Ten years ago, almost to the day, the late I.G. Patel opened his presentation to the Stanford University Conference with a quote from the Reserve Bank of India’s Report on Currency and Finance for the year 2003: “India is no longer an economy of scarcity and shortages: food stocks and foreign exchange shortages and rationing of essential goods and materials are memories of the past. In the macroeconomic and financial spheres inflation has been contained, external debt indicators have improved exchange rate is flexible and the country is free of financial repression…India has become much more integrated with the world economy.”
The RBI’s tone is euphoric, it evokes a sense of freedom from chains, and the fruits of that heady liberation are evident in its laundry list of achievements.
It is also evident in the assertion by IG, as he was called, one of the most distinguished economists and policymakers in post-Independent India, of the liberating effect of reforms on consumer choices. As he comments apropos of the RBI report: “The author of (the report) could have gone much further in the same vein. He could have dwelt, for example, on increased freedom of choice for the ordinary consumer and on the freedom for many from having to kowtow to petty clerks and peons and politicians — not for receiving any favours but getting their legitimate due.”
In the speech available in a volume of his papers,
Freedom of choice
In the discourse on reforms, what India seemed to have done was to abandon the old system of planning and controls that among other regulations, curbed what were seen as basic human urges: freedom for consumption and freedom from a rent-seeking state. By shifting to a market-driven model of growth, India had just carried forward its self-acclaimed aspirations for democracy: the freedom of consumer choice was made as intrinsic to a democratic polity as the freedom of expression.
The identification of consumer choice as a basic democratic right, as the expression of a maturing democracy and as potent as universal franchise, thrilled middle class India supposedly chafing under decades of restricted supplies: clunky goods, ponderous services you could count off a finger.
The economic reforms of the 1990s made the promise of the new millennium that much more meaningful for Indians now endowed with a lot more purchasing power. By 2003, the trajectory of expansion that the RBI applauded and IG endorsed had set the Indian middle class well on its way to mass consumption, a process IG noted with approval.
Black money, democracy
But his hope that rent-seeking would vanish under the harsh sunlight of an open economy proved futile; in fact, growth encouraged the entry of more players vying for public resources; soon turned rent-seeking into a never-ending source for the spread of representative democracy to newer social groupings and for emerging entrepreneurs.
Equally, it proved opportune for the perpetuation of that basic freedom — consumer choice and satiation. IG expressed “unease” at the levels of corruption. But he should have known that regardless of its colour — red or black — in India at least, money “liberates” existing and creates new, choice-hungry consumers. Money is primarily the “agent of inversion” as Marx said in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 . The indicted minister is as much a consumer of goods and services as the call centre operator. What the exchequer loses by way of black money, the market gains through the manufacture of desires and their consummation.
Consumer to Consumption
For market economics, it is not enough to know that a growing band of pleasure-seeking consumers can grease the wheels of production. For, it is entirely possible that some wild-haired radicals might re-read Brave New World and encourage mass boycott of frivolity and the desire to consume irrelevance. So consumption had to be apotheosised. It came via the coupling of Investment and Consumption as the twin drivers of economic growth. Consumption was not just an act of freedom, an intrinsic virtue of open societies but a necessary condition for their sustenance. Shop till you drop, or the economy drops around you.
Choice as necessity
The conversion of freedom into necessity found ready acceptance in the middle class consuming public . You need Samsung Galaxy to communicate, an Audi to reach TGIF to “chill”, Levi’s denims and RayBan shades to hide behind.
For decades the reference point to a good life had been the distant West. The reforms brought America home. In the malls, coffee bars, franchised Irish pubs and the BMW the urban middle class Indian was seduced by the meanings of “brands.”
But we are not simply buying the significance of the “brand” so much as the common ethos that binds them , as Jean Baudrillard pointed out years ago apropos of Western consumption. For, the Indian middle class consumers are turning global in this sense: they are being defined by the codes that bind the significance of the objects all around them: Prestige, privilege, status, modernity. When the farmer on the western outskirts of Pune turns stakeholder in a township, he becomes a victim of a larger web of hegemonic relationships — where urban-based progress is the reigning ideology.
Baudrillard’s critique of Western emptiness is evident in the pathology of the mass consumer. But in India, Consumption’s mindless inter-changeability of goods (here’s to the good life!) has led to a heavy toll on the quality of life; emptying it of meaning, history, and memory certainly. But also filling it with the foul air and garbage of our excesses.
We have become slaves of our individual freedoms.