It’s official. Economics Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen won’t serve as the chancellor of the ambitious new Nalanda University (NU) slowly taking shape in Rajgir, Bihar, after his first three-year term ends in June. In a letter written to the board of governors of the fledgling varsity, Sen says he believes the 11-month-old BJP-led government and prime minister Narendra Modi don’t want him to continue his stewardship of NU. Sen’s resignation has resurrected a long-standing but recently dormant, animosity between the Nobel laureate and US-based Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics and law   at Columbia University.   

In a forthright, no-holds-barred essay in the op-ed page of The Hindu (March 10), Bhagwati sharply criticised Sen for allegedly abusing his position as chancellor by making subjective top level appointments and incurring reckless expenditure. Specifically, Bhagwati questions Sen’s choice of Dr. Gopa Sabharwal as vice-chancellor and for awarding her “unconscionable amounts… despite her inadequate qualifications”. 

According to informed sources within the closed circle of top-ranked economists in Delhi, the roots of the Bhagwati-Sen antagonism go back a long way to the early 1980s when Bhagwati emerged as a strong proponent of liberalisation and deregulation of India’s autarkic socialist economy, and integrating it with the free trade global economy to accelerate annual GDP growth rates which would generate resources for human capital development. Ironically, despite the whole world accepting this advice and establishing the World Trade Organisation, Sen was awarded the economics Nobel Prize in 1998 for his quasi-socialist advocacy of greater social welfare spending as a pre-condition of economic growth.

Now with Bhagwati’s protege and comrade-in-arms Arvind Panagriya appointed chief of the new Niti Aayog which replaced the Soviet-style Planning Commission, and Sen’s exit from NU, the pendulum in the growth versus equity debate has decisively swung the other way. Bad news for India’s — particularly Delhi’s — hitherto thriving jholawala (left-wing intellectuals) community.

Good not great

The sudden, unexpected demise of journalist-author Vinod Mehta, until recently the founder-editor of the best-selling weekly newsmagazine Outlook, and founder-editor of a string of magazines and newspapers including Debonair, Sunday Observer, and dailies Indian Post, Pioneer and Independent, has provoked an outpouring of tributes in the media. Though your editor, who began his career in journalism in the post-Emergency era (Business India, Businessworld) and served a short stint in Debonair (founded by Mehta in 1975), crossed paths with him several times in Mumbai and even went with him on a press party tour of Germany in the mid-1980s, we never quite developed a friendship.

In retrospect, this was probably because I fancied myself as a ‘development journalist’ with socio-economic reform objectives in mind, while Vinod was a popular  mainstream scribe obsessed with politics who knew little about economics, law or sociology. As Tarun Tejpal remarks in his tribute to Mehta in Outlook (March 23), his success formula was that he “understood that journalism is basically, refined and dressed up gossip”.

This shallowness was evidenced in his autobiography Lucknow Boy (2011), in which Mehta confesses that during his sojourn in England in the 1960s he was one of the ubiquitous Indians in muddy overcoats who went “au pair hunting”, importuning Caucasian women on the streets, bringing Indians into disrepute. Moreover, while he devotes reams of pages detailing how The Pioneer scooped the early drafts of prime minister Narasimha Rao’s forgotten novel The Insider, the historic liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991 which broke with 43 years of neta-babu socialism and lifted an estimated 300 million Indians out of deep poverty, isn’t mentioned at all. An outstanding editor, but not a role model.

Welcome plagiarism

In the world’s largest kleptocracy where intellectual property is merrily swiped without any fear of punishment from the country’s snail-paced judiciary, the best innovators and original thinkers can do when content is plagiarised and ideas stolen, is to mutter imprecations and move on. But sometimes when ideas are lifted and implemented, it can be a cause for celebration.

Some 15 months ago your editor ran the gamut of the country’s notorious bureaucracy and invested considerable effort in terms of time and money, registering the Children First Party of India (CFPI) with the Election Commission, New Delhi. Among the proposals made in the CFPI manifesto are investing the National Commission of Women at the Centre and in the states with the power to suo motu adjudicate and impose imprisonment sentences of up to 30 days and another 30 days of community service upon anti-socials involved in ‘minor’ cases of sexual harassment and molestation; special under-cover squads of women police backed up by a special wing of helicopter-borne police personnel on standby 24×7 in all metros and state capitals to apprehend, prosecute, punish and incarcerate sex offenders, and permitting session and high courts to order caning of convicted sex offenders in addition to imprisonment and the death penalty.

Unfortunately — for them — the people have ignored the plans and proposals of CFPI to lead them out of the wilderness of neta-babu socialism mixed with crony capitalism. However it is some comfort that a Delhi-based company, ASAS Security Solutions Pvt. Ltd, has designed and developed OTER (one touch emergency response), a mobile app (Rs.250 per month) which at the touch of a button will alert a motor-bike borne squad of tough guys who use GPS tracking technology to swoop down and rescue women citizens from the national capital’s multiplying tribe of sexual predators and sex offenders. 

Yet the critical difference between ASAS Security and CFPI is that the latter wants this service — funded by a modest civic cess — to be available to all women countrywide. Meanwhile even if my idea has been swiped, no complaints.