Themes > Analysis
10.11.2003
Address at the Convocation of Kalyani University
Prabhat Patnaik
Your
Excellency the Chancellor of the University, Mr
Vice-Chancellor, Assembled Guests, Members of the
Faculty, Young Scholars, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a singular honour for me to have been invited as the chief guest at the convocation of this university which, though young in age, has built up for itself an enviable academic reputation. This achievement is due partly no doubt to the ethos of West Bengal: even as the academic ambience over much of the country has deteriorated sharply, West Bengal continues to produce a steady stream of exceptionally fine young scholars who are much in demand at home and abroad. But it also owes much to the dedication and commitment of the faculty members, with many of whom I can claim personal acquaintance. It gives me particular pleasure to be amongst them on this happy occasion.
The importance for our national life of institutions such as this one, indeed of higher education in general, is often not appreciated. Some even argue that institutions of higher education constitute a white elephant, a drain on the nation’s resources which can be better deployed in promoting the spread of elementary education in the country. Instead of the pyramidal structure we should have built up, of a broad base of elementary education supporting a smaller apex of higher education, we have actually built up, they contend, a top-heavy structure where a plethora of colleges and universities has grown up within a vast ocean of illiteracy and ignorance.
This argument, whose proponents include many progressive and sensitive thinkers, is, nonetheless, fundamentally flawed. There can of course be no two views on the urgent need for eradicating illiteracy and enlarging the spread of elementary education. In fact it is a national shame that even after half a century of independence, more than one-third of the population in the country remains illiterate, and around two-fifths of children of school-going age remain outside the ambit of formal schooling at any given time. The mistake consists in believing that an absolute curtailment (or even a curtailment relative to GDP) of expenditure on higher education is necessary for overcoming these failures. The shortage of resources that is usually cited in this context as a constraint is a mere alibi.
I shall discuss what has been happening on the resource front in the more recent period later in the course of my address. But the crucial point is this: at no stage during the entire post-independence period has India spent an adequate amount on education, by any reasonable definition of the term ‘adequate’. In fact the proportion of GDP that the white-supremacist South African state spent on the education of the black majority even during the apartheid period, notwithstanding the massive drain on its exchequer that maintenance of the highly oppressive police, military and intelligence apparatus entailed at the time, was higher than what the Indian state has ever spent throughout its post-independence history. The matter, in short, is one of priorities. Any government that has the political will to eradicate illiteracy and provide universal primary education would always find the resources for doing so without curtailing higher education. And any government that complains of lack of resources and considers it necessary to starve higher education in order to provide for the spread of literacy and primary education simply lacks ipso facto the political will for effecting universal literacy and primary education.
While strengthening higher education does not preclude in any way the expansion of elementary education, such strengthening is essential for the development of the country, indeed for the very survival of the freedom of its people. The realm of higher education is the cradle of ideas; the shrinking or extinction of this realm necessarily makes a society parasitic on others for its ideas, and such a parasitic society cannot remain free.
John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the twentieth century, may have exaggerated a trifle when he wrote: ‘... the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.’ But the exaggeration is no more than a trifle. After all Bertolt Brecht, coming from a very different segment of the political spectrum, also wrote: ‘Hungry man, reach for the book!’ The hungry man, however, must reach for the right book, one that tells him not that his chronic hunger is the result of sins committed in some previous birth but educates him instead on the social conditions that keep him hungry. This presupposes that the right book must be available, that the crowd of hungry men must have their own ‘organic intellectuals’ whose ideas must develop independently of the ideas of those who preside over a social arrangement that keeps the hungry, hungry. Independent institutions of higher education are essential for this. To be sure, having such institutions is not a sufficient condition for the development of independent ideas that are relevant for the life, freedom and progress of a particular society. But it is a necessary condition.
The mass mobilization that constituted our freedom struggle would not have been possible if the intellectual groundwork for it had not been done by pioneering thinkers like Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chandra Dutt, who dared to think independently of the prevailing theoretical constructs in the institutions of higher learning in the metropolitan countries. This tradition of independent thinking is necessary also for defending the gains of our freedom struggle. Since we are now in a position to have our own institutions where the conditions for independent thinking can prevail as a matter of course, we must develop and nurture such institutions.
II
Implicit in what I have just said is a whole series of rejections. First, there is rejection of the view that different institutions of higher learning belonging to different societies can be ordered as being ‘better’ or ‘worse’ along one particular axis. If these institutions are to be ‘organic’ to their specific societies, then, since the interests of these societies are quite obviously not in harmony, each set of institutions must be different from the others in order to fulfil its legitimate role. I often feel amused when I hear comments like ‘Kalyani University (or Jawaharlal Nehru University, for that matter) should imitate Harvard’; ‘Our institutions should enrich themselves by borrowing ideas and faculty from advanced country institutions’; ‘We have to judge ourselves by how well we are recognized by top institutions in the world’, and so on. This whole approach, to my mind, is wrong. It sees higher education as a homogeneous commodity of which some institutions are better producers than others, and not as a means of producing ‘organic intellectuals’ for a particular society. I referred above to Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt, whose contribution to the struggle for the freedom of our society was enormous. But scarcely any one in Harvard or Cambridge doing economics would have heard of them (though those doing ‘India studies’ might have). Modelling our institutions after Harvard or Cambridge, which would entail copying their curricula and syllabi, would therefore necessarily mean sacrificing, to our great cost, the conceptual framework, perspective and insights of a thinker like Naoroji.
