Punjab in the Soul

See Bedi (1999), Sharma (2016), Harbans Singh (n.d.), and Roopinder Singh (n.d.).

Or perhaps Ajit might well have asked for a bit more: Kairon ran Punjab ruthlessly with an iron grip, virtually as a family fiefdom; a “one-man state”, a “robber baron”, and other such unsavoury descriptors would be caricatures, but then caricatures are exaggerated forms of features embedded in the reality. His defence would surely argue that it was the only way Punjab could be run in that post-Independence era, and that he was a modernising visionary who got Punjab moving, and there is not just a grain but perhaps a “kilograin” of truth in that. Punjab politics, as in many other Indian states, was mostly in the hands of “leading families” which vied and took turns with each other to run the show. Punjab has notoriously been run by no more than five family lineages, which are now all fairly intertwined through marriage and other business devices; any other Punjab leader would have fitted the same caricature with regard to “governance”, but fallen well short of Kairon’s real worth as a transforming leader; he was, at the time, the only show in town; certainly, viewed through the lens of the Nehruvian development paradigm, there was no alternative; TINA applied with full force. Viewed differently, say, in Gerschenkronian terms, there was no real capitalist class to drive a modernisation process, the economic system was largely agrarian and dominated by the larger landowners, and the state was the historical agent that substituted for the missing conditions of capitalist transformation; and Kairon was effectively this state; relatedly in Marxian terms, this phase of state-led development was also characterised by a wave of primitive accumulation, again facilitated by the state. Within the Sikh political configuration of the times, Kairon was also hostile towards the Punjabi Suba movement, which brought him closer to Nehru in Delhi and also reflected his class base within Punjab. This must not take away from the long-running tradition and strong currents of revolutionary and communist movements and mobilisations in Punjab ever since the early decades of the twentieth century; indeed, Pratap Singh Kairon’s brother Jaswant Singh was a standard bearer of this radical tradition and is said to have withdrawn from active politics altogether once his older brother’s career as a Congress politician took off.

The reference is to the episode in Ajit’s college days in Chandigarh when he was obliged to stand down from an election for leadership of the student body, in favour (in all likelihood) of Jassinder Singh, nephew of Partap Singh Kairon who was then the sitting Chief Minister of Punjab; as noted, Jassinder’s father, and brother of Partap Singh Kairon, was Jaswant Singh Kairon who had a long and strong allegiance to communist organisations and had been highly politically active in the USA in the interwar years.

In a devastating attack on B. S. Minhas’s work to construct a static production function from international statistics, Joan Robinson likened it to “a case of looking in a dark room for a black cat that we are pretty certain is not there”; in a thinly veiled reference to his neoclassical mentors, she added: “it is a sad comment on the state of education that a talented young man should be fetched from India to be bamboozled like this” (Robinson 1964, p. 205). Minhas’s economics and mentors clearly placed him on the enemy side of the Cambridge war that Ajit was later to enter. See also Deena Khatkhate’s fine piece on Bagicha Singh Minhas (Khatkhate 2008). But good can come from bad: Geoff Harcourt reviewed Minhas’ book in Economic Journal (Harcourt 1964), and this led later to his paper in Review of Economic Studies (Harcourt 1966) on the empirical biases hidden in the measurement of the elasticity of substitution of CES production functions.

Worthy of a mention here is the cross-border research on agriculture in the two Punjabs done by my contemporaries, Rashid Amjad (who like his brother Shahid Chaudhry earlier, was at Queens’) and Abhijit (Manik) Sen, leading to a paper presented to the South Asian Workshop in Cambridge, and later published as Sen and Amjad (1978), cited by Ajit in his paper on Punjab (Singh 1983).

“Soviet Leaders Visit Sonepat Area”, report in The Tribune, Chandigarh, dated 13 December 1955, cited in Chohan (2015, p. 47).

For Minhas’s analysis and policy proposition, see Minhas (1970).

