The Wire has an article by Prof. Deepak Malghan- an 'ecological economist'- which claims that Gandhi Offered an Antidote to Our Sanitised Economic Inequality Discourse
Economists have developed compelling portraits of rising inequality around the world.
Governments keep National Income Accounts so as to discover whom they can tax. Economists have access to this information. They need information about the distribution of Income and Wealth to forecast what will happen to Aggregate Demand and thus how Inflation and Unemployment and the Balance of Payments are affected.
Deepak appears to be angered that Economists don't wipe their arses on the papers they circulate. Also they use 'sophisticated' techniques like addition and multiplication and calculating percentages. What they ought to do is use their own shit to write papers. Also they shouldn't use 'sophisticated' metrics. They should just point to a large lump of shit and then a much smaller lump of shit so as to communicate their findings re. Income inequality.
Thanks to sophisticated metrics and especially new data sources, we have an unparalleled understanding of wealth and income distributions. However, the inequality numbers produced by the ivory tower have, for the most part, been disconnected from political mobilisations on the street (except perhaps for the 2011 “Occupy” movements in Western cities). Instead, technocratic institutions have co-opted and defanged the academic discourse on inequality.
Because they are not utilizing only their own feces- which is what an ecological economist would do.
The Indian struggle against British colonial rule in the interwar period, especially the 1930s, offers a study in contrast. Indeed, a single “historic letter” encodes how economic inequality became the pivot of one of the 20th century’s most famous political mobilisations.
But it failed utterly. India still has a Salt tax.
On this day, 92 years ago, Gandhi “inaugurated” the Civil Disobedience movement by writing to the British Viceroy, Lord Irwin. The political weight of this letter rests on Gandhi’s clinical dissection of the economic inequality precipitated by a rapacious colonial state.
It was a very stupid letter. The fact is, Indian Maharajahs and Zamindars were much much richer than British officials in India who did much more work and were much more effective because they were trusted by people of all communities. Thus India has the cheapest administration in the world precisely because people trusted salaried foreigners with no personal interest in the country and who would return home after they qualified for a pension.
Gandhi wrote-
The iniquities sampled above are maintained in order to carry on a foreign administration, demonstrably the most expensive in the world.
The opposite was the case. Per capita administrative expense was a fraction of what it was even in equally poor China.
Take your [Viceroy Irwin’s] own salary. It is over Rs. 21,000 per month, besides many other indirect additions. The British Prime Minister gets £ 5,000 per year, i.e., over Rs. 5,400 per month at the present rate of exchange.
So what? The Viceroy represented the King Emperor. He received a tiny fraction of what the King received or indeed what many Maharajahs received. The Prime Minister merely served the King. He was paid less than the Lord Chief Justice.
You are getting over Rs. 700 per day against India’s average income of less than annas 2 per day.
But the Viceroy was giving India peace and security and a relatively uncorrupt administration- at least at the higher levels. The 2 anna a day India would have been worse off if some fraction of a paisa from his income had not gone to the Viceroy. Indeed, millions of such Indians lost their lives or became refugees when Gandhi's crew took over. Large scale famine mortality reappeared in Bengal when Muslim Ministers took over from White (and Brown) ICS officers.
The Prime Minister gets Rs. 180 per day against Great Britain’s average income of nearly Rs. 2 per day. Thus you are getting much over five thousand times India’s average income.
Cheap at the price. The alternative was incessant martial strife between Princes and within Princedoms.
The British Prime Minister is getting only ninety times Britain’s average income.”
But the Royal Family was getting a lot more. On the other hand, it is true that in 1930, George V did decide to forego about £50,000 due to him from the Civil List because of the Depression but the dude was by no means poor. Interestingly, the ratio for the British PM has gone down a lot to about five times average Income. India's PM gets about 15 times average earnings.
Gandhi’s letter is the first-ever published account of income ratios being used to measure economic inequality.
No. The Lorenz curve (for wealth) was used from 1905 and the Gini coefficient from 1912. However, complaints about the high salaries received by officials- e.g. the Viceroy in Ireland- and the low income of the peasants had been made in the eighteenth century and, perhaps, even earlier.
