Pulapre Balakrishna getting Nehru-Mahalanobis wrong

In an article titled 'the economic consequences of Mr. Nehru' Pulapre Balakrishnan wrote- 

As the maxim “the proof of the pudding lies in the eating” must apply most closely to matters economic, the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy can be considered only as good as its outcome.

It wasn't a lot better than corrupt, repressive, Pakistan. Indeed, because Pakistan got more aid it had a higher growth rate. Some other countries went for even more useless white elephant projects. Still, it should be remembered that Nehru's first love had been the Community Development program- i.e. getting the Indian peasant to be less Indian and peasanty. That, and its diluted version, the National Extension Scheme failed ignominiously, so the Second Plan had to do with ensuring that the capital goods sector would be just as shitty as Indian agriculture. 

It had aimed to raise the rate of growth of the economy. With the distance that half a century affords us and the aid of superior statistical methods, we are now in the position to see that its early success was nothing short of spectacular. Depending upon your source, per capita income in India had either declined or stagnated during the period 1900-47. 

This was a period when there were two world wars which greatly depleted the wealth of European powers. Some countries like Iran became proxy battlefields and suffered famine during both wars. Others like Indonesia suffered greatly at the hands of the Japanese. Some 4 million died or were displaced. India emerged from both wars relatively unscathed. It became a net creditor rather than debtor of the UK. Those sterling balances were only fully spent by 1956. Thus India had experienced 'forced saving' during the War but wasted that money after Independence on stupid bureaucratic shit like Community Development and the Mahalanobis plan which had to be scaled down almost immediately because the country ran out of hard currency.

One reason why India stayed poor and weak was that its wealthy people had lost neither lives nor property during either global conflict. The Great Depression had relatively little effect on Indian industry though, initially, it meant a large export of gold, and, from the mid-Twenties, rising agricultural distress which in turn meant that even die-hard Tories saw the wisdom of further devolution of power even at the price of British capital having to enter a partnership and eventually take a junior role to the Hindu banyan. Thus, Indian capitalists- unlike those almost everywhere else- were in an enviable position precisely because of Gandhi and his charismatic disciple- the admittedly Socialist, but reassuringly stupid, Nehru. Indeed, these merchant princes turned into a privileged caste superior to the 'box-wallah' or IAS officer. One reason industrialists were happy during the Second Plan was that lots of f.d.i in the shape of partnerships with Western firms were filling up their pockets. But this also meant that they got protected markets for luxury goods thus completely negating any 'Socialist' aspect to the Mahalanobis plan. However talk of collectivizing agriculture scared the industrialists who then began to flirt with the Swatantra party. This was short-sighted. Congress was bound to take its revenge on them. 

Wealthy people did well under the Raj and some well connected industrialists got a lot wealthier under Nehru.  The ordinary Indian may have seen no great improvement in living standards since the time of Akbar. However, many Europeans were better off in 1900 than in 1947 when they were living in bombed out cities and having to turn to prostitution to survive. Precisely for this reason they worked hard and their economies grew very rapidly in the Fifties and early Sixties. In India, things got a little worse for the middle class decade by decade but this happened gradually and emigration was a safety valve. As for the poor- they had babies like crazy because why not? It wasn't like they could buy cool stuff and have a good time. 

Nehruvian complacency arose from the fact that Britain had protected India in both Wars while building up a political and administrative and judicial system he could inherit. Without the Brits, India could have been a battleground between foreign powers or come under Japanese control or else have experienced the War Lordism of China in the Thirties. Its wealthy would have had to make common cause with the middling and the poor just to survive. Adversity would have created the will to grow rich and strong. Nehru's legacy was a country which, not just China, but even Pakistan thought it could attack with impunity. 

The suggestio falsi in Balakrishnan's assertion is that India might have done better without the Brits or that Nehru could have achieved anything had the Brits not transferred power to him.  This was not the case.  Moreover, from the inauguration of dyarchy onwards, Indian politicians showed extraordinary dexterity in preventing the implementations of good policies- e.g. free and compulsory education till age 10. The Lees-Mody pact was an example of the way 'Liberal' politicians could sacrifice the interests of the country to line their own pockets. To his credit, Nehru (and Churchill!) was against that chicanery. But Nehru kept quiet while Churchill spoke out. Similarly, Nehru knew well enough that the Second Plan was a gift to certain sharp-eyed industrialists. Thus Ghanshyam Das Birla ended up turning a huge profit on his generous donations to the Maha-crackpot. 

Over 1950-65, its growth was approximately 1.7 per cent.

The Second Five Year Plan did have about 4 to 5 percent growth. The problem was that it could have been 12 to 15 percent before the eventual fiscal and forex crunch. Still, that sort of boom-bust drunken lurching does charaterize countries climbing out of poverty to middle income status.  Making expensive mistakes doesn't matter provided you learn from them. Development is about mimetics but there is a risk that the wrong mimetic target is selected. 

India’s economy, which was no more than a colonial enclave for more than two centuries,

because Indians were shit at cohesively administering and defending themselves- probably because of the Hindu Muslim divide. 

had been quickened.

But its politics had been more than quickened. It went into overdrive crushing the economy in the process.  

It is made out that this quickening achieved in the 1950s was no great shakes as the initial level of income was low

this is silly. Many European countries were growing very rapidly at the time. But so was America- the richest country of them all.  

and a given increase in it would register a higher rate of growth than at a later stage in the progression.

There was scarcely any growth for the median Indian.  

This confounds statistical description with economic assessment.

No it doesn't. The statistical description supports the economic assessment that India neglected or negated its true areas of comparative advantage- viz. growing and exporting food and cash crops and textiles and 'wage goods'- in order to invest in White Elephant projects which were soon strangled by the administrators and politicians. Freight equalization was introduced in 1952 and lasted till 1993. This was simply mad. 

It is a widely recognised feature of economic growth that every increase in wealth makes the next step that much easier to take due to increasing returns to scale.

This is nonsense. Economies of scope and scale become available as the size of the market increases and production becomes concentrated. India was deliberately designating some fields where the market was huge as being the monopoly of the cottage sector. It was also giving the public sector a monopoly over industries where competitive pressure needed to be intense. This was a recipe for growth based on subsidy which was not sustainable for a poor country. 

The principle works both ways, rendering the revival of an economy trapped at a low level of income that much more difficult. It is worth stating in the context that the acceleration of growth achieved in the 1950s has not been exceeded since. Also, that India grew faster than China in the Nehru era.

Because that was the British legacy to India. What Mao inherited was quite different. Naturally he concentrated on increasing the military and political power of the country.  

So if the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy had led to such a good start, why were the early gains not sustained?

Because they were not sustainable. Anybody can borrow and boost revenue for a brief time. Then the chickens come home to roost.  

The loss of an early vitality in the economy had to do partly with political economy

in which case Nehru & Co's thinking was flawed. Also those guys were very old. Vitality tends to ebb as you pass retirement age.  

and partly with a flaw in the strategy itself.

So, senile fools were pursuing a flawed strategy. After the Chinese invasion, Nehru admitted he and his chums had been living in a fantasy world. However, economically speaking, this suited a large class of rent-seekers.  

The death of Nehru created a crisis of leadership in the Congress Party

not really. Shastri succeeded without too much trouble. He was backed by both the CIA and the KGB. The crisis came later and was only fully resolved when an openly dynastic Indira came back to power after Janata's disastrous reign.  

which was communicated to the polity. It took almost a decade-and-a-half for stability to be restored.

Shastri's rule was stable. Indira as the Syndicate's puppet was secure enough. But Congress began to lose important provinces. Kamaraj's own Tamil Nadu went over to the DMK. U.P and Bihar were beginning their journey towards being 'Congress Mukht'. 

Instability does not matter. The Nineties were unstable politically but economically they marked a turning point.  

The instability impacted the governance of the public sector, and public investment which had been the engine of growth since the early 1950s slowed.

No. The fact that nobody was going to subsidize that nonsense was the problem. Kennedy may have believed that India had to outperform China economically so that other newly independent countries would choose the multi-party Democracy model. Then China took Nehru's pants down and made fun of his puny genitals. India was a basket case. The hole in the begging bowl was its Gandhian soul.  

Additionally, the private corporate sector, which contrary to conventional wisdom had flourished under Nehru, was initially repressed by Indira Gandhi.

Because they were flirting with the Swaraj party and other such 'Fascist' forces. Nehru had a cozy relationship with some industrialists though he'd always show them who was boss. Indira went the extra mile. But the eighties, industrialists crawled to her peons or stenographers.

Private investment collapsed. This held back the acceleration of economic growth.

Smart people were fleeing the country. Some guys who knew whom to bribe could get a good return for shareholders while bequeathing billion dollar enterprises to their sons. 

Neglect of primary education

occurred because it would have taken political will to implement the thing. It was safer to stick to rent-seeking while gassing on about Sarvodaya and Socialism or Ahimsa and how Amrika is totes evil.  

