Ashok Mitra (1928 – 2018) is among the most well-known economists of his time in India, but in an irony he would have loved, not really for his economic writings. An entire generation of readers who had nothing to do with economics remember him for his journalistic writings ranging from Calcutta Diary¹ to his later columns in The Telegraph. Mitra was also among the tallest bilingual intellectuals in the country. He was a regular columnist in Bengali newspapers and publications and was conferred a Sahitya Academy award for his collection of Bengali essays.  Literature and poetry, in many ways, were Mitra’s first love from the days of his early school and college education in Dhaka, where he was born. Of course, he was also well known among a lot of poor, even illiterate voters in West Bengal where he contested elections as a candidate of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPI(M) in the 1970s and 1980s.

Make no mistake, Mitra was not just a polemicist or a politician. He finished his PhD in economics with Jan Tinbergen, the first winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and one of the founding fathers of the discipline of econometrics. His PhD was preceded by an undergraduate degree in economics in the University of Calcutta and a masters in Banaras Hindu University. He taught economics in a whole lot of places ranging from Lucknow University, Delhi School of Economics, Indian Institute of Management Kolkata, Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, and Economic Development Institute in Washington DC. Mitra was the youngest person to head the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) and serve as the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India during Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. He also served as the finance minister of West Bengal when the CPI(M)-led Left Front captured power in the state in 1977. 

Despite having such a successful and illustrious career, Ashok Mitra’s attitude towards economics ranged from an almost childlike curiosity to absolute disdain in his later years. At the root of both of these emotions was the unique mix of his intellectual integrity and humility.

“I came to acquire something like a new passion: to understand who the actual movers of the Indian economic system were, how they operated as they did, and why,” he wrote in his autobiography A Prattler’s Tale: Bengal Marxism, Governance describing his modus-operandi as the chairman of the CACP. For someone heading one of the most important economic policy bodies of the government, this was as far away from grandstanding as an economist could get.

It was the mix of this intellectual curiosity with a political mind which was behind Mitra’s biggest contribution to India’s economic discourse: his work on terms of trade across sectors and classes and its inseparable link with political economy. While the main argument has been published in his 1977 cult classic Terms of Trade and Class Relations: An essay in Political Economy this was an issue which pretty much drove Mitra’s economic pursuits in almost all his economic thinking.

Mitra’s basic argument in his work on terms of trade was simple and yet profound. An economy’s fortunes are a result of negotiations between various sectors and classes within sectors and therefore necessarily linked to their political strength or lack of it. While the argument has been the bedrock of many Marxist analyses and debates, especially in socialist economies², Mitra improvised it to describe the contradictions between democracy and capitalism in the Indian economy at a critical juncture in its history, namely, the period of green revolution. The green revolution was a strategy to safeguard India’s self-sufficiency in food production where the Indian state introduced high-yielding varieties of key crops along with use of chemical fertilisers to give a boost to production. To make sure that farmers adopted these methods, they were offered both input subsidies and price support. The resource deployment in this entire strategy, however, was regionally skewed, largely a function of areas which had assured irrigation networks.

Mitra’s analysis led him to conclude that the rich peasantry had made undue gains from state subsidies and other benefits in the necessary quest of achieving food self-sufficiency. This was proving to be inimical to the interests of both the poor, who were net buyers of food, and to the economy as a whole, which was diverting scarce resources towards an influential political class and getting inflation and inequality in return.

That his arguments did not curry favour with his ideological fellow travellers including senior communist leaders caused him disappointment but did not stop him from speaking his mind. Mitra writes in his autobiography: 

“In the summer of 1967, when E.M.S. (Namboodiripad) was back as the chief minister of Kerala. He vigorously supported the Punjab chief minister’s proposal to increase the procurement price of wheat by a substantial amount. I met him in Trivandrum and tried to argue as follows: Not a grain of wheat is grown in Kerala. You have to import a lakh tonnes of wheat from Punjab and Haryana every year. If the price of wheat is increased by hundred rupees per quintal, you will gift away a hundred crore rupees annually from Kerala to the rich peasantry of Punjab and Haryana.” 

His warning to the left about regional inequalities in Indian agriculture and its political consequences are relevant even today.

