Bibek Debroy (1955-2024): The Polymath

THERE IS A PECULIAR quality to modern intellectual life in India. It either harks back to the past, whether of remote antiquity or to a more recent time, or it looks forward to a distant future. This quest for a “golden age” is an apt summation of what intellectual ventures in India are all about. Changing the present for the better without looking for some model of the past has little traction in this class. Bibek Debroy was an exception to this cage-like mentality. The translator of the Mahabharata and designer of railway reforms understood India’s present moment on its own terms. He was, above all, driven by pragmatism.

Consider, first, his output as a translator of Indian classics. This included the entire Mahabharata, a feat that has not been seen for more than a century. Along with that massive exercise came the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, a plethora of Puranas, and more. That alone would have exhausted a scholar. But in his case, there were other stars in his intellectual constellation. Appointed to the Niti Aayog in 2015 and later, in 2017, to the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), he examined India’s requirements for economic reforms. These were, however, not the paper exercises that New Delhi’s intellectual class aspires to. Unlike the usual calls for “big-ticket reforms” in labour and land markets, Debroy looked at eliminating the irrationalities that accumulated in the government over time but led to adverse economic outcomes. It was also in these years that he became an academic administrator: president of the Indian Statistical Institute (in 2018) and, in 2024, the chancellor of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, an institution where he had served in an earlier phase of his career.

This variety of roles for an intellectual has been rare in recent decades in India. Partly it is a function of the country getting over its fascination with ‘learned people’ and the appreciation of actual expertise. But it is also the result of a genuine paucity of expertise in the Indian system, expertise developed by working and understanding a system instead of trying to push it in a direction that is considered desirable on ideological grounds.

Some of Debroy’s best writings were on India’s legal and constitutional system. He tried to ensure that this subject reached as many readers as possible. Through his multiple weekly columns, he pointed out the infirmities and irrationalities that had crept in the system.

Last year, in an allegedly controversial op-ed, Debroy asked a simple question: What Constitu­tion did India need for 2047, when it would mark the 100th anniversary of Independence? Now, the Constitution is something of a fetish for the liberal class with some of its more daring members going even as far to say that India’s politics should be circumscribed by what was ‘prescribed’ in that text. Debroy had no such illusions. He clearly said, “For me, the bedrock is the Constitution. Everything else follows.” He went on to say, “We no longer possess the one that we inherited in 1950. It has been amended, not always for the better, though since 1973, we have been told its ‘basic structure’ cannot be altered, irrespective of what democracy desires through Parliament: whether there is a violation will be interpreted by courts.”

These are the words of an intellectual who was clear-sighted and one who knew the value of institutional boundaries prescribed by the original Constitution. In a series of rhetorical questions, as he described them in the op-ed, he went on to raise questions about certain articles in the Constitu­tion that impede on executive efficiency. He questioned the original rationale for creating new states and the political realities under which new states had been carved out of existing ones. Then there was the question of the supervisory control of the Supreme Court over high courts. Debroy went on to imply that there was little to suggest in the Constitution that it had the powers that it was exercising. He then raised questions about the apportionment of legislative powers in the Seventh Schedule. The list of these “rhetorical questions” was longer.

He concluded by saying, “Much of what we debate begins and ends with the Constitution. A few amendments won’t do. We should go back to the drawing board and start from first principles…We the people have to give ourselves a new Constitution.”

Predictably, these bold words did not go down well in the intellectual class and soon enough, the EAC-PM—the institution that Debroy led—said the op-ed represented his own view and not that of the EAC-PM. But the questions that he raised highlighted the logjam that India had walked itself into over time. In the name of “checks and balances” and “countervailing institutions”, the executive itself was in danger of becoming rusted. There were other, more alarming, possibilities as well. While he did not dwell on those themes, the direction he pointed toward was clear: India was in need of a new constitutional compact.

This combination of attraction towards the past, attention to the present and calm appreciation of what is needed in the future made him a very different mind from contemporary intellectuals.

What is interesting about his career trajectory is that he got his due in the last decade of his life during the three terms of the Narendra Modi government. Intellectuals being appointed to government positions in India is mostly a matter of luck, their politi­cal outlook and connections with the powers that be. It would be improper to dwell on this theme beyond a point in Debroy’s case but one can safely say that his prominence in the Modi government was not an accident. His talents as a scholar of Indian classics, as an economist and as someone who knew the importance of a sound legal and constitutional order made him the right man at the right time and place. His talents will be sorely missed in the time ahead.

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Siddharth Singh

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