Diplomat Shankar Acharya’s memoir a tale of privilege & intellect
Book Title: An Economist at Home and Abroad
Author: Shankar Acharya
Sandeep Dikshit
Shankar Acharya is the archetypal Khan Market liberal whom the right wing loves to lampoon on social media. Educated mostly abroad by an ICS-turned-diplomat father, his family was the epitome of the Anglicised gentry with just the connections the right-wingers accuse the Lutyen Delhi’s (former) elite of having used as stepping stones to the galleries of power. His journey as a young man was, he admits, due to his great good luck to be born in a well-placed family of India’s small professional class.
After his father turned down Satyajit Ray’s offer to cast him as Apu in ‘Pather Panchali’, the turning down has continued, now of his own volition, the posts of Deputy Governor in the RBI and Adviser in Manmohan Singh’s PMO. But he was neck-deep in economic policy formulation from the first stirrings of economic liberalisation during the Rajiv Gandhi era to the wholesale dismantling of rules and regulations in the 1990s and early 2000s as the country’s longest-serving Chief Economic Adviser. His verdict: the Vajpayee regime pushed economic reforms more vigorously than the Narasimha Rao government and the 10 years of UPA was a lost decade.
Despite his bhadralok credentials and association with the Congress, Acharya’s sobriety of judgment and assessment, and his extraordinary intellectual detachment, may have tempted PM Modi to invite him to his economic circle twice; first, as his CEA and, then as Chairman of BRICS Bank. Shankar preferred the placid boardroom of Kotak Mahindra Bank and brainstorming at Business Standard editorial meetings.
In any case, Shankar would only have lasted till demonetisation in 2016. Several decades back, he had warned against such an exercise. Now, he feels, India is headed for bad news. The growth in the medium term will be 5 per cent, which will be inadequate for India’s bouquet of priorities from the security to social welfare sectors.
The book is not just bone dry economics. Shankar began writing for close relatives and friends. “I thought I would share a document with them and leave,” he later recalled. While admiring his intellectual rigour that was unsparing for friends and foes alike, one can’t but marvel at the posh life he led at the World Bank or that the entire band of economists who entered India’s public policy-making differ among each other only on the detail and pace of dismantling the state sector, not on its morality or context for its existence.