Even though we now have reason to believe

if we are paid to do so 

that the mechanism of long-term growth that remains to this day, which is that of cumulative causation,

Nope. It is mimetics under competitive conditions. Cumulative causation can't explain shit. Why is Ludhiana losing industry to Madhya Pradesh? But some succeed in mimetics while others fail or don't even get started. Why? Competition. If your product is shitty, nobody will give you money for it unless they are coerced. But coercion too is costly. Moreover, others will keep trying to kill you so as to take over your territory. Thus competition is all that matters.

had been ignited by the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy,

which was as English as Fish & fucking Chips. The Brits passed power to the last Englishman to rule India. Mahalanobis- also a Cambridge man with zero understanding of Econ- helped him.  Then their house of cards collapsed. India had become more dependent on Whitey, not less so, after Independence. Only Amrika could save it from Communist China and only Amrika could feed its emaciated population. The problem was that Amrika might decide to do regime change. Indira was on the qui vive for a stab in the back by LBJ or Nixon. So she took a Nationalist path. She couldn't take a laissez faire path- though her son could- because she didn't trust the money-bags any more than she trusted the Americans.

the strategy itself was incomplete. This is best understood by reference to the Asian Development Model as it had played out in the economies of east Asia. These economies had pursued more or less the same strategy as India

No. They followed the Japanese model. The State supported conglomerates under strict conditions. In the Sixties and Seventies, South Korea was a dictatorship. The Saemal Undong 'New Village' campaign was like China's Cultural Revolution. Shamanism and ancient religious practices were ruthlessly suppressed. Some 'dissidents' were killed. India didn't want and may not have been able to use such direct coercive means. But it could do corruption and rent-seeking in a sustainable enough manner. Those who didn't like it were welcome to emigrate or set up a virtue signaling NGO. 

in that the state fostered industrialisation. But a glaring difference marks the Indian experience. This was the absence of a serious effort to build human capabilities via education and training.

Because that would have taken political will. The one method everybody knew worked was that used by Travancore. Grants to poor families and free mid-day meals and only introducing compulsion after 80 percent attendance had been achieved. Tamil Nadu took that route. The fact is tax payers won't pay for Schools where teachers are absent or Hospitals where there are no doctors.  

In the east this had taken the form of a spreading of schooling, vocational training and engineering education.

Which tax-payers were prepared to fund because it led to better outcomes- a virtuous circle of higher income, higher tax revenue and better public goods.  

In India, on the other hand, public spending on education had turned towards technical education at the tertiary level too early on.

Because that's what the politically important middle class wanted. It enabled some to emigrate and earn good money. This served as a safety valve. Why be a Naxalite in some jungle getting bitten by mosquitos if you could go off to sunny California and earn big bucks in O.R or I.T?  

The slow spread of schooling ensured that the growth of productivity in the farm and the factory remained far too slow.

No. It is enough if a few farmers or factory workers are literate. They can direct the others. I'm literate but I need a smart guy to show me how to use my computer in a manner which raises productivity. I recall the slow pace of my writing when I used my laptop as a pad on which to rest my notebook. I'd read the instructions but didn't get that you have to charge the thing and then open it up and turn it on and then type on the keyboard. 

There was high productivity in capital intensive industries. The trouble was that the real rate of return, once subsidies and opportunity cost were taken into account- was often negative or became so because of bureaucratic bloat, feather-bedding, peculation, and lack of competitive pressure.  

Now the pace of poverty reduction also remained slow, and, via positive feedback, slowed the expansion of demand needed for faster growth of the economy.

Effective demand depends on having money to pay. If you invest in White Elephants or put up industries which bureaucrats and politicians mismanage, then, sooner or later, effective demand will fail because nobody lends to you or gives you 'Development Aid'.  

It is intriguing that the issue of schooling did not figure majorly among India’s planners, especially as it was a part of Gandhi’s Constructive Programme.

Gandhi's 'Nai Talim' failed immediately. It was blamed for alienating Muslims and helping Jinnah. As Zakir Hussain said, 'Basic Education as currently practiced is a fraud'. Gandhi thought kids could pay for their own education by spinning cotton. But the cotton that they spun was worthless. They had destroyed, not created, value. On the other hand, my own 'Basic Space Travel' program- which involves farting till you achieve lift off and escape Earth's gravitational field is not stupid at all.  

This had not gone unnoticed even at that time. B.V. Krishnamurthi, then at Bombay University, had pointed out that the priorities of the Second Five-Year Plan undergirded by the Mahalanobis model were skewed.

If the States wanted to do compulsory education they were welcome to do so. But most didn't want the headache. Parents want their kids to be taught English and Maths not Gandhian shite. Rajaji almost made Congress unelectable by deciding that kids should be taught their ancestral skills so as to know their place in society. He truly was a fool.  

He castigated it for a bias toward “river-valley projects,”

coz India don't need no irrigation or electricity. What it needs is skools where Gandhian or Socialist shite should be taught.  

reflected in the paltry sums allocated to education. But it was the argument advanced by him for why spending on schooling matters that was prescient.

It was nonsense. The guy didn't get that the States did not have the coercive power or political clout to push through compulsory public education. It would have meant confronting problems of caste, creed, language, gender- not to mention ideology. A dictatorship which shoots people wants schools where it can brainwash the kids and encourage them to inform upon their parents. India wasn't a dictatorship. It was a Westminster type democracy.

He argued that education would enable Indians to attend to their livelihood themselves without relying on the government, thus lightening the economic burden of the latter,

This is sheer madness! The 'educated unemployed' had been around since education took off. K.N Saigal's song 'fashion pe marne walon abh faqon mar rahe hain' was about the stylish college student who gets his diploma but then starves to death because all the jobs go to people with connections.  

presumably leaving it to build more capital goods in the long run as envisaged in the Mahalanobis model.

Why the fuck should the government produce capital goods? Is it a fucking inventor or engineer? 

But this was not to be, with enormous consequences for not only the economy but also the effectiveness of democracy in India.

Democracy is effective in India. Education doesn't matter at all. Different political parties have a symbol which people can recognize. You don't have to be literate to make a cross.  

While the failure to initiate a programme of building the capabilities of the overwhelming majority of our people is a moral failure of colossal proportions,

In which case Nehru was a moral imbecile of colossal proportions. 

we would be missing the wood for the trees if we do not recognise the economic significance of the short Nehru era in the long haul of India’s history.

Nehru was a fucking disaster in economics and diplomacy and defense policy. On the other hand the guy did look and sound like Alaistair Sims. I suppose presiding over an Indian Cabinet is much the same job as being Head Mistress of St. Trininian's.  

It was path-breaking in that a moribund economy had been quickened.

If it was 'quickened' then England gets the credit. It educated Nehru and passed power to him.  

This would have been the precondition for most changes in a country with unacceptably low levels of per capita income.

The precondition for having a high per capita income is not having babies like crazy. Young peeps should be spending their money on cool stuff not pooping machines.  

It is yet to be demonstrated how this could have been achieved

it wasn't achieved. Anybody can borrow or beg to temporarily raise expenditure. But the thing is not sustainable.  

in the absence of the economic strategy navigated through a democratic polity by Jawaharlal Nehru.

But that 'democratic polity' became dynastic and that 'economic strategy' embedded a rent-seeking class which is still with us. Corruption and incompetence have hysteresis effects. Competition and competition alone can restore ergodicity. Sadly, 'governability' in India has always been co-dependent on rent seeking.  

Nicholas Shea, intentionality and nautrism

In his recent book Nicholas Shea asks- 

how do mental states manage to be about things in the external world?

They don't. Aboutness is a predicate which is about predication or, put another way, predication is what aboutness is about. 

Predication can now be done by a machine not just a mind. There is a 'noesis' (to use Husserl's vocabulary) and a 'noema'- i.e. a 'process' and 'content'- aspect to the activity of predication. One may speak of intentionality or representation or naturalism or anything else in this context but this too is mere predication. No doubt, some predication is useful and some is mischievous but most is idle or inconsequential. 

Mental states are important to us. Changing them may be easier than changing our physical state.  Indeed, it may be essential to change your mental state if you want to change your physical state. How we do predication can matter a great deal. But, most predication is useless or mischievous. 

One possible predicate of a mental state is that it is about a thing in the external world. Another predicate someone else may apply is that it only pretends to be about a thing in the external world because it actually wants to fuck Mummy and kill Daddy. Anybody can attach any predicate they like to any object they like whether or not the object is real, imaginary or incompossible. True, each such predication may hinge on implicitly predicating something really magical to the object in question. Some peeps get worked up about 'mental states'. Others might speak of the mysteries of the soul which enable it to be raised up to God by listening to the St. Matthew Passion or damned to perdition for  watching porn. 

The truth is there is an ontologically dysphoric aspect to predication. It isn't at home in this world. 'Naturality' is category theoretical. But categories are either 'intensional' (non-substitutable or context dependent) or 'transcendental' in the sense of being a priori or outside experience. I suppose, one could say 'intention' is 'intensional' or non-substitutable and arises out of arbitrary or uncorrelated asymmetries. But is it useful to say any such thing? Not for me. I should concentrate on jocular farting. I could be the next big thing on Tik Tok. 

Shea, sadly, is unlikely to attain such eminence. Still, considered as a verbal fart, the following is not too shabby. 

That mental representations are about things in the world, although utterly commonplace, is deeply puzzling.

A representation has some object as its predicate. That object may not be real. I think I see a snake. I have a vivid mental representation of the thing hanging in front of me utterly motionless yet malevolently poised to strike. But the snake does not exist. It is a rope. Thus 'snake' is a predicate of the rope, as far as I was concerned, but it was unreal and delusive. However, it is obvious that it is useful to have mental representations like 'snake!' because snakes, where I come from, really are dangerous. If we evolved by natural selection we would be bound to make mistaken predication of that sort. There is nothing puzzling here whatsoever.  

How do they get their aboutness? … This is an undoubted lacuna in our understanding, a void hidden away in the foundations of the cognitive sciences

This assumes that 'cognitive sciences' have 'foundations'. There is a 'matam' (doctrine) corresponding to the vigyan (techne). If such is the case, surely the object-predicate relation lies there? Shea, in the immediately preceding passage, says

there is very good reason to believe that thinking is the processing of meaningful physical entities, mental representations.