Pointing out the regional and class differentiation in the economic exchange between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors was not the only area where Mitra was, in left parlance, ​“politically incorrect”. As the finance minister of the Left Front government in West Bengal, Mitra often found himself fighting a lonely battle for fiscal prudence despite his wider political ideological struggle to achieve greater equality in India’s fiscal federalism or his critique of fiscal conservatism as embedded in structural adjustment programmes. His memoirs capture a constant dilemma and struggle resulting from having limited financial means to cater to never-ending demands from his own governments, not just in terms of quantity but also quality of spending. “…if the overall expenditure exceeded overall budgetary allocations, the outcome would be a crisis. If the excess in expenditure were in every instance on account of developmental activities, there would be relatively less cause for worry. But that was hardly the ground reality”, Mitra writes in his memoirs, in many ways, sounding a fiscal alarm well ahead of his times.

True to Mitra’s style, economics was not the only area of disagreement he had with his fellow communists when it came to running the state. He was publicly critical of the nepotism the communists were indulging in when it came to appointments in the public education system and also made arguments in favour of things such as differential fee structures which were seen in conflict with the established wisdom and populist notions of running a left government. These ideological conflicts led Mitra to exit from the Left Front government, and turned him into one of its most upright yet fraternal critiques despite a lifelong affinity to the cause of the left in both West Bengal and outside.

As the finance minister of a state which had a political adversary in power at the centre, Mitra was among the pioneers of the struggle for equality in India’s fiscal federalism. He raised the demand for greater say of states in the making of the Finance Commission and played a key role in mobilising other opposition parties for the cause. This struggle also made him realise the importance of engaging with India’s Constitution rather than being confined to economics, so much so that he started carrying a pocket edition of the Constitution in his pocket. This is yet again an important lesson in political economy underlining the need for not just a partisan but also an institutional engagement with the structure and organs of the state. 

Mitra’s ability to critically yet objectively analyse an economic problem was what made him India’s best home-grown Marxist economist. His economic methods can be best captured by borrowing from his obituary of American economist Wolf Isaac Ladejinsky, who was among the key architects of land reforms in post-war Japan under American occupation. ​“He was no ideologue but he was not afraid of ideology either”, Mitra wrote in the obituary for his friend in the Economic and Political Weekly, parts of which were censored as it was published during the Emergency.

What is one to make of Mitra’s economics today? Times have changed and so has the Indian economy. A lot of his comments about private capital and its relevance for India’s onward economic march can appear irrelevant if not completely wrong today. Is his economic brilliance a relic of the past?

Mitra was not the type to be tied to past economic views as dogma. He was aware that capitalism and with it the political economy of both India and the world were changing and called for a rethinking of economic and political faultlines. These changes however did not make the fundamental questions of political economy redundant, he always argued. 

Luckily for us, he got an opportunity to articulate these thoughts in a new introduction he wrote for a reprint of Terms and Trade and Class Relations in 2004. The essay, worth reading in full along with the book, while reiterating the importance of bringing back a classical political economy approach in economic analysis also talks about the changes which liberalisation has brought in the terms of trade. Some of the points made in the introduction continue to be worth deep engagement. For example, he describes outsourcing as a ​“curious concatenation of events”, where ​“a section of labour from a poor country enters into an arrangement with capital in a rich Western country to render damage to the trade union movement in both countries”.

One can always agree and disagree with Ashok Mitra’s views. As a self-proclaimed ​“communist and not a gentleman” Mitra himself was never afraid of speaking his mind. But if there is one thing students of economics can learn from Ashok Mitra’s approach to the discipline it would be to keep their intellectual quest relevant and original rather than make it pointless and mundane behind a veil of sophisticated methods. Mitra’s warning to his younger peers in economics by using an analogy from poetry is worth reproducing in detail in lieu of a conclusion:

Much in the manner of economists the poets too are emersed (sic) in a world of their own…The other day, I heard a horrifying story, in a special issue of a well-known journal, the first half of poet A’s poem had been spliced with the second half of poet B’s offering, and again, poet B’s initial stanzas had been added to poet A’s opening stanzas. Neither poet, however, had discovered the blunder for quite some time. This might be a mere fable, or a wild exaggeration of what actually happened. But one cannot disregard its symbolism: the poets have lost their separate voices and become echoes of each other. 

About the author

Roshan Kishore is the Data & Political Economy Editor at the Hindustan Times. He received his MPhil in economics from Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His weekly opinion column in Hindustan Times, echoing Ashok Mitra, is titled Terms of Trade.