SWARAJ is SURAJ

It is easy, at least for me, to get lost in wonky economic debates about taxes, regulations and vouchers. I write some pro-free-market articles, send them to my friends, but most of them are not interested in policy debates. They are interested in real life-and-blood people. Maybe, one needs to be less technical and write even more from the heart. Therefore let me do exactly that with regards to a point of view which I initially thought would be too sensationalist.

So much emotion against sectarianism, hardly any against socialism?

There should be no ambiguity about one thing – sectarianism is wrong, sectarianism is dangerous. Killing a baby for a religion or caste her parents have bequeathed her (indeed for a religion or caste she does not even know has been bequeathed to her) can never be justified. It cannot even be justified as avenging the murder of another baby which was killed precisely because of the same passions – albeit the other baby had a different last name.

But can it then be justified when a nation’s leaders followed – and to a not insignificant extent, continue to follow – economic policies that they know will help them politically in the short run, but in the long run result in lower development and consequently, amongst other things, higher infant mortality? To put it more starkly, is it justified for a politician to kill babies in the future for votes in the present? A recent paper by Swaminthan Aiyar concludes: (here is the HTML link for the entire paper)

What would the impact on social indicators have been had India commenced economic reform one decade earlier, and enjoyed correspondingly faster economic growth and improvements in human development indicators? This paper seeks to estimate the number of “missing children,” “missing literates,” and “missing non-poor” resulting from delayed reform, slower economic growth, and hence, slower improvement of social indicators. It finds that with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line. The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India’s socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither.

Imagine that – 14,500,000 children would not have died if the Rao-Singh-Vajpayee reforms had been ushered in a decade earlier.

14.5 million is about 10,000 times worse than the number of people who were killed in the post-Godhra riots

That is more than the total population of Jews worldwide. That is easily more than the population of Sweden. That is, the casualty figure of Indian children due to just one more decade of socialism exceeds the populations of entire communities, entire nationalities.

Where is the anger? Again, a million is a thousand thousands.

The murder of hundreds, at most thousands of, Kashmiri Pandits, Delhi Sikhs, Gujarati Muslims, Orissa’s Christians, Bihar’s “lower” castes, Nagaland’s natives, Jharkhand’s tribals – either by fanatics or terrorists or the state itself led to so much anger, as it absolutely must have.

But what about the many more Indians who were killed – slowly but surely – by the state’s economic policies? Now, a careful understanding of India’s political economy will reveal that there is no choice between attacking sectarianism or socialism – indeed they are often joined at the hip. Yet, only sectarianism gets attacked, not socialism.

Of course, the 14.5 million figure is not exact – it could be conservative, it could be an overestimate.

In any case, we are not counting many more millions.

What about those who died in their fifties because central planning and industrial licencing kept them poor and malnourished, and state hospitals ended up being nothing more than death registration centers.

What about those who died because narrow state “highways” did not have a clear demarcation between the two lanes, or because the pathetic condition of sanitation in slums and villages spread diseases faster and further than in most countries?

The vast majority of deaths in India are because Indians are poor, not because of communal or casteist hatred.

And Indians are poor, because the government still regulates businesses too much, taxes high-earners too much, and even after that fails to redistribute to the genuine needy. It stifles the very private sector that creates jobs and prosperity, and then feeds completely inefficient public sector unions.

All this in the name of inclusive development. In the name of the common man. What a sham.

But there will be another attack on some community in some locality and the mainstream media will shout about that for the next one week or more, until there is another attack somewhere else. Our country’s high taxes and regulations, our country’s crony capitalism, our country’s decaying government schools and hospitals – all these are rarely discussed, and never with any purpose or passion. Yet these too lead to early deaths and devastated families – and at a much larger scale.

But one Godhra is a tragedy.

Ten thousand Godhras is a statistic.