[ad_1]
\n<\/p>\n
New Delhi: Top corporate executive of the yesteryear and now an acclaimed author and public intellectual, Gurcharan Das, has laid out a feast for thought in \u2018The Dilemma Of An Indian Liberal\u2019 (Speaking Tiger), which was formally released here on Wednesday evening.<\/p>\n
Known for consistently advocating liberal values, Das began by explaining etymologically what the word \u2018liberal\u2019 stands for.<\/p>\n
He noted that out of the three-fold guiding principle of the French revolution \u2014 Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity \u2014 fraternity seems to have been forgotten today, even as the noise around liberty gets louder.<\/p>\n
Making no bones about the journey of his \u2018evolved\u2019 socialist values, he said that \u201cthe liberal is always suspicious\u201d of those who wield religious, military, economic, or political power.<\/p>\n
Talking about his liberal \u201cheroes\u201d \u2014 Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru \u2014 and pointing out that the country\u2019s first prime minister introduced the word \u2018socialism\u2019 in our national vocabulary, turning the author and his family into socialists, he shared an anecdote from the time when he worked for the US multinational, Procter & Gamble, that produced Vicks Vaporub.<\/p>\n
There was a year of the flu and \u201cwe produced a hell of a lot of Vicks Veporub\u201d. But in those days of the Licence Raj, the companies produced way more than they were permitted to. As a result, far from celebrating what they thought was a great job done during an epidemic, they had to deal with the government\u2019s summons accusing them of breaking the law.<\/p>\n
Informed of a possible three-year jail sentence for breaking the law (by overproducing for consumers in need), his interaction with the bureaucrat led Das to change his mind and he became a libertarian from a classical liberal. And he joined the Swatantra Party.<\/p>\n
Recalling his \u201cmoment of conversion\u201d, Das emphasised the fundamental importance of a market economy. \u201cNehru was a creature of his times and all were socialists then, but by the time of Indira Gandhi, the world saw the rise of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, that had already become Asian Tigers or were in the process of becoming that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Das pointed out that they became a middle-class country from a poor country on the basis of labour-intensive manufacture; and by the time Indira Gandhi could see that there was an alternate path, the world, which admired Nehru and India for safeguarding liberal democracy, began to regard the country\u2019s experiments with a socialist mixed economy as being pathetic.<\/p>\n
The cardinal error was that although Nehru wanted compassionate socialism, the bureaucracy toppled it with Licence Raj. India achieved political freedom in 1947, but it was in 1991 that India got its economic freedom, emphasised Das.<\/p>\n
Recounting another story about the \u2018steel frame\u2019 of the nation, Das mentioned an unsung hero, Amar Nath Varma, who was Principal Secretary to Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who held a meeting every Thursday. It was called the \u2018Thursday Committee\u2019. The secretaries of all economic ministries attended the committee meetings and one new reform was discussed every week.<\/p>\n
The meeting\u2019s minutes were discussed in the subsequent Cabinet meeting and press notes were released that evening. And in the weekend edition of popular business dailies, \u201cIt was Diwali.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Congress government is believed to have ushered in Liberalisation in 1991, yet it fell foul of reforms in the long run. \u201cThe mistake was that none of the reformers sold the reforms to the public,\u201d Das said.<\/p>\n
Quoting examples of Deng Xiaoping, who spoke every day about the market, and Margaret Thatcher, who said she spent 20 per cent of her time reforming and 80 per cent of her time selling reforms, the author said: \u201cWe were doing reforms \u2018chupkey chupkey\u2019 (furtively).\u201d<\/p>\n
And none of the future reformers, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and \u201ceven Modi, none of the reformers have taken the trouble to sell the reforms, which means that people still believe that reforms make the rich richer and the poor poorer. They still believe there is no difference between being pro-market and pro-business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Noting that manufacturing represents less than 17 per cent of the GDP when it should be double of that, and the exports of any manufactured commodity are less than 2 per cent of the total production, Das said: \u201cIf we increase that by 2-3 per cent, we will have an industrial revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, what went wrong? We did not create that industrial revolution, \u201cbut we are in a far better position right now to create it because our infrastructure is far better that it was in 1991\u201d.<\/p>\n
In 2014, when the author was fed up because of the absence of real reform, what attracted him most to the change promised by Narendra Modi was his slogan of \u2018Minimum government, maximum governance\u2019.<\/p>\n
Landmark events such as demonetisation and its flawed execution began to make Das lose faith in Prime Minister Modi, but he\u2019s now convinced that it is only the Modi government that can truly fast forward necessary reforms.<\/p>\n
(IANS)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n