Much has been written recently on the various contributions that the late Dr. K.N. Raj made to India’s development. He was not only the architect of the First Five Year Plan, but the architect of India’s economic policy “thought” if that word could be used to describe a domain.
The 1950s were heady days. It was an open intellectual space and scholars and public figures considered and debated the various ideologies that had been spinning in their heads and in the other places, before the people of India actually became free. In those heady days, Raj as a colleague, collaborator, associate of Pandit Nehru and his intellectual spirit, set the platform for debate.Raj was essentially a debater — not quite the same as what Amartya Sen calls the Argumentative Indian. No one who ever met him would not have noticed the exuberance, the deeply Malayali loud laughter of Raj. His eyes, voice and body language were one of eagerness to know, to connect and to argue.My privilege was that between 1963 when I joined Miranda House as a teacher in the Economics Department and 1966 when I married and settled down in Delhi, I was a kind of hanger on at the Raj household in Probyn Road. There were many like me, being nurtured by Sarasamma and Raj, in that flat. Most of the time after college, I would walk for lunch to their house, then again after college. In the evening, there would be a convergence of friends in Raj’s house. The Sens, Chakravartys, P.N. Dhar, and an endless number of others, often interrupted by those “outsiders”, the visitors from New Delhi. The conversation was always on the political economy, what was happening in New Delhi, namely government and then bigger issues like Indo-Pak relations. So that had been my privilege that I could be on the fringe of these discussions.With this personality and with this curiosity to identify what could be called the most relevant or appropriate political philosophy for countries like India, Raj had made many friends across the countries of South Asia. One of his dearest friends was Nurul Islam who then became senior official in Food and Agricultural Organisation, Rome. They were both deeply interested in the agricultural economy.Links with Pakistan came as a natural corollary to Raj’s enthusiasm for countries of the South. Thus, when the Delhi School of Economics opened a new Centre for Advanced Studies, the agenda in the first few years was Pakistan and Pakistan’s economy. I joined the Centre for Advanced Studies as a Senior UGC Fellow and undertook the study of the dispute over the Indus Rivers. After two years of research and interviews with those who had been involved from the Indian side, I wrote a paper called the “Politics of Aid” as indeed, like many of the current deals, much of the discussion and divisive ideas were determined by the consultants from abroad who were looking for their piece of cake. Raj was my supervisor for this paper and recommended it for publication. As every body knows, Raj was one of the most loved students of Prof. Joan Robinson who perceived Raj and his family as her extended family and stayed with them. Austin Robinson as president of the International Economic Association along with Raj and Nurul then convened a conference on the economies of India and Pakistan. This conference was held in Colombo and Raj took two of us from the Delhi School of Economics, Elizabeth Krishna and myself as rapporteurs. The conference once again emphasised Raj’s idealism — he was indeed an idealist and desired to change the world. If India and Pakistan’s economies could come together through knowledge and institutional links then much of the agony that was being experienced by these two countries could be resolved. A message and a strum that we hear today too.Every travel of Raj, whether in Africa, Latin America, China, Washington or Bangkok, brought with it knowledge for all of us to chew over, learn. A teacher for all times.His idealism about the former colonies getting free from that kind of influence extended itself to other South continents too. Wherever he went, he would get totally involved as, for example, through his visits to the African continent and Latin America.Coming back from Brazil, he taught all of us about the Brazilian economy which were two parallel economies, one for the elites for whom certain types of goods have to be produced and they were their consumers. There was one cycle of consumer production at the top. Then, there was the production at the lower end of the economy for the consumers at that end. He brought back this information for all of us as an alert, an early warning on what can happen if we did not make our development and production plans basically speak to the masses.We were the fortunate ones.
Devaki Jain