Lord Desai obituary

The Guardian

9 hours ago

An economist with a strong grasp of politics, Meghnad Desai, who has died aged 85, put telling the truth ahead of the pursuit of personal ambition. His work as professor at the London School of Economics had the wide perspective that came from his Indian heritage, and his interest in Labour politics led to him becoming an active member of the House of Lords.
The first of his books, Marxian Economic Theory, was published in 1973. I was one of his many students who benefited from the use of his book Applied Econometrics (1976). Testing Monetarism (1981) predicted the demise of the money-supply targeting that was then being pursued by Margaret Thatcher's government.
Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (2002) contains perhaps his best-known contribution to the discipline. He asserted that Karl Marx had been misunderstood: he never said that capitalism was going to collapse anytime soon. On Meghnad's reading, Marx expected capitalism to continue until it had exhausted its productive potential, which given globalisation, could take a very long time.
Appointed to the Lords by Neil Kinnock in 1991, he became a frontbench economics spokesman, but was sacked three years later by John Smith when a theoretical speculation of his ran counter to Labour's need for a presentable tax policy. Meghnad backed a proposal to widen the scope of the VAT net to include food and children's clothing. This view was subsequently supported in 2010 by Sir James Mirrlees' review for the Institute for Fiscal Studies as to how a more rational tax system could operate, but it was not a political headline that Labour was looking for in 1994.
More presciently, he pointed out in early August 2022 that if Liz Truss were elected as Conservative leader and so the new prime minister, which she was a month later, then she would crash the pound.
On the international stage, Meghnad championed a move away from a narrow focus on material progress in measuring development, and proposed instead a human development index. This found its way into the human development reports produced by the UN.
With particular regard to India, Meghnad was an early proponent of, and an optimist about, the market-based reforms that were first introduced in 1991 and were to mark a turning point for Indian economic growth. In a tribute at the time of his deah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called him a 'distinguished thinker and reformer'.
His later writings included Nehru's Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India (2004), on the film star who brought method acting to Indian cinema; Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror (2006), distinguishing between the religion and the militant mindset; and The Rediscovery of India (2011), covering the last 500 years of the region's history. He turned his hand to fiction too, with Dead on Time (2009), featuring a British prime minister, and an autobiography, Rebellious Lord (2020).
He published more than 200 articles in academic journals and books, and was co-editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics from 1984 to 1991.
In British political life, he was chairman of the Islington South and Finsbury Labour party between 1986 and 1992; the constituency's MP was Chris Smith. When in 2020 Meghnad felt that the Labour party had not done enough to counter antisemitism, he became a non-affliated peer, and then, in 2023, a crossbencher.
Born in what is now Varodara, in Gujarat state, Meghnad was the son of Mandakini and Jagdhishchandra Desai, a civil servant. He started secondary school at the age of seven and matriculated at 14. Then he was educated at the University of Bombay and subsequently won a scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his PhD at the age of 23 under the supervision of the Nobel laureate Lawrence Klein.
After a short spell at the University of California, Berkeley, he arrived as a lecturer at the LSE in 1965, becoming professor in 1983 and emeritus in 2003, and president of the Association of University Teachers in Economics (1987-90). At the LSE he was head of the Development Studies Institute (1990-95), and founded and headed the Centre for the Study of Global Governance (1992-2003).
In 1970, he married Gail Wilson, a lecturer at the LSE. They had three children, Tanvi, Nuala and Sven.
The editor of his book on Dilip Kumar was Kishwar Ahluwalia. After his first marriage ended in divorce, he married Kishwar in 2004, and his family then expanded to include her three children, Gaurav, Mallika and Priyanka.
In 2008, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian honour awarded by India.
Six years later, Meghnad founded the Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust, and as chair of the trustees, he raised money and worked with the UK government to help erect the statue in Parliament Square in 2015. He also supported Kishwar in her role as chair of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, the NGO responsible for creating and running the Partition Museum, which opened in Amritsar in 2017.
Meghnad's kindness and generosity were evident when the economics internship I had been offered at a government department in 1979 fell victim to spending cuts by the incoming Thatcher government. He quickly found money to offer me a research assistant post, and encouraged many people early in their careers. His open-mindedness showed in his insistence, when I was an undergraduate, that I read widely, including John Rawls, the advocate of 'justice as fairness'.
He is survived by Kishwar, his children and four grandchildren, Om, Ira, Chloe and Kiko.
Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Lord Desai, economist, born 10 July 1940; died 29 July 2025