Former London School of Economics Economist Arrested in India

Jean Dreze

The Jharkhand, India police on Thursday arrested economist and academic Jean Dreze and two others for allegedly holding a public meeting without permission from authorities on the "right" to food.

Dreze, his friend and social activist Vivek Kumar and another person were detained at Bishunpur police station in Garhwa district, The Hindu reported.

They were later released after submitting personal bonds.

Dreze is currently an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics and a visiting professor at the Ranchi University. He previously taught at the London School of Economics.

An extreme lefty, he has championed the causes of Maoists and Naxalites (the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of India).

While at LSE, he frequently slept rough and lived with homeless squatters, helping to start a squatters movement in 1988 that opened buildings to the homeless and defied eviction.

In 2008, he coauthored a paper, "Nutrition In India: Facts and Interpretations" with Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton.

During the 1990–1991 Iraq War, he joined a peace camp stationed on the Iraq-Kuwait border. His 1992 article with Haris Gazdar, "Hunger and Poverty in Iraq, 1991", was one of the first assessments of Iraq's economy after the Gulf war, and an early warning about the potential human costs of the Iraq sanctions.

-RW