The ongoing graceless and unedifying tussle between the Congress and the BJP over BR Ambedkar brings to mind the famous line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Read reservations and economics, respectively.

I am reminded of this line because of the extreme absurdity of the ongoing battle over one of the great intellectuals India has produced, Ambedkar. But the Nehruvian Congress denied him his place in history which, ironically, the current rump is seeking to restore.

Not that the BJP and the RSS are very much better. Left to themselves they would, as indeed they have, ignore Ambedkar’s economic analysis as comprehensively as the Congress did. It’s only of late that he has become their mascot, for all the wrong reasons.

The politicians only remember him as a politician, which he became a decade after he had become an economist. As a result all the politicians have completely forgotten Ambedkar the economist. They have rejected the best part.

Unresolved issues

So it’s worth reminding ourselves of his analyses of Indian economic problems 107 years ago. Yes. 107. In a nutshell he identified, hold your breath, unemployment, under-employment and low productivity in the Indian economy as its main challenges. They remain even today, unaddressed and unsolved. Worse, thanks to the Nehruvian policies of the Second and Third Five Year Plans they will remain unsolved.

Ambedkar had a straightforward solution that remains valid even today: invest in agriculture. He had pointed out in 1918 that low wage employment was because of low productivity. That’s where the problem still is.

To be fair, Nehru did try to shift the surplus labour of agriculture to manufacturing but he got the sectoral allocation completely wrong. He directed it into heavy industries that can’t absorb much labour.

Not just that. Ambedkar wanted the private sector to take the lead on industrial investment and most of the state’s investment to be in agriculture. Nehru did the opposite.

So today there are nearly a billion people dependent on agriculture. They have neither employment nor productivity.

Another Ambedkar insight was that it was de-industrialisation, and not small farms, that was responsible for the low productivity of labour. In the 1960s Amartya Sen reached the same conclusion.

Ambedkar also had very clear views on monetary and exchange rate policies. He was against fixed exchange rates. He wanted a slight devaluation of the rupee. Above all, he thought the currency should be fully replaced every ten years to tackle black money. That might have been too drastic, though.

Ahead of his time

He was thus way ahead of his time and perhaps that’s probably why the Congress had no time for him. But it can revive his economic views now and give up, as it did between 1991 and 2014, the leftist prescriptions which it has readopted now. There’s a lot of research available now.

It turned left first in 1956 after Nehru came under severe pressure from his own party for low growth. It turned further leftward when Indira Gandhi became dependent on the Communists for survival during 1969-71. The same thing happened in 2004, when Sonia Gandhi turned the economy into an Indian version of a European welfare state — which is fifty times richer and has fifty times less people.

But what’s Rahul Gandhi’s excuse? His father had no faith in the Left’s economic prescriptions. In fact, he was the first to initiate market reforms. So why has Rahul Gandhi gone back to his mother’s distribution oriented leftist economic stance instead of his great grandfather’s investment oriented one?

The explanation perhaps lies in what the BJP has been doing since 2014. While loudly proclaiming its devotion to Ambedkar, it has been careful to avoid his economic ideas.

Ambedkar would have been appalled at the extent of freebies that the BJP is subsidising the poor in one guise or another.

Indeed, it has been behaving exactly like the Congress. It believes, as strongly as the Nehru-Indira Congress did, that the state alone must control economic resources and their distribution. And in its current avatar, the BJP equates the state with the PMO which is exactly what the Congress did between 1956-2014. Ambedkar would have been seriously annoyed. So neither party has any right to adopt Ambedkar as its guiding force.

Politics, of course, is a different matter. It doesn’t require any intellect, just the will and ability or cunning to wear down the opposition by any and all divisive means available. That’s what we are witnessing now, with poor Ambedkar caught in the middle.

Ambedkar wanted the private sector to take the lead on industrial investment and most of the state’s investment to be in agriculture. Nehru did the opposite