India At Sixty- II

With the Nehruvian command model of inward looking insular Indian economy faltering and collapsing to deliver the goods, India made a paradigm shift in the early 1990s in its economic policy. Confronted with a severe payment and fiscal crisis India embraced market ideology. For more than a decade we have been seduced sufficiently to believe that our heightened romantic filtration with market economics and continual embrace of globalization administered on us by international agencies like World Bank, IMF and WTO would serve as an express way for growth, help alleviate poverty and inequality and also strengthen the roots of our democracy and freedom. Imperialism and colonialism are no more in a raw form. They have worn a new cloth namely economic globalization. We have never conducted any serious debate on pros and cons of liberalization and a marketisation process going on in our country.

Globally Berlin wall has fallen; in our economy too the command model which was more like a Berlin wall has been dethroned. Trade barriers are slowly breaking down. Finance capital has become more mobile. They inject more oxygen into sensex. For a long time our stock market was on song. Only very recently close on the heels of sub-prime lending banking crisis in the US and world wide stock market crash, our market received a setback. Along with rise in sensex there is also an escalation in the rate of farmers’ suicide. Windows have opened for the IT professionals but the doors are shut for dalits and adivasis. The world has become flat for the educated middle class but it is still a night mare for those lacking access to education and health.

Our scholar prime minister has clearly evolved and adapted himself to the status of a matured politician. He is now in a catch 22 situation over the nuclear agreement with the US. To what extent the Left can succeed in keeping the US at a distance from our foreign policy making is a moot point. There are doubts about the very survival of the government. We don’t think that the vested interests will allow the government to fall.

The single most fundamentally flawed aspect of our shallow democracy is stinking corruption and growing amorality in Indian politics at a time when the Indian economy is undergoing sweeping economic reforms, it is also time for ruminating over reforming politics and humanizing the tribe called politicians. Taming and pruning the inflated ego and misplaced arrogance of those politicians having criminal nexus is not an easy job. With all the aggrandizement of power which has resulted in an infinite accumulation of wealth, they really enjoy a monopoly power and it is very difficult to dislodge them. Even while debating the nature and content of our economic reforms, there is more politics and economics in it. Unless the political entrepreneurs and the economic policy entrepreneurs seriously commit themselves to remove the pitfalls and contradictions in the governance of our country, economic reforms and globalization can not work.