Thiruvananthapuram: A communist government in Kerala hiring a Harvard economist to advise it may seem as bizarre as Keralites swapping their breakfast menu of dosa (a pancake made of rice batter) and tea with burger and coke.
But that is just what the Left Democratic Front ministry led by Pinarayi Vijayan has opted to do, and is faced with strong political headwinds over the same.
Earlier this month, the Communist Party of India - Marxist government decided to have Harvard professor Gita Gopinath, who has family roots stretching to Kerala, as the chief minister’s economic adviser and the decision seems not to have gone too well with the communist cadres in the state.
Gopinath is the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Economics at Harvard University. She specialises in international finance and macroeconomics and is also a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
She was born in the South Indian city of Mysuru, where her father was an entrepreneur, did her under-graduation in New Delhi and then moved to the US for her post-graduation and PhD.
All that reads like the perfect curriculum vitae for a role in international economic theory or practice, but as it turns out, it does not gel well with everyone in Kerala. In the CPM circles in the state, many consider her to be an advocate of neoliberal economics, a line of thinking that the CPM in Kerala strongly opposes.
The latest to reveal apprehensions about Gopinath’s appointment as economic adviser to the chief minister is Left thinker and economist, Prabhath Patnaik, himself a former deputy chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board.
Patnaik was quoted as saying that “the development outlook of Keralites cannot be toppled by the advice of any one person”.
Without naming Gopinath, he said “the Left government should not fall into the trap of liberalisation policies. They are anti-labour and anti-people. Such advice will not stand its ground before the well-informed Kerala society”.
Incidentally, Gopinath’s appointment as the chief minister’s economic adviser comes at a time when the LDF ministry has none less than T.M. Thomas Isaac, an economist of repute himself, as the finance minister. Within the Left circles, questions are being raised as to the need of another adviser when Isaac is the finance minister.
There have also been rumours that Gopinath has been roped in by Vijayan to cut down the influence of Isaac. The finance minister, however, has refused to be drawn into that controversy.
For Vijayan, Gopinath’s appointment is the second such controversy after appointing advocate M.K. Damodaran as his legal adviser. When Damodaran went on to be counsel for some controversial persons including lottery magnate Santiago Martin and Indian National Trade Union Congress leader, R. Chandrasekharan, there was an outcry against Damodaran.
Damodaran finally decided not to take up the post of legal adviser, embarrassing the LDF government, which had cleared his appointment.