Second, my argument rejects the view that professionalization of subjects like ‘economics’ and ‘political science’ is a desirable process. The ‘profession’ in these disciplines, as well as in others, is dominated by the advanced countries; therefore recognition in the ‘profession’ would necessarily mean sacrificing any independent thinking and parroting borrowed concepts. This would not matter if these borrowed concepts were genuinely ‘scientific’ and not imbued with the ideological objective of defending the hegemony of the advanced countries. In the social sciences at least, as I shall illustrate later, such is not the case. This does not mean that everyone engaged in social science research in universities in the advanced countries is a conscious ideological defender of imperialist hegemony, but everyone is entrapped by the need to belong to and be recognized by the ‘profession’, and therefore undertakes research within strictly circumscribed limits which preclude any critical awareness of the role of the handed-down conceptual apparatus in the ideological defence of imperialist hegemony. Stepping out of these limits invites reactions of unease, astonishment, silence, derision and even hostility, resulting in a loss of academic and financial status. Hence even the best-intentioned dare not step beyond the limits. In societies like ours where domination of the western theoretical orthodoxy in the social sciences is far from complete, thanks precisely to our rather recent birth as a nation after a prolonged anti-imperialist struggle, any emphasis on ‘professionalization’ would mean voluntarily surrendering ourselves to this domination, closing the space has been made available to us for independent thought.
Third, my argument entails a rejection of the attitude which places a special value on ‘recognition’ in the advanced countries, and hence on awards and distinctions bestowed from there. In the social sciences, at any rate, all such awards and distinctions are conditional on conformity, on keeping within the ‘limits’ and abjuring the use of concepts that critique imperialist hegemony. Unfortunately, this attitude of prioritizing ‘recognition’ in the west is all too pervasive in our country. Almost all of us, when we sit on Selection Committees, prefer a candidate who has published in a western journal over one who has published within the country, even without looking closely at the quality of the two publications. By doing so, we contribute to a stultification of the tradition of independent thinking.
To say this is not to reject the notion of quality, or to argue that we should not have criteria for judging quality. But these criteria must be our own, and not those employed in the institutions of advanced countries. Developing these criteria, to be sure, is not easy, but there is no escape from the need to do so if we are to preserve a tradition of independent thinking.
III
Let me give an example, drawn from my own discipline, economics, to underscore the necessity of a tradition of thought independent of the prevailing orthodoxy in the west. One consequence of the policy of ‘liberalization’ has been the relaxation of restrictions on the flow of finance into and out of the country, because of which it so happens that a significant inflow of foreign exchange has taken place of late. To prevent the exchange rate from appreciating, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has intervened to buy up the foreign exchange that has been coming in, and as a result we currently have exchange reserves of nearly $90 billion. Now, holding such large reserves is not a sensible thing to do. Foreign exchange reserves are nothing else but IOUs of other countries; hence holding such IOUs represents a waste of resources that could be more productively used elsewhere. What is more, since the rate of return that those bringing funds into the country earn is higher than the rate earned on these reserves (which is a trivial amount), the country in effect is borrowing from abroad at a higher rate to lend at a lower rate. This is palpably unwise.
In this connection, suggestions have been made by the Bretton Woods institutions, and by independent analysts, including academics, in western financial journals, that India should allow its exchange rate to appreciate, and that towards this end the RBI should stop adding to its reserves but lower them instead. Several Indian academics and financial journalists have also endorsed this idea. Let us look at the implications of such a move.
If the rupee appreciates, the competitiveness of our goods vis-à-vis foreign goods is lowered through a cheapening of foreign goods. Since such an appreciation would not expand the total domestic demand, this relative cheapening of foreign goods would mean that a given volume of domestic demand would be met by foreign goods rather than by domestic goods; likewise, our exports would be supplanted in outside markets by foreign countries’ exports. It follows that an appreciation of the rupee would lead to a closure of domestic producing units and to higher unemployment, together with an increase in our trade (and current account) deficit (which is in fact how the reserves would have got used up). We would have, in short, unleashed a process of ‘debt-financed deindustrialization’, i.e. borrowed to finance the ruination of our own production base. What is more, when the time comes for foreigners (or non-resident Indians) who are now bringing finance into the economy to start taking it out, we would have no funds left to cover the outflow, since these would have been used meanwhile in financing imports at the expense of home production. Thus, frittering away foreign exchange reserves through an appreciation of the rupee would mean ruination of the country twice over: through deindustrialization and unemployment now, and bankruptcy later.
This of course would work to the advantage of foreign, especially metropolitan, countries: they would obtain larger markets now, which, given the prevailing recessionary conditions, they desperately need (it is noteworthy that a similar demand for revaluing the exchange rate upwards is being made with regard to China); and they would be able to impose whatever ‘conditionalities’ they choose in the future, when our country, in order to finance capital outflows, approaches them or agencies like the IMF and the World Bank dominated by them, for loans. It is not surprising then that the western press, the Bretton Woods institutions and many western academics are demanding an appreciation of the rupee. But to oppose this demand, to avoid this double ruin, and to protect our sovereignty and freedom, it is essential that there be people within the country who think independently and have the capacity to see the implications of such moves.
If, it may be asked, holding large reserves is unwise and getting rid of reserves through an appreciation of the rupee even more so, what should the country do? Obviously, if there was an agency that undertook productive investment either using the reserves or on the strength of these reserves, i.e. using these as cushion (since plenty of unutilized domestic industrial capacity also exists), then they would have been put to some good use. The only such agency can be the state (since capitalists’ investment decisions are spurred by their own calculations and cannot be stimulated just because the country has a plethora of unused resources). True, even if the state undertook investment on the strength of these reserves and used up a substantial chunk of them, when the time comes for finance to flow out the country may still find itself short of funds (unless the investment undertaken in the meantime earns sufficient foreign exchange). Some degree of control over capital flows, therefore, would have to supplement larger state investment. In short, a combination of capital controls and larger state investment is required if the country is to cope with the burgeoning capital inflows.