This is silly. 'Mental representation' is a predicate like 'snake'. It may have an object which is a meaningful physical entity. It may not.  

That insight is one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century—it may turn out to be the most important.

This would be the case only if we had a means to produce mental representations of any sort or change those which arise. Suppose there was a small, inexpensive, device which would cause any woman viewing me to see a gorgeous hunk of a man who speaks words of wit and wisdom. Then, I'd agree that that a very important discovery has been made. But not otherwise. 

But I have to admit that the question of meaning is a little problem in the foundations. We’ve done well on the ‘processing’ bit but we’re still a bit iffy about the ‘meaningful’ bit.

I'm not. The meaning of a woman's mental representation of me as a hunky dude would be that they would not scream and run away when I smile at them. Meaning is pragmatic or utilitarian. In Sanskrit the word for meaning- Artha- is also the word for Economics. The reason I'd pay for a device of the sort I mentioned is because it would have cash-value for me.  

We know what processing of physical particulars is,

If we can reprocess them to a utilitarian end- sure. Superior reprocessing would require superior knowledge. I suppose I could pay a lot of money to hair-dressers and make-up artists and dentists and tailors and personal trainers and so forth to make myself look marginally less like a gargoyle but Science has a long way to go before it can either cause women to see me as sexy or cause me to appear less hideous.  

and how processing can respect the meaning of symbols.

Processing can do no such things. I can respect the fuck out of all sorts of symbols. I can even assign them more or less the right meaning- e.g this is the flag of my country, this is the emblem of my religion- but an assignment is not 'symbol processing' unless by symbol a mere character- e.g. a letter or a number- is meant. However, we don't really know why some people with certain medical conditions can't process some character strings the way most people can nor do we really know if such accurate processing is 'multiply realizable'.  

For example, we can make a machine whose manipulations obey logical rules and so preserve truth.

No. All we can say is that a machine language does so within a particular context. We can't say machines infallibly follow rules unless we had a way to infallibly implement machine languages. To our best knowledge, this is impossible.  

But we don’t yet have a clear idea of how representations could get meanings, when the meaning does not derive from the understanding of an external interpreter.

By stipulation to solve a coordination game or create a discoordination game. That's all that happens when philosophers write for each other. They are playing a game which involves stipulations which are merely a type of more or less protocol bound predications. 

Shea takes a different view. He quotes Putnam

An ant is crawling on a patch of sand. As it crawls, it traces a line in the sand. By pure chance the line that it traces curves and recrosses itself in such a way that it ends up looking like a recognizable caricature of Winston Churchill. Has the ant traced a picture of Winston Churchill, a picture that depicts Churchill?

If we stipulate that 'depicts' equals 'looks like', then sure. If we say 'depicts' is the same predicate as 'an intention to represent' then, no. Depicts is a predicate and the protocols governing it may differ in a legal context, a theological context, an aesthetic context and so on. I may say 'the only true depiction of Churchill that we have is that of the laborious ant which, in an aleatory manner, composed- quite accidentally- this marvel. Surely, God himself has chosen this most insignificant of creatures to depict the likeness of one our Nation's greatest heroes!' Furthermore, it may be that the ant's depiction shows Churchill as graver or more tormented than his cherubic features would warrant. We would see some aesthetic quality in the ant's workmanship which gave us a new understanding of the Katechon which keeps the Day of Wrath at bay. 

Shea, however, won't accepts that 'depict' is a predicate which may, by stipulation, be governed by protocols. 

The lines on the sand look like Churchill, but they do not represent him.

Save by express stipulation. If the Queen in Parliament declares that the thing does represent him then certain consequences may follow- e.g. that patch of sand is protected by law for future generations to marvel at. Over the course of centuries, a cult of Churchill is built up and this becomes its Veronica- or true icon. Zealots destroy all other pictorial or other depictions of Churchill as the work of heretics and blasphemers. Such things are the snares of the devil. The ant alone depicted Churchill. It would be a sin against the Holy Ghost to seek to improve upon it. 

It is a familiar point that resemblance or similarity is not sufficient for representation.

Nor is it necessary. However stipulation, for certain practical purposes and in certain contexts, suffices.  My passport photo does not represent me- Mummy says I'm cute- but rather depicts a horrible gargoyle. Yet it alone represents me for certain official purposes by express stipulation of HMG. This may be cruel, this may be unfair, but it is the way the world works. 

It is often claimed that resemblance is not necessary either. As a point about representation in general, this is easily demonstrated by the phenomenon of linguistic representation, since words do not resemble what they represent.

Neither do two dimensional pictures of three dimensional objects. But what they represent is a matter where stipulation plays a great role.  

But this is only relevant because we are talking about representation in general. After all, it might be relevant to a theory of pictorial representation that if a certain kind of picture depicts someone, then it usually resembles them in some way; so the fact that philosophers move so quickly to conclude that resemblance is not necessary for representation indicates that they are looking for a general account of representation, not just an account of pictorial representation.

With pictorial representation we are dealing with protocol bound predication. When I was 5 I produced a picture of my Mum which greatly pleased her. Everybody agreed I had captured her grace and beauty though what I had drawn resembled a hideous space monster. I continued to produce such masterpieces till, when I was around the age of 35, Mummy suggested I give up painting as a career. Picasso may have said that every child is a genius up to the age of 5 but most people get better at drawing by the time they are 10. Also, darling, you mustn't eat so many of your crayons. You are getting very fat and your hair has fallen out. 

Putnam wrote

To have the intention that anything … should represent Churchill, I must have been able to think about Churchill in the first place.

This is not the case. A group of artisans supplied only with numerical information of a certain type might place dynamite on a rock face and then proceed to smooth it out. Only after this labor has been accomplished could they gather on a promontory which others had constructed and see that what they had done was to carve the depiction of a man's face. Later they learn that the man in question is the Prime Minister of the Queen across the Seas. As for the civil servant who sent the numerical information, it turns out he thought he was ordering some latex masks for the No. 10 Christmas party. He hadn't realized that through a hilarious series of comical mix-ups the Nabob of Kuch Nahin would wind up thinking that Queenji Gor' bless 'er, wanted him to create a Mt. Rushmore type depiction of England's greatest public servant in its finest hour. 

If lines in the sand, noises, etc., cannot ‘in themselves’ represent anything,

save by predication or stipulation 

then how is it that thought forms can ‘in themselves’ represent any thing?

in the same way that 'thought forms' exist- i.e. by predication or stipulation.  

Or can they? How can thought reach out and ‘grasp’ what is external?

By telekinesis. This involves quantum entanglement and the fact that you were bitten by a radio-active spider from the fifth dimension. Sadly, our scientists haven't got to a point where this technology is readily available. On the other hand, you can buy X-ray specs which enable you to see what type of panties girls are wearing. I don't know why anyone would want to- but it is a comforting thought.  

Shea says

 If we look more closely at the passage we see that Putnam does not just say ‘thought’, but ‘thought forms’. What are thought forms?

They are predicates applied to thoughts for different purposes which are more or less useful depending on who is doing the classifying. 

The introduction of the word ‘form’ is not an accidental slip of the pen on Putnam’s part; it embodies an assumption that is needed to make the parallel with lines on the sand intelligible.

It is a way of tarting up or dignifying his argument. An assumption was needed for his ant to depict Churchill and another assumption is needed for him to get that assumption to do some work for him. What we have here is a predicate of a predicate. There is an object and one predicate of it- viz a thought- is given another predicate- viz  having a form.  It is perfectly possible that a string of predicates can have a further predicate- viz. the quality of profundity or intelligibility or the quality of being meaningless bullshit,

For the only way to make sense of the parallel is if there is something that relates to thoughts as mere shapes relate to meaningful words, or as lines in the sand relate to a picture in the sand. Putnam himself does not defend the hypothesis that there are such things as thought forms, but without it the argument cannot move forward.  

An argument could be a string of predicates about an object that could exist. But if it is about an incompossible object and serves no good purpose, there is an argument to reject it. Of course, we could stipulate that some set of assumptions should be made. But, in that case, stipulation is doing the heavy lifting. That's what moves things along. 

Putnam’s overall argument can therefore be represented as follows: 

(1) No physical representation represents intrinsically

 Representation is a predicate but so is 'intrinsic'. We might say 'this is a closer representation than that or 'a photograph is more intrinsically representational than an abstract painting'. Some physical processes- e.g photography- are intrinsically representational. When we look at still water we may see our reflection. That is a representation of us. We can't see our image in the falling rain. 

(2) What goes for physical representations also goes for mental representations

I can imagine special training such that mental representations become better and better at capturing details of the physical object.  An expert witness may be able to authoritatively identify particular objects of a similar nature. 

(3) Therefore no mental representation represents intrinsically

But some mental representations are intrinsically realistic and determined by the object. Through training or experience they may become more so. Others are imaginative or stereotyped. 

(4) Therefore mental representation must represent via some non-intrinsic connection

No. The representation must intrinsically be mental. Different minds may, for evolutionary reason, be intrinsically different.  

Causation is the leading candidate for a non-intrinsic connection which is proposed to underpin representation.

But it is also the leading candidate for an intrinsic connection.  

And of course, one of Putnam’s aims in the beginning of Reason, Truth & History is to use the causal theory of representation to argue against the coherence of the idea that we might be brains in vats. I will not discuss this additional argument here, since my interest is only in his argument which begins with the thought-experiment about the ant and ends with the conclusion labelled (4) above. Premise (1) is supposed to be illustrated by the thought experiment about the ant. But a couple of things need to be clarified. First, ‘intrinsically’ is not explained — for the moment we can take it to mean, ‘in itself’, or ‘in isolation from anything else’ or ‘not in relation to anything else’.

