By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
New Delhi : Voting for the growth of businesses in India, C. Rangarajan, who heads Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s economic advisory council, has said the interest of the business class in India must be protected at all cost.
“The legitimate interest of the business class must be protected,” Rangarajan said releasing a book, “Business and Polity” by D.N. Ghosh, chairman of ICRA (Investment and Credit Rating Agency of India) and the managing trustee of the Sameeksha Trust which runs the Economic and Political Weekly, late Friday evening here.
“We cannot do anything that can be dangerous to the spirit of innovation and enterprise. The main elements of capitalism will remain,” he added.
“Nothing in this world is totally good. Free trade has its own limitation. The unipolar world did not last long,” Rangarajan said.
“But it has given rise to most interesting situation – like the financial crisis – and it has weakened one of the most powerful countries like the US,” he added.
The chairman of the prime minister’s economic advisory council drew situations out of Ghosh’s book to comment on the state of the world.
He said the current economic upheavals have made it clear that “no one country can impose its will on another country even in terms of good ideas”.
Rangarajan said “developing countries were growing at a faster rate”. “Freedom and democracy will now take roots in many countries.”
Ghosh’s book spans 3,000 years of the history of ties between business and polity worldwide – and how the two have helped each other flourish in the evolving city states across the world.
The author said the idea for the book germinated after reading “some of the greatest business deals in 16th century Europe”.
“It was a series of serendipities that happened,” he said. And the inspirations were grounded in historical events – the way purse-strings were controlled in the great medieval European empires.
“During the last two decades of the 20th century, the world went through tumultuous changes,” Ghosh said.
“The global landscape was changing dramatically – the Berlin Wall was torn down, the mighty Soviet Union collapsed and China was taking the capitalist road to economic growth,” he said.
“It was in all appearances a victory for the market capitalism and for the policies that the world’s most prosperous and powerful country stood for,” he added.
Transnational corporations became the most visible instruments for the propagation of the capitalist message all across the globe.
“Market spirit came to be universally idealised and globalisation came to acquire a kind of quasi-religious sanctity,” he said.
Ghosh said the tempest of globalisation travelled over nations to sweep across India as well.
“It stirred in its wake spirited debates over how our policies and institutions could be restructured so that maximum benefit could be drawn from the changing global environment,” he said.
And underlying this theme was the premise that if an open and liberal market economy and good policies and good institutions associated with it were to be adopted and developed “politics must learn to keep its hands off business, restricting its role to ensuring rule of law and putting in place a social safety net”, he added.
The book has been published by Sage India.