On The Evil Professors Of Delhi U

There is a huge taxpayer-funded advertisement in my newspaper of yesterday on the NREGA. It features the smiling face of a village woman with the caption: “Not just livelihood, it earns me respect too.” In the backdrop there is a long line of village women, all bearing headloads. At the bottom right-hand corner are photos of Madamji Soniaji Gandhiji and Chacha Manmohan.

Can “respect” be earned by queuing up before government clerks for money and carrying headloads at their behest?

Anyway, the ad got me thinking of the “labour armies” that socialist professors of the Delhi School of Economics have always advocated. In yesterday’s post, I discussed Professor KN Raj’s many evil schemes, but omitted writing about the “labour army.” Today, let us probe this evil idea of theirs.

I quote from the same book by Peter Bauer I cited yesterday. Here are the words of Professor KN Raj:

In view of the social objectives underlying the Plan, and the large employment opportunities proposed to be created in the investment projects, it will be desirable to give up the present system of recruiting labour at random and discontinuing their services on the completion of particular projects, and instead organize labour armies on a more permanent footing. In view of the uneven disposal of agricultural labour in the country referred to earlier, the recruitment will be confined in the main to a few States where distress is the greatest. The potentialities, implicit in the organization of such labour armies, are immense from many points of view.

Professor BN Ganguli was then KN Raj’s boss, and Director of the Delhi School of Economics. Bauer quotes at length from his memorandum entitled Institutional Implications of a Bolder Plan with special reference to the Chinese Experience. Professor Ganguli favours the “planning of consumption” through State-trading and “control over private savings.” He goes on to suggest that “all transport in India must be under the authority of a single State-owned enterprise.” He advocates compulsory co-operatives in agriculture along Chinese lines, because the “vast private sector in the countryside can no longer be left to the devices of anarchical individual operation of farms.” And finally, he too advocates direction of labour and the setting up of labour armies in the manner of totalitarian states. Professor BN Ganguli writes:

One way of inducing social change that is needed and of also completing our vast construction projects quickly is to organize a trained and disciplined national labour force which, like the armed services, does not recognize differences of caste or community and which can be deployed all over the country like a vast mobile force imbued with patriotic emulation to undertake and complete in record time projects of national construction. People belonging to the depressed classes should form the bulk of this force. The idealistic youth of this country may easily form a powerful element of this force as members of the technical, supervisory and teaching cadres. The Indian Army, as the People’s Army in New China, may very well find scope for its wonderful capacity for leadership, discipline and hard work… in peaceful constructive activities in collaboration with the civilian labour force. The national labour force that I contemplate should not be a voluntary labour service corps which may operate on small projects for short periods….

The Grand Vision of the Delhi School of Economics can be summarized as follows: The Total Chacha Nehru State employs us all – the poor, the depressed classes, the idealistic youth, the army, all are at the service of the Total State. Has any King ever employed all his subjects? What will happen to his Treasury if he does so? Does the smart King not encourage his subjects to create wealth themselves, in Liberty, so that his Treasury is always full?

Further, labour is not performed by the Individual for anything but what he can buy from its proceeds. We all work to consume. But here, the Delhi School of Economics advocates “planned consumption” and, not only that, the total appropriation of all savings too. Sounds like criminal insanity to me. But we were talking about the NREGA of Chacha Manmohan.

Let us not forget that Manmohan Singh was very much part the faculty of this Delhi School of Economics, as was Amartya Sen. Thus, the NREGA remains very much the same old idea of The Total State employing “labour armies.” There can be no “respect” in working for such an army; and certainly not “self-respect.” On the contrary, it is but degrading servitude.

Let is therefore salute the spirit of Professor BR Shenoy, who alone dissented – and suffered the consequences with stoic composure. I have written of him in a recent post. Bauer called him a “hero and saint.” He was also the only true economist.

The Delhi School of Economics should be closed down. Their professors are pure evil, enemies of truth, enemies of reason, enemies of the youth.