Why? Intrinsic means endogenous- without any further outside input.  Let us suppose I am asked to describe a person of interest to the police. I am not intrinsically good at remembering faces or noticing height and weight. However, it may be that a hypnotist can help me recover that memory. That would be an example of an extrinsic or exogenous factor shaping a representation. However 'recovered memories' may not be accurate. I remember the person as black whereas he was white because the hypnotist projected his own racial bias on to me.  

Second, strictly speaking the thought experiment is only about pictures; but it is easy to draw the same conclusion if the ant had made the shapes WINSTON CHURCHILL on the sand, and maybe we can generalise from that to all physical representations.

Perhaps there is a way to manipulate ants to do that by applying a spray of some sort. 

Or maybe not; this is not my focus here. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that premise (1) is true. Premise (3) follows from (1) and (2) obviously, and (4) follows from (3) on the assumption that mental representations represent via some kind of connection.

Some mental representations are intrinsically naturalistic and concerned with capturing salient features of the object.  

The crucial premise of the argument, then, is (2).

Surely 'representation' is a thing minds do? Would physical objects without minds bother to produce representations?  

To assess the validity of the argument, we have to make precise what ‘goes for’ means;

Why? It means the same predicate applies. 

and to assess its soundness, we have to figure out whether premise (2) is true.

It is meaningless. It is non-informative. It is neither true nor false.  

So what does (2) mean? The most plausible reading of (2) is something like this: what is true about physical representations with respect to their representational powers is also true of mental representations.

But physical representations only represent things to minds. We may feel joy at seeing a picture of our sweetheart. But she suddenly looks hideous now we know she is fucking the football team.  

After all, it cannot be true in general that everything that is true of physical representations is true of the mental;

'True' is a predicate. I may say 'nothing is fixed about about a physical representation and therefore any predicate applied to it is as false of any predicate applied to a mental representation- except for pictures of Mummy at any age or my mental representation of Mummy at any age- both are always Divine.'  

the issue here is rather the representational character of these representations, and where it comes from.

The same place from which sexiness of the sexy comes from. It is a very sill place which quickly turns into an infinite regress. Where does the sexy nature of sexiness come from? What about the sexiness of sexy nature or the sexy nature of that meta-meta- sexiness?  

So what is the reason for believing in (2), so understood?

To earn a little money pretending to be a philosopher. 

Given that a physical representation is a representation in which we can distinguish representational properties from non-representational properties,

e.g a picture of Churchill in a magazine is made of paper, whereas Churchill was made of flesh and blood.  

the the truth of (2) depends on whether there are ‘thought forms’ as described above: something that, by definition, represents but has properties other than its representational properties.

My mental picture of a table is not made of wood.  

So our question becomes, why believe that there are such things as thought forms? 

No. The question is why we use certain words or phrases. The answer is that this solves a coordination problem.  

In the tradition in which Putnam is writing, I think it is plausible to say that there are two broad reasons for believing in thought forms.

Actually focal solutions of coordination problems can be 'believed in' for any reason at all provided that's the game we want to play.  

The first is physicalism;

Or Buddhism which pays a lot of attention to 'thought forms'. 

the second is what I call a semantic picture of all representation.

Semantics looks at solutions to coordination and discoordination games. We use words or ascribe meanings to them for one of those two reasons. 

 Physicalism says that everything is physical,

But it hasn't actually contributed to physics. It is non-informative.  

or that everything is determined by the physical, or supervenes upon the physical, or constituted by the physical, or grounded in the physical.

But what is the physical? Does it feature 'action at a distance'? If so, how is it different from Spiritism? Is the Universe a hologram? Physicalism can't contribute to the discussion. It is useless. On the other hand it is definitely true that the Universe is pervaded by a bloke who has the head of an elephant.  

These formulations are perhaps progressively less clear, but not in a way that matters for my purposes here. Nor does it really matter here how exactly we define the physical, though that is important in other contexts.

It is the only thing which matters. If there is a definition of the physical then this is a falsifiable theory. If not, it is non-informative 'matam' with no vigyan associated with it. This is not to say 'cognitive science' does not exist but philosophy isn't its meta-language. It is physics. What is philosophy's meta-language? It is logic which does deal with predication. 

What matters is that the subject-matter of physics, whatever that precisely is, has ontological priority — everything else has to be understood or explained relative to this subject matter, to the physical.

Structural Causal Models have to be physicalist so that mechanisms can be designed so that 'cognitive science' develops tools to improve or repair cognition. Currently, I can get my teeth fixed at the dentist. I'd love to get my thinking fixed at a brain shop. That way I wouldn't write like shit.  

So physicalism requires that anything which is not obviously part of the fundamental physical world must be explained in physical terms

This is silly. Plenty of mathematicians have contributed both to physics and to economics precisely because the latter is not physicalist, it is strategic and involves coordination and discoordination games and hedging and arbitrage between them.  

. This reductionist doctrine has dominated analytic philosophy of mind in the last half century or more.

But analtickle philosophy hasn't dominated shite. It can't contribute to physics or econ or anything else. The thing is a wank. 

Intentionality and consciousness are typically taken as the central mental phenomena

except in blokes like me- who represent the vast majority of our species. Soliciting Food and Sex and snarling or purring composes the totality of our mental activity. 

which do not seem to fit easily into the world as conceived by physics. Jerry Fodor, in a well-known passage, writes: I suppose that sooner or later, the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep… If aboutness is real, it must really be something else. (Fodor 1987: 97)

Suppose physics gets a theory of everything and 'carves the world at its joints', would Knightian uncertainty disappear?- i.e. would all possible states of the world and their associated probability distribution be known? No because of the impredicativity associated with knowledge agents themselves being part of physical reality. Incidentally, language would disappear if there were no Knightian Uncertainty. Thus strategic predication will always remain a feature of discourse. Thus intentionality will become more not less important. Indeed, in Buddhism, which had a background physicalist theory in Samkhya, intentionality (cetana) becomes all important. There is neither future nor past just the empty present briefly illumined by the lightning flash of intention. 

Buddhism has flourished much more than analtickle philosophy because it is concerned with making people have better, happier, cognition. Now if only some nice Buddhist Lama could invent a Nirvana double cheese bacon burger, I too would get on board. 

If we start with this metaphysical assumption, then it is natural to see how the introduction of thought forms is required for an understanding of intentionality.

Nonsense! The fact is our understanding hasn't been advanced in any way by Putnam or other such psilosophers. It may be that CBT or Mindfulness or some such thing can improve our understanding and ability to control our own intentions. That's a type of thinking which has 'cash value'.  

The basic idea is that you postulate something in the brain of the thinker, call this the ‘vehicle’ of representation, and then explain its representational content in terms which are acceptable to physicalism (e.g. in causal or informational terms). In fact this is what Fodor (1987) himself does; as does Hartry Field in a famous paper (1978). Fodor’s view is that these vehicles of representation are sentences in a ‘language of thought’ (1987, appendix).

Why not notes in a melody of thought or strokes in a masturbation of thought? Such statements are all equally non-informative.  

Physicalism gives you a reason to believe in thought forms, whether conceived as sentences in a language of thought, or in some other way.

Which Kavka's toxin will this belief help you quaff? Just the one which keeps you employed in a shitty Department of a University where your STEM subject colleagues are doing useful research and the Law faculty and the Business faculty are helping kids rise up socially and economically.  

Understood in this way, it’s clear that what motivates the postulation of thought forms is physicalism, not some general concern about the possibility of representation. (Cf. here Shea: ‘The physical and biological sciences offer no model of how naturalistically respectable properties could be like that’ (Shea 2018: 5)).

Why be concerned about something which adolescents do very vividly while wanking? I get that peeps wot teach shite might want to pretend that they are connected to prestigious disciplines like Physics. But there was a time when physicists took an interest in philosophy. But then people like Putnam started saying silly things about Quantum Mechanics and the technology involved in and budget for experimental physics expanded exponentially. Meanwhile armchair thinkers were senilely soiling their chairs in Philosophy Departments. 

Putnam’s argument, however, was supposed to be a quite general argument — the argument does not anywhere state that it is assuming physicalism. So although appealing to physicalism does give a reason to believe in thought forms, it makes the Putnam argument redundant. If you are a physicalist you will have already rejected ‘intrinsic intentionality’ (perhaps for Fodor’s reasons) and maybe you will postulate something like thought forms instead.

So, instead of saying 'this guy intends to murder me which is why he keeps shooting at me.' we would need to say 'this guys' thought forms are causing him to shoot at me so as to ensure I die'. One may as well say 'the infernal machinations of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat have resulted in the guy I cuckolded shooting at me.'  

So you do not need Putnam’s argument.

It is not an argument. It is non-informative.  

The starting point of Putnam’s argument — as expressed too in the quotes from Dickie, Shea and Williams — is that we will find intentionality philosophically problematic (‘puzzling’, ‘spooky’).

No. We find philosophy shite. But there's no great puzzle as to why it should be so. The thing is useless. It is adversely selective. Stupid peeps go in for it and become professors. They have to teach the yet stupider or downright crazy. Cretins sometimes crave academic credentials. They can dash off what looks like 'philosophy' without doing any thinking whatsoever. They can then smuggle in their own craziness- like Jason Stanley or Amia Srinivasan- and get to virtue signal on the basis of a meretricious virtuosity.  

Shea's paper concludes that intentionality

 ... naturalism — understood as a view distinct from, though compatible with, physicalism — does not require an answer to the question of aboutness.

