31-07-2025
Meghnad Desai, an economist of many parts
I got to know Meghnad Desai well over the last two decades, and especially over the last 10 years. He had been unwell for some time, but his mind was as acute and incisive as ever. It was a life well lived, and I want to celebrate my good fortune of having known him 'closely' over the last decade. In many discussions (arguments) between friends, Meghnad was never at a loss for insight. Gentleness marked his approach to people — but not towards bad ideas.
I had the occasion to visit him often at the House of Lords, dining and even being allowed to sit in on the debates. No visit to London was complete without a joint meal with Meghnad. We had a lot in common — cricket, economics and the difficulty of economic reforms in India, and a passionate interest in politics and films (and he has many books on politics, and one book on films — Nehru's Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India).
His greatest accomplishment is his book The Rediscovery of India. It starts with Vasco da Gama and extends to the end of the UPA's first term. His views on the destructive economic policies of the Congress party, Jawaharlal Nehru to Sonia Gandhi, anticipated what is now conventional wisdom.
Meghnad was kind, a gentle and modest soul, with a lot to be immodest about. In many ways, he had no equal. He obtained his PhD at the age of 23, the youngest Indian to do so, along with K N Raj. While trained as an econometrician, he was everywhere in thought. His well-known works include a considerable amount on Marxian economics, including Marxian Economic Theory, a book that compares and contrasts Marxian economics with their classical and neoclassical avatars. Just so that nobody can typecast him, there are his treatises on the pricing of tin in the world market, problems with Phillips curve, history of economic thought, on Islam (Rethinking Islamism), The Poverty of Political Economy, on globalisation, and climate change. I could not find a single important economic or political economy topic that he has not written expertly on — with facts, figures, and dispassionate analysis.
Sir David Hendry, a world-renowned econometrician at LSE, wrote in Arguing about the World – The Work and Legacy of Meghnad Desai (2011): 'In an era when specialisation has been a dominant force, his many and diverse contributions are a welcome beacon of genuine multi-disciplinarity, and a leading indicator of a recent recognition of the benefits of drawing on a range of skills and knowledge.'
His independence of thought and action are illustrated by several acts of commission. He was at LSE, a university founded on the principles of Fabian socialism, but was extremely critical of the practice of socialism in England, and elsewhere. He was made a member of the House of Lords by the Labour Party, but resigned over its acts of racism and antisemitism. He was a 19th-century liberal renaissance individual — captivated by ideas, their origins, consequences, and remedies. He possessed, in abundance, both intellectual integrity and rigor in thought. He was a classical political economist, though his training and early career was, for lack of a better word, as a quantitative economist. From a very early age (try 23!) he was at the forefront of econometric modelling. He obtained his PhD under the guidance of Lawrence Klein, a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in macro-modelling.
His short articles for Elara Global Research summarised the economic and political scene in India, and did so as a one-handed political economist. Clear, concise, dispassionate in analysis but deeply passionate about the issues.
As a young kid, I often heard a band with a funeral procession. I was told that when an old person passes away (Meghnad was 85), it is a celebration for a life well-lived. I will drink to that. Especially to the fact that Meghnad held himself up to the highest sense of intellectual integrity, a rare individual in a polarised world.
Bhalla is chairperson of the Technical Expert Group for the first official Household Income Survey for India
