When in the year 2000, Hernando de Soto came up with his magnum opus The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, it was a fundamental shift in thinking about an economic system that has had as many cheerleaders as critics. The book examined capitalism through the prism of legal rights and how they needed to change in order that the rest of the developing world, particularly the poor, engages in the creation of capital. Since then this Peruvian economist has been turning his think tank, Institute of Liberty and Democracy, into an ‘action tank’; he serves as co-chair of UNDP-supported Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, the first global initiative to focus on the link between exclusion, poverty and law. Gautam Chikermane and Sandeep Singh questioned Hernando de Soto on the subject, and its relevance to ideas that India is currently grappling with — land rights, squatters, SEZs, development and eminent domain. Excerpts:

• The Left hates your ideas, the Right wants to smother them. You must be doing something good.

There are many people in my organisation who have Left leanings and many are with the Right. You are probably referring to the assassination attempts on me. Those were specific. They had to do with the fact that I wrote a book The Other Path. The Peruvian Marxist terror group Shining Path had intellectual pretensions. The advantage for them in the country was that there was no challenge to them from the right or the centre. After the book there were a variety of organisations, which originally were trade unions, that created the ripple effect.

... contd.