Unless we think of it in category theoretical terms as 'naturality' or 'non arbitrariness'- in other words any sufficiently developed and useful theory will have pretty much the same concept of it. But this arises because predication has to be constrained for a protocol bound discourse to be useful. Mathematical logic will constantly improve this.  

Sometimes it looks as if there are only two choices: giving an account of intentionality by answering the question of aboutness in general, reductive terms;

Predication is strategic- i.e. game theoretic. Game theory is not necessarily reductive. Its 'Tarskian primitives' can evolve or change discontinuously.

and proudly declaring oneself to be a non-reductionist who is not concerned with these scientistic questions.

Which is cool if you are not just concerned with but actively involved in making the world a better place.

And it can seem as if the first approach is the only respectable approach for a naturalist to take.

Useless people are often concerned with being 'respectable'. But dressing like a toff doesn't mean you are actually a toff. Similarly babbling about 'physicalism' doesn't make you a physicist not talking of 'naturalism' make you a naturalist. A naturist or nudist maybe. But that won't keep you of jail if you run around Waitrose stark naked and with a radish up your bum. I'm not talking about myself. This happened to a bloke I know. We were in the SAS together so I can't tell you his name for reasons of National Security.

In this paper I have questioned this false dichotomy. The first approach is not obligatory for naturalists,

or naturists 

and the second involves putting one’s head in the sand (or perhaps leaving it in the clouds).

make up your mind, Shea. Stuff like this matters! 

I conclude that it is possible to explain intentionality naturalistically without being required to answer the question of aboutness.

Aboutness is predication. Saying everything is 'naturalistic' is fine, more especially if you are streaking through Waitrose with a radish up your bum. It is quite unfair to be accused of trying to steal the radish if you fully intended to put the radish back but couldn't coz the cops turned up and took you away in the paddy wagon and the magistrates, taking account of your previous record, decided to pass a custodial sentence coz all them guys be racist as fuck. 

 

Kim, Ka, Kha & Kena

Whether we read Kipling's Kim as Ind's Beauty's Katha mark of interrogation

Or breed the Kena's Nachiket as Duty's stark Samkhya of supererogation

Whether 'tis by mother, or wife, or our own Upanishad's Chandogya

More luckless than Thy Nishaad, my I hunted by Bhogya.

Envoi- 

Prince! Ka & Kha speak of Sex, Spatiality, the Black Hole of You.

Kena the wonder of Puja for but Duja- Love's wandering jew.

Khilnani, Nehru & auto-fellation

In 1954, the leaders of two great political parties which controlled the 2 most populous countries met for the first and last time. To many observers, the INC and Pandit Nehru looked stronger than Mao- who was little known internationally- and his Chinese Communist Party which had only come into existence some 30 years previously whereas the INC was by then already a mass organisation with members in every corner of India and representatives in London and other foreign cities.

Indeed, Mao said to Nehru that he knew India was much ahead of China in industrial development. He also thought India was closer to going nuclear. China might need ten or fifteen years to catch up. But, Mao, made it clear, China would catch up. It would rise to a position where no combination of foreign powers could ever bully it again.

A couple of years later, Nehru rejected both the US and the USSR's offer of support for a permanent Security Council seat saying Communist China should get it first. Mao was planning for China to become a Great Power. Nehru was going in the reverse direction. India had projected force onto European and MENA and other battlegrounds during the two World Wars. That must never again be allowed to happen. India should remain poor and weak. Others must feed and defend it and wipe its bum. 

Why was Nehru so defeatist? Sunil Khilnani gives us one part of the answer. Indians thought India was shit. It could achieve nothing on its own but must pretend to try anyway because...urm... Indians are shitty people. They do stupid shit. 

 Contemplating the 1950s, most of us slip into torpor.

The early Fifties were a time of hope. It was entirely possible that India would not turn into a shithole. Mao was treating Nehru as an equal in 1954. He would bitch slap the fool in '62.  

Lodged between the exhilarating, tragic '40s

A bad period. Japanese bombardment, Famine, Partition- what was so fucking exhilarating about it?  

and later decades of manoeuvrings, personality cults, self-mutilations and shimmering aspiration, the '50s seem a black & white newsreel.

No. It was classic black and white films like Naya Daur but also Pyaasa.  

Press Fast Forward. Even better, Delete.

Who would delete Pyaasa?  

The settled aura of the 1950s is a trick of retrospective vision. For the 1950s, as lived, were precarious times:

No. They were safe and featured rising material standards of living because of post-war global recovery.

years in which solutions to crises-political, economic and international-had to be invented on the fly in testing conditions.

There were no crises for India.  

To some, this was the era when India took all the wrong turnings: towards socialism, big dams and vast industrial plants, non-alignment, bureaucratic babuworship.

Nothing wrong with taking a wrong turning if you then take the right turning and proceed apace.  

But the truth is, as usual, more complex.

Khilnani knows shit about the truth. 

The decade opened with India's future direction in limbo.

No. Nehru was PM and Nehru remained PM. Nobody expected any other result. 

Gandhi was gone

A nuisance had been curbed.  

and Patel, with whom Nehru battled for leadership of the Congress party, would be dead by December 1950.

Nehru was his Party's main vote-catcher. Since he was a Leftist, this enabled Congress to prevail over the various Socialist outfits while taking a strong line with secessionists and Commies.  

Even as Nehru saw off other challengers, he struggled to get a strong grip over his party and government.

Not really. It was more a case of grumbling than struggling. The marriage between the machine politicians and their vote catcher was not warm or affectionate but it was a marriage of the traditional Hindu sort. Panditji was the husband. The Congress machine a reluctant, but resigned, spouse.  

Inside the Congress, many of his colleagues opposed him

but hadn't enough support to do more than grumble impotently 

and the regional bosses had real powers.

This is more to the point. However linguistic re-organization and the centralisation of economic power through the Planning Commission reduced their power. Still, it must be said, Nehru had no problem with strong leaders in the Provinces nor they with him. Abdullah, being a close personal friend, was an exception to this rule. Nehru jailed him but the two lurved each other greatly. Kashmiris can be a very peculiar people. 

Outside, he faced vigorous criticism from the Hindu right,

He crushed them. The truth is Hindus wanted elected politicians with mass following to rationalize their Religion and get rid of wasteful or stupid, holier-than-thou, status competition between sub-castes.  

economic liberals, socialists, Communists, as well as those pressing for recognition of linguistic identities.

These problems were successfully dealt with. The British inheritance was flexible and highly pragmatic. Nehru described himself as the last Englishman to rule India. The politics of the Thirties duplicated themselves in the Fifties under more favourable global circumstances.

There was no common political consensus for him to rely on.

Nonsense! There was great continuity between the Nehru of 1937 and the Nehru of 1957.  In 1936 he told the INC in his Presidential address- I am convinced that the only key to the solution of world’s problems and India’s problems lies in socialism and when I use this word I do not use it in a vague humanitarian way but as a scientific economic doctrine … I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation and subjection of Indian people except through socialism …

That means ending of private property except in a restricted sense and the replacement of the present profit system by a higher idea of cooperative service. It means ultimately a change in our instincts, habits and desires. In short it means a new civilisation radically different from the present capitalist order. 

In other words, Nehru was the new Manu of a New Man based on a caste system whose Manthrins, or Mandarins, would be useless and boring. Did Nehru really think that 'kulaks' would voluntarily give up their land and cows? Would they be happy to see those cows  slaughtered to boost beef and hide exports? Nehru said 'the problems that trouble us are essentially middle class problems, like the communal problem, which have no significance for the masses.' But some peasants consider the cow holy whereas other peasants think it makes for good eating. Religion matters at a fundamental economic level more to the masses than to the classes. Lawyers and bureaucrats and Ministers can treat religion and economics and defense strategy as topics for debate or an academic or sentimental type. But this is not the case for the 'kisan' or 'jawan'. The soldier is the son of the peasant. He will join with his Daddy in beating the fuck out of any middle class revolutionaries who turn up to propose 'collectivization'. On the other hand 'Bhoodan' was hilarious. Everybody gave away everybody's else's land. 

Nor were there effective instruments-apart from the inherited ICS bureaucracy-to engage in what was then called 'nation building' let alone to aggressively pursue social change.

In other words, the Gandhians were useless. All those khaddar workers- or, later on, bhoodan workers- were utterly shit. By contrast, Mao's cadres were good at beating and killing people though they could also 're-educate' them by lecturing them in between beating and killing them. That's how Communism works. A new Man is created in a Pavlovian fashion by beating and the 'reinforcement' involved in getting to eat well while beating and killing bourgeois idealists or class enemies. 

The crises years of the 1940s had eroded the state's -ability to ensure security:

Because power had been handed over to Provincial Ministries in 1937. But, by 1950, Congress had expanded the state's coercive capacity. Nehru could fuck up Commies and ensure they stayed fucked up in a manner which was the envy of the Brits in Malaya or, later, the Americans in Vietnam. That's why the US and the USSR were prepared to give India China's seat on the Security Council. Nehru had kicked Commie and Muslim ass and made himself master in his own Hindu house. Unfortunately, Nehru hated Hindus. He wanted them to remain poor and weak till they finally changed their instincts, habits and desires and became as boring and vacuous as himself. 

the British, preparing for exit, had gradually drawn down state capacities,

No. They had transferred power to Indians who decided after Independence not to have a powerful Army and to leave the Navy under a British Admiral.  However they did expand the constabulary for 'Police Action'- i.e. killing Commies or kicking Muslim ass. 

and the Indian leadership-emerging blinking from jail-was in no position to develop alternatives.

