09/24/09 – Sauvik Chakraverti – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And just like I told you when I started the show half an hour ago, I am sitting here reading the Antidote blog, which is salvik-antidote.blogspot.com.
Salvik is spelled S-A-U-V-I-K because that's the first name of my guest this half hour, Salvik Chakravarti, Libertarian Opinion from India.
Welcome back to the show, Salvik.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Nice to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And of course, I'm also just very happy to know that the Rothbardian understanding of free market economics and natural rights and all the wonderful, you know, probably revisionist history and all the great stuff that combines into modern day Austro-libertarianism is being spread throughout India.
What a great deal.
Tell me it's not just you.
Thank you so much.
And actually, tell me in the broad sense, how big is the movement there?
It's not just you and your blog, is it?
It's quite big.
But the thing in India is that we have a law, a legislation on the representation of the people, which says that every party that is to be recognized to enter the electoral race has to be a socialist party.
And that is the reason why you have all these moronic parties and people in power in India, because there is a silent majority of free market opinion today in India.
I won't say all of it is totally libertarian like I am.
But throughout India, the market has made its presence felt over the last 20 years and improved life of lives of everybody, especially the poor.
I mean, 20 years ago, nobody had a phone.
Even rich people had trouble getting a phone.
Now, every poor guy's got a phone and it goes on like this.
And the number of cars on the streets are increasing.
All indicators of life, consumption indicators are improving ever since India started liberalizing its markets.
But the problem is that this kind of opinion is not allowed to enter the electoral arena by law.
Well, does that sort of kind of reinforce the power of it outside of the government?
I mean, in the sense that, you know, the people who who do have more of a free market approach because they're banned, does it kind of make them believe even more?
And that makes, you know, actually that makes an entire section of opinion quite alienated from the official parties.
And see, we also know that what the socialists have been doing in India for 60 years, they are continuing to do the same thing.
And no change is happening.
For example, in India, there has hardly been any privatization.
We have a huge loss making public industrial sector.
Nobody's saying a thing about that.
The government continues in its, you know, welfarist and other social sector expenditures of which are very high.
Just like your government is borrowing a lot of money, our government is also planning to borrow 4.5 trillion rupees.
So we are also expecting big inflation and all the other problems that you are.
Oh, no, Savik, you can't you can't do that because we're going to need to borrow that money from you guys.
What's going to happen to America if we can't borrow money from the poorest nations in the world?
Well, I think America is the one which has to, you know, cut their coat according to the cloth.
Well, now explain a little bit more about the transformation of India.
I mean, we're talking about basically a billion people on this subcontinent south of the Himalayas there.
And I guess, you know, when I was a kid, I haven't really heard very much about this at all lately.
But when I was a kid, I learned that in India, because of the belief in reincarnation and everything, you have this caste system where if you're born poor, you're supposed to be poor and you just stay poor.
And that the society is so divided and that there's no or at least when I was a kid and learned this, there was virtually no ability for someone to be, you know, what they call upwardly mobile, right, for a poor person to save up their property, invest it, improve it and really be able to move up in their income and their station in life there.
Has capitalism changed that at all or is that even true at all the way I learned it when I was a kid in the first place?
Well, it's not only capitalism that changes it, it's also urbanization.
These kind of attitudes and these kind of beliefs are typically rural, you know, in the rural kind of atmosphere, small villages, one village of this caste, one village of the other caste, these kind of things go on.
But in an urban situation, there is anonymity of caste.
Nobody cares.
If you come to my tea shop, I don't ask you what caste you are.
And there is a caste grouping in politics, of course, there is a party that professes to represent these lower castes, but they are also including other castes in the party and they are also, you know, getting rich.
And they are also in favor of capitalism and urbanization.
So this is something that will go in no time if we do the right thing.
Yeah, I guess this is a bad thing in society, but it is going, and it definitely doesn't exist in the urban centers.
The problem is we have only five cities in these 60 years since the British left.
You know, we haven't urbanized at all, and all the five old cities are, you know, the population is getting bigger and bigger, and they're getting more and more overcrowded.