But both these are anathema as far as the theoretical orthodoxy in the west is concerned. There may of late have been some grudging admission of the need for capital controls, but larger state investment is taboo, especially for third world economies. The only reasonable way of coping with financial inflows is thus closed to us if we follow the lead of the dominant theoretical orthodoxy in my discipline. This fact only underscores the absolute need for independent thinking in societies like ours.
Of course, simply having institutions of higher education does not mean that this need gets automatically fulfilled. A whole range of measures have to be undertaken to ensure that these institutions play the role that they should; but that is a separate, albeit vital, issue. Not having any such institutions completely forecloses the possibilities of any independent thought.
IV
The pressure for ‘professionalization’ is one persistent factor working towards the destruction of independent thought, and thwarting the emergence of institutions capable of producing ‘organic intellectuals’ for our society. In addition to this, two other specific factors have emerged in recent years which work in the same direction. The first is the tendency towards privatization which has gathered momentum on account of the fiscal crisis of the state. This crisis existed even earlier, but it has become greatly accentuated by the pursuit of ‘neoliberal’ policies at the behest of the Bretton Woods institutions since the beginning of the 1990s.
The fiscal constraints on an economy pursuing neoliberal policies are obvious. Since ‘liberalization’ must include trade liberalization, customs duties must be brought down; since the state which lowers customs duties cannot simultaneously increase excise duties (for otherwise it precipitates gratuitous deindustrialization by favouring imports over home production), its capacity to raise revenues from indirect taxation as a whole gets reduced. To entice foreign capital, which is supposed to play a central role in ushering in development, it must lower direct taxes on such capital (whether or not foreign capital actually comes), for otherwise capital would go to destinations with lower tax rates. To maintain some inter se equity between foreign and domestic capital, the latter also cannot be taxed too heavily, so that corporate tax revenue shrinks relatively, which cannot be offset, again for reasons of inter se equity, through larger personal income taxes. It follows that the logic of a ‘liberalized’ economy is to reduce the tax–GDP ratio.
This in fact is what has happened in a host of economies adopting neoliberal economic policies, and India is no exception. If we take triennium averages, there was a reduction of 1.6 per cent in the ratio of central gross tax revenue to GDP, and 1.3 per cent in central net tax revenue to GDP between the triennia centred on 1990–91 and 1999–2000. Even taking the lower of these figures it turns out that if only the same tax–GDP ratio had been maintained at the end of the decade as prevailed at the beginning, prior to ‘liberalization’, the central government would have garnered an additional revenue of Rs 26,000 crore in a single year.
There is an additional fall-out of ‘liberalization’. It invariably entails an increase in the rate of interest that the government has to pay on its borrowings. An estimate for India, for instance, suggests that the increase in the interest burden of the public exchequer on this score, even without taking into account the compounding effects of higher interest rates, was as much as Rs 13000 crore in 2001–02. The total drain on the central government exchequer of both these measures therefore amounted to about Rs 40,000 crore at the end of the decade of the 1990s, compared to the beginning of the decade. And the centre ‘passed on’ this ‘drain’ to the state governments, making the latter’s fiscal situation precarious.
The effect of all this, together with the fact that the fiscal deficit under the neoliberal dispensation is supposed to be kept under strict control, is a curtailment in total government expenditure, which has a particular impact on expenditure on social sectors like education and health, and which unleashes in turn a tendency towards privatization of these sectors.
The implication of privatization, which necessarily brings in a profit-motive into the sphere of education, has been missed by many, including several sensitive thinkers who see no harm in it. If education becomes a business, it loses its capacity to produce ‘organic intellectuals’ for the people. Education is not a homogeneous good, like steel or cement, which can be produced by the public and private sectors alike. Education, seen as the product of educational institutions, is fundamentally heterogeneous. Education that enables a person to get a well-paid job in the existing job market is not the same as education that produces an ‘organic intellectual’ of the people (a distinction analogous to the one that Paul Baran drew between the ‘intellect worker’ and the ‘intellectual’). To draw this distinction is not to say that ‘organic intellectuals’ of the people should be incapable of obtaining a job in the job market; the point, rather, is that even while imparting education to enable persons to obtain jobs and serve the country as ‘intellect workers’, education must simultaneously ensure that they do not remain mere ‘intellect workers’ but also become ‘intellectuals’, in the sense of ‘organic intellectuals’ of the people. Privatization of education produces exclusively ‘intellect workers’, and no ‘intellectuals’.
The matter can be put somewhat differently. Privatization turns education into a commodity where the buyer’s preference must necessarily enter to determine the nature of the commodity produced. There is a basic difference between education that satisfies the preference of the buyer and education that is undertaken in the interests of the people. If education is to be undertaken in the interests of the people, to defend their interests, it must be publicly financed. If it ceases to be publicly financed, the education that increasingly gets to be produced is one that is intrinsically incapable of serving the interests of the people. (To say this is not to ask for a ban on private institutions of higher education but to emphasize the need for a predominantly public educational system, into which private institutions must fit. The modalities of where and how they can fit in have to be carefully worked out.)
But then, it may be asked quite pertinently: how can we ignore altogether the dictates of the market? In an era of the IT revolution we have to have people with IT expertise. Universities consequently have to orient themselves towards imparting knowledge on IT rather than continuing to emphasize traditional subjects like the liberal arts and producing unemployable graduates even as the country misses out on the new technology that is unfolding. In other words, the market is a signalling device which indicates changing demands that are by no means socially irrelevant. Ignoring the dictates of the market, therefore, is a perilous venture for any society.
