Arvind Panagariya, professor of economics at Columbia University, and Chairman of India’s 15th Finance Commission, has written a brilliant book titled The Nehru Development Model: History and Its Lasting Impact (2024) in which he laments the inorganic Nehruvian public sector-led economy development model imposed upon the country soon after independence. Over 345-pages, Prof. Panagariya proves beyond all doubt that Nehru’s project to transform newly independent India into a Soviet-style socialist republic was ill-conceived and doomed to failure.

The burden of Panagariya’s book is that even six decades after Nehru and half a century after Nehru’s super-socialist daughter Indira Nehru-Gandhi drove the nation to the edge of bankruptcy, the socialism mindset dominates the establishment — bureaucracy, academy, judiciary and the media. However Panagariya’s criticism of the media — spread over several pages — for failing to stand up to poverty-distribution socialism, needs to be contested. His study of the media is restricted to one publication, Times of India. According to the good professor, the sole journalist who critiqued Nehruvian socialism was ToI’s Swaminathan Aiyar and mildly, Prem Shankar Jha.

Clearly holed up in his American ivory tower, the good professor is ignorant about the stringent criticism of neta-babu licence-permit-quota raj by Business India and BusinessWorld — India’s first business magazines. For over a decade starting 1978, these two fortnightly publications panned the pathetic performance of public sector enterprises and rehabilitated routinely vilified pioneer industrialists such as G.D. Birla, JRD Tata, S.L. Kirloskar, Rahul Bajaj as business heroes who had kept their tax-paying and employment generating enterprises afloat despite every discouragement from the socialism enamoured neta-babu brotherhood.

It was these magazines — Narasimha Rao was reportedly a reader — that led the charge against Nehruvian socialism which was half, not entirely, banished in 1991. But with typical academic myopia, Panagariya contends that books written once in a quinquennium and establishment newspapers that endorsed socialism for decades before u-turning, prompted liberalisation in 1991. Dear Professor, give credit — even a little — where it’s due.