Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Neither the first argument—that democracies are inherently deficient reformers
—nor the revisionist variant just described, can fully explicate the Indian case.
While it is true that democratic governments can engage in reform, the Indian
experience suggests that the kind and sequence of the reforms is dramatically
affected by electoral exigencies.
8
In India, the neo-liberal reforms that are perceived to have the most immediate
effect in terms of job and wage losses, and thus, the reforms that are most likely
to inspire immediate popular opposition, have been for the most part forced off
the reform table during the first reform decade. These include public sector
retrenchment and privatization, labor reform, measures to curtail government
subsidies and other spending, and agrarian reforms. Each of these reforms carries
the threat of short-term job and/or welfare losses. They are known collectively by
the moniker 'second-generation reforms', and to date, they are a generation that
is largely unborn.
When these reforms have been successful, they have been accomplished not
because politicians have successfully swayed public opinion to craft coalitions in
their support, but often by what Rob Jenkins has described as 'reform by stealth'.
9
The 'unseemly underside of democracy', according to his argument, enables
leaders to use savvy political skills in manipulating the circuitry of democratic
institutions to deflect attention from reforms, dress reforms in the garb of the
status quo, and shift the onus and responsibility for reforms to other levels of
government in India's federal system.
10
As the privatization, or disinvestment as it is called in India, of BALCO
suggests, the bifurcation of political power between the state and the center, and
the new environment of competitive investment promotion that resulted from
opening the economy to private investment, play important roles
in simultaneously shaping and delimiting the political strategies available to both
incumbent and opposition leaders.
On the one hand, four consecutive democratically elected governments in
India in the 1990s were able to pass important legislation that carried India far
from its historical moorings in centralized planning and towards a market-
oriented system. However, as others have pointed out, the kinds of reforms that
India's leaders have enacted had little direct, obvious, or immediate effect on
India's masses.
11
In the parlance of economic reform literature, the reforms of
India's first decade were met by little organized resistance from the
losers
from
reform and important support from a small but influential group of the potential
winners
from reform.
On the other hand, the reforms that have yet to be undertaken are all met by
sizeable and organized opposition from those, who stand to lose in the immediate
term. Some students of Indian political economy have suggested that the
structural adjustments that remain to be attempted may yet require another crisis
such as the one faced in 1991 to allow politicians the necessary latitude to