It seems to me, however, that the objective of higher education that I have been outlining is perfectly compatible with the other purpose which education serves, namely, to impart skills, the nature of which changes with changing technology. Sensitivity to the latter need is not synonymous with the commoditization of education. The point at issue is the exclusive determination of educational priorities by the market. Privatization of education has a tendency to lead to such exclusive determination not just in the privatized segment, but in the sphere of higher education as a whole, through the pressures it brings to bear on the non-privatized segment.
Some contend that if the state is afflicted by a fiscal crisis, it ipso facto implies that the people are not paying for producing ‘organic intellectuals’ for their own cause, i.e. they have implicitly ‘voted’ not to have such ‘intellectuals’. Too many tears should not, therefore, be shed over this fact, for the people themselves want it this way. It is not the ordinary people in the country, however, who have been the beneficiaries of the reduction in the tax–GDP ratio which underlies the fiscal crisis. On the contrary, while the tax concessions have gone in favour of the rich, the ordinary people, especially in rural India, have suffered from the effects of deflation via unemployment and cuts in social expenditures. They are not the votaries but the victims of these cuts. Privatizing higher education in this context has the effect not only of excluding them from its ambit, but also of muting whatever intellectual opposition exists against the policies that victimize them.
The need for nurturing such intellectual opposition arises not out of charity, or out of a mere transcendental commitment to democracy and egalitarianism. It is essential for social peace, indeed for social survival. Society can ignore this need only at its own peril, for in the absence of an intellectual articulation of the plight of the victims, in the absence of ‘organic intellectuals’ who can provide such articulation, the opposition of the victims to their plight takes on highly destructive, socially debilitating, and extreme and unproductive forms, such as terrorism, which cause much suffering, usually pointless suffering, all round.
V
One cannot be critical only of privatization of higher education without raising one's voice against another phenomenon that has been quite pervasive until now, namely the appropriation for purely private ends of public education. I have in mind the fact that a large proportion of the products of prestigious institutions of higher learning in our country, such as the IITs and medical institutes like AIIMS and PGIMR, whose education is financed in large measure by the ordinary Indian masses, who are among the poorest people in the world, then migrate to the advanced capitalist countries to make a comfortable living for themselves. I do not blame them for one instant. But I do blame our successive governments for having turned a blind eye to this phenomenon and permitted the continuation of a state of affairs where the poorest in the world are made to subsidize the health system of the richest in the world. Even if no restrictions on emigration are placed, at the very least a minimum period of service in India could be demanded, or a refunding out of their sumptuous salaries abroad, of the expenses incurred by the country on their education. Nothing of the sort has been imposed, and the country has handed over gratis, skilled persons trained at the people’s expense, to advanced countries.
What is more, they have been lionized, notwithstanding their choice to leave the country. Their paltry contributions, setting up a hospital here or donating some money to their alma mater there, have been much heralded by the media and the government; by contrast, they have been resoundingly silent on the massive transfers, amounting now to well over $10 billion per annum, by poor Malayalee Muslim migrants to the Gulf, which have been a major prop of our balance of payments. In the case of the other migrants, skilled doctors and engineers, whose transfers have been paltry, we have a clear case of private appropriation of public resources. The fault here lies not with the appropriators but with those who allow it. Their lionization, moreover, amounts to encouragement of such appropriation. It is imperative that the struggle against privatization of education be complemented by a struggle against such privatization of public resources in the sphere of education.
VI
The second factor which works in the direction of enfeebling the generation of ‘organic intellectuals’ in our society is the increasing sway of communal and obscurantist forces over the sphere of education. These forces, at any rate segments of them, often claim to be fighting the ‘western’ influence on our education system (two names that figure in their perception of the ‘evil trinity’ being Marx and Macaulay). Paradoxically, however, they end up strengthening the very ‘western influence’ that they claim to be fighting. Their attempt at the introduction of courses in state-funded universities to turn out purohits and astrologers, on the explicit argument that there is a market demand for them, is as much a ‘commoditization’ of education as the demand for capitation fees and the substitution of basic disciplines by more ‘marketable’ subjects. Likewise, their attempt to change textbooks to make them conform to the prejudices of a handful of bigots on the ground that nothing offensive to the ‘religious sentiments’ of the ‘majority community’ should be carried in such books, is antithetical to the spirit of scientific inquiry without which there can be no ‘intellectuals’, let alone ‘organic intellectuals’ of the people. The retreat to prejudice, the promotion of obscurantism, the substitution of extraneous criteria for scientific investigation in evaluating the worth of academic propositions—all of these entail a devaluation of the content of higher education which actually disarms the country intellectually against the onslaught of imperialist ideology. At a political level, communalism and fundamentalism divide the people and contribute to a weakening of the nation vis-à-vis imperialism; at an intellectual level, they make a parallel contribution by obliterating the intellectual capacity to see through their machinations. Opposition to the ideology of imperialism, one must remember, was provided by an inclusive Indian nationalism that was secular, democratic and self-confessed by socialist. Communalism, whether of the Hindu or the Muslim variety, never had an anti-imperialist thrust. Should it come as any surprise, then, that the emergence of communal politics and ideology also paves the way for reassertion of the hegemony of the imperialist ideology?
VII
I have gone on long enough. Even though a degree of ritual sermonizing is de rigeur on occasions such as this, nonetheless these are basically happy occasions, occasions for celebration: for the university for completing yet another fruitful year, and for the young scholars for entering into a new life and new responsibilities. Now that I have done my bit of obligatory sermonizing, I wish to join you in the celebrations. May I warmly congratulate the young scholars who are receiving their degrees today and wish this university many more years of productive, distinguished and fruitful life? Thank you for your attention.
