DAWN - Cowasjee Corner; 14 March, 1999
Shantiniketan
By Ardeshir Cowasjee
IN 1863, at Shantiniketan (The Abode of Peace), in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, an ashram, a meditation centre, was founded and endowed by Maharishi (Great Sage) Debendranath. In 1901, Maharishi's son, Rabindranath Tagore, in turn established there the Brahmo Vidyalaya, an open-air laboratory school.
By 1921, the school had greatly expanded and Tagore inaugurated the Vishva-Bharati University, its aim to seek a basis for a common fellowship between the cultures of East and West, to blend the best of the two traditions. Tagore himself, a gifted writer, composer and painter, was most influential in introducing to the West the best of Indian culture, and vice versa. At nearby Sriniketan, the following year he set up an institution that deals with rural reconstruction, health, social welfare and the revival of ancient arts and handicrafts. In 1931 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
In 1951, ten years after his death, the residential University was incorporated, with colleges for fine arts and crafts, Sino-Indian studies, music and dance research, teacher training, technology, and postgraduate studies and research. The university's museum, Rabindra-Sadana, is an academy for the study of Tagore's works.
Born at Shantiniketan in 1933 was Amartya Kumar Sen, in the house of his grandfather who taught Sanskrit at Tagore's school. Sen's early education was at his birthplace. He graduated in 1953 from the Presidency College at Calcutta and went on to teach economics at Jadavpur University. In 1957 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught at the London School of Economics, at Nuffied College, was appointed the Drummond Professor of political economy at Oxford, and in 1980 moved to Harvard as Lamont Professor of economics and philosophy.
Last year he was appointed Master of Trinity College, and was selected by the Swedish Royal Academy for the 1998 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (worth $978,000). Sen is the sixth Indian to be awarded the Nobel Prize. He was honoured for a lifetime's work and for his achievements in investing the dismal science of economics with concerns far from the mundane. His interests are abstruse in comparison with the usual market-oriented research of the past few laureates, light years away from his concern for social choice, for measuring poverty and inequality by the most rigorous scales, for his studies of the reasons for economic failure and of famine.
Sen's seminal work, 'Collective Choice and Social Welfare,' published in 1970, offered an answer to the 'impossibility theorem' of US economist Kenneth Arrow (1972 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics). Arrow's argument was that it is impossible to devise a voting system with an outcome both rational and egalitarian, as there are grey areas in individual and group choices. Thus, perfectly responsive representative government is impossible. Arrow had, in effect, said farewell to democracy. His disciples still hold that view.
Sen's answer was that there is a strong case for democracy, that there is much middle ground in the analyses of choice, that economic inequality cannot be measured without a proper yardstick. His 1973 work, 'On Economic Inequality,' provided the tolls. The poverty line is a common measure of the share of population below a tolerable standard of living but it ignores the levels of deprivation. The number of those below this line does not lessen even if the poorest are given a better deal. He devised a new formula for poverty indexation, based on income inequality below the poverty line.
This formula, known as the Sen Index, is now a standard tool for calculation of the Human Development Index. It was used by our own economist, Mahbub ul Haq, for his excellent yearly reports on Human Development in South Asia, which contained the most reliable statistics available on the human miseries and deprivations which beset this republic. Dr Haq, so sadly missed after his death last year, was 'mystified' by the fact that our region, though it has done better than Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of economic growth, has fallen behind even that rock-bottom area when it comes to human development.
Sen's milestone work came in 1981, 'Poverty and Famines : An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation,' in which he showed how famines are the result of maldistribution rather than food shortages and that famine-stricken countries can even export food. No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. There are no exceptions to the rule - take the current starvation in Sudan and North Korea, the recent famines in Ethiopia and Somalia, the earlier famines in the Soviet Union, in China, in Northern Ireland, and in India under alien rule. India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence (the last being in 1943). They disappeared suddenly, after independence, with the establishment of a multi-party democracy with a free press.Sen's recent concern is social opportunity. He argues that even well-functioning markets cannot take care of the problems posed by a shortfall in 'human capabilities' caused by inadequate basic education, a low level of health services, poor ownership patterns, skewed social stratification, and gaping gender inequalities. His belief is that variations in social opportunities can be reduced by more political protest and opposition.
In a paper on 'Democracy and Social Justice,' presented at the World Bank conference in Seoul last month, Amartya Sen identified what to his mind is the pre-eminent development of the 20th century - the rise of democracy, the establishment of the idea of democracy as the 'normal' form of government to which any nation of the world is entitled. He maintains that there is no question of a particular country being 'ready' for democracy; it is taken for granted that it is. There have always been lengthy arguments about whether one or another country was yet 'fit for democracy,' as there was with the British when they stalled on the question of independence for India. But a country does not have to be judged 'fit' for democracy. It has to become fit through democracy.
Sen argued against the 'Lee hypothesis,' named after Lee Kuan Yew's holding that non-democratic systems are better in bringing about economic development. Admittedly, there are certain relatively disciplinarian states such as Lee's own Singapore, pre-democratic South Korea and post-reform China that have had faster rates of economic growth than many less authoritarian ones such as India. But this is no definitive proof, says Sen, that authoritarianism does better in promoting economic growth, just as there is no definitive proof that democracy does better, as it did in Botswana which has one of the finest records of economic growth in the entire world and has been an oasis of democracy in the African continent for decades. He finds no convincing evidence that authoritarian governance and the suppression of political and civil rights are beneficial in encouraging economic development.
Questions for Amartya Sen : What is the difference between the penalties imposed upon a people by admitted undemocratic governance and by sham democratic governance? Is a democracy in name only enough to foster fitness and readiness for a true democracy?
How does a country of 140 million people, the larger percentage of them below the poverty line and deprived of basic amenities, most of them illiterate, which describes itself as a democracy and makes a show of formally following the norms of democracy merely by holding frequent dubious elections, become 'fit' for democracy through a sham form of democracy?
How can it be taken for granted that a country is 'ready' for democracy when it is riddled through and through, from top to toe, with massive corruption, when the politicians both in and out of power are venal to the hilt, when it has two political family parties alternating in power, steadily robbing the national exchequer and bankrupting it?
How can it be 'ready' or 'fit' when all its institutions are either destroyed, subdued or neutralized - parliament, administration, judiciary, armed forces, and whatever else passes for an institution - when its Constitution is amended over and over again, at will, purely to suit the aims of its rulers?
What does Tagorian Sen recommend the oppressed perennially-in-debt people of such a country do to make it 'fit' for democracy through democracy?