The urban land prices are going up very high, and the poor cannot afford it.
But if we tried to be a country with 200, 300 cities, this problem would be wiped out in no time, in less than one generation.
Well, you know, this is something that you're talking about on your blog, right, where you're against all kinds of central planning, but you know what, if you're going to have this budget, build roads.
Build them everywhere.
Yeah, I say that because, you know, for 60 years, they have not built roads.
The British railways, which they left behind, have expanded by hardly 10%, even in 60 years.
And the entire transportation infrastructure in India, I mean, it is a disaster.
It has to be seen to be believed.
And the biggest problem with such a transport infrastructure is that around every city, the satellite towns don't develop.
So this is the reason why our urbanization process is going haywire.
And that's why I emphasize that this should be done by government money, because, you know, in India, the average car ownership, although it is rising phenomenally over the last 10-15 years, is still quite low.
And I don't see that over such a huge landmass, all roads can be provided by private enterprise.
That is why I say there should be a role of the state.
Well, and that's even a Hayekian principle, right?
As long as you have a government, they ought to maintain good infrastructure and that kind of thing.
Hayekian or even Adam Smith, you know, the third duty of the sovereign Adam Smith said to build those public works, which no individual or small group of individuals can afford to put up.
The sovereign should do that.
That has been my viewpoint.
I'm a great fan of Gabriel Roth, I must tell you, I don't know if you've heard of this transport economist.
No, I'm sorry, what's his name?
Gabriel Roth.
No, tell me about him.
He is a free market transport economist, and I'm a great admirer of his work, and especially on roads.
He says how they can be privatized to the greatest extent.
And I'm for that.
But I do believe that a very large role of the state is required at this current moment of time.
Yeah, well, and you know, that's the thing about being an anarchist is we live in a world of states.
And, you know, in our lifetimes, these states aren't going away, I guess.
But it's a slippery slope, though, because you know what, as long as they're going to do roads, why not do all kinds of other things they want to do, too?
I tend, I prefer to give them no permission to exist at all.
Yeah, I would do too, but as you say, we cannot wish these states away, and we cannot wish our money away.
And don't forget, in a country like India, like the government has no money to build roads, but they have invested the entire fortune of the people in these loss-making industrial units.
Now, if we could privatize that, that entire booty could fund the roads without additional taxation.
And that is the kind of thing that I am suggesting, I'm advocating, that make it not taxation for roads, but privatization for roads, that the public fund is invested in a new thing.
So that is the way I kind of suggest it in my blog.
The thing is that we can't wish away the state, we can't wish away the entire public industrial sector.
This government has not been set up on principles like the American government.
This government has been set up on the principle of occupation of the commanding heights of the economy.
It's a complete wrong-headed government.
We can't wish it away, we have to take it and, you know, sort of fix it.
Well, is there a movement to legalize non-socialist political parties at all, or is it just going to be like this for another generation, or what?
Yeah, I must tell you a little bit of the background to this.
When India became independent in 1947, there was a liberal free market, liberal in the classical sense, liberal free market party called the Swatantra Party.
That party had the support of the erstwhile royal princes, you know, the princes of India, and the bankers, the private bankers.
Now, this party did quite well, and it was about the largest party in the opposition up to 1976 or something, when Indira Gandhi, as Prime Minister, took away the privy purses which the royalty used to get, and she simultaneously nationalized all the banks, thereby killing all the money which this party was getting, and this party folded up.
Then she changed the law to make sure that no such party can be reborn.
And these people, for over 15 years now, have filed a case before the High Court of Bombay saying that this law is discriminatory, and we are an old party, we should be allowed to start again.
But for 15 years, the case hasn't come up for hearing.
The man in charge, I mean, he has aged before my eyes.
He was reasonably young-looking when he started off, and now he's a completely old man.
They are not hearing the case.
Well, now, it's interesting...
They are scared of this kind of opposition, you know, really.
And I have seen it.
You talk to poor people in India, you know, in the cities at least.
What do they want?
They want an opportunity to earn money in the market.