Prabhat Patnaik
It is a singular honour for me to have been invited as the chief guest at the convocation of this university which, though young in age, has built up for itself an enviable academic reputation. This achievement is due partly no doubt to the ethos of West Bengal: even as the academic ambience over much of the country has deteriorated sharply, West Bengal continues to produce a steady stream of exceptionally fine young scholars who are much in demand at home and abroad. But it also owes much to the dedication and commitment of the faculty members, with many of whom I can claim personal acquaintance. It gives me particular pleasure to be amongst them on this happy occasion.
The importance for our national life of institutions such as this one, indeed of higher education in general, is often not appreciated. Some even argue that institutions of higher education constitute a white elephant, a drain on the nation’s resources which can be better deployed in promoting the spread of elementary education in the country. Instead of the pyramidal structure we should have built up, of a broad base of elementary education supporting a smaller apex of higher education, we have actually built up, they contend, a top-heavy structure where a plethora of colleges and universities has grown up within a vast ocean of illiteracy and ignorance.
This argument, whose proponents include many progressive and sensitive thinkers, is, nonetheless, fundamentally flawed. There can of course be no two views on the urgent need for eradicating illiteracy and enlarging the spread of elementary education. In fact it is a national shame that even after half a century of independence, more than one-third of the population in the country remains illiterate, and around two-fifths of children of school-going age remain outside the ambit of formal schooling at any given time. The mistake consists in believing that an absolute curtailment (or even a curtailment relative to GDP) of expenditure on higher education is necessary for overcoming these failures. The shortage of resources that is usually cited in this context as a constraint is a mere alibi.
I shall discuss what has been happening on the resource front in the more recent period later in the course of my address. But the crucial point is this: at no stage during the entire post-independence period has India spent an adequate amount on education, by any reasonable definition of the term ‘adequate’. In fact the proportion of GDP that the white-supremacist South African state spent on the education of the black majority even during the apartheid period, notwithstanding the massive drain on its exchequer that maintenance of the highly oppressive police, military and intelligence apparatus entailed at the time, was higher than what the Indian state has ever spent throughout its post-independence history. The matter, in short, is one of priorities. Any government that has the political will to eradicate illiteracy and provide universal primary education would always find the resources for doing so without curtailing higher education. And any government that complains of lack of resources and considers it necessary to starve higher education in order to provide for the spread of literacy and primary education simply lacks ipso facto the political will for effecting universal literacy and primary education.
While strengthening higher education does not preclude in any way the expansion of elementary education, such strengthening is essential for the development of the country, indeed for the very survival of the freedom of its people. The realm of higher education is the cradle of ideas; the shrinking or extinction of this realm necessarily makes a society parasitic on others for its ideas, and such a parasitic society cannot remain free.
John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the twentieth century, may have exaggerated a trifle when he wrote: ‘... the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.’ But the exaggeration is no more than a trifle. After all Bertolt Brecht, coming from a very different segment of the political spectrum, also wrote: ‘Hungry man, reach for the book!’ The hungry man, however, must reach for the right book, one that tells him not that his chronic hunger is the result of sins committed in some previous birth but educates him instead on the social conditions that keep him hungry. This presupposes that the right book must be available, that the crowd of hungry men must have their own ‘organic intellectuals’ whose ideas must develop independently of the ideas of those who preside over a social arrangement that keeps the hungry, hungry. Independent institutions of higher education are essential for this. To be sure, having such institutions is not a sufficient condition for the development of independent ideas that are relevant for the life, freedom and progress of a particular society. But it is a necessary condition.
The mass mobilization that constituted our freedom struggle would not have been possible if the intellectual groundwork for it had not been done by pioneering thinkers like Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chandra Dutt, who dared to think independently of the prevailing theoretical constructs in the institutions of higher learning in the metropolitan countries. This tradition of independent thinking is necessary also for defending the gains of our freedom struggle. Since we are now in a position to have our own institutions where the conditions for independent thinking can prevail as a matter of course, we must develop and nurture such institutions.
II
Implicit in what I have just said is a whole series of rejections. First, there is rejection of the view that different institutions of higher learning belonging to different societies can be ordered as being ‘better’ or ‘worse’ along one particular axis. If these institutions are to be ‘organic’ to their specific societies, then, since the interests of these societies are quite obviously not in harmony, each set of institutions must be different from the others in order to fulfil its legitimate role. I often feel amused when I hear comments like ‘Kalyani University (or Jawaharlal Nehru University, for that matter) should imitate Harvard’; ‘Our institutions should enrich themselves by borrowing ideas and faculty from advanced country institutions’; ‘We have to judge ourselves by how well we are recognized by top institutions in the world’, and so on. This whole approach, to my mind, is wrong. It sees higher education as a homogeneous commodity of which some institutions are better producers than others, and not as a means of producing ‘organic intellectuals’ for a particular society. I referred above to Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt, whose contribution to the struggle for the freedom of our society was enormous. But scarcely any one in Harvard or Cambridge doing economics would have heard of them (though those doing ‘India studies’ might have). Modelling our institutions after Harvard or Cambridge, which would entail copying their curricula and syllabi, would therefore necessarily mean sacrificing, to our great cost, the conceptual framework, perspective and insights of a thinker like Naoroji.
