| Deepak Lal: The anarchical society | 14-NOV-09 |
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| Ever since Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, which castigated India as a “soft state”, western observers, as well as many members of the Nehruvian wing of Macaulay’s children, have failed to understand the anarchical society which has existed in India for millennia. A recent review (Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009) by Lant Pritchett (a former World Bank official in Delhi) of Financial Times’ former India correspondent Edward Luce’s book In Spite of the Gods, reflects a similar unease of both with the Indian reality. Both find it puzzling why a country with a firmly-established democracy and many world-class institutions and firms, and which is an emerging superpower growing rapidly, should in many dimensions of human well-being have a worse record than many sub-Saharan African countries. |
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| Deepak Lal: Macaulay's children redux | 29-SEP-09 |
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| At a recent Engelsberg seminar organised by the Ax:son Johnson foundation in Sweden, I gave a paper on “The view of America from India”, revisiting a theme I had written about in the late 1980s, in a paper entitled “Manners, Morals and Materialism: some Indian perceptions of America and Great Britain” for a seminar organised by Nathan and Lochi Glazer at Harvard (reprinted in my Against Dirigisme). I had then argued that the mutual perceptions of Indians and Americans were unflattering, if not openly hostile. I had ascribed this to the attitudes (in part) of the British-educated Indian elite, who echoed many of the British critiques of American manners, morals and materialism. |
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| Deepak Lal: Spiking the road to Copenhagen | 25-AUG-09 |
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| Three cheers for Jairam Ramesh! India at last has an environment minister who is willing and able to denounce the hypocrisy and immorality of the West in twisting the arms of India and China to curb their carbon emissions. |
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| Missing in action | 02-JUL-09 |
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| If you think government babus don’t work, a possible reason for this is that they simply aren’t around. AK Lal, who was a research officer in the finance ministry’s department of economic affairs, for instance, has not been at work since August 30, 1995. He was since been charge-sheeted for ‘absenting himself unauthorisedly from duty’ — presumably a very thorough investigation was carried out, since the charge-sheeting was done on May 8, 2009. The charge-sheet, sadly, was not received by Mr Lal since the address he’d given — D-44 Chander Nagar, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh — does not exist. The government has now issued an advertisement advising Mr Lal to contact it within 10 days and participate in the inquiry or face an ex-parte order. |
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| A new financial order? | 30-JUN-09 |
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| The Obama administration’s financial White Paper and Mervyn King’s Mansion House speech provide some insight on the possible lineaments of a new financial system in the two major Anglo-Saxon economies. Their common feature is that central banks are likely to be given the power to monitor and ensure the stability of their financial systems, in addition to their traditional role of maintaining monetary stability. |
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| Deepak Lal: The Pakistan conundrum | 28-APR-09 |
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| With the Pakistani state having surrendered Swat to the Taliban, the future of Pakistan as a normal functioning modern state is in question. As the former Pakistani ambassador Zafar Hilaly noted in a recent column, “The fear that extremism may overwhelm Pakistan has been replaced by the certitude that it will. Lives are being planned accordingly and so too are investments.” This potential jihadist takeover of a nuclear-armed Pakistan poses India with a serious conundrum. |
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Content Guide