They don't want the police to come preying on them, they don't want the problems about doing business which the bureaucracy inflicts upon them.
So this message is a very powerful message for the poor in Indian cities and towns today.
That's why they are scared of it.
They don't want to allow it into the political arena.
Well, now, I mean, there's...
Obviously, there's been major changes, as you said, and over the past 20 years, there's been more and more capitalism, and the lives of more and more people have been improved to the point where, even as you're saying, it's kind of destroying the old notions of capitalist and all that, as people in lower caste get richer than people in higher caste and that kind of thing, it makes all that kind of irrelevant.
So it sort of seems like, you know, maybe it's taking a long time and it's going slowly, but really, libertarianism is on the march in India, and socialism is basically, after failing to provide, capitalism has come in and provided exactly what the socialists were unable to this whole time.
So, there's, I mean, as you're saying, you know, you got, like you just said, you ask the average person, at least in the cities, what they want.
They don't know about libertarianism, but they know that they want to be able to own property and keep what they earn and things like that, even if they've never heard the word before.
And by the way, how do you say libertarianism in Hindi?
Hindi, well, one of my books has been translated, and the term they have used is Udaarvaad.
I really, I'd never heard of that word before, till I saw this translation.
But we say Kulla Bazaar, which means free market.
Yeah.
Or Mukt Vyapar, we say it's free trade.
And economic freedom, which also is a term we try to use with poor people, it means Arctic Swatantrata is the word that is used in Hindi.
That means in your economic life, there is no restriction.
You are independent.
These ideas have a powerful effect on poor people.
Because they're quite tired of the kind of politicians the socialists and others represent.
You know, they always have doles to give out to the poor, that I'll give you this, I'll give you that.
Whereas our message is, hey, we just give you the liberty, you do it on your own.
Because ultimately people know, whatever the socialist politicians might promise, they don't get anything out of it.
They've never received anything in 60 years.
Well now, what's the effect?
Property titles.
Property titles are very important.
And this message has gone down throughout India now.
That, you know, the free market is all about property.
And property is the name of the game.
Every poor rural farmer knows this.
He's hanging on to his land.
He won't let the government acquire it.
And this awareness of property, although it is not recognized in the Constitution.
The government can take your property by the Constitution.
But now there is such an awareness throughout the country that the government cannot simply take property anymore.
We have achieved a lot.
Even though it's basically legal, because the attitude has changed so much, they don't dare, is that it?
Yeah, that is the thing.
We have achieved a lot, you know, in the past 10-15 years on this front.
And on property, what has happened is that the government has made many big mistakes.
They have the power, you know, like you have eminent domain.
They have used this power to give land to private enterprise.
And there have been protests and storms.
In West Bengal, the government even fell.
So, because of these mistakes also, the idea of private property as an inviolable right has gained currency all over India.
Now, talk to me a little bit about the effect of the global financial crisis on India.
It's, I guess, quite apparent that a big part of y'all's economy is based on exports or at least services provided to American businesses like the phone answering centers and that kind of thing.
Has it hurt y'all very much?
Or is India's economy kind of, you know, isolated enough in a sense that it wasn't really brought down by the fall of the West this time around?
Yeah, the latter would be more correct.
You know, it is not entirely coupled with the international economy, especially the financial markets.
So, the effect was not that prolonged in India.
And there has been some recovery.
Well, that's good to know.
But we are anticipating bad times ahead.
Oh, well, I was just going to say, we have a lot of bad times ahead of us here.
I'd be happy to hear that you guys are already on your way back up again from that.
Well, you know, it's like the Green Shoots theory in your country and mine.
They're coming up with these theories.
But nobody really believes them, I think.
Yeah.
But at least the Indian government wasn't invested in a bunch of AAA bonds and housing mortgages and all this garbage, right?
Well, they didn't do all that.
Well, they didn't do all that.
But the money supply is growing at 20 percent.
Let's look at the bad sides.
Money supply is growing at 20 percent.
Inflation is low now, but asset prices are rising in various classes.
