Arjun
Sengupta led such a varied life, played so many different roles, that
it is as if there was not one but several different Arjun Senguptas.
Each person who knew him, knew only one of the Arjun Senguptas, but
had little idea about the others. I for one knew little about the Arjun
Sengupta who was an economic adviser to Indira Gandhi, or the Arjun
Sengupta who advised the IMF Managing Director De Larosier, or the Arjun
Sengupta who was a member-secretary of the Planning Commission. But
I did know the Arjun Sengupta who was my teacher at the Delhi School
of Economics and who took upon himself the role of acting like a Bod-da
(elder brother) to me, invariably bantering, and often giving me gratuitous
advice about what I should do with my life, which was generally infuriating
but always affectionate. (On one occasion when I was a junior faculty
member at Cambridge, and like others of my generation dreamt of the
revolution, he visited me, and to my intense fury, advised me not to
waste my life on ''all this radical stuff''). Whenever we met, after
a lapse of months or years, he would pick up this role from where he
had left it, no matter what he or I were doing in the interim.
It was in the mid-sixties that Arjun first appeared at the Delhi School
coffee house, a handsome young Bengali economist with a fresh MIT Ph.D
who had just joined the Institute of Economic Growth. Those were the
days when all Bengali economists were Left, the only question being
whether they were with the Left Communists (CPI (M)) or the Right Communists
(CPI). Delhi School student gossip made Arjun out to be a Right Communist.
Within a short time he joined the Delhi School faculty and started teaching
us Growth Theory.
He was full of fun in the class, full of jokes, absolutely without any
airs and highly approachable. The Sens, the Chakravartys and the Rajs,
despite their best intentions, were quite forbidding; so we naturally
warmed to Arjun, one of whose many stories in the class was about how
in an examination hall, the entry of some pigeons had provided him and
his class-mates the opportunity to take recourse to means, not altogether
''fair'', to answer a particularly difficult question paper. He produced
around that time a major paper on the impact of foreign aid, which was
published I think in the Oxford Economic Papers. To the batch which
immediately followed mine and which included Utsa (Patnaik), Deepak
(Nayyar) and Isher (Ahluwalia), he taught the International Economics
option. But shortly afterwards he left the Delhi School to join the
faculty of the London School of Economics, which is when I lost touch
with him, apart from his visit to Cambridge mentioned earlier.
We met up again after I had returned to India to join the Centre for
Economic Studies and Planning at JNU, by which time he too had returned
to a series of important positions in the Government of India, but our
contacts were infrequent. It was in the late seventies that he produced
his excellent paper (written perhaps when he was at the IMF) on the
world capitalist crisis of the mid-seventies. The argument of the paper
was simple but incisive: since the oil-price hike transferred purchasing
power primarily from the consumers in the advanced capitalist world
to the oil-producing countries, which held a large portion of their
increased oil revenue in the form of bank deposits, it entailed a reduction
in world demand, in particular aggregate demand in the advanced capitalist
countries. To counter this, it was necessary that the governments in
the advanced capitalist countries should run increased fiscal deficits.
But since the oil-price hike had given rise to cost-push inflation in
these countries, and the governments, in a futile bid to counter this
inflation had curtailed their fiscal deficits, they only compounded
the contractionary impact of the oil-shock. This explained the mid-seventies
crisis in the capitalist world, which, until then had been the worst
since the 1930s.
I met him more frequently after he joined the School of International
Studies of the JNU. We would meet regularly on evening walks in the
JNU campus (on which he would often be accompanied by Jayashree and
daughter Meethu) and pause to have long chats. During our chats, bantering
as ever, he would make comments, often unflattering, about things I
had written, which to my surprise and gratification, he always made
a point of reading. I remember writing an obituary on Paul Sweezy in
which I had mentioned that Samuelson and Sweezy were Schumpeter’s pet
students at Harvard and that Schumpeter was perhaps responsible for
the denial of tenure to Sweezy on ideological reasons. Arjun told me
during one of our evening chats that Schumpeter had also been responsible
for the denial of tenure to Samuelson on grounds having to do not with
ideology but anti-semitism. Samuelson himself however tended to downplay
Schumpeter’s anti-semitism, and would perhaps have absolved him of the
charge of denying him tenure, though the fact of his leaving Harvard
owing to anti-semitism was never in doubt. But I assume that Arjun,
having been in MIT as a Ph.D. student of Robert Solow, would have known
something which Samuelson’s loyalty to his old teacher might have prevented
him from admitting publicly.
Once he tantalizingly told me that he had some comments to make about
a piece I had written in a volume, A World to Win, edited by Prakash
Karat on the Communist Manifesto, and that he was going to make them
in a review of the book he was writing for the Economic and Political
Weekly. That review unfortunately never got written, so I never knew
what he was going to say. My evening chats with Arjun were always chastening,
stimulating and a source of great pleasure for me. And we talked of
everything under the sun, from contemporary politics, to gossip about
celebrity economists, to common friends. Even after he retired from
JNU, the Sengupta family would still come to the JNU campus for its
evening walks.
Around this time he started attending seminars organized by International
Development Economics Associates (IDEAS), which provided further opportunities
for us to meet and discuss things. He was passionately committed to
the idea of providing a social safety net for the unorganized workers,
which the Commission headed by him had recommended. But being Arjun,
provocative, infuriating and contrary as ever, he once argued in an
IDEAS meeting for a combination of labour market flexibility and social
safety net, before a group of Left economists, who were as passionately
opposed to labour market flexibility as they were committed to a social
safety net.
On one occasion when we were both returning from Kolkata to Delhi, Arjun
surprised me by suggesting that in India we should settle down to a
two-formation polity, a right-of-centre formation consisting of all
political forces in favour of neo-liberal policies, and a left-of-centre
formation consisting of the Left Parties, progressive civil society
organizations, dalit groups, tribal groups, and feminist organizations
which would press for a progressive economic agenda. The moral of the
story was that the Left political parties should make an effort to build
a coalition of the dispossessed to take on the new economic establishment.
Since Arjun prided himself on being hard-headed and not given to wishful
thinking, I was a little surprised by his prognostication and pointed
out its obvious weakness. This lay in my view in the fact that the BJP
would never tear itself away from the RSS to either become or merge
itself into a political formation with a mere right-of-centre economic
agenda, which meant in turn that the Left would always have to fight
on two fronts, anti-communalism and anti-neoliberalism. Whether Arjun
had thought much about this or it was a suggestion on the spur of the
moment, I do not know, since to my knowledge he has not written about
it. But whatever it was, it was typically Arjun, brilliant, incisive,
novel and not run-of-the-mill.
Meetings with Arjun were always fun because he was never intellectually
stodgy, never pedestrian, never predictable, never dull, always sparkling,
even if irritating, annoying and infuriating. It is sad to think that
a person so full of life, so full of fun, so full of sparkle, so iconoclastic
with a twinkle in his eye, has left us forever.