August 4, 2013.

The Fight Over India's Future

"Stand easy!" barked the instructress, a little more genially.

Indian politics isn't generally known for its intellectual bent, so it was a curious sight last week when two Ivy League professors were thrust into the political limelight here. Harvard's Amartya Sen and Columbia's Jagdish Bhagwati are two of India's most eminent economists. Mr. Sen is a Nobel laureate and former master of Trinity College, Cambridge; Mr Bhagwati is a much-decorated scholar of international trade. Both are highly respected, both have recently published books on Indian development----and both have been engaged in a long-simmering feud.

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself----that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become conscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.

The origins of the feud are unclear. Messrs. Sen and Bhagwati attended Cambridge together in the 1950s; they later taught at the same university in New Delhi. Rumors of bad blood have circulated for years, and their work has placed them in very different ideological camps. Mr. Bhagwati is known as an advocate for free trade and market liberalization as a means of achieving rapid growth. Mr. Sen has spoken out against what he calls "market fundamentalism"; his approach to development argues that economic growth must be accompanied by attention to social "capabilities" like health, education and gender rights.

The instructress had called them to attention again. "And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!" she said enthusiastically. "Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two!..."

Mr. Bhagwati's disdain for Mr. Sen's views is evident in his latest book, "Why Growth Matters," written with Arvind Panagariya. Last month, their differences spilled onto the letters page of the Economist, when Messrs. Bhagwati and Panagariya, responding to a review of Mr. Sen's new book, "India: An Uncertain Glory" (written with Jean Dreze), accused Mr. Sen of paying only "lip service" to economic growth and instead championing what they called "redistribution." Mr. Sen responded in the next issue, complaining about an "outrageous distortion" and arguing that he has always supported growth, while adding that investments in social indicators are essential to fostering growth.