Amit Bhaduri - Notes from a lecture on Development and Rights, and an interview

December 14, 2007

Kapil Bhattacharya Memorial Lecture by Professor Amit Bhaduri at Bharat Sabha Hall, Kolkata, 9 December, 2007

Topic : Unnoyon o Odhikar / Development and Rights - organised by APDR

Notes by Soumya Guhathakurta, Sanhati

I attended the session and am attempting a brief report. However,the session started late and I had to leave the venue before the lecture ended, and may have missed the final summing up.

The lecture was in essence an elucidation of his book ‘Development with Dignity’ published in 2005.

The lecture was divided into two parts :

1. Development and Human Rights

2. Alternative Routes to Development

The idea of human rights as understood generally today is individual rights and not group rights (or community rights).

An essential precondition of individual human rights is separation of executive, legistlature and judiciary and an essential characteristic of fascism is a wish to control all the three or, as in West Bengal, denounce all of them if they do not speak in the same voice as the party in power.

However, more important is the question of group rights since it is these rights that are trampled upon during the process of development. In India, we can see this happening in Kalinganagar, Chattisgarh and in Nandigram. In mineral rich Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa, the right to collective use of natural resources of adivasis is being forcibly abrogated to state agencies for their ultimate transfer to corporations. Statistics show that while only 8% of the Indian population is comprised of adivasis, they bear the brunt of development by forming 50-60% of the people who are displaced by the same. While not exactly colonisation of yesteryears, this process can be termed internal colonisation. There is resistance to this process because people obviously do not want to be colonised.

Globalisation - is it the only way?

A first rebuttal may be the argument of time scale. The European example of development i.e transformation of an agricultural economy to a substantially industrialised one, happened over 80-100 to 150 years. However, Indian politicians are not willing to wait so long due to the inherent logic of electoral politics where elections are won/lost on the issue of development (for example “Shining India”).

The second argument (also to be rebutted) is that external markets are more important than internal ones and need to be catered to on a priority basis. How? By increasing productivity. However, the net result is the production of more and more goods for the external markets by less and less productive hands. An example may be taken of TELCO plant in Pune where employment has been reduced by half during a period when output has increased by 2.5 times. In other words since more importance is given to external markets the internal market shrinks due to lesser number of working hands. This is corroborated by the fact that while India’s economy is growing at the rate of 8% annually, the growth in employment is only 1%. Further, 90% of India’s workforce is in the unorganised sector where there is no capital equipment to increase productivity and so the demands of increased productivity are honoured by extended hours of work.

Moreover, this process of development distorts the composition of the basket of produced goods because the benefits of the development process accrues to a narrow section of the society and therefore the goods and services produced must be geared to meet the demands of this section only. Therefore malls are constructed with impunity, world class medical facilities are available in India, but the state of general health services is extremely poor. For example, in the field of healthcare, the overwhelming obsession is with obesity and not the eradication of malaria. In other words, the increasing inequality distorts the composition of the basket of goods and services.

The Alternative:

A progressive panchayat act exists in India. It is a 3 tier structure where every elected member has decision making power. It is this act whose implementation must be energised in all the states including the ones where it is supposed to be working like West Bengal, Kerala, and Karnataka. The stumbling block to this end is the fear across political spectrum of power percolating to lower tiers to an extent that the existing political class becomes redundant. The panchayat institutions must be utilised to produce and use goods at the local level. These projects will call for funds which will be a drag on the existing budget deficit but the deficit needs to be financed by printing notes. It will not lead to inflation since the deficit financing will be utilised to the production of goods and services and their consumption.

A more lengthy discussion of these basic points is available in Professor Bhaduri’s paper Alternatives in Industrialisation, available here.

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Amit Bhaduri - an interview

Eminent economist and Professor Emeritus in JNU, Delhi, Amit Bhaduri has just returned from Kolkata and Mumbai where both Nandigram and the struggle against SEZs was part of his academic and political involvement. He participated in the massive rally of intellectuals and artists in Kolkata against the siege of Nandigram. A veteran teacher and academic, his essays on globalisation, among other subjects, are marked by meticulous insight and rigour. In conversation with Amit Sengupta.

What is your take on the joint letter by Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and intellectuals on Left unity in the wake of the Nandigram recapture?

Ideally, Left unity is desirable, provided your objective is clear. When a party gets sold completely to the industrial corporates, it grabs land from the peasants at any cost for private capital and continues to make big mistakes, Left unity is not possible. How can there be Left unity when the Left is totally hooked by the pro-corporate and pro-capitalist logic?

Why is the CPM pushing this current economic policy?

The fact is that the CPM has failed completely after 30 years of dominating rule in West Bengal. After Operation Barga as land reforms, it has failed to do anything for the productive sector. For instance, take NREGA: the CPM’s performance is miserable — worse than the worst states. I will give you one example. In Purulia district, till the end of October 2007, 16 per cent of the money allocated for the NREGA was not used. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has no idea or intention to increase productivity in agriculture or augment the livelihood of the people. He is driven by narrow middle-class notions of industrialisation. There is an abject lack of imagination.

So what is the difference between the Manmohan Singh-Montek Singh economic paradigm of growth and the Buddhadeb-Biman Bose model?

Why not add Prakash Karat also? The CPM’s official line on growth and the Congress’s line on growth have no difference except in terms of rhetoric. For instance when it comes to trade unionism, the CPM will raise the provident fund issue. These are marginal issues. As for things which are basic, the CPM is totally toeing the Manmohan Singh line on industrialisation, pandering to corporates, acquiring land of farmers and tribals which belongs to them for centuries — basically colonising. It seems very strange. They talk of American colonialism and imperialism but choose to ignore internal colonialism as integral to this global process. They seem completely confused and then they adopt a two-faced approach on the question of colonisation.

So are they communists or are they like the Christian Democrats in Germany?

In Europe I have seen the Christian Democrats closely: they have completely degenerated. The CPM is communist in the most negative sense. They completely follow the compulsory notion of a Leninist party in terms of structure such as having politburo, cadre etc, but in reality they function like a non-communist party. Their content therefore is that of a bourgeois party while the technology of the party is Leninist. A communist party stands for revolutionary principles, for revolution, not free market democracy and corporations.

Do you think Nandigram will mark a rupture in this new era of relentless globalisation?

If we are successful in Nandigram, it will help in stopping the big corporations’ muscle power which is propelling globalisation. Then we can defeat this process. And that will be great for the social, economic and political future of the ordinary people.

This interview originally appeared in Hardnewsmedia