by PRABHAT PATNAIK
No less a person than the prime minister, while speaking to probationers of the Indian police service in the capital the other day, invoked a curious argument against the Maoists. He did not just make the usual criticism — that Maoists were attempting to overthrow the constitutional order by violent means. He went on to add: “If we don’t control Naxalism, we have to say goodbye to our country’s ambition to sustain a growth rate of 10 to 11 per cent per annum”. And this, he clarified, is because central India is where the bulk of the country’s mineral wealth lies. In short, 10 or 11 per cent growth rate is elevated to the status of a national goal. Anyone who opposes policies that seek to achieve this goal is therefore acting against the national interest, and is ipso facto anti-national.
The reification involved in this piece of reasoning, as Karl Marx would have noted, is astounding. A nation can have objectives, such as the eradication of poverty or the elimination of hunger or the removal of illiteracy or the maintenance of full employment or the achievement of an egalitarian order. But the mere rate of augmentation of the mass of goods and services produced cannot possibly be a national objective. True, some, including the prime minister, would argue that this rate of augmentation holds the key to the achievement of the national goals just listed, but this is a particular ideological position. Others may have a different position on the relationship between growth and poverty. To posit the growth rate as a national objective is to sanctify one particular ideological position above all others as a nationally accepted one, and hence to decry anyone who opposes it as anti-national. Decrying those who oppose a particular ideological position as being anti-national is to implicitly criminalize dissent.
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More than a century-and-a-half ago, John Stuart Mill, while theoretically anticipating a “stationary state” (that is, zero growth economy), had nonetheless remained unfazed by the prospect. He had declared that he would not mind a stationary state as long as the working people were better off in it. Mill had thus implicitly advanced two propositions. First, the condition of the working people did not depend upon the rate of growth of the economy, that it could be better even in a stationary economy than in a growing one. Second, what mattered to him, and hence, by inference, what should matter to society according to him, was not the rate of growth per se but the condition of the working people. Both these propositions of Mill, a liberal, are diametrically opposed to what the official neo- liberal argument advances today and wants to elevate to a national consensus.
The fact that Mill was right, that high growth may be accompanied by increasing poverty, is amply demonstrated by the recent Indian experience itself. Indeed, the empirical evidence for absolute impoverishment in the recent period of high growth is overwhelming. Let us briefly look at this evidence. The official criterion for the identification of poverty (until it was changed recently after the Tendulkar committee report) has been the intake of 2,400 calories or less per person per day in rural India and 2,100 calories or less in urban India. By this criterion, poverty has certainly increased. Direct measurement of calorie intake suggests that 74.5 per cent of the rural population was “poor” in 1993-94, and 87 per cent in 2004-05. The corresponding figures were 57 per cent and 64 per cent respectively for the urban population. (These figures, based on National Sample Survey Organization data, are from Utsa Patnaik, Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 23-29, 2010, and their veracity cannot be questioned.)
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)