Nonsense! It inherited the full machinery of coercion and quickly expanded it.  

In the international domain, India's options were constrained, as pressure built for the country to choose a tent in one or other of the Cold War camps.

Not really. India was Hindu. Hindus hadn't done well in defending themselves. Their latest Mahatma was the nutter Gandhi. Stalin didn't want a basket-case on his hands. The Americans disapproved of Nehru's living in a fantasy world but understood that China's rise would influence other newly independent countries. Thus, some money was given to India so Liberal Democracy wouldn't look like a complete disaster in comparison with Communist tyranny. 

Gravest of all was the economic situation: the effects of Partition, which disrupted economic networks and created a large refugee population, were now superimposed upon endemic poverty.

The refugees were welcome to eject Muslims. If they failed to do so, they were useless and might as well starve or vote Communist.  

Food and basic necessities were in short supply, and capital too was scarce.

India was an agricultural country untouched by the ravages of war. Why was food in short supply? The answer is that Food had been under Indian control since 1937. India's food situation worsened under Nehru. By the Sixties, the country was living 'ship to mouth'.

Such were the unpropitious circumstances in which India embarked on its great transformation: from a territory where

elected Indians had been running the Provinces since 1937 and elected Indians had been running the Center since 1946 

an authoritarian colonial state ruled over a repressive traditional agrarian order into an open democratic society linked into a single economy.

Democracies don't feature dynasties. It is considered unusual if the PM's daughter becomes PM and then her son becomes PM and then her daughter-in-law presides over the Nation acting as regent for her idiot son.  

As India effects this transition, it turns out the 1950s was the decisive decade.

The 1930s were the crucial decade. The War was an interregnum. What the Fifties showed was that the ICS was okay, the British inheritance was okay, Congress was okay- but just being okay isn't enough in a competitive world. 

For two reasons: because of what did happen during these years, and equally because of what did not.

Both were determined in the Thirties. The course had already been set. Had, there been no War and had India remained a Dominion with a weak Center, Partition and the Chinese invasion (because of the Anglo-American nuclear umbrella) would have been avoided. Real interest rates would have been lower and industrial development would have been more rapid at least in some Provinces. There could have been Land Reform at the Provincial level but there wouldn't have been much centralized planning save such as accompanies Federal Budgeting in the usual way. This would have been preferable to what obtained. The fact is the Brits had a good blue-print for India. Gandhi and Nehru and Jinnah didn't. They were lawyers not administrators or statesmen. Their amateurishness imposed a heavy price on the Nations they fathered. The Brits had a plan to slowly devolve power and gradually raise up a class of liberal politicians who could get voters to agree to new taxes which revenue would be spent so sensibly that voters would experience a net benefit. Income would rise, Tax revenue would rise and more public goods would become available. It must be said, Motilal Nehru and C.R Das originated the Indian policy of refusing to mature as politicians. They entered the Legislature to frustrate its actions. This was the behaviour of a retarded adolescent. Congress's problems, India's problems, were always self-created. Motilal and Jawaharlal pretended that any type of cooperation with the Brits was evil. Then J.P and Lohia and so forth said the same thing about Congress. Finally, Mrs Gandhi showed that the repressive apparatus of the State had greatly expanded. Congress hadn't really won Freedom. It had sulked in jail till the Brits found it convenient to hand over power to them.  Under Indira, Congress lost its freedom. It's jail was Dynasticism. 

The middle class politics of the Congress could have always been rolled up by the Brits. Nehru, in 1936, admitted as much saying-     'when our propertied classes were hit hard by the Government’s drastic policy of seizure and confiscation of monies and properties, and were thus induced to bring pressure for the suspension of the struggle.' The Brits could have killed off 'satyagraha' by expropriating its financiers. Nehru understands that Congress was the interlocutor the Brits wanted to have and it suited them if Congress behaved childishly because that gave them more legitimacy as the maai-baap Sarkar dealing with a fractious teenager. He also understand that if he, like Mao, had been supported by the masses, not the 'monies' of the classes, then and only then would he have been a true revolutionary. 

The trouble was that Nehru and Congress were middle class. Nehru says 'How is this problem to be solved then? Inevitably, we must have middle class leadership, but this must look more and more towards the masses and draw strength and inspiration from them. The Congress must be not only for the masses, as it claims to be, but of the masses; only then will it really be for the masses. I have a feeling that our relative weakness to-day is due to a certain decay of our middle class elements and our divorce from the people at large. Our policies and ideas are governed far more by this middle class outlook than by a consideration of the needs of the great majority of the population. Even the problems that trouble us are essentially middle class problems, like the communal problem, which have no significance for the masses.'

Religion did matter to the masses. It determined who you could marry and who would stand with you in a fight. Nehru may have thought of Socialism as a universal religion- a Din Illahi. But Socialism has an infinity of squabbling sects. Also, that shit is stoooopid. The masses tell it to fuck off. They have their own leaders who will squeeze rents out of the modern sector and such of the middle class as can get by in the knowledge economy. 

The period saw three fundamental accomplishments.

Which the British had already accomplished for India

Most foundational was the consolidation of the state and its assertion of sovereignty over the social.

Meaningless jibber jabber.  Patel did a good job strong-arming the Princes- but that's about all that was required.

Law was established

by the Brits 

as a basic tool for India's self-transformation. Law became the means to express the ambition to abolish caste and remedy historical injustice through 'reservations'.

Which were there in the 1935 bill passed by Westminster. 

So too, unjust religious practices were changed through reform of Hindu law.

This was why the Hindus wanted democracy. The fact is, new laws had to be passed so as to prevent vexatious litigation over stuff like your parents having been sva-gotra and thus your not having a right to inherit.  

Law is usually seen as the principle of stability, rather than of change, in society.

In India it is seen a fucking nuisance.  

India's interpretation was unusual interpretation, and consequential.

But the entire legal system was and remains British.  

It

No. The Brits 

gave law and the courts a central role in our politics, not merely in defending rights but in pursuing social goals.

Or just being a fucking nuisance.  

The decade's second defining impulse was the will to create institutions, from the Atomic Energy and Planning Commissions to the Election Commission (a body that has proved crucial to maintaining India as a democracy).

But Nehru kept the Salt Bureau. There is still an Indian Salt Service. Indeed, the Opium Bureau survives as the Central Bureau of Narcotics.  

The performance of these institutional spawn was, and is, uneven. But overall, the energy invested in creating new institutions gave public life a structural density that has helped to sustain an open society.

Fuck off! Creating bureaucratic Departments does not sustain shit.  

Third, the state secured the subcontinent as a zone of relative peace with conditions of economic stability under a democratic government.

Because nobody wanted any big chunk of a starving shithole. Anyway India had inherited a good army and a kick ass Police Service. 

This sounds unremarkable, until one thinks of the rest of Asia in the decades after World War II.

They did better than India except for Burma after it got rid of Indians.  

Across Asia, two patterns emerged: zones wracked by civil or interstate war

which, apart from Yemen and Afghanistan, still did better economically than India.  

and a mosaic of authoritarian regimes. India, too, faced similar challenges; yet it managed to achieve a stable, inflation-free environment under an elected government. Without this feat, India's later development would have been impossible.

But this feat was only possible because that was what was inherited from the Brits. We might add that Hindus don't kill Hindus for religious reasons. That's it. That's the whole story. Having lots of Hindus and inheriting a British administrative and legal and political system makes for certain amenities. But if you have a Planning Commission doing stupid shit, then the economy worsens.  

Many of today's battles revisit the 1950s trenches.

Which came up in the Thirties. The difference is the War economy made the Nehruvian path feasible. 

How should the economy work? What is the role of the state?

Three things that did not happen during the 1950s were equally consequential. First and foremost: the government failed to educate the citizenry.

Because its citizens saw little benefit in education.  A Prince, like the Gaekwad of Baroda, could enforce compulsory education- but only by extorting heavy fines from parents who didn't send their kids to school. What was important was the coercive power of the state. Obviously, the fact that no school exists is no excuse for your not sending your kid to school. However, there is little point prosecuting those who cannot pay. Bombay did make education compulsory in 1939 but refused to prosecute offenders. What did work and was feasible was paying a little money to get kids into schools. Travancore gave grants to poor families and then free mid-day meals. Only after attendance was 80 per cent did they make education compulsory.

From the Planners point of view. Free, compulsory education would have cost about 9 billion Rupees. The Government was only prepared to spend a little under 2 billion over the plan period. One positive aspect was that everybody agreed that Gandhian 'Basic Education' was a money-pit.

India began the decade with a mere 18 per cent of its population classed as literate; a decade later, the figure had increased by only 10 percentage points and 85 per cent of India's women remained illiterate. A useful comparison is China, whose per capita GDP in the 1950s was lower than India's. Although China began the 1950s with a literacy rate similar to India's, it made a concerted effort to educate women. Female literacy increased by around 3.5 per cent a year for much of the decade, and by the early 1960s, around 40 per cent of Chinese women were literate.

China could use compulsion. Also, Chinese officials who did not submit fabricated statistics tended to get shot. 

The 1950s set a long pattern for education-rhetorical attention, practical neglect. And even that attention was fitful. Nehru's huge prime ministerial correspondence contains astonishingly little sustained discussion of primary education. And it is sobering to realise that even when Maulana Azad headed the education ministry, the ministry lacked competence to utilise the monies allocated to it.

The Maulana, gossip averred, was no friend of sobriety.  

A second missed opportunity was the inability to alter India's unequal distribution of land ownership.

Land, like Education was a State subject.  

Again, a comparison with other Asian countries shows that in the countries that later enjoyed sustained economic growth, land reform was a pillar-a key precondition of the East and South East Asian economic miracles.