Ajit empirically tests and shows “striking support” for Kaldor’s “related but stronger proposition, namely that the ‘faster the overall rate of growth, the greater is the excess of the rate of growth of manufacturing production over the rate of growth of the economy as a whole” (Singh 1983, p. 4).

Shamsher Singh, personal communication; email dated 28 October 2015.

Ajit was interviewed on the occasion of a seminar on the Doha Development Agenda (Gayatri 2004a).

The Punjab Research Group (PRG) was formed in 1984 by “a group of independent and interdisciplinary individuals engaged in Punjab Studies”; “one of the aims of the PRG when it was established was to create dialogue between the three Punjabs: East Punjab, West Punjab, and the Punjabi Diaspora”, and thereby “to promote and enable a virtual community to communicate across the globe”; see: https://​theprg.​co.​uk/​about-2/​. It is striking that the formation of the group coincided with the high point of the Punjab crisis in India when Indian troops conducted Operation Blue Star and stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, then the bastion of the separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. The separatist movement had created waves on both sides of the border and further overseas, and the “three-punjabs” reflected this, noting that “early 1984 was a tense period in Punjab and for Punjabi communities in the UK” (ibid.). Undoubtedly Ajit, like every other Sikh, was strongly affected by these events. He was a staunch supporter of this pan-Punjabs, cross-border greater Punjab intellectual group. In 2006, PRG was honoured with an award for outstanding contributions by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Punjabis in Britain. See The Tribune, Chandigarh, 30 March 2006, http://​www.​tribuneindia.​com/​2006/​20060330/​punjab1.​htm - 5.

“Punjab Development Initiative in House of Commons”; see The Tribune, Chandigarh, 16 June 2006, http://​www.​tribuneindia.​com/​2006/​20060616/​punjab1.​htm.

As reported by the PRG: https://​theprg.​co.​uk/​category/​prg-meetings/​page/​2/​.

Reported in Shamsher Singh (2015).

Shamsher Singh, 2015, personal communication, email dated 28 October 2015.

The references to and quotations from Shamsher Singh in this and the following paragraph are drawn from Shamsher Singh (2015), and from personal communications, email dated 28 October 2015.

Shamsher Singh, 2015, personal communication. Dr. Jane Singh hailed from one of the oldest Sikh families in the USA and was later a librarian at Berkeley; they are both eminent researchers of Sikhism, though one cannot tell how far Ajit troubled these scholars or how dedicated a student he was on this score; Dr. Jane Singh did know Ajit, but not during his Berkeley years, she said (personal communication).

Pritam narrates the incident in 1971 when he was picked up by the police and tortured to get him to “confess” that he was a Naxalite (which he was not, though he “told them I was a Maoist in my ideological beliefs”); and how Professor Rangnekar (then head of the economics department of Panjab University) and Pritam’s leftist teachers Professor G. S. and Sheila Bhalla responded with affection and concern, vigorously taking up his case with the Vice Chancellor and with the Panjab University Teachers’ Association, also insisting that the police should not be allowed to enter the university precincts. Pritam observes that Rangnekar was a liberal educated at Cambridge. Ajit was linked with all: Rangnekar had been his teacher too when Ajit was an undergraduate in Chandigarh; and Prabhat Patnaik brought it to my notice that G. S. and Sheila were close friends of his, though perhaps later, and would often be his Chandigarh hosts. Prabhat: “I remember hearing of Sheila for the first time from Ajit at Cambridge and he referred to her, with some admiration, as the ‘chain-smoking Canadian lady who taught Hicks’ A Revision of Demand Theory at PU, Chandigarh’. When the Bhallas moved to JNU, Ajit would be a regular visitor at their house on the campus whenever he visited Delhi and all of us would congregate there” (personal communication). Moreover, the proposal for Pritam’s OUP book was very positively reviewed by Ajit (Singh 2010), who later went on to review it in Economic and Political Weekly (Singh 2011); Pritam and Ajit were both involved with the Punjab Research Group in the UK, apart from other connections. Prabhat (personal communication) also commented on the very significant presence of the left in the universities of Punjab, even though the high electoral profile of earlier decades had ebbed in more recent years. I am also struck by the parallel with Ajit’s own commitment to the cause of students’ right in Cambridge; he was frequently at the front lines of encounters with university authorities, and on occasion had also stood up in relation to the police in a high profile episode, coincidentally also in 1971, to defend the rights of students to protest peacefully without penal sanctions from the law or university.