Second, my argument rejects the view that professionalization of subjects like ‘economics’ and ‘political science’ is a desirable process. The ‘profession’ in these disciplines, as well as in others, is dominated by the advanced countries; therefore recognition in the ‘profession’ would necessarily mean sacrificing any independent thinking and parroting borrowed concepts. This would not matter if these borrowed concepts were genuinely ‘scientific’ and not imbued with the ideological objective of defending the hegemony of the advanced countries. In the social sciences at least, as I shall illustrate later, such is not the case. This does not mean that everyone engaged in social science research in universities in the advanced countries is a conscious ideological defender of imperialist hegemony, but everyone is entrapped by the need to belong to and be recognized by the ‘profession’, and therefore undertakes research within strictly circumscribed limits which preclude any critical awareness of the role of the handed-down conceptual apparatus in the ideological defence of imperialist hegemony. Stepping out of these limits invites reactions of unease, astonishment, silence, derision and even hostility, resulting in a loss of academic and financial status. Hence even the best-intentioned dare not step beyond the limits. In societies like ours where domination of the western theoretical orthodoxy in the social sciences is far from complete, thanks precisely to our rather recent birth as a nation after a prolonged anti-imperialist struggle, any emphasis on ‘professionalization’ would mean voluntarily surrendering ourselves to this domination, closing the space has been made available to us for independent thought.
Third, my argument entails a rejection of the attitude which places a special value on ‘recognition’ in the advanced countries, and hence on awards and distinctions bestowed from there. In the social sciences, at any rate, all such awards and distinctions are conditional on conformity, on keeping within the ‘limits’ and abjuring the use of concepts that critique imperialist hegemony. Unfortunately, this attitude of prioritizing ‘recognition’ in the west is all too pervasive in our country. Almost all of us, when we sit on Selection Committees, prefer a candidate who has published in a western journal over one who has published within the country, even without looking closely at the quality of the two publications. By doing so, we contribute to a stultification of the tradition of independent thinking.
To say this is not to reject the notion of quality, or to argue that we should not have criteria for judging quality. But these criteria must be our own, and not those employed in the institutions of advanced countries. Developing these criteria, to be sure, is not easy, but there is no escape from the need to do so if we are to preserve a tradition of independent thinking.
III
Let me give an example, drawn from my own discipline, economics, to underscore the necessity of a tradition of thought independent of the prevailing orthodoxy in the west. One consequence of the policy of ‘liberalization’ has been the relaxation of restrictions on the flow of finance into and out of the country, because of which it so happens that a significant inflow of foreign exchange has taken place of late. To prevent the exchange rate from appreciating, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has intervened to buy up the foreign exchange that has been coming in, and as a result we currently have exchange reserves of nearly $90 billion. Now, holding such large reserves is not a sensible thing to do. Foreign exchange reserves are nothing else but IOUs of other countries; hence holding such IOUs represents a waste of resources that could be more productively used elsewhere. What is more, since the rate of return that those bringing funds into the country earn is higher than the rate earned on these reserves (which is a trivial amount), the country in effect is borrowing from abroad at a higher rate to lend at a lower rate. This is palpably unwise.
In this connection, suggestions have been made by the Bretton Woods institutions, and by independent analysts, including academics, in western financial journals, that India should allow its exchange rate to appreciate, and that towards this end the RBI should stop adding to its reserves but lower them instead. Several Indian academics and financial journalists have also endorsed this idea. Let us look at the implications of such a move.
If the rupee appreciates, the competitiveness of our goods vis-à-vis foreign goods is lowered through a cheapening of foreign goods. Since such an appreciation would not expand the total domestic demand, this relative cheapening of foreign goods would mean that a given volume of domestic demand would be met by foreign goods rather than by domestic goods; likewise, our exports would be supplanted in outside markets by foreign countries’ exports. It follows that an appreciation of the rupee would lead to a closure of domestic producing units and to higher unemployment, together with an increase in our trade (and current account) deficit (which is in fact how the reserves would have got used up). We would have, in short, unleashed a process of ‘debt-financed deindustrialization’, i.e. borrowed to finance the ruination of our own production base. What is more, when the time comes for foreigners (or non-resident Indians) who are now bringing finance into the economy to start taking it out, we would have no funds left to cover the outflow, since these would have been used meanwhile in financing imports at the expense of home production. Thus, frittering away foreign exchange reserves through an appreciation of the rupee would mean ruination of the country twice over: through deindustrialization and unemployment now, and bankruptcy later.
This of course would work to the advantage of foreign, especially metropolitan, countries: they would obtain larger markets now, which, given the prevailing recessionary conditions, they desperately need (it is noteworthy that a similar demand for revaluing the exchange rate upwards is being made with regard to China); and they would be able to impose whatever ‘conditionalities’ they choose in the future, when our country, in order to finance capital outflows, approaches them or agencies like the IMF and the World Bank dominated by them, for loans. It is not surprising then that the western press, the Bretton Woods institutions and many western academics are demanding an appreciation of the rupee. But to oppose this demand, to avoid this double ruin, and to protect our sovereignty and freedom, it is essential that there be people within the country who think independently and have the capacity to see the implications of such moves.
If, it may be asked, holding large reserves is unwise and getting rid of reserves through an appreciation of the rupee even more so, what should the country do? Obviously, if there was an agency that undertook productive investment either using the reserves or on the strength of these reserves, i.e. using these as cushion (since plenty of unutilized domestic industrial capacity also exists), then they would have been put to some good use. The only such agency can be the state (since capitalists’ investment decisions are spurred by their own calculations and cannot be stimulated just because the country has a plethora of unused resources). True, even if the state undertook investment on the strength of these reserves and used up a substantial chunk of them, when the time comes for finance to flow out the country may still find itself short of funds (unless the investment undertaken in the meantime earns sufficient foreign exchange). Some degree of control over capital flows, therefore, would have to supplement larger state investment. In short, a combination of capital controls and larger state investment is required if the country is to cope with the burgeoning capital inflows.