Nonsense! Korea and Taiwan had land reform because the Japanese had been chased out. Japan had land reform imposed on it by the Americans. What land reform did Malaysia have? On the other hand, the Shah of Iran did impose land reform. It was a disaster. That's why he had to run away. 

There was an American Ambassador who'd keep biting Nehru's ear off with demands for land reform. Nehru explained that the Indian farmer had shit for brains. Give him land and he will mortgage it to pay for his daughter's wedding. The older view, amongst Nehru's class, was that if the peasant has a good harvest and thus gets his hands on a good sum of money, he doesn't spend it on drink or dowries. He uses it to pay a lawyer to get him acquitted after he has killed a couple of his neighbors.  

India's land policy (like its primary education policy) was in the hands of the regional state legislatures. The 1950s, when the Indian National Congress controlled both the Central and state legislatures, was the optimal time to push through legislation.

It was the optimal time to reduce the burden of Land Revenue/Agricultural Income Tax by 'benami' transactions- i.e. showing that all your land was actually owned by hundreds of starving imaginary people.  

But the battle was evaded, and lost. The result was the forfeiture of a crucial instrument both to raise agricultural productivity and to effect economic redistribution, fundamental problems with which we still struggle.

This is misleading. People cared about their kids and their land and their religion. Interference in any of these areas carried a risk of a backlash. The optimal solution was where a vulnerable minority owned the land, they could be deprived of it with popular support. Otherwise, no matter what the legal regime, the strong would hold land though they may no longer pay any revenue for it.  

A third failure was in the international realm. India's foreign policy during the 1950s is usually framed in the context of the Cold War's Soviet-American rivalry; many now criticise Nehru's policy of equidistance from the superpowers.

No. They think Nehru was a loony for getting suckered by the Chinese who took his pants down, wrecked his rectum, and caused him to die a broken man.  

In fact, this was very effective, given India's interests and meagre resources. The actual failure lay elsewhere-the inability to work out a positive regional stance.

There could be none. The region was a shit show. Burma and Sri Lanka wanted rid of Indians and went crazy each in their own idiosyncratic way. Pakistan was always a shitshow and will always remain a shitshow. India wasn't wholly a shitshow- at least for Hindus.  

This is most clear in the case of Pakistan. The irresolution of the Kashmir dispute has kept the subcontinent the least integrated region of Asia and has blocked the region's economic development.

What resolution could there be? What was important was the Indus Water treaty. Kashmir turned out to be a positive for India because Pakistan moved prematurely against it and this caused American aid to be cut down and thus it lost its chance to grow rapidly. Had Pakistan bided its time and done growth first before gambling on a military adventure, there was a chance that Hindu India would once again have faced an Islamic threat on its Western border. Indeed, in 1939, Gandhi predicted that Indian Muslims would ally with Punjabis to take over the subcontinent. The Hindus would be supine or divided. By weakening India, Nehru made Hindus more anxious to hang together rather than wait to hang separately.  

Still more important was the failure of India's China policy, the country with which we share our longest border. Nehru's China policy, in which he was so personally invested, suffered a slow deflation through the closing years of the decade. The policy's collapse in October 1962, when Chinese forces routed Indian troops, should have come as no surprise. The cloud which ever since has enveloped our relations with China has only just, and slowly, begun to dissipate.

Khilnani was writing this 20 years ago. China had gone back to its Fifties approach but India can't be tempted in that direction.  

It is striking how many of today's battles revisit the trenches of the 1950s.

There were no trenches in the Fifties. Nehru ruled, the conservatives drooled. They were stupider than him. They were welcome to use cow-dung to purify their houses while remembering their glory days in prison with the Maha-crackpot. 

How should the economy work?

It shouldn't. That's something all Indian political parties are in agreement about. The thing should be a shitshow- just like the administration and the judiciary.  

What should be the role of the state?

It should enrich those in power and their nephews and pimps.  

What are the terms of redistribution?

Buying votes is not redistribution- it is commerce.  

What role shall we have in the world?

That of the largest completely unimportant portion of humanity.  

The persistence of these questions is cause for frustration-but also reassurance. Beginning in the 1950s, we have accrued a body of experience from which we can learn, if we choose to learn.

Or yearn, if we choose to yearn ; or churn if we choose to churn ; or earn a little money- which is what Khilnani is doing by writing this facile shite.  

Authoritarian societies, committed to forgetting, obliterate their pasts.

Crap societies, committed to being crap, talk worthless shite about their past and future and present.  

They live in a permanent present, defined by the exercise of political will. Democracy is the most historical of political forms.

Except for monarchy.  

Indeed, it is nothing else but history.

That's monarchy.  

And the 1950s launched us on a historical quest: to try to master our present by making whatever sense we can of our own cumulative choices.

That might help us masturbate but it won't help us master shit.  

Our own history is the resource we have to draw

 Okay, okay. I get it. Khilnani can suck his own cock. He is a Yogi-Bhogi. Good for him. Perhaps he has attained immortality. Fifty years from now he'll still be recycling this article by drawing on his own resources- i.e. sucking himself off. 

Nikhil Menon on Mahalanobis

Few readers of this blog will be aware that my first academic publication was on the topic of the Indian Planning Commission. It was 560,000 words long- i.e. about the length of Das Kapital- but failed to find a publisher because all those 560, 000 words were 'shit'. Still, that is what Indian Planning was- utter shit.

Nikhil Menon takes a different view.

The following is an excerpt from his interview with Chintan Modi of News 9

You describe "the Indian planning project" as "an arranged marriage between Soviet-inspired economic planning and Western-style liberal democracy." Why this metaphor?

Because it sounds better than just saying 'shit' 560,000 times. The truth is that the war economy had created Government controls over almost all economic activity. Furthermore, under Bretton Woods, cross-border financial flows, including f.d.i, were tightly regulated. Thus everybody had some sort of planning. Soviet planning was based on State control of almost all enterprises. But it was backed up by the sanction of getting shot in the head or shipped off to the Gulag. This wasn't remotely feasible in India where the 'kulaks' were the dads of the soldiers. If you tried to 'collectivize' their land they would kill you and take their time with your daughter. So, no marriage- shotgun or otherwise- was possible with Soviet style planning. 

Western liberal democracy was not wanted in India. The Hindus did want elected representatives to change their customary laws so as to reduce wasteful and stupid status competition between 'jatis', but they didn't believe in liberal democracy which means representation so as to have more taxation. Indians didn't believe tax money could ever be spent in a productive manner. They wanted no taxation but some representation which doesn't have any power save that of sending public signals that it was okay to abandon casteist or superstitious practices without fearing a law suit from relatives claiming your ancestral property on the grounds that you had become 'acharabrashta' or other nonsense of that sort. Also, get rid of polygamy. You pay for an IAS officer son-in-law but if the guy marries a hundred other girls for their dowries you are back with 'kulinism'. 

What did Hindus want if not 'liberal democracy'? The answer is a benign sort of Dictator. Gandhi had been too much of a crackpot. Nehru was more sensible. In any case, linguistic reorganization of the States was inevitable, so people looked to Delhi because they could not be sure they'd be on the right side of any new regional border. The other point is the creation of Pakistan had revived Hindu fear of an Islamic onslaught. Only a strong Center could provide the Hindu people with a powerful Army which could take the battle to the enemy rather than wait around for the next invasion. 

Nehru's power increased because of the Planning Commission of which he was the head. Control of the economy- license permit Raj- curbed the power of the Presidency cities and the entrepreneurial class which had financed Gandhi. The Textile industry was strangled because the next wave of entrepreneurs would have risen within it. 'Export pessimism' was pessimism about Delhi being able to control foreign exchange flows which would have been disproportionately concentrated in the port cities of the littoral. The Bengalis, who had already lost much and who would lose more through things like 'freight equalization', were mollified when one of their own- Mahalanobis was put in charge. The guy knew no economics whatsoever, so the real fun of clerks and peons in the PMO running everything could begin. Savvy industrialists settled for 'the best of monopoly profits- a quiet life' while various British Managing Agencies were taken over by Marwaris and very quickly run into the ground. I suppose there was some 'value release' from what were in effect stranded assets. 

Why did the US decide to give 'free money' (Ambassador Kaul's phrase) to finance this farcical 'Socialism'? Well, it turned out that the money wasn't free, it was inflationary and the US got an unexpected benefit- viz. intellectual coolies. Still, the fact remains that US foreign policy consists, in the words of Obama, of doing stupid shit. Indian Planning was definitely shit, so obviously they paid for it for a few years. 

To conclude, Indian planning was an arranged marriage between a senile prostitute- viz. the war economy regulatory machine- and an impotent Dick-tato (i.e. a cross between a Dictator and a Potato with the qualities of the potato predominating) for which Uncle Sam provided money so as to keep up an appearance of Liberal Democracy thriving in the second most populous shithole on the planet. 

Menon disagrees.

I used this metaphor because during the time of the Cold War and the competition between the two superpowers — Soviet Union and the United States — planning and democracy were seen to be incompatible.

This is nonsense. France and Japan had 'indicative planning' but most war ravaged countries had what was in effect the same thing. In any case, there was a little thing called the 'Marshall Plan'. The US actually knew more about planning than anyone else precisely because they had more resources to allocate.  

They didn't appear to have any natural inclination towards each other. So, India's choice to put these two together was an experiment, a leap of faith by the Indian state (which, in this metaphor, represents the parents doing the arranging!)

India's choice was based on the Hindu need for a strong Center able to respond proactively to Islamic aggression. Nobody wanted to go back to the days of Prithviraj Chauhan. With the Brits gone, Hindus had to hang together.  

