Bad news for jholawalas

It’s official. Economics Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen won’t serve as the chancellor of the ambitious new Nalanda University (NU) slowly taking shape in Rajgir, Bihar, after his first three-year term ends in June. In a letter written to the board of governors of the fledgling varsity, Sen says he believes the 11-month-old BJP-led government and prime minister Narendra Modi don’t want him to continue his stewardship of NU. Sen’s resignation has resurrected a long-standing but recently dormant, animosity between the Nobel laureate and US-based Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics and law   at Columbia University.    In a forthright, no-holds-barred essay in the op-ed page of The Hindu (March 10), Bhagwati sharply criticised Sen for allegedly abusing his position as chancellor by making subjective top level appointments and incurring reckless expenditure. Specifically, Bhagwati questions Sen’s choice of Dr. Gopa Sabharwal as vice-chancellor and for awarding her “unconscionable amounts… despite her inadequate qualifications”.  According to informed sources within the closed circle of top-ranked economists in Delhi, the roots of the Bhagwati-Sen antagonism go back a long way to the early 1980s when Bhagwati emerged as a strong proponent of liberalisation and deregulation of India’s autarkic socialist economy, and integrating it with the free trade global economy to accelerate annual GDP growth rates which would generate resources for human capital development. Ironically, despite the whole world accepting this advice and establishing the World Trade Organisation, Sen was awarded the economics Nobel Prize in 1998 for his quasi-socialist advocacy of greater social welfare spending as a pre-condition of economic growth. Now with Bhagwati’s protege and comrade-in-arms Arvind Panagriya appointed chief of the new Niti Aayog which replaced the Soviet-style Planning Commission, and Sen’s exit from NU, the pendulum in the growth versus equity debate has decisively swung the other way. Bad news for India’s — particularly Delhi’s — hitherto thriving jholawala (left-wing intellectuals) community. Good not great The sudden, unexpected demise of journalist-author Vinod Mehta, until recently the founder-editor of the best-selling weekly newsmagazine Outlook, and founder-editor of a string of magazines and newspapers including Debonair, Sunday Observer, and dailies Indian Post, Pioneer and Independent, has provoked an outpouring of tributes in the media. Though your editor, who began his career in journalism in the post-Emergency era (Business India, Businessworld) and served a short stint in Debonair (founded by Mehta in 1975), crossed paths with him several times in Mumbai and even went with him on a press party tour of Germany in the mid-1980s, we never quite developed a friendship. In retrospect, this was probably because I fancied myself as a ‘development journalist’ with socio-economic reform objectives in mind, while Vinod was a popular  mainstream scribe obsessed with politics who knew little about economics, law or sociology. As Tarun Tejpal remarks in his tribute to Mehta in Outlook (March 23), his success formula was that he “understood that journalism is basically, refined and dressed up gossip”. This shallowness was evidenced in his autobiography Lucknow Boy (2011), in which Mehta confesses that during…