The 'establishment' Communist

Economists generally and Indian academic economists particularly don’t write their autobiographies. Padma Desai’s autobiography is the only one I can think of amongst the latter. Pranab Bardhan also wrote one, in a manner of speaking. It is a pdf file all of five pages long! 

But that is all. None of the others — P C Mahalanobis, Amartya Sen, Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Avinash Dixit etc —  have written about themselves. Even the two prolific Desais — Meghnad and Ashok — have kept mum. 

Economic administrators like I G Patel, Ashok Mitra, Y V Reddy etc have taken the plunge. But even they have refused to kiss and tell all. 

So it came as a very pleasant surprise when Uma Kapila, who started the highly successful Academic Foundation Publishing that specialises in economics 25 years ago, sent me Professor C H Hanumantha Rao’s memoirs. He is the last person I would have expected to write one.

This is not an autobiography or even a memoir in the strictest sense. It is a collection of his recollections, randomly distributed. The chapters are short and to the point. They cover a huge range of topics, all worth reading because they tell us how a former Communist sympathiser was conditioned by his feudal environment.

The story

Professor Rao (b. 1929) says he came early to Marxism-Leninsm via his brother-in-law, a lawyer who was “on good terms with” the Communists. They lived Karim Nagar in Nizam’s Hyderabad. Professor Rao was in his teens.

When he was 16 he was chucked out of his school for taking part in what the Headmaster called "political" activities. He completed his schooling in Aligarh because they taught in Urdu there. At 20, he was arrested when the police came looking for his brother, who was a Communist. They could not find him, so they took Professor Rao instead, who was a believer in the Communist Party of 

India cause. 

He spent nine months in jail but when his health began to fail, the jail authorities took him to the station and left him there. He somehow made his way back home. Then he went underground for a while. He was arrested once again in November 1951 and released a short while later. He then got back to the task of getting his degrees from Nizam College. 

After completing his MA, at the instance of VKRV Rao, he found himself at the Delhi School of Economics for his PhD, which he completed in around 1962. By the end of the 1960s, he had become an established economist at the Institute of Economic Growth.

In 1970, as the Left slowly started taking over academic institutions via the minority Indira Gandhi government, which relied on the CPI’s “outside” support, he came to be seen by the establishment as an establishment economist. That may have been true as far as Indira Gandhi’s economic policies were concerned, but not her politics. 

He even pointed out that the Emergency was a bad thing but no one took him seriously. Instead, he was asked to write a eulogy for the 20-point programme, of which he approved because its egalitarian objectives. He avoided the task and then in 1977, Indira Gandhi was voted out. In the early 1980s, he found himself on the government committees. In 1982, he was appointed to the Planning Commission as member where he served till 1986. 

For a man, who had been expelled from school once and arrested a few years later for his political views, this was a strange turn of events. In 1949, Nehru used to bracket Communists with the communalists but his daughter, in search of votes, had adopted the former and rejected the latter.

All serious observers of Indian economics and the Indian economy should read Mr Rao’s story because he opens a large window to two huge Indian puzzles: Why did so many clever young economists think Marxist-Leninist economics was intellectually acceptable? And, why did so many of them assist in legitimising the many follies of Indira Gandhi during 1969-73?

I think Marx’s explanation of history was so powerfully right that it led many people to conclude that his economics must also be the same. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The answer to the second question is, of course, that people looking for a change tend to believe politicians who promise it. The only problem is that when the change comes, it is not what they sought.

My Journey from Marxism-Leninism to Nehruvian Socialism: Memoirs and Reflections
By C H Hanumantha Rao
Academic Foundation
Pages 309, Rs 1295