Like Karl Marx in Kolkata

If every employer disliked what Deena Khatkhate had to say, he must have written worthwhile stuff

Ruminations of a Gadfly: Persons, Places, Perceptions
Deena Khatkhate
Academic Foundation, Rs 795
If every employer disliked what Deena Khatkhate had to say, he must have written worthwhile stuff

The year was 1993 and a report was talked about by Indian economists interested in policy formulation. This was the Khatkhate report on financial-sector reforms. Only the privileged few had access. Despite a precondition set by the author that the report should be disseminated and debated, as far as I know, it has never been placed in the public domain. That’s the Khatkhate tragedy. Khatkhate is a name that should have immediate brand recognition, outside the fraternity/sorority of economists. There are few commentators who write with such sarcasm, satire and wit, backed with erudition, and yet manage to produce good copy.

Deena Khatkhate has worked for the RBI, IMF, the UN system and the World Bank, before retiring from the IMF and revamping the academic journal World Development. He has published in most professional journals one can think of. And if every employer disliked what he had to say, he must have written worthwhile stuff.
So why doesn’t the name have wider recognition? First, he writes mostly about the financial sector and there, too, rarely about the capital market. That’s perceived to be esoteric stuff, not easy to identify with. Second, his popular writings have appeared mostly in business and academic journals. Third, he has sometimes been constrained to write under an alias.

As far as I know, this is Khatkhate’s first book. Neither his academic writings proper nor his popular writings have been brought out in book form. This is a compilation of 80 popular columns, with a few quasi-academic papers extracted to give them popular form. A few unpublished pieces have also been included. But other than those, the time span is mostly 1988 to 2007, with a couple of them going back to 1966 even. The inevitable problem in compiling and publishing columns is in choosing ones that retain topicality, beyond the temporary shelf life of newspaper columns. The 80 columns chosen are divided into five heads — “Americana”, “Indica”, “Lest India Forgets”, “The Places in Between” and “Time’s Sweet Revenge”. “Lest India Forgets” is particularly valuable, because it talks about economists (the term is being used in a loose sense) whose contributions to India are being forgotten — Manu Shroff, B.S. Minhas, I.G. Patel, Krishna Raj, Asok Mitra (the ICS demographer), V.K. Ramaswami, S. Jagannathan, C.D. Deshmukh, D.T. Lakdawala, B.K. Madan, B.P. Adarkar and Sachin Chaudhuri.

As a heading, “Time’s Sweet Revenge” — about the global collapse of communism and the time-warp Indian communists are caught in — is not explicit enough. The last piece under this head and the last essay in the volume is particularly hilarious. “A bearded man, aged, dressed in nineteenth-century western style, a broad, lapelled jacket with a crumpled necktie of faded colours, with narrow-bottomed trousers reaching up to the knees, landed at Santa Cruz airport one chilly morning in December 1989.” This is Karl Marx. From Mumbai he is sent off by immigration to Kolkata and a mutually unsatisfactory dialogue ensues with CPM leaders.

Khatkhate has lived in the US for a long time. Understandably, this means being caught between two societies, two cultures and two economies, with a foot in each. But for those given to introspection, this offers a unique perspective of looking at America with Indian eyes and of looking at India with American eyes. “Americana” is about the former and constitutes the bulk of the essays in this volume; “Indica” is the latter. Given Khatkhate’s training and profession, “Indica” can also be interpreted as a chronicle of India’s state of economic reform and non-reform. After all, most essays were written after 1991. There is a delightful piece on Manmohan Singh, written in 1996, with a priceless quote that is even more relevant today. “Manmohan could in those (South-South Commission) days throw a bon mot at the World Bank Development Seminar that ‘the issue is not so much whether the prices are right as whether the politics is right.’… When Manmohan and his few trusted colleagues leave the stage, there is no knowing whether the apparatchiks who were shoved to the wings will not be back at the helm to truncate the reforms.” Partly wrong. The empire has struck back even when Manmohan Singh occupies centre stage.

This leaves six essays under the head of “The Places in Between”, concerning Russia, Afghanistan, Germany, Israel, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. This head doesn’t quite belong and could have been junked, since Russia, Afghanistan and Germany are included in “Time’s Sweet Revenge”. But as far as the core essays are concerned, this is a delightful chronicle of our times, written by a gadfly (this is a reference to a Business Standard column) who has never been part of the establishment, in any sense. He has always been the “angry and excitable young man”, a sobriquet given to Khatkhate early in his career, but one that serves him well even now. This explains the verve, the disrespect and the highlighting of the feet of clay many idols possess (such as the piece on C.D. Deshmukh). A book worth reading.