MUMBAI: Rock-star French economist Thomas Piketty said it was “very moving” for him to be in Mumbai “after what happened in Paris in the last few weeks”.

In a wide-ranging conversation moderated by writer Patrick French, Piketty, author of the acclaimed Capital, an exposition on global inequality, and renowned Harvard professor Michael Sandel, whom French introduced as “the public philosopher of the BBC”, talked about everything from growing inequality and the rise of Donald Trump to intolerance and climate change.

French asked Piketty about a paper he had co-authored with economist Abhijeet Banerjee in 2005 that examined the tax data of India’s one per-centers in the 20th century. What had Piketty learnt? One problem they had faced, he answered, was the lack of transparency in getting tax data. “But in a way it is worse today in terms of transparency,” he said. “Access to income tax data and statistics is very hard to get.”

When French asked if the opening up of the Indian economy had helped in reducing inequality, Piketty was critical. “There is a lot of hypocrisy in the way the Indian elite is interpreting capitalism’s role in development,” he said.

“Every strong capitalist country in the world has invested in public education, healthcare, in more inclusive development. In many countries, it came after big shocks, the traumas of the Bolshevik revolution and the world wars. Indian elite still has to make this adjustment.”

Even today, Piketty said, India is still lacking in the quality of public services awarded to the bottom half of people. “I hope the elites understand this—because otherwise capitalism is not sustainable.”

Sandel said that “on the one hand, capitalism had brought rising affluence and broken down bureaucratic forms of power, but at the same time it had created rising inequality and, as Thomas Piketty had shown in his work, it has crowded out non-monetary values like solidarity and civic debate”.

Switching subjects, French asked Sandel if could throw light on the sudden rise of Donald Trump in American politics, noting that while India had many colourful politicians there was “no one quite like Trump”. “The Donald Trump phenomenon is a symptom of a hollow, empty public discourse that affects American and European politics,” Prof Sandel said. “We have lost the capacity to debate meaningfully. This allows voices of intolerance like Donald Trump and the European anti-migrant populists.”

With reference to the terror attacks in Paris, Piketty said that the rise of inequality triggered “nationalist tensions” and “the politics of hate”. It is always convenient, he said “for politicians to blame the ‘other’. Since they don’t want to tackle inequality through peaceful channels such as progressive taxation and alternative forms of property organization, they choose non-peaceful channels like demonizing the other”.

Sandel added that rising intolerance across the world is a reflection of deep-seated social anxieties. “When people vote for political parties that vilify migrants or attack those who eat beef, it is symptomatic of anxieties about whether we can hold our societies together in the face of difference,” he said.

On the issue of climate change, Sandel said that while India’s position had a strong element of justice in demanding that developed countries take responsibility for their role in current levels of greenhouse emissions. “But,” he qualified, “it is not so persuasive for India to say that you’ve spewed all this time, now let us do it. Why not learn from our mistakes?”