However, intellectual priority is the least of the reasons why we will do well to revisit the Kuznets Ratio and rightfully call it the Gandhi-Irwin Ratio.
This is nonsense. Kuznets compares the top 20 percent to the bottom 20 per cent. The British population in India was too tiny to affect such a measure.
We must care about the Gandhi-Irwin Ratio because Gandhi constructed modern India’s most iconic political movement with economic inequality as a principal grievance.
But we still had (till 2016) the highly regressive salt tax which Secretary of State Olivier had deplored in Parliament six years previously. The fact is the hike in the Salt tax had been a Swarajist rallying cry. Gandhi came late to that party. The Dandi March was financed by Dalmia. But it was a fiasco. Gandhi wasn't prepared to back a 'no rent' campaign. So the masses lost interest.
Unlike Kuznets Ratios that fill up numerous technocratic reports on inequality, the Gandhi-Irwin Ratio is inseparable from the political crucible that birthed it.
What crucible? Gandhi failed. The salt tax remained and, at the Second Round Table Conference, everybody, including the non-Brahmins of the South and the Sikhs and the Dalits united against the INC.
For Gandhi, the extreme economic inequality that he recounted in his letter to the Viceroy was structural,
it was Malthusian. The solution was industrialization and urbanization- which Gandhi opposed.
and the response had to be decidedly political.
The political effect was disastrous. The INC was repudiated by everybody except high caste Hindus- though, even there, Punjab and Bengal were by no means enthused by it.
Indeed, “[w]that distinguished the 1930 Civil Disobedience campaign [from] the Non-co-operation movement of 1920-21 was the stress” that Gandhi laid on “economic grievances.’’
But what made them similar was that they failed utterly, broke up unity between Hindus and Muslims, and left it to die-hard Tories to dictate both the shape and the pace of progress towards responsible government and Dominion status.
During the interwar years, Gandhi and the Congress were especially consumed by how the large and illegitimate public debt incurred by the colonial government was a fundamental driver of extreme inequality.
India had a small debt though its credit was good and money was cheap. India needed responsible government so as to raise loans for productive investment while the going was good (i.e. during the liquidity trap period). During the War, India became one of the UK's largest creditors.
The Congress sessions at Gaya (1922), Lahore (1929), and Karachi (1931) all prominently debated public debt and its impact on economic welfare.
They talked ignorant bollocks. That was fine because politicians are supposed to talk ignorant bollocks. What they should have done was come up with a plan to borrow abroad and invest in infrastructure.
Gandhi’s letter to Irwin only codified this abiding political concern.
No. Irwin, quite naturally, was worried that Congress had been taken over by the Socialists. They would demand 'land to the tiller- i.e. no land revenue, no rent, no zamindari, no begar (corvee labor), no corporal punishment, etc, etc- and withdrawal of Indian troops from the MENA, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. Instead Gandhi repeated the claim he made when he unilaterally surrendered in 1922- viz. India was unable to feed or defend itself. Thus Indians had become infantile cretins. Thus Gandhi could not help by go crazy from time to time and demand the Brits leave though they couldn't because Indians were shit.
Billionaires committing to a “giving pledge” will not cut it for Gandhi. Indeed he acknowledged that the wealthy Viceroy perhaps probably donated the “whole of [his] salary [to ]charity.” However, for Gandhi, a “system that provides for such an arrangement [high inequality] deserves to be summarily scrapped.”
Gandhi did advocate the scrapping of modern Industry and Education and Medicine and so forth. He also thought sex should be scrapped. The human race should be allowed to die out. That's how you get equality.
Kuznets ratios and human development indices computed to three decimal places drive the logic of technocratic inequality tinkering with new-age philanthropy at its apogee.
The UN is useless, not evil. There's no harm in meeting UN Sustainable Development goals- more kids in skool, more peeps vaccinated etc.
In contrast, the Gandhi-Irwin Ratio is firmly grounded in the politics of economic freedom and economic justice.
And nobody having sex so the human race can die out.
