Best Seller Sees 1990 Depression : Book Predicting Slump Has Roots in India Sect

“The Great Depression of 1990.” In bold, black letters the scary words leap off the white cover of this new best seller. The book’s chilling prediction of economic catastrophe is suddenly a fashionable topic among economists and a fast-growing number of lay readers alike.

Author Ravi Batra, a professor at Southern Methodist University, basks in overnight celebrity. A wave of publicity in newspapers and magazines keeps the royalties rolling in. The book climbs to a heady third place on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction.

Make no mistake: This is not a typical case of pop-cultural hype. The roots of this soft-spoken seer lie continents away from the U.S. mainstream. Literally.

His views are grounded in a controversial offshoot of Hinduism, one whose more zealous adherents were associated with a wave of violence in India and other countries several years ago. The movement’s guru, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar--whom Batra cites repeatedly in the book--was jailed for murder in a highly political trial in the 1970s, although he was vindicated on appeal.

As for Batra’s financial advice, it’s also, well, different. For example, he goes so far as to tell readers to sell all their real estate after mid-1989. Pension assets? Individual retirement accounts? Cash them in after the impending stock market crash, he advises.

Then there is the matter of the book’s foreword, a bit of an embarrassment to Lester C. Thurow, the well-known economist and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote it.

He agreed to lend his prestigious name to the project at a time when the book’s title was “Regular Cycles of Money, Inflation, Regulation and Depressions” and when Batra was paying to publish the book himself. But, when Simon & Schuster agreed to publish it, the economist sought unsuccessfully to have his name taken off the cover. His gripe was with the dramatic title used by the publisher.

“I thought I was being a nice guy helping some poor, struggling economics professor at SMU who couldn’t get his books published,” he explained, somewhat apologetically, in a telephone interview.

Polite and Articulate

Batra, 44, is his own chief promoter. He is polite and articulate but not too shy to describe himself as “one of the top trade theorists in the world”--a depiction that is not universally shared. As for his pessimistic economic predictions, he said he is so certain of trouble ahead that he is donating his condominium in Dallas to his movement to stop it. “Normally, people don’t like to participate in social movements,” the scholar said in an interview. “But this is one you can’t afford to neglect.”

And he’s an entrepreneur. Batra used to go on radio shows and hawk the book through a toll-free telephone number and was rewarded late last year with the New York publishing deal. The tremendous success has surprised many but seems to reflect an undercurrent of fear among the public. “The interesting thing about the book is that it clearly has struck a responsive note,” Thurow said. “Clearly, people are worried about financial collapse.”

What’s going on here?

The answer requires a glance eastward, to a meeting 23 years ago between a young graduate student and a charismatic guru with a growing following in north-central India. Batra, who was born in India’s Punjab state, still remembers the date he rode the train from New Delhi to Lucknow to hear Sarkar speak: Aug. 16, 1964.

Follows Yogi Life Style

Batra’s own interest at the time was in the spiritual life style prescribed for yogis--those seeking a link with the divine and members of the Path of Bliss, known in India as the Ananda Marga. “He said a yogi should not eat foods which create heat in the body,” Batra recalls, explaining why he became a vegetarian. He began also to meditate four hours a day, a regimen he said he still maintains.

Batra went on to get a master’s degree from the Delhi School of Economics and moved in 1966 to the United States, where he got a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University. After a two-year teaching stint at the University of Western Ontario, he was offered a full professorship by SMU at age 30, an achievement for an academic so young.

In those days, Batra’s scholarly work focused on esoteric issues of trade theory. His interest in Sarkar’s historical teachings emerged in the 1970s, after he read one of the guru’s books, he said. The experience was galvanizing: “I was amazed by the scope and depth of his vision. Here finally was an answer to the puzzle of social evolution; here finally was a philosophy of history that in one stroke could unravel the mystery of every social phenomenon.”

Sarkar’s teachings encompassed a view of history as well as a prescription for society. According to Batra, a key is Sarkar’s law of cycles--a view that history can be divided into phases in which societies are dominated variously by laborers, warriors, intellectuals and acquisitors--business interests.

Batra’s best seller combines Sarkar’s cyclical views with the writer’s own economic and historical analysis. In the book, he argues that America is in the downhill phase of the “age of acquisitors” and on the verge of a depression that will be far more painful than the calamity of the 1930s.

A 60-year economic cycle is completing itself, he argues, with various forces coming together that will lead to disaster in 1990. Current parallels to the 1920s include a soaring stock market, bank failures, falling energy prices and--most important--a growing concentration of wealth among the top 1% of the population, he says. He contends that the concentration of wealth is destabilizing, because, among other things, it pressures banks to make bad loans, jeopardizing the whole financial system.