But a strong Center meant one where industrialists have to go through New Delhi rather than find some new crackpot of a Mahatma to act as their cat's paw. 

What is it about India's Five-Year Plans that excites you as a researcher? What were some of the research questions that you started out with? How did they change over time? 

India's Five-Year Plans intrigued me because we are used to the debates about whether they succeeded or failed, but I felt that we didn't know enough about why India adopted them in the first place.

Because nobody then or now was going to come out and blab out the truth. Hindus wanted a strong Center. They didn't greatly like Banias and Marwaris and so forth. Also, maybe the Government could run industries better than some greasy Seth. What was certain was that public sector employment would rise. In India everybody was a philosophical anarchist who wanted a sarkari job for their son.  

How they came to define India's economy. The Planning Commission's decisions rippled across every aspect the economy, and the rhetoric of planning became part of the texture of public life in India.

Kishore Kumar, in Apna haath Jagannath, had a hit with 'Permit ke liye mar mit' in 1960. Whatever enthusiasm there may have been for Planning, it died quickly.  

When I first entered the archives for this project, I didn't have a very clear idea about what the book would look like. In some senses, I allowed myself to be directed by where the archives and libraries took me. That's what led me to the history of India's first computers, or the role played by Bollywood and sadhus in promoting Five Year Plans.

In the Fifties, some believed that there could be a sort of National Service scheme for school leavers. India might become a One Party state. The best and brightest would join the Party and this would grease the wheels and permit superior coordination. Nehru did start a technical cadre- engineers and other specialists- but the jealous IAS generalist strangled it quickly enough. Still, it seemed possible that Congress- perhaps after becoming dynastic (thus reducing intrigue and infighting)- would create an all Indian political cadre and then set goals for different industries. After all, there were one or two examples- e.g. Kurien and Amul- where a technocrat with good political protectors achieved something worthwhile. 

How would you describe to non-academics the role that PC Mahalanobis and the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata played in crafting independent India's economic trajectory?

The Mahalanobis model was based on the experience of the 1930's when there were high tariff barriers. It viewed India as a closed economy which needed to be technologically self-reliant. The main constraint was 'capital goods'- i.e. machines that make machines- and thus the Government needed to push resources into this sector regardless of profitability. It should be stressed that the Mahalanobis plan was modified greatly within two years of its introduction because of inflation and balance of payments problems. But it did come close to its target because of the favorable global climate. The Third Plan was more Sukhamoy Chakraborty's work but for obvious reasons it failed dismally. Plan Holidays followed till finally, with the Gadgill formula, the nature of the game changed to admitting that the real issue was the division of spoils between the Center and the States. In other words, Nehru's Centralization had failed. Indira Gandhi was more concerned with fucking over the Hindi belt than with distant States which were able to rise up a little.

Politically, one could argue that National cohesion required the sort of stupid shit Mahalanobis presided over but from the Economist's point of view the whole thing was utterly mad and pointless. It had negative hysteresis effects which stretch down to our own day. 

India never became technologically self-reliant. There wasn't enough money for creating a nation of inventors and engineers. Some people were sent abroad to study but when they came back they had to be given a clerical job under a stupid IAS officer pending availability of work for which they were trained. Even if this materialized, they had little scope to innovate or improve techniques. They were expected to conform to bureaucratic, not technocratic norms. The sensible ones stuck it out for a couple of years and then emigrated. Others quietly rotted away and became useless. Meanwhile there were some turn-key projects which did boost steel production and so on. But Indian steel destroyed value- i.e. exporting iron ore paid more. The result is a continuing culture of protectionism. The the Indian steel producer lobbies government to put high export duties on high grade iron ore to reduce its costs but Indian manufacturers suffer from high steel prices. That's why steel intensive goods- e.g. construction equipment- are bought from China. Meanwhile, people like Laxmi Mittal hired technocrats from the Indian steel industry and made a fortune for himself in places like Indonesia before settling in London. 

Making a budget involves having a plan. A good budget ensures that 'investment' generates financial returns- i.e. raises revenue. A bad budget pisses money against a wall because 'investments' turn out to need more and more monetary support. You have to cut down on food so as to feed your white elephant which was supposed to make you rich. But it can't do so. It isn't 'strategic' at all. It eats money and produces shit. 

The 'Gandhian' element to this was protection of cottage industries. But the motive was political. Textiles could be exported. Smarter, shrewder, entrepreneurs might rise up in the industry. They might back new political configurations in the country. Better be on the safe side and strangle the thing at birth.

The alternative to Mahalanobis was the Vakil & Brahmanand plan which would have let textiles and other wage good industries expand rapidly so that industrial employment could grow quickly thus ending agricultural involution and raising productivity- and therefore creating a food surplus- in that sector. However, neither of those two worthies- both being academic economists- appeared to be wholly sane. What was needed was a guy who understood budgets not one who pretended to understand gobbledygook. 

Mahalanobis, or 'the Professor' as he was known, was one of the most influential Indians of his generation.

If by 'influential' you mean 'shit'- sure.  

This was mostly because of the role that he and the Indian Statistical Institute played in authoring India's Second Five Year Plan (1956-61).

The craziest shite ever conceived. It ensured India would be a beggar. This meant reform would come from outside and take the shape of a 'Plan holiday'. However, as with our current malaise, the charitable view is that Mahalanobis too was being manipulated by a rent-seeking coalition. But, back then, there was more input from the PMO. There was a clear political purpose- keep the farmers starving so they don't wag their tail; strangle the new generations of Sarabhais and Birlas lest they find some Mahatma of their own and start up that satyagraha nonsense; concentrate all power in Delhi by reducing Calcutta and Madras and Bombay to an equal penury. Mahalanobis, being a Bengali succeeded with respect to Calcutta. Bombay fought back by fair means or foul and retained some dynamism. In Madras, the film industry drove out Congress and created a Dravidian model of development. The 'Andhrapreneur' then made Telugu Cinema more dynamic than that of Tamil Nadu and did well for themselves and their State. Some other States found their own modus vivendi to a modest type of affluence and dynamism. But the country as a whole suffered and continues to suffer. 

That document provided the policy blueprint that India's economy followed for the next few decades, until the market reforms of the 1990s.

But rent seeking had become entrenched. Some export led growth occurred but more and more rents were captured. Billionaires increased in number but so did beggars. 

As someone who engages deeply with the history of capitalism,

which India didn't have. It had feudalism and then a corrupt type of socialism and then a corrupt type of billionaire culture based on borrowing from Government banks or the LIC etc. 

how do you look back at the liberalisation of India's economy in 1991? Does it seem like a failure of the promise of the welfare state?

There was no welfare state. Why speak of promises? 

Can the inequalities that exist in India today be attributed to that moment?

No. They can be attributed to Indian economists being shit and Indian politicians being shit and Indian industrialists being shit.

I should begin by saying that I'm not an economist, so I don't study this in the manner that they do. As a historian, I look at changing patterns in economic thought and practice and offer explanations for them. With that qualification, I would say that market liberalisation was a seminal moment for the Indian economy. While India was forced into it due to a crisis, it clearly led to a substantial increase in GDP and growth rates. As a result, not only did the Indian economy change, but so did consumer patterns and hence popular culture as well. The uptick in growth has contributed to a reduction in absolute poverty and an increase in income and wealth inequality. India could have harnessed this growth towards more equitable outcomes by acting, as you suggest, like a welfare state. However, our investment in social security programmes, health and education still remains low.

Because subsidies go to the rich. The game has been rigged in advance. That's the problem with Centralization. You get 'Agency Capture'. The regulator becomes the puppet of the entity she is supposed to keep on the straight and narrow. The Banker becomes the henchman of the Bank robber.  

What continuities do you notice between the Planning Commission and the NITI Aayog? The NITI Aayog resembles what the Planning Commission had become towards the end of its run — the government's think tank. In the 1950s however, as Planning Democracy reveals, the Planning Commission was an enormously powerful body.

Or so it appeared. What it actually was an enormously pliable body.  

To the extent that a Finance Minister John Matthai resigned in protest of the Planning Commission's sprawling powers. He said that it was more like a "parallel cabinet"!

Nehru's initial instinct was to put business minded, non political, people in charge of Finance. But the temptation to concentrate power in his own hands was too strong.  

What makes you conclude that India's civil society needs/wants a technocratic saviour? 

I think there is often a want, though I am unsure that there is a need. While these trends ebb and flow, I am struck by how often there is a popular appetite for a technocrat to solve our problems. We saw this with the lionisation of Mahalanobis, as we did later with Manmohan Singh in the 1990s, and as we have seen more recently with the celebrity of someone like Raghuram Rajan. A few years ago, a newspaper ran a column with the title 'Who Will Be the BJP's Mahalanobis?' I think we need to find a balance between yearning for a technocratic saviour and rank anti-intellectualism. In India currently, the latter appears the much bigger issue.

A healthy sign. Economics is something successful businessmen in open markets understand better than pedants. There is nothing wrong with having a sort of political entrepreneur who recombines factors of production and improves allocative efficiency by relaxing stupid red tape regulations without blowing a hole in the budget. This can be done by a CM but not a PM because India is too varied. Subsidiarity is the need of the hour. Let decisions be taken as close as possible to the people affected. Indian Trade policy is crazy shit. There needs to be experimentation at the margin. The top-down approach is still with us because of embedded rent seeking. Breaking that nexus appears an elusive dream. To be fair, Modi and Shah do seem to be learning from their mistakes. The question is whether they can last long enough in office for the country to benefit by the knowledge they have gleaned.