8 ISSUES AND INSIGHTS MUMBAI | 20 JULY 2019 > down shelters, driving thousands of jobless men into the streets where some of them can A welfare state born in India still be seen, with their squalid bedclothes 50 years of and begging placards. “Today Labour are vot- How William Beveridge’s Bakargunje legacy is safe in modern Britain ing to increase benefits by more than work- ers’ wages”, a Tory poster mocked before the socialism north Calcutta. But she fell out with Keshub London’s fashionable St John’s Wood in a fur 2015 election. The Tories won by promising Chandra Sen, married Beveridge and became coat, to be driven in his chauffeur-driven to cut welfare by £12 billion and balancing t is perhaps easy for a surprisingly fierce opponent of the Ilbert Rolls to the employment exchange where he the books. “Fairness”, said George Osborne us today, in a coun- Bill establishing judicial parity between registered as unemployed. It was a legal who became David Cameron’s chancellor of I try that has been Indian and European judges. necessity for someone who was later convict- the exchequer, is “about being fair to the per- socialist since inde- Thereby hangs another tale of karmic ed of swindling a well-known insurance com- son who leaves home every morning to go pendence — and coincidence. When he returned to India in pany out of millions of pounds. out to work and sees their neighbour still which, in spite of a 1871, the Ilbert Bill’s author-to-be, my great- Great stories did the rounds in those days. asleep, living a life on benefits”. quarter century of liber- grandfather, Behari Lal Gupta, the second One was of a man who collected disability ben- But it would be political suicide to try to alisation, seems to be Indian in the ICS, was posted as assistant efits while competing successfully in body- abolish the welfare state. As Labour party growing more socialist magistrate and collector under the senior building contests. Another man — someone I leader, Ed Miliband, promised to crack down every year — to imagine Beveridge in Bakargunje near Dhaka. came upon as a reporter — maintained his on migrants receiving benefits but didn’t sur- the alternative possibil- WHERE MONEY TALKS Beveridge was full of praise for young Gupta, family in comfort on the allowance for an vive long enough to prove his courage. When ities that existed 50 SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY but I mustn’t forget a more recent link with alleged back injury many years earlier. A Osborne did introduce cuts, Labour MPs TICKER years ago, as we nation- those heroic personalities, the younger woman with a pair of delicately trimmed chose to abstain rather than oppose them. alised the banks. We Beveridge this time. My old friend Gritta Weil Pekes said, “It’s not worth my while working” However, a bunch of left-wing backbenchers MIHIR SHARMA know, in retrospect, that uspended between many uncertainties was his secretary in Oxford during World War as she collected thousands of pounds. No won- ignored the whip and voted against the cuts. India was condemned and nervously awaiting a new govern- II (before joining The Observer newspaper der Peter Lilley, the Tory welfare secretary in One of them, John McDonnell, declared dra- to increasing statism, disruption, and authoritarianism in the S ment in a matter of days, Britain can still where she mentored me) and typed out 1992, adapted the libretto of a Gilbert and matically he would “swim through vomit” to years after 1969 — and that Indira Gandhi’s style of inner- be proud of one prized asset — the welfare William Beveridge’s massive Social Sullivan musical to tell the party conference, vote against the cuts; another, Jeremy party autocracy, her hawkishness, and her left-wing populism state that makes it the world’s envy. Not many Insurance and Allied Services report that is “I’ve got a little list/ Of benefit offenders who Corbyn, the party leader could in theory suc- would eclipse her father’s social-democratic liberalism as the know, however, that it was born — literally so regarded as the blueprint for Clement I’ll soon be rooting out/ And who never would ceed Theresa May as prime minister. preferred archetype for Indian political leadership. — in India. Attlee’s welfare state. be missed.” With the British Social Attitudes Survey But it is easy to imagine how it could have turned out William, Lord Beveridge, its creator, was People are careful not to mention the Tory paternalism was never sympathetic predicting that concern over growing pover- differently. What in my book Restart I called “India’s great the son of Henry Beveridge of the Bengal question mark that may hang over its future to