Bastiat Meets His Match as Indian Writer Wins Prize

By GARY SHAPIRO, Staff Reporter of the Sun | October 29, 2007

An Indian writer and blogger, Amit Varma, has won the Bastiat Prize, awarded for wielding a witty pen in the defense of free markets and institutions.

Mr. Varma garnered the $10,000 prize, sponsored by the London-based think tank International Policy Network, for columns he wrote for Mint, a joint venture between India's Hindustan Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The award comes with an engraved crystal candlestick, recalling the 19th-century French writer Frédéric Bastiat's satire in which candle makers petition the government for protection against their competitor, the sun.

In accepting the award in Midtown last week, Mr. Varma said he had been reminded of Bastiat upon seeing a recent headline on McClatchydc.com that read: "As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch." A link to this headline on a blog that Mr. Varma publishes, Indiauncut.com, notes, "I demand protectionist policies to save the livelihood of the cemetery workers."

One article for which Mr. Varma won the prize was "The Devil's Compassion," a spoof purporting to be a speech given by Beelzebub at a convention of demonic beings. The piece, to "Comrades and Monsters," addresses topics including the outlawing of dance bars in the Indian state Maharashtra, with the result that, the author writes, many dancers went into prostitution.

Another piece, "A Beast Called Government," quotes individuals such as Thomas Jefferson and C. Northcote Parkinson. The latter found that the British civil service tended to expand by a predictable amount annually "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done."

At the award ceremony, a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly, Clive Crook, won second place. A contributing editor of National Review, Jonah Goldberg, was awarded third prize.

Commenting online, a blogger in attendance, Reuben Abraham, wrote that his friend Mr. Varma had graciously acknowledged the assistance of a group of Indian bloggers devoted to private property rights and individual freedom. Their humorous name in cyberspace? The "Libertarian Cartel."