But both these are anathema as far as the theoretical orthodoxy in the west is concerned. There may of late have been some grudging admission of the need for capital controls, but larger state investment is taboo, especially for third world economies. The only reasonable way of coping with financial inflows is thus closed to us if we follow the lead of the dominant theoretical orthodoxy in my discipline. This fact only underscores the absolute need for independent thinking in societies like ours.
Of course, simply having institutions of higher education does not mean that this need gets automatically fulfilled. A whole range of measures have to be undertaken to ensure that these institutions play the role that they should; but that is a separate, albeit vital, issue. Not having any such institutions completely forecloses the possibilities of any independent thought.
IV
The pressure for ‘professionalization’ is one persistent factor working towards the destruction of independent thought, and thwarting the emergence of institutions capable of producing ‘organic intellectuals’ for our society. In addition to this, two other specific factors have emerged in recent years which work in the same direction. The first is the tendency towards privatization which has gathered momentum on account of the fiscal crisis of the state. This crisis existed even earlier, but it has become greatly accentuated by the pursuit of ‘neoliberal’ policies at the behest of the Bretton Woods institutions since the beginning of the 1990s.
The fiscal constraints on an economy pursuing neoliberal policies are obvious. Since ‘liberalization’ must include trade liberalization, customs duties must be brought down; since the state which lowers customs duties cannot simultaneously increase excise duties (for otherwise it precipitates gratuitous deindustrialization by favouring imports over home production), its capacity to raise revenues from indirect taxation as a whole gets reduced. To entice foreign capital, which is supposed to play a central role in ushering in development, it must lower direct taxes on such capital (whether or not foreign capital actually comes), for otherwise capital would go to destinations with lower tax rates. To maintain some inter se equity between foreign and domestic capital, the latter also cannot be taxed too heavily, so that corporate tax revenue shrinks relatively, which cannot be offset, again for reasons of inter se equity, through larger personal income taxes. It follows that the logic of a ‘liberalized’ economy is to reduce the tax–GDP ratio.
This in fact is what has happened in a host of economies adopting neoliberal economic policies, and India is no exception. If we take triennium averages, there was a reduction of 1.6 per cent in the ratio of central gross tax revenue to GDP, and 1.3 per cent in central net tax revenue to GDP between the triennia centred on 1990–91 and 1999–2000. Even taking the lower of these figures it turns out that if only the same tax–GDP ratio had been maintained at the end of the decade as prevailed at the beginning, prior to ‘liberalization’, the central government would have garnered an additional revenue of Rs 26,000 crore in a single year.
There is an additional fall-out of ‘liberalization’. It invariably entails an increase in the rate of interest that the government has to pay on its borrowings. An estimate for India, for instance, suggests that the increase in the interest burden of the public exchequer on this score, even without taking into account the compounding effects of higher interest rates, was as much as Rs 13000 crore in 2001–02. The total drain on the central government exchequer of both these measures therefore amounted to about Rs 40,000 crore at the end of the decade of the 1990s, compared to the beginning of the decade. And the centre ‘passed on’ this ‘drain’ to the state governments, making the latter’s fiscal situation precarious.
The effect of all this, together with the fact that the fiscal deficit under the neoliberal dispensation is supposed to be kept under strict control, is a curtailment in total government expenditure, which has a particular impact on expenditure on social sectors like education and health, and which unleashes in turn a tendency towards privatization of these sectors.
The implication of privatization, which necessarily brings in a profit-motive into the sphere of education, has been missed by many, including several sensitive thinkers who see no harm in it. If education becomes a business, it loses its capacity to produce ‘organic intellectuals’ for the people. Education is not a homogeneous good, like steel or cement, which can be produced by the public and private sectors alike. Education, seen as the product of educational institutions, is fundamentally heterogeneous. Education that enables a person to get a well-paid job in the existing job market is not the same as education that produces an ‘organic intellectual’ of the people (a distinction analogous to the one that Paul Baran drew between the ‘intellect worker’ and the ‘intellectual’). To draw this distinction is not to say that ‘organic intellectuals’ of the people should be incapable of obtaining a job in the job market; the point, rather, is that even while imparting education to enable persons to obtain jobs and serve the country as ‘intellect workers’, education must simultaneously ensure that they do not remain mere ‘intellect workers’ but also become ‘intellectuals’, in the sense of ‘organic intellectuals’ of the people. Privatization of education produces exclusively ‘intellect workers’, and no ‘intellectuals’.
The matter can be put somewhat differently. Privatization turns education into a commodity where the buyer’s preference must necessarily enter to determine the nature of the commodity produced. There is a basic difference between education that satisfies the preference of the buyer and education that is undertaken in the interests of the people. If education is to be undertaken in the interests of the people, to defend their interests, it must be publicly financed. If it ceases to be publicly financed, the education that increasingly gets to be produced is one that is intrinsically incapable of serving the interests of the people. (To say this is not to ask for a ban on private institutions of higher education but to emphasize the need for a predominantly public educational system, into which private institutions must fit. The modalities of where and how they can fit in have to be carefully worked out.)
But then, it may be asked quite pertinently: how can we ignore altogether the dictates of the market? In an era of the IT revolution we have to have people with IT expertise. Universities consequently have to orient themselves towards imparting knowledge on IT rather than continuing to emphasize traditional subjects like the liberal arts and producing unemployable graduates even as the country misses out on the new technology that is unfolding. In other words, the market is a signalling device which indicates changing demands that are by no means socially irrelevant. Ignoring the dictates of the market, therefore, is a perilous venture for any society.
