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By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 11:23:13 am

Bengal’s Ludwig Erhard

For decades, Swapan Dasgupta made a career of diagnosing India’s political ailments. As a columnist, editor, author and public intellectual, the erudite and scintillating Dasgupta dissected challenged orthodoxies and defended the intellectual traditions of the Indian Right. However, following his new appointment as the new Finance Minister of a West Bengal in economic doldrums, he perhaps faces the most demanding assignment of his career. His supporters however are confident that if there is...

Bengal’s Ludwig Erhard

For decades, Swapan Dasgupta made a career of diagnosing India’s political ailments. As a columnist, editor, author and public intellectual, the erudite and scintillating Dasgupta dissected challenged orthodoxies and defended the intellectual traditions of the Indian Right. However, following his new appointment as the new Finance Minister of a West Bengal in economic doldrums, he perhaps faces the most demanding assignment of his career. His supporters however are confident that if there is anyone most suited to sort out Bengal’s messy economy, it is Dasgupta. His appointment following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ascent to power in Bengal after overthrowing Mamata Banerjee’s TMC regime is among the more intriguing political transitions in recent Indian political memory. India has seen journalists cross into politics before. M.J. Akbar moved from the newsroom to the Ministry of External Affairs. Arun Shourie, one of India’s most formidable investigative journalists, became a reform-minded minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. Others, from Manish Sisodia to Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi and Chandan Mitra, have made similar journeys. Yet Dasgupta’s case is distinctive. Unlike many journalists-turned-politicians, he was never merely a ‘reporter.’ Whether in debate or through his prolific and trenchant writings, he has always been an intellectual combatant, a scholar of political ideas with a sweeping knowledge of world history by which he leavens those ideas. Dasgupta has always been one of the most articulate exponents of modern Indian conservatism. Educated at La Martiniere College in Kolkata, St Stephen’s College in Delhi and later the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he earned a doctorate, Dasgupta cultivated a reputation for formidable scholarship. His books, including Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right and The Ayodhya Reference, revealed an uncommon ability to place contemporary political disputes within a broader historical and ideological framework. For his supporters, he was among the few intellectuals capable of articulating conservative ideas in a language usually dominated by the Left. To critics, he was a sophisticated polemicist. Yet, even his opponents seldom questioned the breadth of his reading or the sharpness of his arguments. However, the challenge facing Dasgupta now is no longer intellectual but administrative. The Bengal he inherits bears little resemblance to the state that once led India in industry, commerce and scientific innovation. As he himself quipped in trademark fashion with a sharp historical analogy, the state’s economy resembled postwar Germany. The figures are sobering. West Bengal’s state debt has ballooned to around Rs. 8 lakh crore during the TMC regime. Thousands of companies have relocated or curtailed operations over the years amid a hostile investment climate. The new BJP government has inherited not merely a fiscal challenge but a crisis of confidence. “We are left with a near-bankrupt treasury,” Dasgupta said. Equally troubling, in his view, is the erosion of trust among investors and entrepreneurs. Bengal’s relationship with business has been uneasy to say the least. First the long night of the Left, followed by the TMC’s anti-business, appeasement brand of politics has ensured that the scars of industrial disputes and land controversies remain fresh. In this dire situation, reviving private investment will require convincing businesses that Bengal has changed. In this respect, Dasgupta’s strengths may prove unexpectedly useful. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to engage with ideas, institutions and stakeholders across ideological divides. His early moves hint at a broader vision. Rather than confining pre-budget consultations to Kolkata, Dasgupta shifted the Finance Department’s attention to Siliguri in a moved suffused with deliberate symbolism. North Bengal has long complained of neglect by governments centred on the state’s southern districts. By engaging tea producers, agricultural interests, tourism operators and local business groups, the newly-minted finance minister appears eager to demonstrate that economic revival will not just be a Kolkata-centric project. That said, debt servicing consumes a substantial portion of state revenues. Welfare commitments are politically difficult to unwind and infrastructure deficits remain significant. While public intellectuals excel at identifying problems, governing demands compromises and the acceptance of imperfect solutions. Still, Bengal’s new finance minister possesses as fine an appreciation of history than any Indian politician around. He knows that states decline not just because economic mistakes but because they lose faith in their future. Restoring that confidence may be the central task of his tenure. For years Swapan Dasgupta chronicled India’s political story from the sidelines. Now he finds himself at the centre of one of its most consequential state-level experiments. Whatever the outcome of his tenure, few would deny that Bengal’s finances have acquired perhaps their most learned custodian in decades.

American Hellhole

US President’s Donald Trump’s latest lapse of judgment wherein he amplified a post that branded India a “hellhole” might have been dismissed as yet another crude flourish in a career built on provocation. But the timing renders it something darker. Even as he recycled insults about foreign lands, gunfire echoed once again in the heart of his own.


Secret Service agents again rushed the President to safety as shots rang out near the Washington Hilton during the correspondents’ dinner. The suspected gunman, Cole Tomas Allen, arrived with multiple weapons and a manifesto sent to his family minutes before the attack, laying out his intent to target senior administration officials.


This echoed the July 2024 campaign rally shooting in Pennsylvania, when an assailant opened fire at Trump, wounding him. In America, even its most guarded spaces are not immune. The country and the world have now become inured to such episodes.


Gun culture is so rampant that anyone can build a small arsenal and rain fire in American schools, churches or political gatherings, that are routinely transformed into theatres of violence. While certain bigoted American citizens casually dub countries with a civilization and culture they can scarcely comprehend as a ‘hellhole,’ their own country – touted the world’s most powerful democracy cannot imagine itself without the constant hum of gunfire in the background.


And yet Trump chooses to endorse such offending remarks, which were originally made by a conservative radio host and casually relayed by the President on his Truth Social account. Trump’s retweeting of the anti-India post is supremely ironic while America struggles with dysfunction that is both visible and visceral.


America has normalised a peculiar blend of ultra-permissiveness and institutional paralysis: a culture where firearms circulate with ease, opioids ravage communities and an of consumption has become a civic condition. America’s deeper malaise is embedded in its culture of consumption. This is a society that has elevated acquisition into identity. The result is material plenty paired with dire social fragmentation. It is a country that prides itself on liberty, yet seems increasingly captive to its own extremes.


The hypocrisy deepens in its foreign policy. Trump leans on Pakistan, a failed state that harbours and enables extremist networks, while sermonising to others about order and civility.


The irony is sharpened by the diplomatic context as Trump once boasted of warm ties with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Those ties have since cooled, frayed by tariffs Trump imposed on India, only to be tentatively rewoven through ongoing trade negotiations. At this delicate moment, rhetorical recklessness on Trump’s part is not merely impolite but strategically foolish. Great powers do not build alliances by insulting each other’s dignity.


But Trump has long treated language as a blunt instrument. From branding Somali immigrants “garbage” to deriding entire nations, his vocabulary is one long performance of disdain.


Ultimately, the crudest insults often tell us less about their targets than about those who utter them.

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