| Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai | |
|---|---|
| Born | Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai 10 July 1940 Vadodara, Gujarat, India |
| Nationality | Indian British |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Alma mater | University of Mumbai University of Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Economist |
| Political party | Labour |
| Religion | Atheist |
Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai (born 10 July 1940) is an Indian-born British economist and Labour politician. He unsuccessfully stood for the Speaker in the British House of Lords (2011) [1], the first ever non-UK born candidate to do so.
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Born in Vadodara, Gujarat, India, Desai grew up with two brothers and one sister.
He is said to have gone to secondary school at age seven and matriculated at 14. He secured a master's degree from University of Mumbai, after which he won a scholarship to University of Pennsylvania in August 1960. He completed his PhD at Pennsylvania in 1963.
He worked as Associate Specialist in the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California . He then became Lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1965. At LSE, he taught econometrics, macroeconomics, marxian economics and development economics over the years.
He wrote his first book Marxian Economic Theory in 1973 followed by Applied Econometrics in 1976 and Marxian Economics, a revised edition of his 1973 book in 1979. He wrote Testing Monetarism, a critique of monetarism, in 1981.
In the 1970s, he taught an idiosyncratic version of economic principles to freshers at the LSE (starting with Sraffa).
Desai has written extensively on a wide range of subjects. He has published over 200 articles in academic journals and many more articles in newspapers with a regular column in the British radical weekly Tribune, 1985–1994, in the Indian business daily Business Standard between 1995–2001 and currently in Indian Express and Financial Express. From 1984-1991, he was co-editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics. A selection of his academic papers is published in two volumes as The Selected Essays of Meghnad Desai in 1995.
He has been active in the British Labour Party, becoming Chairman between 1986 and 1992, and was made Honorary Lifetime and President of Islington South and Finsbury Constituency Labour Party in London. He was made a life peer as Baron Desai, of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster, in April 1991.
In 2002, Desai wrote a book Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism which states that globalization would tend toward the revival of socialism.
He published a biography of Indian film star Dilip Kumar entitled Nehru's Hero: Dilip Kumar in the life of India (Roli, 2004). He has described the book as his 'greatest achievement'. Examining Kumar's films – some of which Desai has seen more than 15 times – he discovers parallels between the socio-political arena in India and its reflection on screen. He discusses issues as varied as censorship, the iconic values of Indian machismo, cultural identity and secularism, and analyses how the films portrayed a changing India at that time.
He has written Rethinking Islamism: Ideology of the New Terror (2006), The Route to All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound (2007), a novel Dead on Time, (2009) and The Rediscovery of India(2009).
In 2003, he retired as Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, which he founded in 1992 at LSE, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He was Chairman of the Trustee's Board for Training for Life, Chairman of the Management Board of City Roads and on the Board of Tribune magazine. Lord Desai was also a founding member of the Development Studies Institute (DESTIN) at the LSE in 1990.
(Lord Desai had retired from LSE in 2003)
In 2007 Desai was asked by the University of London to serve with Tony McGrew of the University of Southampton as one of the two external examiners of the PhD thesis of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the leader of Libya. They did not immediately accept the thesis, as it was found to be weak. It was subjected to an oral examination for two and a half hours and Gaddafi was asked to revise and re-submit it.[2] The revised version was subsequently accepted.
As Desai had already retired from the LSE he had no involvement with the donation from Saif Gaddafi's charity to LSE.[3] Learning from the press of these links between LSE and Libya, Desai demanded that the money be returned to the people of Libya.[4] He expressed disappointment at a speech Saif Gaddafi subsequently made on Libyan state television declaring the Gaddafi family's willingness to "fight to the last bullet", observing that "he was not behaving as if he had had an LSE education."[5]
In 1970, he married his LSE colleague Gail Wilson, his first wife. She was the daughter of George Ambler Wilson, CBE. They had three children. [2]
During the course of writing Nehru's Hero, he met Kishwar Ahluwalia, his second wife who worked as an editor for this book. On July 20, 2004 he married Ahluwalia. Desai and 47-year-old Ahluwalia were both divorcees and married at a registrar's office in London.
Desai is an atheist.[6] He is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.