It is not surprising that some of the finest social and political movements in independent India have implicitly invoked the Gandhi-Irwin Ratio.
The were useless. Vinobha Bhave's bhoodhan movement was an utter fraud. Perhaps Deepak thinks Lok Pals have greatly helped India.
Of course, the most notable example is the various farmer movements routinely comparing their precarious economic life with the pay-commission protected sarkari babus.
Get rid of babus! Do it now! Maybe this Deepak bloke aint such a bad egg. He was born here in the UK and did his PhD in America. Perhaps the guy is a Thatcherite who believes, with Ronald Reagan, that government officers destroy national wealth and prosperity.
The 1930s represent the lull between two major direct political uprisings against the empire – the Civil Disobedience Movement and the Quit India Movement.
Both of which failed utterly.
Historiography of modern India has primarily mirrored the ebbs and flows of the freedom movement, and has thus simply glossed over the years between the end of Civil Disobedience and the beginning of the World War II.
No. We know what happened. Gandhi failed. The Brits passed the 1935 Act and Congress meekly took part in elections and formed administrations where they could. They quickly got a taste for the perks of office and discriminated against Muslims with vim and vigor. Partition became inevitable because Muslims in Hindu dominated areas saw no future for themselves save as a powerless minority sinking ever further down in education and influence.
The scholarly neglect of the decade of the 1930s is perhaps best reflected in Richard Attenborough’s eponymous feature film, Gandhi. In the motion picture, a frame shows Gandhi returning to India after the political failure of the Round Table Conference following the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. The next substantive frame shows Gandhi addressing the large Bombay crowd assembled to herald the beginning to Quit India. In the interim decade, Gandhi and his colleagues were not overtly taking on the empire’s might; they were engaged in an even more arduous task – one of forging the contours of the modern Indian nation, state, society, economy, and polity.
i.e. ensuring Pakistan would be created and Hindus and Sikhs would flee to the Hindu majority areas where Muslims would be marginalized. Gandhi's financiers would get very very rich in a protected market.
While the Gandhi-Irwin Ratio from March 1930 provides us with a potent tool to confront the contemporary economic inequality,
Like what? Saying the C.M of Kerala earns more than a hundred times as much as an elderly, disabled, female pensioner? We must overthrow the Communist regime in Kerala so as to establish a more equal society!
it is not without its blind spots that Gandhi himself recognised as the 1930s wore on. The “crucible years” of the 1930s saw Gandhi and Ambedkar clash on several questions that continue to reverberate to the present day. This clash transformed each man and developed the grammar for how independent India would engage with justice and injustice, freedoms and unfreedoms.
India would squabble over reservations in jobs only a tiny percentage of them could ever get.
Ambedkar forcefully pointed out how India cannot even begin to think through questions of economic justice without addressing questions of grave social injustice codified in the deeply hierarchical caste structure.
Fuck 'thinking through questions of economic justice'. Just imitate what other poor countries did to stop being so fucking poor.
The conversation between Gandhi and Ambedkar resulted in the Indian preamble enshrining social and economic justice as the first two objectives of the newly independent republic.
Coz words have magical powers- right?
Contemporary India will do well to urgently move away from a technocratic Kuznets Ratio world and embrace the normative and political promise of the Gandhi-Irwin Ratio.
Coz words have magical powers.
The Gandhi-Irwin ratio gives us a shot at least partially redeeming the solemn pledge reflected in our constitution’s preamble.
Deepak needs a shot- against rabies as do the people he thanks- Amit Basole, Sumanas Koulagi, and Siddharth Varadarajan for critical comments- all of whom have expensive foreign educations.
The plain fact is that inequality is important because it helps us identify a Structural Causal Model which explains why we lag behind in some area. This immediately yields a prescription for how we can make our own life better even if we don't 'catch up'. Deepak doesn't get that. He thinks inequality matters because it involves redeeming solemn pledges by writing stupid shite.
This guy teaches at IIM. He is earning at least ten trillion times more than donkeys which shit out something more useful- at least as fertilizer. Still nobody could accuse of him of being sanitary or 'technocratic'. That's a comfort.
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