Batra says that only pronounced changes in public policy will ward off the crash. As a result, he said he wants to organize a movement that will support political candidates who favor a huge increase in property taxes for the richest 1%, would prohibit loans for corporate takeovers and would stop banks from offering interest on checking accounts because, he said, such programs force banks to seek out borrowers and make bad loans.

And he warns that failing to stop the predicted depression could bring grave consequences to America: “There will be a lot of crime and violence.”

Batra is not the first follower of Sarkar to cast a spotlight on his teacher. In the 1970s, members of the Ananda Marga Yoga Society were associated with various incidents of violence in India and elsewhere--both as victims and perpetrators, according to J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion at UC Santa Barbara.

“The Ananda Marga grew up as a Hindu movement that was intensely nationalistic,” Melton said. “It was the equivalent of the Moral Majority here.”

Following the murder of six dissident members in the early 1970s, Sarkar was sent to jail in India after a trial that by all accounts was highly political--the movement worried government officials, who considered it fanatical--but the verdict eventually was overturned. During the seven years of his confinement, Sarkar’s followers protested in the United States, Australia and other countries, sometimes violently.

Sarkar, now 66, retired several years ago from a school he founded in Calcutta, where he still lives, Batra said.

The author said he has never been involved in the Ananda Marga’s protests. He acknowledged, however, a “sympathy” for the Ananda Marga, but not for violence, and said he has donated “a few hundred dollars” on occasion to its members: “Some of his (Sarkar’s) followers are traveling in America, and they need money to move around. So I give money once in a while.”

He said he identifies with the social arm of Sarkar’s movement, known as the Proutist Universal movement, whose goals include a more equitable distribution of wealth. As a result, for example, Batra’s book recommends legal measures to restrict the gap in wealth between the rich and poor. These include limiting the amount of money that can separate the highest wage from the lowest wage and capping the amount of money that people may inherit.

Although Batra sounds at times as though he is defending the U.S. economic system, he ultimately sees the demise of the leading forms of government in both East and West and the emergence, as envisioned by Sarkar, of a more equitable political system throughout the world with a greater emphasis on spirituality. “Capitalism and Marxism are both alike in the sense that they’re both materialistic,” Batra said, “And nothing based on matter lives forever.”

None of which has anything to do with Batra’s reputation as an economist. According to the press release accompanying the book and Batra’s own biographical sketch, he is “one of the world’s top trade theorists.”

Questions Title

Is he? Thurow responds: “I think that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration.” Thurow found some of the book appealing--he writes that Batra provides a “novel and brilliant exposition.” Batra approached him when the book was being published with $15,000 from Batra’s own pocket. “I thought I was being a nice guy and wrote a reasonable foreword for a reasonable book with a reasonable title,” he said. “But the title has become unreasonable.”

When Thurow learned of Simon & Schuster’s new title, which placed enormous emphasis on a prediction Thurow disputes, he said he asked the publisher to remove his name. He also contacted a lawyer but was told that, “unless I wanted to make a big legal fuss, it would be difficult to do so. So I gave up.”

Paul R. Krugman, a professor at MIT who without question occupies a high-level rung in the field of trade theory, described Batra as a “journeyman worker” in international economics. “Batra is neither the most famous man among his colleagues in the field nor is he a person of utter obscurity living in a log cabin.”

Not a Lone Voice

Whatever Batra’s standing, the issue of whether the United States and the rest of the world are heading for an economic crash is, of course, an important one, and Batra is not alone in citing dangers on the economic landscape. Many economists point to the trade and budget deficits, high levels of debt by consumers and the soaring stock market all as serious causes for worry.

But few forecast a massive depression. And, in a profession where the phrase “on the other hand” is uttered with maddening regularity, not even the gloomiest of other analysts sound as certain of the impending troubles as does Batra.

Thurow, for example, said he believes that a stock market plunge is possible, but he argued that it would take a collapse of the banking system to cause a depression and that that is not likely to happen.

“There are lots of reasons--some similar to what might have existed in the 1920s, some not--why anyone should be concerned that the future won’t be as bright as we might like,” said Lawrence Chimerine, chairman of Wharton Econometrics in Bala-Cynwyd, Pa. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean a depression. We might just go into a period of slow growth like the United Kingdom.”

But Batra does not seem to mind the critics--some of whom have been withering, such as the writer for Forbes magazine who declared that “Batra’s bafflegab is awful, appalling, terrible, no redeeming features whatsoever. If you want cycles, stick to Wheel of Fortune.”

In return, the professor dismisses much of his profession with an amusement that borders on disdain: “Look at the forecasts of every other economist. They change them every three or six months--and they’re still wrong.” The best-selling author added of his colleagues’ writings: “In every article I find 20 pages of equations and one page of naive conclusions.”

Meanwhile, Batra scurries to keep up with appearances in various cities and with the constant demand for interviews. At the current rate, he said, the book’s profits will approach half a million dollars by the end of the year.