Manmohan Singh's Moral Policing

The Prime Minister seems to be in a moralising mood again. As he has done before, he has tried to caution businessmen about their wasteful conspicuous consumption. “A measure of sobriety in corporate lifestyle and compensation can also help cut costs and maintain the price level”, Dr Singh told a business lobby group. This is little short of ridiculous. There is no doubt that big businessmen and small businessmen in India all love to spend their money, and often do so in grotesquely ugly ways and very rarely make any real charitable contribution to Indian society. But that is something for padres and priests to admonish them about, not prime ministers. Why was India’s PM addressing a business lobby group at all, it might be asked. The frequency with which the PM, UPA Chair, Finance Minister, Commerce Minister, Opposition Leader, even a former President and many other “top dignitaries” end up facing ig business audiences or talking to media moguls is itself a measure of how powerful such lobbies have become in the country’s politics. Asking businessmen to curb their conspicuous consumption is in any case like preaching abstinence in a brothel. For a politician to be doing the preaching makes it even more incongruous. Yet what may be worse than the PM’s misplaced moralising is the illogic of his inflation-analysis. For him to suggest that if only businessmen cut their personal consumption, the price-level might be maintained, i.e. inflation might fall, reveals that Dr Manmohan Singh has not lost any of his socialist misconceptions from his days as a favoured bureaucrat of Indira Gandhi’s coterie. No Prime Minister, inflation is not being caused by such banalities as businesmen’s conspicuous consumption. The more serious matter to look at is, as has been argued in these pages, the wasteful and indeed conspicuous consumption indulged in by India’s Union and State Government politicians, bureaucrats and military ~ paid for by more and more paper money printing. Intellectual honesty, like charity, needs to begin at home.