People in the service of the market

One is confronted with a new market-madness these days whenever one flips through a newspaper or switches on a television set. There is an almost lunatic obsession for 9, 10 and 11 percent GDP growth, as if pure adding of numbers is any substitute for looking at what quality of life the common Indian is enjoying.
Had I been P. Sainath I would have dished out data like “in a country with X millionaires, Y percentage of children are anaemic”; that 42 percent India lives under 1.25 dollars a day, even if in PPP terms.
The point, however, is that we have entered a radically new free market regime where individual wealth gets linked to everything from nationalism to social morality. If we believed that markets are for people even up to two decades back, today we believe that people are for markets.
Even the Supreme Court in a recent case said that the displaced people’s willingness is not required for ousting them from their lands if the land is used for “public” activity, even if by the private sector. In other words, we have erased the distinction between the public and private sectors.
All riches are public – goes the new mantra. If Mukesh Ambani beats Bill Gates by a mile, he will enrich the whole country through the adding of figures leading to higher national income, if the media are to be believed. And to ask whether the whole nation would be benefited by his private profit is thought to be illegitimate. The market would, after all, ensure that some crumbs trickle down.
If Tata’s Nano comes on the road, new puncture-repair shops will be needed, opening new service sector avenues for each displaced farmer, according to the free market logic.
In other words, whatever a capitalist does with land – unless he buries gold inside it like rich people in villages some time back – he is believed to be serving a public purpose. If he wants 1000 acres of land to make whale-sized cars, he is indulging in some sort of philanthropy as the cars will be bought by the public.
And yes, he is contributing to the GDP. And the poor farmer whose land is taken away even without his consent cannot raise the GDP much because of his poverty, lack of saving and impossibility of investment in money-spinning enterprise. So, he cannot serve public purpose: he can either patiently wait for some trickling down of crumbs, or pose a law and order problem, or worst, become an encroacher on useful public land.
A loss to Ambani is a loss to GDP, and, therefore, national interest! A loss to the rickshaw puller is a loss to none, as he cannot contribute much to GDP.
So, 17 years after he liberalized India’s economy, Manmohan Singh has stood Nehru and the entire freedom struggle on its head. And Gandhi, who was the biggest enemy of growth-madness through his emphasis on cottage industries and small-scale and non-mechanised production, is rendered hypocritical lip-service on October 2 each year.
While during the freedom struggle, capitalists used to come forward to join the cause to enhance their legitimacy. Today, politicians – witness Buddhadeb’s boot-licking – joins the capitalist profit-maximisation cause to somehow enhance his standing among the rootless urban upper middle class.
We may believe that in the courts an innocent should not be punished even if the guilty go scot-free. But in the working of our economy, we are ready to sacrifice the poor GDP-irrelevant farmer to please the pot-bellied dons of the GDP-obsessed discourse of development.