Ep 447: Rahul Ahluwalia Fights for Growth and Freedom

**Rahul Ahluwalia** (0:06)
We think of India's freedom struggle as something that happened in the past. We imagine it ended in 1947 and that we are now a free country. This is not true. All we got in 1947 was political independence. We replaced white skinned rulers with brown skinned rulers. And despite our constitution paying lip service to freedom, we remained subjects and not citizens. We don't have freedom in the marketplace. We don't have freedom in our homes. We don't have the freedom to speak our mind. And this has consequences. Our moral imperative in 1947 should have been to lift every Indian out of poverty.
Almost 80 years have passed and we have failed. At the heart of that failure is the absence of freedom. We cannot be a rich country unless we are first a free country.
That is why I say India's fight for freedom is ongoing.

**Amit Varma** (0:57)
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.

**Rahul Ahluwalia** (1:10)
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Rahul Ahluwalia, the Founder Director of Foundation for Economic Development. Rahul studied economics, did an MBA from IIM Calcutta, worked at Brookings, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Niti Aiyog, and then recognized that to make progress in the great passion of his life which was to help India become a developed economy, he needed to strike out on his own. So he set up the Foundation for Economic Development. In this conversation, Rahul and I chat about India's failures, the path out of them, the importance of growth, the importance of freedom, how our state functions, the effects of political power, and why heavy metal can be a force for good. I admire Rahul deeply. He is doing important work and the clarity of his thinking holds lessons for all of us. Please listen to this episode carefully. It's an important conversation. But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Rahul, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:04)
Thank you for having me.

**Rahul Ahluwalia** (3:05)
It's such a pleasure having you over, Rahul, because, you know, over the 430-something or 40-something, by the time this is out, episodes of the show, some people who don't really listen to the show properly, they keep asking me that, why don't you get someone on the show that you disagree with? And I'm like, dude, if you ever listen to the show properly, you will understand that I disagree with literally everybody, right? Everybody, except that the disagreements are then articulated and phrased and argued in a very polite civil way. This is not Twitter. We don't shout at each other. We don't put each other down. So we disagree in gentle ways. And people who listen regularly, of course, know this.
And this is, and I'm just beginning to think that apart from my episodes of Shruti Rajagopalan, perhaps, this is one episode where I am most in alignment with the guest, which of course I have known about you for a while, that you share many of my core values in terms of freedom, agency, consent, all of those things, the importance of economic growth. And so I must say, Rahul, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you for coming.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:08)
Thank you. And for the same reason, it's a pleasure to be here. Also on your point about agreement and disagreement, very interesting for me always has been that, for example, Ajay, right, who's a collaborator of yours. I have, I think, agreement with Ajay's perspectives on maybe 99% of things.
But yet when I meet him and talk to him, it's always about the 1% where we disagree, right? Because I think that's where the friction and that's where the interest of learning lies. Because what's the use of just saying to people, oh hey, I agree with you and I agree with you more. But I hope here we can chalk out something from both 99% and 1% of agreement and disagreement.