Commentary/Ashok Mitra

The moribund worship at the altar of the moribund from other lands

They have also another grievance to post with the authorities: the last vestiges of restrictions on the import of consumer goods must go. Without a wonderful feeling inside, they cannot persuade themselves to indulge in risk-taking, which investment activity basically is. That feeling is a function of the availability of lush, imported consumer goodies, durable as well as non-durable. The wealth they -- the country's well-heeled ones -- have accumulated and propose to accumulate is for the purpose of enjoying the high life; there can be no high life without imported luxury consumer goods.

One straightaway runs into a dilemma. If goods that tantalise are freely imported from overseas and are consumed in a gala manner, no resources would be sparable for investment and capital formation: consumption does not complement investment, it detracts from it.

The chronicle of the past six years is a fairly non-complicated one: India's non-growth is the outcome of the government's withdrawal from the arena of investment activity, even as the bourgeoisie embarked on the fast-track consumption, thereby killing off the possibility of private savings compensating for the retreat of savings and capital formation on public account.

This dilemma of choosing between domestic savings and domestic consumption has not been resolved. And the wretched foreign investors have chosen to play hooky. The climate of blind conformism, however, discourages candid admission of uncomfortable facts.

If a hypothesis or a strategy fails to click, the obviously logical next step is to abandon it. That step will be taken; the present arrangements have ensured high living for those occupying society's upper cluster; it is they who really matter in the polity. The Deve Gowdas will therefore keep asserting, morning, afternoon, evening and late in the night, how much they are beholden to the Narasimha Raos for the trail the latter had blazed.

Barring miracles, the nation will remain a prisoner of the destiny copycat liberalisers have ordained for it. A few hucksters will continue to make hay, while the rest of the community will keep groaning under the burden of joblessness and high prices. But suppose something gives some part or parts or the Union of India refuses, after a while, to go along with the charade? Suppose some of them indulge in a rough stocktaking. The gains from opening up the economy have been minor, and these gains have been most unequally distributed between classes and regions.

A class uprising, straddling the whole country, against the nongains of globalisation is unlikely; the working class movement is much too inchoate and disorganised for that kind of homogeneous reaction. A particular region of the country may not suffer from similar constraints or inhibitions though. The stretch of the North-East, for instance, has gained little nothing just from liberalisation, but from being a part of the Union over the past half a century.

A number of other regions or states have gone through a not dissimilar experience. The citizenry of these states have not, till now, allowed their resentment to shade off into rebellion. Nor have they provided encouragement, till now, to dissident groups itching to take the lawless road.

Suppose persistence with liberalisation measures aggravates income inequalities and intensifies the sense of deprivation amongst those occupying the lower depths of a State. Unemployment, specially urban unemployment, is likely to swell with every day. As sources of livelihood shrink with the progressive automatisation of both manufacturing and services, social discontent will intensify.

At a certain juncture, sections and groups, who feel that they had had enough of liberalisation, could want to break away. They might insist on choosing a different development model for themselves, a model which reinstates self-reliances as both the primary objective and the primary instrument of growth. They might want to abrogate deals and contracts which, according to their judgement, amounts to a re-sale of the country to foreigners and thereby rudely thwart central policies. And they could insist on a different moral code to guide public affairs from what it has been in the recent period.

These are terrible thoughts, but not inconceivable ones. Dear reader, you are absolutely right. Such thoughts are provoked by the spectacle of the native lot of the moribund worshipping at the altar of the moribund from other lands.