Personal communication, in conversation, dated 15 August 2018.

The engraving was from the sketch made by William Carpenter in 1833, three years after the gold work was completed.

Such pride is immediately visible in some of the choices of male first names such as Jarnail (General), Karnail (Colonel), Major (Major), Kaptan (Captain), Subedar (Sergeant) and, I suppose if you could not agree on the rank to be conferred, Fauja (Army), are commonplace, particularly in the Army’s traditional recruitment areas; one supposes “Brigadier Singh” was too much of a mouthful to roll easily off a Punjabi tongue.

See, for instance, Pritam Singh (2008) at Oxford, and a younger collaborator of Ajit; Darshan Singh Tatla (1993); Telford (1992a, b); also papers in Journal of Punjab Studies. See also Bakke (2015, pp. 131–183) on the rise and decline of the crisis of militancy in Punjab.

From Executive Intelligence Review, 11(47), 4 December 1984, p. 49. See: http://​www.​larouchepub.​com/​eiw/​public/​1984/​eirv11n47-19841204/​eirv11n47-19841204_​048-international_​intelligence.​pdf.

In 2002 Arnaud de Borchgrave, Editor-in-Chief for The Washington Times, called Executive Intelligence Review “an anti-Semitic potpourri of disinformation, factoids, rumor, gossip, loony tunes and an occasional fact”. The New York Review of Books said that Executive Intelligence Review “echoes Kremlin propaganda”. See: https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Executive_​Intelligence_​Review.

This was further confirmed to me in a conversation with Manmohan Singh (on 17 November 2017), when he referred to these being “some people in California”. He said that he had dissuaded Ajit and advised him to keep away from this path, and that Ajit had agreed “out of respect for me”; apparently these people also tried to involve Bagicha Singh Minhas (who also had distant Stanford antecedents), but without success. Manmohan confirmed Ajit’s strong emotional association with Sikhism and Punjab: “he was a strong Punjab nationalist”.

Manmohan Singh was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 16 September 1982 to 14 January 1985. Footnote added.

For a detailed report, see: https://​svaradarajan.​com/​2009/​10/​31/​1984-who-are-the-guilty/​.

“These debates over proper Sikh practice were given an explosive boosting in the 1980s by the rising influence of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, further underscored by his martyrdom in the Indian Army’s bungled attack on the Akal Takht in June 1984. Before his death, Bhindranwale’s jathedars attracted little support in Britain, but the wave of revulsion following the assault on the Golden Temple was so great that British Sikhs were suddenly united as never before. In all sections of the community the new shaheed was regarded as a shining and faultless exemplar of religious steadfastness, and his chauvinistic teaching — that Sikhism differed utterly and comprehensively from degenerate Hinduism — suddenly became the new orthodoxy” (Ballard 1994, pp. 112–113).

Coincidentally, Ajit and Manmohan also shared a negative experience, each having been rebuffed by their universities: Ajit, whose promotions to Reader and then to Professor at Cambridge were inordinately delayed by the orthodox economics camp; and Manmohan who was turned down for a professorship at Panjab in the late 1980s. Reminiscing in 2004 on the occasion of a visit by Manmohan Singh to Panjab University, Prof M. R. Aggarwal “remember[s] the time when he [Manmohan Singh] had come back from Geneva [presumably at the end of 1990 or early 1991 after his stint as Secretary General of the South Commission] and applied for the post of professor in our department. The Syndicate, plagued with politics, rejected his selection. He never came back after that. The university watched him grow in stature from a distance. Then, a couple of years back, our department re-established the snapped links by inviting him for a lecture. A lot of persuasion went into that. Finally, he is back with us” (Gayatri 2004b). Both were dedicated teachers and retained their loyalties to their university which later rediscovered good sense, corrected the aberrations, and restored normality letting the past go as water under the bridge.

