Recalling Jaswant Singh, The Planner

India’s principal opposition party, the BJP, is becoming a laughing stock. Jaswant Singh has been expelled over a book he has written; and the book has been banned in Gujarat by the Narendra Modi government because it contains remarks critical of Sardar Patel, a Congressman who was a Gujarati.

Jaswant Singh has responded by pointing out that, in 1948, immediately after the assassination of Gandhi, it was the Congressman Patel who, as police minister, banned the RSS. Why should the BJP and the RSS get so uppity over remarks against Sardar Patel?

This is indeed a crippling blow to the credibility of Narendra Modi – the “star” of the BJP. Modi is actually running a government. He has banned a book – that is bad enough. But now it seems that Modi’s “ideology” is foggy. And the BJP is very proud of its “ideology.”

I remember Jaswant Singh from 1998, when he was the head of our Planning Commission and I had just been inducted into the editorial team of the Economic Times. One day, I was told by a senior editor that our The State was holding an Economic Editors’ Conference, and that I was to represent the paper there. I went.

I had expected to meet some of the big-wigs of economic journalism, but the room was full of journalists from small towns all over the country, who had been invited to Delhi for this conference at State expense. It was not really an economic editors’ conference at all.

Anyway, the opening act was by Jaswant Singh. He waxed eloquent on his forthcoming visit to Washington DC to discuss economic policy with the World Bank and the IMF. He then spoke of how he remained a village boy at heart, talking about his childhood in rural Rajasthan (which elicited loud cheers from some Rajasthani patriots in the audience), and then he said the most bizarre thing:

“My greatest desire is that no villager should move to a city.”

I walked out after that, without attending the official lunch. I never attended an economic editors’ conference again.

Why do villagers move to cities? It certainly cannot be for “environmental” reasons. They have homes in the villages. The air is clean there. There is greenery. Birds twitter. Why do they leave all this to live in nasty city slums? There is only one reason: The Market.

And the head of India’s Planning Commission, who plans for a billion people, does not understand The Market.

None of these morons do.

And they want to teach!