So, I got a report from an investment bank, their outlook over the next one year.
It doesn't look too healthy.
It doesn't look too healthy.
Isn't that interesting?
You hear that, everybody?
In India, they're increasing the money supply by 20 percent.
It hasn't led to widespread price inflation across the board.
It's led to asset bubbles.
Yes.
Where the money goes, follow the money.
That's the Indian theory of the business cycle, right?
Yes.
All right, now tell me about what you see as India's relationship with neighboring states, particularly with Afghanistan and Pakistan and China, I guess has been in the news, troop movements and things along the Chinese border.
And in a more general sense, what you see as the future of Indian foreign policy.
Well, let's say one thing.
For 60 years or almost, we've had a more or less autarkic economic policy.
We had, we made enemies with all our neighbors because we didn't want to trade with them.
And now a new world is emerging and we must trade.
Now with China, we have built some highways over land, over the mountains.
But with Pakistan, we don't trade.
With Afghanistan, of course, it's in a mess.
But we never talked the language of trade.
Then, these are what I think, if there was an alternative kind of political formation in the government, its first concern would be trade and peace.
Now, liberalism, classical liberalism, the idea has always been that trade and peace, both internal and external, are what the entire belief system is all about.
And this hasn't happened.
And we are still fighting with this one, fighting with the other one, fighting with the third one.
And we haven't really established a sort of nice trading atmosphere in our very gifted region.
This region has no reason to be poor.
Even Bangladesh in 1600, when the British came to Bengal, it was the richest province in this entire area.
There's no reason for these places to be poor at all.
And it's a sad thing that the establishment politics is all about autarky and fighting and war all the time.
The noises they make are all unsound.
Well, now, I guess, a lot of people would say, well, it's because of Western imperialism, and the people of the third world, their resources are always taken away and given to the West at artificially low prices and the local people get screwed out of it.
Is that not what's going on here?
Well, it's also a hangover of the attitudes of the last 60 years.
Even in Indira Gandhi's time, for example, if anything went wrong in the country, she would allege the workings of a foreign hand.
But a foreign hand is working and spoiling things in our country.
It's the same thing nowadays.
The government can't handle its own country properly and they will talk about China being a threat or Pakistan being a threat.
This is a kind of negative nonsense.
We are a big country.
We should try to be a major player in the area and do things in our own economic interest.
But economic interest gets the go-by and it's all political musclemanship.
And that's the problem here.
I'm talking with Salvik Chakravarti.
He's on the phone from Delhi, India today.
He keeps the blog salvik-antidote.blogspot.com It's S-A-U-V-I-K-antidote.blogspot.com And do you teach school?
What exactly do you do for a living there, Salvik?
Well, I'm just a columnist and writer.
I don't teach anywhere.
And that is also...
We are trying to set up an institute for Austrian economics.
Let's see if we can do it.
Wow, that would be great, huh?
Yeah.
Did you hear that?
All you Austrian economics fans out there in the audience?
They're trying to set something up on the subcontinent there.
Could use your help.
I wrote a piece in newrockwell.com on this.
How the market in India is opening for education and government economics programs.
I think most of the students have realized they're studying rubbish.
So there is a great scope in the free market for a for-profit Austrian economics institute.
That's what I have written.
Yeah, that would be great.
I'm trying to remember who it was.
I read something, I guess, maybe a year or so ago now about somebody reading libertarian stuff translated in Afghanistan.
And, you know, I'm kind of, in a very minor way, I guess, I could associate my libertarian views with those of the insane neoconservatives in that, you know, I really do believe in the Scottish Enlightenment principles and all that stuff.
I see, you know, modern Rothbardian style libertarianism as just, you know, consistency with the Declaration of Independence and all that kind of thing.
And I do think that if there's going to be a future of mankind, it's, you know, without wiping ourselves out with hydrogen bombs and so forth there's going to have to be markets in peace.
Or there's just going to be famine and warfare and eventually a nuclear holocaust or something.
So I'm all about spreading liberty and I think this is how you spread liberty.
Right?
