Mihir Sharma's RESTART IS NO UPSTART!

BOOK REVIEW

Title:               RESTART –The last Chance For The Indian Economy

Author:          Mihir S Sharma

Publisher:       Random House India, 2015

Price:              Rs. 599/-

RESTART  Is No UPSTART

Writing; author, journalist Pankaj Mishra once told me, is: ‘as individual as a signature’. Mishra meant the interiorscape of the author, his unique way of expressing his thoughts.

Mihir S Sharma, young, articulate, Harvard educated, and currently looking after Opinion at the Business Standard, is a very good writer indeed. He digests his information, and writes engagingly, even racily, about economics.

This is refreshing because many others display their gravitas by writing academic, neutral, verbose, jargon-infested, navel-gazing tomes.

Sharma’s RESTART sparkles with intelligence. It is is a journalistic, traveloguish, deliberately blokey take on many of the economic issues of the day, reprised over the years since independence. It is also very earnest. If readability is its strongest suit, a certain wide-eyed naiveté on the politics of progress may be its weakest.

Sharma thinks, for example, an inveterate political survivor like former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao ‘never had an overarching idea of what he intended to do’ with regard to the first stage of Reforms in 1991. They were marked, says Sharma, truthfully enough, with ‘half-measures and timidity’. He writes, somewhat disingenuously, that this ‘set the template for all our efforts at reform since’.

But let us consider that Rao knew exactly what he could get away with. And if we are only looking forward to a solid second stage of reform under Modi, 24 years later, it is probably due to the proverbial curse of Montezuma, or is it his revenge? 

After all, this country set out to be a Fabian socialist realm from the get-go under Nehru. That is a potent witches’ brew indeed, and leaves a bitch of a hangover, with its ‘mixed economy’ and ‘commanding heights’, its disdain for commerce, resulting in magnificent, 2% GDP  growth! But, decades of it creates an addiction to the mai baap Raj, and a culture of entitlement.

Modi might well do Reforms, because he wants to sweep out this failed Nehruvian narrative, and usher in Modinomics in its place. He says he wants modernisation, infrastructure development , manufacturing, fancy farming/agri-business, defence ‘make in India’, etc. all of it topped off with a splash of welfare. He says he’s pro-poor and pro–business both; poverty elimination, not alleviation.

Throughout the narrative, Mihir Sharma tends to conceptually swing both Left and Right. But on balance, he reveals a yen for efficiency, and  a willingness to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette.

Sharma pitches for massive growth: ‘India has a passion for under-capacity’ he states in counter-point. He is correct when he breezily writes that India ‘needs to go through three transformations’ simultaneously. He calls them ‘Democratic transition/ Disruption from building infrastructure/Social transformation’. Sharma suggests the perpetual revolution shake-up that will result, is desirable.

Mihir Sharma’s voice is younger, hipper, than say, that of a Gurcharan Das, or even the magisterial VS Naipaul, but with something their grand-touring style. He incorporates sociology, humour, observation and anecdote to leaven the economics. 

There is psychology too. He points to the Indian prejudice against manual labour. Sharma thinks we are ‘rent-seeking’ and believe ‘you can’t get rich through trying’. He points out that ‘In Indian movies, you inherit wealth, or you marry wealth, or you spurn wealth. You don’t earn it.’ He thinks the key aspiration runs towards ‘one big deal and then joining the rentier-class.’

RESTART feelingly describes the unfortunate decline of Indian manufacturing for lack of policy support, and the unviability of having 60% of our people trying to live off the rural economy when a fifth of them are actually farmers.

Sharma ends his book with a number of policy prescriptions. They are interesting but no ladders are provided. He does not, like most theoreticians, have an answer for how to get this ‘premodern society’ successfully ‘attempting postmodern economics.’

RESTART, given the sweep of its ambition, is definitely entertaining, opinionated, stimulating, almost evangelical. It is well worth a read.

For:  Mail Today

(650 words)

March 18, 2015

Gautam Mukherjee