BENGALURU: S Gurumurthy, who addressed the annual regional meeting of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Bengaluru on Friday, hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to ban high-value currency notes, saying such a disruption was vital to breaking the cycle of a parallel economy based on black money.
Gurumurthy, a chartered accountant and leader of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, said that only a non-conformist way of economic thought can break the age-old conformist theories of economics. “There is not a single functional economic theory today, not a single one. I am not against the crisis of economists but against the crisis of economics in itself,” he said.
According to him, the CII should constitute a think-tank that will encourage people to “think against all the existing economic theories”.
According to Gurumurthy, India’s growth will come from domestic savings, unlike the US where people do not save and are completely dependent on the state for retirement and pension benefits. Taking a jibe at economist Jagdish Bhagwati who had earlier called Gurumurthy a ‘Bharatnatyam dancer’, he said that many others like him are not able to understand that India’s economic problems will have to be solved in a manner that is intrinsic and suitable to India, rather than following every economic policy followed in the west.
He cited the example of how former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic battled the country’s galloping inflation by introducing a second dinar, which was convertible with the Deutsch mark. Yugoslavia saw its inflation fall from 2,000 per cent to below 10 per cent within 45 days of the action because he had taken a decision suitable to his country’s needs rather than listening to global economists.
“India’s golden period of economic growth from 2004-2010 saw only 24 lakh jobs being created, which indicates that it was jobless growth. So, where was this 10 per cent GDP growth coming from? It was coming from the cash that was stashed, the participatory notes that were being used to fire the stock markets,” he said.
All economic power was derived from political power and the US was a proof to this, according to Gurumurthy. The US dollar was still the benchmark currency despite the US having a current account deficit of more than $12 trillion. “Economic theories do not work against the US in this case. Had India had this CAD, all economic theories and policies would have been applied because we do not have geopolitical power,” he noted.