You send the Salvik Chakravartis of the world out there with the principles in hand to teach, to spread ideas.
You don't go overthrowing regime-changing countries and taking over their pipeline routes and whatever.
You spread liberty by example and by, you know, sending pro-liberty propaganda out to the wind.
Which has never been easier, by the way, with the World Wide Web as I'm seeing right here before my eyes looking at your blog.
Yeah.
Well, you see, the problem is that we are not there in the official politics and there the voices are quiet.
We are little in the politics.
We are in the blogs.
We have think tanks.
We have student outreach programs.
We have lots of things.
We're getting a lot of public opinion on our side but when it comes to practical politics our voice is never heard.
You only hear the voice of the other side, the enemy side and that is the real problem.
Yeah, well, welcome to my world, pal.
Peace with Pakistan.
Peace with China.
Open borders, open trade, open movement of goods and people.
You know, let people in poor countries concentrate on production, on exchange, on earning money and let's keep politics in the back burner.
That's what I believe.
Did you see, Shavik, the article, I guess a few weeks ago about how Turkey and Armenia have opened up their border to trade after all this bad blood, after all these years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of the Armenians.
They're beginning to get along again and what better way for Armenians and Turks to start seeing eye to eye than to have a shared profit motive together.
Thank you for telling me that I've missed it but that is exactly what India and Pakistan need to do.
You know, there's lots of things we can trade with each other, lots of businesses can be made but the borders are closed.
There are soldiers guarding everywhere.
They're talking of barbed wire fencing across all our borders.
You know, this barbed wire will cost a fortune.
Alright, so can you talk to me about Kashmir?
Is this the kind of thing that's going to go on forever until people start throwing hydrogen bombs or at least atom bombs at each other or is there a way that this could actually be worked out?
You know, there are peace settlements throughout Africa or trying to have one in Palestine working out these disagreements.
There's got to be some kind of solution to the Kashmir problem short of mass murder, right?
Well, I have been to Srinagar a few years ago on a lecture tour and what I can say is that my impression of that area, that city that's where the entire problem is called Kashmir Valley my instinct is that I am ashamed to be an Indian to see the situation in that city.
It's like we have an occupation army there.
There's a soldier every five yards with a gun.
There are soldiers everywhere.
It's a tourist spot actually.
It's one of the most beautiful places on the earth and it's a hellhole.
I don't believe it.
There must be some solution and there are lots of people who have talked about it.
But the one person who has written a book, recent book published by the Harvard University Press Sumantra Bose he's a political science man from the London School of Economics he says that herbicide is dangerous in Kashmir because the factions in society will kind of break up and he says that society is a homogeneous society and therefore herbicide is a bit dangerous.
So the only way is through talk through you know one part of Kashmir is occupied by Pakistan also so that there is this need to have a multi dimensional approach to peace but we are not getting there at all nowadays none of my sympathies are with the people there that much I can say I have no sympathies with the government of India Well you know it seems kind of pie in the sky or whatever but my idea for all of these situations which I would never want the American government to intervene and force it this way or anything I'm just saying is to get to the point where it's only job is protecting the life and liberty and property of the people who live there and then in that case it won't matter who the government is if their only job is actually protecting people's rights same thing as in Palestine right who cares good administrators of those things yeah with the total state we have problems a total state destroys society doesn't allow society to function and in India we have a total state commanding centralised control even the state governments are not powerful below the state governments one central government that too consistently doing the wrong thing for 60 years can you imagine the mess actually socialism the mess you can see on the ground whether you go to Kashmir or whether you go to New Delhi or Bombay you see the mess you say who's the idiot running this country the first question any foreigner should ask you're on the rise you're 20 years into a brand new revolution in economics there right we are getting there we are getting there 10-20 years give us some time I'm sure we'll change that system around Salvik it's been so great talking to you again yeah thank you Scott everybody that's Salvik Chakravarti he uh well the more your tyranny the more he's an anarchist you can check out his blog at salvik dash antidote dot com that's S-A-U-V-I-K salvik dash antidote dot blogspot dot com libertarian opinion