There’s something disquieting about the increasing number of US-based NRI academics, taking leave of absence from tenured professorships in American universities to play advisory roles in the Central government, enjoy public adulation and exaggerated respect for a few years in India before they scarper back to tolerance and condescension abroad.

These musings are the outcome of (incomplete, abandoned) reading of Policy Maker’s Journal: From New Delhi to Washington DC (2021), the diary-style journal of Dr. Kaushik Basu, a professor of economics at Cornell University, USA who served a three-year-term (2009-2012) as chief economic advisor to the scandals-tainted Congress-led UPA-II government. The predominant takeaway from this journal is the round of dinner parties and soirees attended by Basu and spouse, their first class air travel in India and abroad and the splendid lakeside resorts and restaurants — enumerated with exemplary exactitude — at which they tarried and dined at public expense.

The no doubt brilliant economic growth and development advice Dr. Basu rendered the government is somewhat shrouded in modest obfuscation. Indeed, Basu admits awareness that his advice wouldn’t make much difference because despite being an atheist, he believes that everything is pre-destined, a conviction that gives him mental peace and detachment. This Calvinist belief in predestination enabled him to smoothly mingle and fraternise with the biggest names in politics, industry and even the film world. Curiously the great coal, telecom spectrum allotment and other scandals which doomed the UPA-II government and paved the way for the BJP’s electoral triumph of 2014, receive scant attention.

During the past decade not a few reputed NRI academics — Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Panagriya, Arvind Subramanian — have been imported to aid and advise the Central government and made media headlines and attracted public accolades they will never receive in their adopted countries. But the nation and economy continue to stumble from crisis to crisis. Perhaps there is something to be said for predestination, after all.

Also read: AFAIRS’ Study In India Virtual Expo 2021 for NRI students