Alternative economic survey 2000 - 2001

The structural adjustment programme (SAP) has completed a decade. The Indian state brought upon itself an acute intensification of the chronic fiscal and balance of payments difficulties. The statist economic growth model in force during the 1950-1990 in its various avatars was essentially friendly and subservient to market forces; it was demonised as the root cause of the crisis of macro-economic management in early 1991. The steadily worsening crisis of the denial of livelihood security and basic democratic rights as well as a critical failure to realise the potential for good life for the overwhelming majority of Indians formed no part of this perspective. Ignoring this wider social goal, the self-created economic and financial 'crisis' was used as a ploy to trigger off a series of far-reaching changes in the policy goals, instruments and directions desired by global multinational agencies and organisations and, of course, by a large chunk of India's big capital. It was, in effect, an attempt to make India speedily and stealthily redesign her economy, polity, society and culture bypassing mass political approval. A great euphoria was created especially for the urban middle classes by a massive disinformation campaign using all the resources and tricks at the command of Indian and foreign corporate interests. All this represents, in a nutshell, an unfortunate saga of the disempowerment of popular forces. It represents an emptying politics of the democratic content, leaving only the form. This is why the so-called reforms are facing a strange spectacle of the coexistence of a broad political consensus among all major political parties with the increasingly vocal opposition of civil society, including some associates of the present ruling combine.

A long, tortuous and, in many ways, tragic decade is over. As the chickens come home to roost, it is becoming clear that some serious long-term injury has been inflicted on the country. The course of the so-called 'reforms' has seen its ups and downs. It is a tribute to inherent but wobbling strength of India's political economy and her masses that the 'reforms' were frequently grounded, went off course and saw some rollback as well. Many of the 'reformers' have also been dumped into the dustbin of history-some quite ignominiously and others are awaiting such a fate at the hands of the awakened victims of liberalisation. The jarring chorus claiming the 'reforms' to be irreversible is basically a manifestation of the social disembeddedness of the 'reforms' and of the sense of insecurity which afflicts the 'reforming' rulers, catapulted into positions of power basically by palace politicking, rather than through people's politics. In any case, the song of irreversibility, as also of 'TINA, is fundamentally the public face of an unstable, insecure regime.

Dozens of countries were led up the garden path of liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation (LPG) under the pressure and lure of neo-liberalism. The results have been, to varying degrees, disastrous everywhere even in the countries imposing the SAP. Disenchantment with the present genre of globalisation has become quite widespread and acute as witnessed in Seattle, Prague, Bangkok, Washington, etc. As governance is getting privatised, the states are abdicating their social welfare responsibility, and are in the process of becoming a Public Relations wing and errand boy of global monopolies. The democratic content of the emerging system is fast evaporating. Widespread poverty, growing livelihood insecurity, cultural homogenisation, mindless consumerism, environmental degradation, all-pervasive criminalisation, etc. are visible in every country. They are also becoming our common future.