Deepak Parekh, chairman of HDFC and IL&FS Ltd, concluded his statement at the IL&FS general meeting with the observation that economic power in the new millennium is not in the hands of the elected representatives of the people, but by those appointed to oversee the rules of conduct of the new international order.To take an example, the power of officials of the World Trade Organisation is immense; so is the power of bureaucrats of the IMF and the World Bank. Everywhere, power is shifting from the hands of the people to supranational organisations. Nor is this movement away from the popular will only an international enterprise.
Within nations, the call is increasingly for technical solutions to economic problems-for instance, the call for independence for the central bank. The movement is rationalised on the grounds of government failure, and has its theoretical moorings in the public choice theory of politics, which assumes that politicians will act only in their selfish interests.
Rather than leave the economy in the hands of politicians, it would be better to let the technocrats run it-so runs the argument. But surely, the new breed of rule-makers are as vulnerable to human foibles as politicians. And a little digging will easily remove the fig leaf of technical jargon to reveal the vested interest of the rich.
The argument is in reality deeply flawed. After all, if politicians do not represent the will of the people, surely the answer to that is to try and remedy that defect, instead of giving power to an unrepresentative elite. But clearly, economic interests dictate otherwise. It is the triumph of propaganda that this castration of people's power is seen to be in the service of the common good.
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