The Hindu Business Line : Sen and Singh: Peas of pod

The two men share a quality that is central to their success: Neither takes any but the most central of positions on any issue. This makes it difficult to get a clear picture of them.

T. C. A. Srinivasa-Raghavan

Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh have sat together on a dais many times. But the last time I saw them together was in early 1971 at a Delhi School of Economics (DSE) seminar. It was a January evening, the room was as cold as such rooms can get, and Joan Robinson, the Little Red Book in her hand, on her way back from China to Cambridge, was extolling the virtues of Mao’s thoughts.

Lost glitter

Now she’s no more, and Mao is just a bad memory. The DSE is still there, of course, but somewhat worn for the wear. The building has been repainted — Dr Sen used to refer to it as ‘ghastly pink’ — in pink. There are computers, and perhaps even a new loo at each landing. But the glitter that people like Amartya Sen, Sukhomoy Chakravarti, Manmohan Singh, Mrinal Datta-Chaudhuri, Dharma Kumar, A. L. Nagar and host of visiting faculty imparted to it, has gone for ever.

As I sat watching the proceedings at Dr Sen’s 75th birthday last Friday, it suddenly came home to me that it was these two men who had led the exodus of talent from the DSE in 1971 and 1972. Dr Singh left around March 1971 and Dr Sen in the summer. Dr Chakravarty joined the Planning Commission in 1972 and Arjun Sengupta went off somewhere. I doubt, though, if the plight of us students occurred to them even for a second. They were all in their mid-30s and on the make, as it were. Each of the men who quit DSE that year has made it big, and none bigger than Dr Singh and Dr Sen, of course.

Comparing contributions

As I listened, first to the birthday boy and then to the Prime Minister, I wondered whether the contributions of the two men could be compared in any meaningful if not especially useful way.

The Prime Minister made a clear point about Dr Sen in his speech. “As Amartya mentioned, we have known each other since the days when we both were students at Cambridge. I certainly felt even in those days that here is an individual who is going to make a lot of difference to the way people think about their problems. He has lived up to that expectation.”

Dr Sen had earlier said that he, too, had known from their very first meetings that here was a very special person. But he added that he never thought that Dr Singh would end up as Prime Minister. (“Nor did Dr Singh,” muttered my colleague who was sitting next to me).

Evaluations of the Great and the Good generally fail for the want of a good measuring rod. But to “make a difference to the way people think about their problems” is a good yardstick by which to measure anyone, and more particularly an intellectual or a politician. So which of them has made a lot of difference?

If Dr Sen has, can one say the same about Dr Singh, even though he is a politician and has never written anything evenly remotely intellectual for the last 40 years, and certainly nothing comparable to Dr Sen?

Some would say that this is an unfair comparison. In that case, here’s another yardstick: their respective legacies. But even if this works, it suffers from one major flaw: we will not know for another decade, at the very least. After all, it took that long even for Keynes (who died in 1946) to be properly evaluated.

A common quality

That said, my own view is that the two men share a quality that is absolutely central to their success but which, at the same time, makes it hard to form anything but a very blurred image of them and which makes them all things to all men. This central characteristic is that neither takes any but the most central of positions on any issue. Thus, Dr Sen champions individual freedom but says individuals must necessarily have to have other loyalties as well.

These effectively serve to restrain their freedom. His seminal paper of 1970, The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal, defined Sen the Man more-or-less completely. The Left and the Right could both claim him, as well as criticise him. That is exactly true of Dr Singh as well. No one knows what he really stands for.

This becomes crystal clear from Dr Singh’s speech on Friday. “The debate on globalisation has become too straight-jacketed and divided between those who seek only global solutions and those who seek national ones. It has become divided between those who remain obsessed with the ideologies of the market and those who adhere to the ideologies of Statism. We in India have long rejected such stereotypes and such ideological strait-jacketing of policies. We have walked the pragmatic Middle Path, and will continue to do so. We must learn to walk on both legs.”

If you wish to be rude, you’d say that both men want to have their cake and eat it too. But more politely, one may perhaps say that it is hard to pin them down to any single position because both can trot out opposing quotes or theorems. In a way, they typify the Indian that the poet A. K. Ramanujam described in his extraordinarily perceptive essay called Is there an Indian way of thinking?

For Ramanujam’s Indian, the context is all; absolute positions are ruled out ab initio; and all courses of action are open. Drs Sen and Singh fit this description perfectly. That is their current strength. But time will tell if that was their defining weakness also.

( blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

More Stories on : People | People | Economy

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page