‘Understanding the past is important, not just to avoid mistakes, but to learn from successes’

Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian’s book A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey on India’s political economy will be released on October 24. Kapur (DK) is currently the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International ‘Studies. Subramanian (AS) isa Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and India’s former Chief Economic Adviser. Edited excerpts from an interview to Roshan Kishore on the book:

- DEVESH KAPUR, PROFESSOR AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, AND ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE PETERSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS

Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian

This is perhaps the first joint attempt by a political scientist and an economist to write apolitical economy treatise on India. Both of you have shown a mirror to the peers in your respective disciplines. One of you has written earlier that the top academic journals in the US have effectively created “new facts” and become the gatekeepers of knowledge about India.

AS: Thanks for saying that we are holding up a mirror. What Devesh and I wanted to do was to cut across these narrow academic silos. Development is much more than either economics or politics, especially for a country like India. India, when it was created, had to do four transformations simultaneously: building a state, creating a sense of nationhood, changing society and building an economy and markets. And these four transformations were done through universal suffrage-based_ politics, which is also absolutely almost unique at that state, and ina society that had so many cleavages. This almost necessitates something that's broader than either just politics or economics.

DK:I think one advantage is both ofusare older, and we really don't care about being published in the so-called elite journals anymore. Many of those who work not just on India, but on other developing countries, there is a lot of pressure to go in the topmost journals. Understanding the country is not something they're interested in. They're interested in satisfying methodological requirements such as causal inference. We don't have any pretensions our book is about making such claims. Our thing was we want to understand India, in whichever way we feel it can be better understood.

Atone pointin the book you say, India’s best time is described by Bhagwati plus Sen rather than the Bhagwati versus Sen framework. This goes against the almost entrenched binary in terms of the debate on political economy in India.