The following passages are from Guha’s article "The LSE and India" Published in The Hindu in 2003.
- “The LSE's connection with State socialism is well known. Less well known, at least in India, is that for many years the School was also home to three of the greatest opponents of socialism. One was a home-grown Englishman, the conservative political theorist Michael Oakeshott. The other two were exiles from Eastern Europe, the economist Frederick Hayek and the philosopher Karl Popper. Both men had experienced at first-hand the horrors of totalitarian rule, which made them lifelong opponents of the nanny state. It was at the LSE that Hayek wrote his classic The Road to Serfdom, and it was also at the LSE that Popper wrote his two-volume magnum opus, The Open Society and its Enemies. Both works argued that the search for liberty and freedom would require us to rely less on government and more on private enterprise.
- The LSE did indeed have a deep impact on the policies and politics of independent India. I forget who it is was who said, speaking of the 1950s, that "in every meeting of the Indian Cabinet there is a chair reserved for the ghost of Professor Harold Laski".
- Without question, India's two most influential Prime Ministers have been Jawarharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. One graduated from Cambridge; the other studied in, but failed to graduate from, Oxford. However, the policies of Nehru and Mrs. Gandhi were profoundly shaped by ideas first articulated by the kind of progressive British intellectual once identified with the LSE. Notably, both father and daughter relied heavily on advisers who had studied at the School; V.K. Krishna Menon in the one case, P.N. Haskar and B.K. Nehru in the other.
- Did the political economy of the Webb-Laski kind have, on the whole, a beneficial impact on India? Or should we have, from the first, followed the alternate Hayek-Popper model of economic development? These are open questions, to be answered by time or by those more qualified than myself. But I do wish now to bring to the reader's attention a man from the LSE whose work had an unambiguously positive impact on independent India. This is a Sardar Tarlok Singh, who studied economics at the LSE before joining the Indian Civil Service in the 1930s. He then developed a keen interest in rural development, and in 1945 published Poverty and Social Change, a book advocating an "economic reorganisation of rural society" on cooperative lines.”
What is missed in this article is the Professor B. R. Shenoy who also studied in LSE and was great Indian liberal economist and academician.
Further reading:
The Results of Planning in India by B. R. Shenoy
Professor B.R. Shenoy (1905-78)
Prof Shenoy book some contents
B. R. Shenoy: Stature and Impact by Peter Bbauer
What To Do about the Planning Commission? by Vasant G. Gandhi
Of liberalism and liberalisation by S.V.Raju
Radical and visionary economist by S. Venkitaramanan
Planning for failure: The Tenth Five Year Plan has missed virtually all targets! Why has planning been a failure in India?
Brilliant point on Guha's omission. High time that Indian liberals mainstream the works and life of Shenoy.
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