welfare. An old tale had the Tories object- ty, no doubt fuelled by anxiety over Brexit, leap left” was by no means a pre-ordained outcome. cadre of the Indian Civil Service, a formida- in post-Brexit Britain. Nor does anyone ing that the working classes would use bath is rising, the controversial Corbyn can even The real reason that the banks had to go was political: ble historian and Persian scholar whose sym- breathe a word about Afro-Asians grabbing tubs in state housing to store coal. They com- claim to have acted astutely. He can cite the the nature of Indira Gandhi’s rivals in the Congress. Men pathy for Indian nationalists cost him the the lion’s share of benefits. Yet the unforget- plained of a Pakistani immigrant claiming finding that 56 per cent of the people think like her finance minister, Morarji Desai, were by conviction judgeship he hoped for. His scholarly wife, table image of princely abuse from my allowances for two wives, one in Karachi and that cutting benefits “would damage too and background sympathetic to India’s embattled capitalists; Annette Akroyd, came to India to further younger days is of the Sri Lankan financier, the other with him in the English Midlands. many people’s lives”. William Beveridge’s for the Indira bloc in the Congress, it seemed that there was female education and ran a girls’ school in Emil Savundra, leaving his lavish house in Margaret Thatcher cut benefits and closed Bakargunje legacy is safe in modern Britain. a dangerous nexus of support and financing that linked the Syndicate, the old corporate houses, and the banks those houses seemingly controlled. LUNCH WITH BS > AISHA DE SEQUEIRA | CO-COUNTRY HEAD | MORGAN STANLEY INDIA Many in the Syndicate were quite clear about where they stood on economic policy. The growth of the Nehru years had dissipated in the mid 1960s, chased away by the twin spectres of famine and war. The public sector, appropriating an ever greater share of national resources, was no longer above criticism. So it was at the fateful 72nd Congress session in 1969, at Life lessons from chess which the party’s president, S Nijalingappa, was scathing about the public sector: “We must see that big industries are not established in the public sector without due regard The investment banker talks to Pavan Lall about the value of pump that diffused targeted ther- to demand and the capacity to produce... I am told that apy that was more efficacious some industries in the public sector are so badly managed reputation, the power of inner strength, and why business is than normal chemotherapy. She that the full capacity is not utilised and that they are run was determined she would not let on very unscientific methods. I believe that industries, by never just about the deal the disease define her, de whomsoever established, should be encouraged. If private Sequeira tells me taking a bite of industries misbehaved or made undue profits they can orry, I’m running 10 minutes steeped in Catholicism, has 40 and learned that a banker’s job her fish. both be punished and controlled through fiscal measures.” late,” the message flashes on cousins and speaks fluent Konkani was beyond just the product. In the months that followed, He then produced a much-quoted summary of the dangers S my handphone. Its sender, that she is the quintessential Goa “You have to grow the business, she took time off when she needed of the licence-permit raj: “Where there are controls and licens- Aisha de Sequeira, who arrived from girl. It’s also lineage. Her grandfa- expand the pie and connect treatment but continued work- ing, there is always corruption — and the sooner we do away New York City around a decade ago ther, Jack de Sequeira, was president with the clients for the long ing, calling clients, stakehold- with licensing and controls, the better it will be.” When Indira to run Morgan Stanley, has raised of the United Goans Party. Her term because it’s never about a ers and friends, and updat- Gandhi replied to her party president’s speech, the papers some $20 billion of capital for clients father Erasmo de Sequeira owned one-off deal,” she says. Along ing them on her treatment noted that she repeatedly stressed the need for greater state in India and provided advisory serv- the local Coca-Cola bottling plant the way, clients — like status. “A lot of people control and for socialism, while Nijalingappa had not used ices for over $70 billion in M&A and was also a member of PepsiCo’s former CEO Indra asked ‘you’re a good per- the word “socialism anywhere in his 6,000-word address”. deals. Those include investments by Parliament. De Sequeira went to Nooyi — became lifelong men- son Aisha, why you’?”.