Critical Debates in History & Politics. London; Kolkata: Frontpage, 2015. x, 250 pp. US$21.95, paper. ISBN 978-93-81043-17-2.
Pranab Bardhan is a highly regarded and prolific economist. He was the long-time chief editor of the Journal of Development Economics, the leading journal in its field, and much of his work is technically sophisticated, but he is also an outstanding public intellectual, who argues cogently for social justice. He states his credo in a recent interview with the Kolkata newspaper, The Telegraph, reproduced in Globalisation, Democracy and Corruption: “I do not really believe that Left and Right labels mean much. I think one has to be clear about one’s objectives. I would consider myself Left if by Left people mean a commitment to social justice. But if the meaning of Left implies necessarily favouring the state over markets, I am not Left” (208). He is impatient with dogma, regardless of its source, though his particular concern has been with what he sees as “the amazing capacity of the Left parties [in India] for self-deception … avoidance of the hard realities and resort to clichés and solace from sacred texts” (183). He is impatient, too, with the sort of lazy radicalism that makes market capitalism and its attendant globalization responsible for all the ills of developing countries. He is surely right that globalization (meaning for him the expansion of foreign trade and investment) is neither the main cause nor the solution to a developing country’s problems, and that its impact will depend upon local factors, notably the state of the country’s physical infrastructure and mass education. Though he is understandably chary of using the term social democracy, given the suspicion with which it is regarded by both Right and Left, not least in India, his writing is inspired by a social democratic sensibility. In only one of the essays, a piece from YaleGlobal in 2006, does he refer to the experience of social democracy in the Nordic countries, pursued in the context of integration into international markets. But it is clear that the way in which the Scandinavians succeeded in enhancing social equity without giving up on competitive efficiency commands his respect. The challenge of combining equity and efficiency, which is what the pursuit of social democracy must confront, is rarely far from his thinking.
Drawing extensively on his professional work as an economist, especially in regard to poverty and inequality, Bardhan’s Globalisation, Democracy and Corruption (an unfortunately nondescript title) brings together 38 articles published between 2006 and 2014, some in newspapers, including the Financial Times and the New York Times as well as top English-language newspapers and magazines published in India, several published in the Economic and Political Weekly, and others in such on-line publications as YaleGlobal and Ideas for India. They engage with a wide range of topics, including globalization, inequality and poverty, corruption, democracy, and comparisons of India and China, as well as with key questions concerning current policy debates in India. One article, published before the outcome of the 2014 Indian general election was known, contains an assessment of Narendra Modi, now the prime minister, which has proven prescient in regard to the rise of the banal Hindu nationalism that has become increasingly evident in the course of 2015. The final piece is “A Conversation with Amartya Sen,” from 2006, about Sen’s books The Argumentative Indian and Identity and Violence, and which in its emphasis on the importance of deliberative public argument stands as a testament to what Indian society seems now to be losing.
The subjects covered in the various articles are diverse; yet they come together around a core theme of the damage that is done to societies in general, and to Indian society in particular, by social and economic inequality. Bardhan especially emphasizes the extent of educational inequality in India, though he sees it as a serious problem in the United States as well. In this respect India is one of the worst cases in the world. An admittedly crude measure (a gini coefficient based on years of schooling in the adult population) shows that India (with a coefficient of 56) lags far behind both China (37) and Brazil (39), and most of the rest of Latin America. Were we to take into account the quality of education, which with the exception of a few private schools is truly lamentable in India, the problem of educational inequality would be recognized as being even more serious. Bardhan says much less in these essays about the state of health care in India, but he consistently emphasizes the importance of improving the quality of health services, as well as education and physical infrastructure, for the mass of the people in the interests both of equity and of efficiency. India suffers too—it is one of the reasons why economic growth has delivered much less poverty reduction in India than it has in China—from its historic failure to address the problem of inequity in the distribution of land, as well as from deep inequalities in social status. Greater equity would, Bardhan argues, make it less difficult than it has been to build consensus and organize collective action, and so to establish a virtuous dynamic of growth and social justice: “attempts to reduce the extreme inequities may increase trust in government and make it easier to persuade most people to make short-run sacrifices for the long-run benefits of all” (80).
As it is, however, trust in government is seriously wanting. Bardhan puzzles over why it is that in a vibrant electoral democracy Indian voters do not hold governments to account, much more than they do, for the failure of the state to address the poor quality of public services from which most suffer. Part of the problem is that the rich can afford to secede. Another is that in the context of deep inequality, widespread poverty, and extensive social fragmentation, short-term populist solutions have a strong electoral appeal, even if they do not serve the interests of the poor over the longer run. At the same time, for want of electoral reform, the sheer costs of fighting elections in India—as in the United States—encourage corruption. A further factor fostering corruption—rather ironically, given the precepts of economic liberalism that the state has supposedly embraced—is that the government exercises great discretion over access to key resources. But these structural causes are ignored, as “public rage is somehow directed away from the rich bribe givers and onto venal politicians” (74), thanks to the influence of figures such as Anna Hazare in India, who project authoritarian populism: they know best what is in the people’s interest. There is a syndrome of dysfunctional government that encourages distrust of democratic politics—a distrust that is fanned by the discourse and the actions of what may be in some ways progressive civil society organizations. Civil society activism can never finally replace the functions of political parties in negotiating and reconciling the inevitably conflicting priorities of different groups and interests. But this vitally important process is vitiated by the failings of democratic politics in India, and in the many other parts of the world in which representative electoral democracy has come into question. Bardhan argues that middle classes, never reliable friends of democracy, increasingly turn away to the “ultra-nationalism” that is becoming increasingly evident across Asia, and look to authoritarian leaders.
Pranab Bardhan is an unfailingly engaging commentator. These diverse writings offer valuable insights into all the topics with which they deal, and the book as a whole offers a strong case for social democracy. It is not really a criticism of it to say that where it falls down is that Bardhan has so little to say about the politics that would make such an approach a practical possibility, and reverse the vicious spiral in which democratic government is locked. His role as a public intellectual is to contest the hegemony of the Right in the realm of ideas, and his book makes a significant contribution to this task.
John Harriss
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
pp. 165-168