Liberalisation on an uneven pitch
Reviewed by M Rajivlochan

Indians In A Globalising World: Their Skewed Rise
by Dilip Hiro. Harper Collins. Pages 377. Rs 699

This book provides a quick overview of how Indians coped with the deregulation of the markets. Hiro begins the story of change by tracing the transformation of small town Gurgaon into a bustling metropolis, almost fully dedicated to providing services to the western economies. He does note the role played by government inaction in creating this town but does not notice that in India de-regulation was also about the government refusing to govern.

He then charts the wonders of innovation and economic growth that the technically and financially-abled Indians wrought when they migrated to the UK and the USA. That description ends with a condemnation of the government of India for not being able to follow up the initiatives taken by the Indians settled around the world to help their motherland. If it is any consolation, one might point out that the government refused to do anything since deregulation came into place.

The four following chapters are about responses within India to the opening up of the economy. Here, in a condemnatory tone and tenor, we are retold stories of the growth of slums, neglect of agriculture, spread of sleaze and corruption, rise of armed resistance to industrial growth and the manipulation of the institutions of a democracy to fulfill nefarious objectives. All this leads the author to the unsurprising conclusion that income disparities are likely to grow even further, social security shall remain weak and the government shall continue to be in the service of the demanding ‘literate and informed majority’. Indians shall continue to emigrate to the stronger economies. Any lowering of growth shall foster social tensions. These conclusions are so general, if not banal, that they would fit every country in the 20th century world, including the US and the UK.

What was unique to the liberalisation process in India was that the government simply gave up on governance. But that is not something that attracts Hiro’s attention. Such inattention results in Hiro repeating many of the bromides against liberalisation, such as the problems of Indian farmers which were outcome of the spread of Bt crops and supposedly impractical forms of modern agriculture. Neither of which is true.

Yet, despite being bormide ridden, there is much in the book that would attract the interested reader. Above all, as with everything that Hiro writes, it makes for a very easy read. It contains a lot of information, not always reliable, without being unnecessarily pedantic. It effectively summarises much of the news that has been around for the past two decades about all that is going wrong in India as it deregulated its markets. It underlines some of the key episodes in India’s experiments with de-regulated markets.

As historians are wont to explain, and most people seem to forget, markets have always ruled the roost, even when states think they are controlling the market forces. Socialistic India, like the USSR, evolved its own smart-set — one that made itself big using government contacts and contracts. The big change after liberalisation was that the playing field got enlarged and one did not necessarily need government contacts to make it big. If Ambani’s growth (ignored in this book) was a consequence of manipulating government contacts, the growth of Aditya Birla’s aluminum empire (mentioned in the book) was the result of the government allowing a free hand to industrialists to grow, reform and spread across the world. Superior management practices and becoming competitive in the world market and that helped Hindalco grow. A hands-off policy by the government enabled the growth of the IT industry in India. When the government extended the logic of hands-off to areas of urban governance, then the salubrious town of Bengaluru, the center of the IT industry in India, rapidly converted into a dump. Such examples of inaction, however, are entirely ignored in Hiro’s analytic.

Errors of facts mar the importance of this book as a reliable source of information. The BJP, for example does not have ‘anti-secularist roots and policies’ (pg 325). If anything, the BJP stands for ‘Gandhian socialism’, as the foundation resolution of the BJP, 1980, tells us!

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