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18.10.2010

On Arjun Sengupta

Prabhat Patnaik

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.

 

© MACROSCAN 2010