Arjun Sengupta led such a varied life, played so many
different roles, that it is as if there was not one
but several different Arjun Senguptas. Each person who
knew him, knew only one of the Arjun Senguptas, but
had little idea about the others. I for one knew little
about the Arjun Sengupta who was an economic adviser
to Indira Gandhi, or the Arjun Sengupta who advised
the IMF Managing Director De Larosier, or the Arjun
Sengupta who was a member-secretary of the Planning
Commission. But I did know the Arjun Sengupta who was
my teacher at the Delhi School of Economics and who
took upon himself the role of acting like a Bod-da (elder
brother) to me, invariably bantering, and often giving
me gratuitous advice about what I should do with my
life, which was generally infuriating but always affectionate.
(On one occasion when I was a junior faculty member
at Cambridge, and like others of my generation dreamt
of the revolution, he visited me, and to my intense
fury, advised me not to waste my life on ''all this radical
stuff''). Whenever we met, after a lapse of months or
years, he would pick up this role from where he had
left it, no matter what he or I were doing in the interim.
It was in the mid-sixties that Arjun first appeared
at the Delhi School coffee house, a handsome young Bengali
economist with a fresh MIT Ph.D who had just joined
the Institute of Economic Growth. Those were the days
when all Bengali economists were Left, the only question
being whether they were with the Left Communists (CPI
(M)) or the Right Communists (CPI). Delhi School student
gossip made Arjun out to be a Right Communist. Within
a short time he joined the Delhi School faculty and
started teaching us Growth Theory.
He was full of fun in the class, full of jokes, absolutely
without any airs and highly approachable. The Sens,
the Chakravartys and the Rajs, despite their best intentions,
were quite forbidding; so we naturally warmed to Arjun,
one of whose many stories in the class was about how
in an examination hall, the entry of some pigeons had
provided him and his class-mates the opportunity to
take recourse to means, not altogether ''fair'', to answer
a particularly difficult question paper. He produced
around that time a major paper on the impact of foreign
aid, which was published I think in the Oxford Economic
Papers. To the batch which immediately followed mine
and which included Utsa (Patnaik), Deepak (Nayyar) and
Isher (Ahluwalia), he taught the International Economics
option. But shortly afterwards he left the Delhi School
to join the faculty of the London School of Economics,
which is when I lost touch with him, apart from his
visit to Cambridge mentioned earlier.
We met up again after I had returned to India to join
the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at JNU,
by which time he too had returned to a series of important
positions in the Government of India, but our contacts
were infrequent. It was in the late seventies that he
produced his excellent paper (written perhaps when he
was at the IMF) on the world capitalist crisis of the
mid-seventies. The argument of the paper was simple
but incisive: since the oil-price hike transferred purchasing
power primarily from the consumers in the advanced capitalist
world to the oil-producing countries, which held a large
portion of their increased oil revenue in the form of
bank deposits, it entailed a reduction in world demand,
in particular aggregate demand in the advanced capitalist
countries. To counter this, it was necessary that the
governments in the advanced capitalist countries should
run increased fiscal deficits. But since the oil-price
hike had given rise to cost-push inflation in these
countries, and the governments, in a futile bid to counter
this inflation had curtailed their fiscal deficits,
they only compounded the contractionary impact of the
oil-shock. This explained the mid-seventies crisis in
the capitalist world, which, until then had been the
worst since the 1930s.
I met him more frequently after he joined the School
of International Studies of the JNU. We would meet regularly
on evening walks in the JNU campus (on which he would
often be accompanied by Jayashree and daughter Meethu)
and pause to have long chats. During our chats, bantering
as ever, he would make comments, often unflattering,
about things I had written, which to my surprise and
gratification, he always made a point of reading. I
remember writing an obituary on Paul Sweezy in which
I had mentioned that Samuelson and Sweezy were Schumpeter’s
pet students at Harvard and that Schumpeter was perhaps
responsible for the denial of tenure to Sweezy on ideological
reasons. Arjun told me during one of our evening chats
that Schumpeter had also been responsible for the denial
of tenure to Samuelson on grounds having to do not with
ideology but anti-semitism. Samuelson himself however
tended to downplay Schumpeter’s anti-semitism, and would
perhaps have absolved him of the charge of denying him
tenure, though the fact of his leaving Harvard owing
to anti-semitism was never in doubt. But I assume that
Arjun, having been in MIT as a Ph.D. student of Robert
Solow, would have known something which Samuelson’s
loyalty to his old teacher might have prevented him
from admitting publicly.
Once he tantalizingly told me that he had some comments
to make about a piece I had written in a volume, A World
to Win, edited by Prakash Karat on the Communist Manifesto,
and that he was going to make them in a review of the
book he was writing for the Economic and Political Weekly.
That review unfortunately never got written, so I never
knew what he was going to say. My evening chats with
Arjun were always chastening, stimulating and a source
of great pleasure for me. And we talked of everything
under the sun, from contemporary politics, to gossip
about celebrity economists, to common friends. Even
after he retired from JNU, the Sengupta family would
still come to the JNU campus for its evening walks.
Around this time he started attending seminars organized
by International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS),
which provided further opportunities for us to meet
and discuss things. He was passionately committed to
the idea of providing a social safety net for the unorganized
workers, which the Commission headed by him had recommended.
But being Arjun, provocative, infuriating and contrary
as ever, he once argued in an IDEAS meeting for a combination
of labour market flexibility and social safety net,
before a group of Left economists, who were as passionately
opposed to labour market flexibility as they were committed
to a social safety net.
On one occasion when we were both returning from Kolkata
to Delhi, Arjun surprised me by suggesting that in India
we should settle down to a two-formation polity, a right-of-centre
formation consisting of all political forces in favour
of neo-liberal policies, and a left-of-centre formation
consisting of the Left Parties, progressive civil society
organizations, dalit groups, tribal groups, and feminist
organizations which would press for a progressive economic
agenda. The moral of the story was that the Left political
parties should make an effort to build a coalition of
the dispossessed to take on the new economic establishment.
Since Arjun prided himself on being hard-headed and
not given to wishful thinking, I was a little surprised
by his prognostication and pointed out its obvious weakness.
This lay in my view in the fact that the BJP would never
tear itself away from the RSS to either become or merge
itself into a political formation with a mere right-of-centre
economic agenda, which meant in turn that the Left would
always have to fight on two fronts, anti-communalism
and anti-neoliberalism. Whether Arjun had thought much
about this or it was a suggestion on the spur of the
moment, I do not know, since to my knowledge he has
not written about it. But whatever it was, it was typically
Arjun, brilliant, incisive, novel and not run-of-the-mill.
Meetings with Arjun were always fun because he was never
intellectually stodgy, never pedestrian, never predictable,
never dull, always sparkling, even if irritating, annoying
and infuriating. It is sad to think that a person so
full of life, so full of fun, so full of sparkle, so
iconoclastic with a twinkle in his eye, has left us
forever.
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