Demonetisation is not a radical change, says Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar

Every week, Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar has offered a refreshingly different take on the India story, post liberalisation.

His book, 'From PV Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi: 25 years of Swaminomics', is a compilation of his columns over the years.

Excerpts from a conversation with economist Surjit Bhalla at the Times Litfest:

Is your contrarianism because of instinct or because you reached a result?
I started being a contrarian because if I said what everybody else was saying, who would read me?
When we started in the 1970s, I was a socialist type. Few of us who could see the writing on the wall were honest enough to change our minds by the 1980s.

When did you stop being a socialist?
Earlier, the idea was that businessmen were greasy fellows and it was much better to have politicians. Remember, politicians had won us independence.

By late 1970s, it had become clear we had moved from greasy businessmen to greasy politicians.

It became clear other countries like South Korea were growing twice as fast. Something was dreadfully wrong. None of our planning documents reported about productivity. In the long run productivity is almost everything.

You require relentless competition. And the public sector has no competition in it.

Your praise for the judiciary as an institution has been controversial.
Judiciary is a mixed bag. If I had to reform one thing, it would be the police-judicial system. Between the two of them, they have ensured nothing happens to anybody who is influential. The only arrests that take place are arbitrary arrests for various reasons. On the other hand, the system has been successful in writ jurisdiction. You can get arbitrary actions stayed. So rule of law comes in.

Even while the judicial process is slow, writ works extremely well. The judiciary has overstepped and got into large number of areas, which is partly a good thing and partly bad.

What happens when you get things wrong?
People who lack confidence have great difficulty in admitting they are wrong. If you are attempting to write a column, a topic comes up 24 hours before you write it, we make mistakes. I have got things gloriously wrong.

On demonetisation, would you change your assessment of Narendra Modi and say he is a radical reformer?
First, demonetisation is not a radical change. It has been tried before; it did not make very much of a difference. As far as generation of fresh black money is concerned, that depends on how easy it is to not pay income-tax. That requires a different set of reforms altogether.