Manmohan Singh, Interview with Mark Tully, 2005. See: https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Manmohan_​Singh.

Sanjay Baru (2012), then Chief Press Officer to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, writes about his amazement when, on a flight, the PM rattled off verbatim a lengthy quotation from Keynes; and I can personally substantiate this capability—in a meeting about this manuscript, Manmohan Singh pulled out, again word perfect, virtually a complete paragraph from Pigou. Both quotations were on the social role of economics and economists as policymakers.

Ajit had developed and widely used the “close-vs-strategic” binary ever since he and Sukhamoy Chakravarty had first developed it in their 1988 paper that sadly forever remained a “first draft”.

Extracted from Daman Singh (2014, Ch. 9, “Letters from Cambridge”).

Gabriel Palma has admonished me for a misuse of Alfred Nobel’s name; hence, this footnote is in contrition. The “Nobel Prize in Economics” isn’t part of the group funded originally in the will of Alfred Nobel, but one that was added later by the Sveriges Riksbank in 1968 to commemorate its own 300th anniversary; ostensibly, it follows the same procedures as the real Nobel Prizes and is awarded in the same ceremony. It has not been free of controversy, not just due to the bias towards mainstream economics, but also on account of the position of the Nobel family that had had serious reservations about the idea of the economics prize. Buzaglo (2010) refers to it as “an unparalleled example of successful trademark infringement”. Since its inception, there have been a dozen differing English translations of what in the original Swedish is: Sveriges Riksbanks Pris I Ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne.

Urdu for “journey”.

In 2012, when the Indian Government and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were attacked by The Financial Times for ineffectiveness in responding to the sluggishness of reforms, Ajit (jointly with Abhijit (Manik) Sen, Cambridge-trained economist from the 1970s and then member of the Planning Commission), argued promptly and carefully in his defence, concluding: “Fortunately for India the PM is not a charismatic figure prone to populism but rather an extremely able and experienced technocrat … your characterisation of Dr. Singh as the do-nothing PM is widely off the mark” (Sen and Singh 2012).

University of Cambridge: University of Cambridge to launch Manmohan Singh Undergraduate Scholarship, 9 January 2009, https://​www.​cam.​ac.​uk/​news/​university-of-cambridge-to-launch-manmohan-singh-undergraduate-scholarship.

The collaboration with Gurmail Singh yielded an article published in 2013 (Singh and Singh 2013), and two more listed as “forthcoming 2015” in Ajit’s 2014 curriculum vitae and published posthumously.

Shailaja Fennell, personal communication, email dated 10 April 2018.

University of Cambridge, “Scholarship Agreement signed for Sikh graduate students”, 22 July 2009, https://​www.​cam.​ac.​uk/​news/​scholarship-agreement-signed-for-sikh-graduate-students.

Cambridge Network, “University’s growing relationship with Sikh community celebrated”, 4 November 2009, https://​www.​cambridgenetwork​.​co.​uk/​news/​university-s-growing-relationship-with-sikh-community/​.

Announcement by Professor Arun Kumar Grover, Vice Chancellor, Panjab University; at that point, both proposals—for the lecture and the speaker—were subject to approval by relevant bodies. See: “Former PM Manmohan Singh to deliver lecture at Panjab University soon”, The Times of India, 12 November 2016, http://​timesofindia.​indiatimes.​com/​city/​chandigarh/​Former-PM-Manmohan-Singh-to-deliver-lecture-at-Panjab-University-soon/​articleshow/​55381299.​cms.