the focus of governmental initiatives will be on the employment of capital and technology, not on the labour of the masses.

This is not to say that any great change has been brought about in government policy, which was always focused on a few hands at the top manipulating the levers of policy under the belief that the gurus can produce wealth in the country, from whose hands some of it will gradually trickle down to the poor. Constitutional amendments like articles 173 and 174, even if meant well, were seen as vote-securing political ploys and not as vital instruments for producing growth.

A false euphoria has been created over the last two decades; first, by Manmohan Singh’s liberalization policies, which somewhat unshackled many corporate hands from a frozen bureaucratic grip, and fed middleclass desires to consume; and second, by the fortuitously timely occurrence of the IT bubble-boom which gave an illusion of a charging elephant amidst East Asian tigers. Economic mentors in the West, who listen to the clanging of cash-registers helpfully produced global political recognition of India’s emerging great power status. And peace was bought at home through the largesse of loan-mafis and the vast MNREGA and similar schemes.

And yet, despite all manipulated statistics, and global elite clubmanship, there is no gainsaying the fact that the great majority of Indians remain desperately poor, ill-fed, uneducated, and live in squalor, with doubtful chances of a secure future. The definitive dismissal of the Congress Party from power over almost all of India is an agonised and desperate attempt by the people to find some solution to their interminable state of poverty. The recent vidhan sabha election results from Maharashtra and Haryana show that the people are imploringly pinning their hopes on the Modi government to bring about a dramatic change. We have reached the era of escalating aspirations, in which all seems possible to other classes, but the vast majority of people are continuously deceived from securing any. A steady dose of much the same, flavoured with a little careful governmental generosity will not be acceptable much longer. So high is the expectation, and so rigid are the structures of governance and so dog-eared the processes of policy, that no superman can possibly give them relief. People’s disappointment and anger could lead to chaos in the foreseeable future.

The astonishing growth of the Chinese economy and its commercial successes, and the misunderstood reasons for its sustainability, have mesmerised Indian planners into a belief that a similar trajectory is possible for India with a little more tinkering. The flatulence of political bombast that has clouded Indian relations with its greatest neighbour has further obscured from reasonable analysis the causes that have differentiated the growth trajectories of the two great economies, particularly in view of the fact that by 1947 India was already a putative industrial leader, while China remained a destroyed and feeble economy in comparison till 1949. It has suited Western theoreticians to accept the masked and politically motivated Chinese interpretation that Deng Xiaoping and capitalism happened after Mao’s death in 1976, ‘and all was growth.’ If anyone is amazed at the industry of the Chinese working classes the simple acceptable explanation among experts is that it is extorted by totalitarian control. The Chinese have no intention of arguing this point.

The long years of struggle and privation, and the Long March, taught Mao, the Chinese communist party and its army, that their country and its nationalities and classes lived under varied conditions and possibilities, and that the hope for the future depended upon a working collaboration between the leaders and the communities of the poor. Building on traditional clan practices, the first years of development saw the emergence of the mutual aid teams, then the larger production brigades and the bigger communes. A feudal and oppressed people learned that they had capacities of self governance, and during the ill-fated Great Leap Forward that even simple peasants could aspire to make backyard steel. A huge human cost was paid then, and later during the Cultural Revolution, which despite the shambles posed a more thorough challenge to the Chinese bureaucratic mandarinate than Manmohan Singh’s curbing of some bureaucratic power through liberalization. This great storm-tossed political period from 1949 till the beginning of the 1970’s was a period, which can be called one of ‘latent development,’  - that is, immediate economic results are not perceived but which will be produced later. In other words, a social process of community education in self reliance and social change on a vast scale, more than the world had ever seen before. ‘The battle for China’s past,’ as a recent scholar, Mobo Gao, has put it, is by no means over in terms of understanding it, but it is time our economists researched it.

What is clear is that ‘development is a political process,’ which requires politicization of associations of the people, as farmers, as artisans, as women, as workers. Real development cannot occur without a genuine partnership between government and communities, however destabilizing this may be for inefficient and self-serving politicians. Development cannot be entrusted to bureaucratic hands, which can only do what was previously laid down. But development immediately implies change across several dimensions, and this depends on the political acumen of the masses to take appropriate and sustainable decisions for their myriad disparate communities and localities. The elite belief that a few experts can solve problems created by complex differing development issues over a vast landscape has proved self-delusional, and dangerous for national stability.

The focus and pride of the rulers of India has been on its nuclear arsenal, its demand for a seat on the Security Council, its political competition with China, its successful billionaires, its numerous IT professionals, its well staffed army and bureaucracy. All these are of no real consequence to India’s debatable future. A stable future depends on the rapidity with which grassroots communities are politicized and linked to empowered Panchayati Raj Institutions in a working planning relationship with higher structures of government. The labour of India’s excluded masses must be the engine of steady growth; the primary agricultural sector, sustaining itself despite periodic monsoon failures, and supporting manufacturing, whose growth must exceed that of the tertiary sector for years to come if the economy is to meet people’s aspirations.

None of these ideas can be termed in common parlance as rocket science. They have the virtue of simple common sense. And the Indian elite are also well aware that this is so. After the days of Mahatma Gandhi, the political elite lazily corrupted itself benefitting by patience and enormous ability to bear pain of the masses. But media and the globalizing world warn that the days of unaccountable self-serving indulgence are fast coming to an end. The elite for survival need to change. The bureaucrats and the learned middle-classes have grown up within a hierarchical  system of governance created by the East India Company, and inherited without much change by Independent India. The early British rulers had little need for development, and none for trusting the people. A system was created to keep the masses in place at little cost. There was no thought of involving subject races in a partnership of governance. Upper caste Indians who came later to rule the country found no issue with this approach. But their own survival in a darkening future depends on accepting the simple idea that the Indian masses can be trusted to develop their communities and localities, and save the nation from possibility of chaos and collapse.