It seems to me, however, that the objective of higher education that I have been outlining is perfectly compatible with the other purpose which education serves, namely, to impart skills, the nature of which changes with changing technology. Sensitivity to the latter need is not synonymous with the commoditization of education. The point at issue is the exclusive determination of educational priorities by the market. Privatization of education has a tendency to lead to such exclusive determination not just in the privatized segment, but in the sphere of higher education as a whole, through the pressures it brings to bear on the non-privatized segment.
Some contend that if the state is afflicted by a fiscal crisis, it ipso facto implies that the people are not paying for producing ‘organic intellectuals’ for their own cause, i.e. they have implicitly ‘voted’ not to have such ‘intellectuals’. Too many tears should not, therefore, be shed over this fact, for the people themselves want it this way. It is not the ordinary people in the country, however, who have been the beneficiaries of the reduction in the tax–GDP ratio which underlies the fiscal crisis. On the contrary, while the tax concessions have gone in favour of the rich, the ordinary people, especially in rural India, have suffered from the effects of deflation via unemployment and cuts in social expenditures. They are not the votaries but the victims of these cuts. Privatizing higher education in this context has the effect not only of excluding them from its ambit, but also of muting whatever intellectual opposition exists against the policies that victimize them.
The need for nurturing such intellectual opposition arises not out of charity, or out of a mere transcendental commitment to democracy and egalitarianism. It is essential for social peace, indeed for social survival. Society can ignore this need only at its own peril, for in the absence of an intellectual articulation of the plight of the victims, in the absence of ‘organic intellectuals’ who can provide such articulation, the opposition of the victims to their plight takes on highly destructive, socially debilitating, and extreme and unproductive forms, such as terrorism, which cause much suffering, usually pointless suffering, all round.
V
One cannot be critical only of privatization of higher education without raising one's voice against another phenomenon that has been quite pervasive until now, namely the appropriation for purely private ends of public education. I have in mind the fact that a large proportion of the products of prestigious institutions of higher learning in our country, such as the IITs and medical institutes like AIIMS and PGIMR, whose education is financed in large measure by the ordinary Indian masses, who are among the poorest people in the world, then migrate to the advanced capitalist countries to make a comfortable living for themselves. I do not blame them for one instant. But I do blame our successive governments for having turned a blind eye to this phenomenon and permitted the continuation of a state of affairs where the poorest in the world are made to subsidize the health system of the richest in the world. Even if no restrictions on emigration are placed, at the very least a minimum period of service in India could be demanded, or a refunding out of their sumptuous salaries abroad, of the expenses incurred by the country on their education. Nothing of the sort has been imposed, and the country has handed over gratis, skilled persons trained at the people’s expense, to advanced countries.
What is more, they have been lionized, notwithstanding their choice to leave the country. Their paltry contributions, setting up a hospital here or donating some money to their alma mater there, have been much heralded by the media and the government; by contrast, they have been resoundingly silent on the massive transfers, amounting now to well over $10 billion per annum, by poor Malayalee Muslim migrants to the Gulf, which have been a major prop of our balance of payments. In the case of the other migrants, skilled doctors and engineers, whose transfers have been paltry, we have a clear case of private appropriation of public resources. The fault here lies not with the appropriators but with those who allow it. Their lionization, moreover, amounts to encouragement of such appropriation. It is imperative that the struggle against privatization of education be complemented by a struggle against such privatization of public resources in the sphere of education.
VI
The second factor which works in the direction of enfeebling the generation of ‘organic intellectuals’ in our society is the increasing sway of communal and obscurantist forces over the sphere of education. These forces, at any rate segments of them, often claim to be fighting the ‘western’ influence on our education system (two names that figure in their perception of the ‘evil trinity’ being Marx and Macaulay). Paradoxically, however, they end up strengthening the very ‘western influence’ that they claim to be fighting. Their attempt at the introduction of courses in state-funded universities to turn out purohits and astrologers, on the explicit argument that there is a market demand for them, is as much a ‘commoditization’ of education as the demand for capitation fees and the substitution of basic disciplines by more ‘marketable’ subjects. Likewise, their attempt to change textbooks to make them conform to the prejudices of a handful of bigots on the ground that nothing offensive to the ‘religious sentiments’ of the ‘majority community’ should be carried in such books, is antithetical to the spirit of scientific inquiry without which there can be no ‘intellectuals’, let alone ‘organic intellectuals’ of the people. The retreat to prejudice, the promotion of obscurantism, the substitution of extraneous criteria for scientific investigation in evaluating the worth of academic propositions—all of these entail a devaluation of the content of higher education which actually disarms the country intellectually against the onslaught of imperialist ideology. At a political level, communalism and fundamentalism divide the people and contribute to a weakening of the nation vis-à-vis imperialism; at an intellectual level, they make a parallel contribution by obliterating the intellectual capacity to see through their machinations. Opposition to the ideology of imperialism, one must remember, was provided by an inclusive Indian nationalism that was secular, democratic and self-confessed by socialist. Communalism, whether of the Hindu or the Muslim variety, never had an anti-imperialist thrust. Should it come as any surprise, then, that the emergence of communal politics and ideology also paves the way for reassertion of the hegemony of the imperialist ideology?
VII
I have gone on long enough. Even though a degree of ritual sermonizing is de rigeur on occasions such as this, nonetheless these are basically happy occasions, occasions for celebration: for the university for completing yet another fruitful year, and for the young scholars for entering into a new life and new responsibilities. Now that I have done my bit of obligatory sermonizing, I wish to join you in the celebrations. May I warmly congratulate the young scholars who are receiving their degrees today and wish this university many more years of productive, distinguished and fruitful life? Thank you for your attention.
Prabhat Patnaik
© MACROSCAN 2003