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Transformative Democratic Politics in Liberalizing India?

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Democratization in the Global South

Part of the book series: International Political Economy ((IPES))

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Abstract

India is widely recognized as having seen progressive liberalization of its economy over the past 20 or more years. Liberalization is commonly thought to have been launched in 1991 when the current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who was the then Finance Minister in a recently elected minority Congress government, introduced what came to be labelled as India’s ‘economic reforms’. A good many scholars think that liberalization actually started well before this time, but there is no doubt of the symbolic significance of the reforms of 1991, in marking a decisive shift away from the highly regulated, interventionist ‘licence-permit raj’ that had been established in the 1950s. India’s liberalization has been pursued very cautiously by successive governments, and reform has been much less far-reaching than many of its advocates have wished. Tariffs have remained – even now – relatively high, there continue to be restrictions on international investment in some sectors of the economy, such as the retail trade, privatization of state-owned enterprises has not gone nearly so far as the liberalizers would have liked and the establishment of a more ‘flexible’ labour market has still not been achieved. A strong case has been made as well, particularly by Atul Kohli (2012), that it has been ‘pro-business’ politics rather than ‘promarket policies’ that have been more significant.

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Authors
  1. John Harriss
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Norway

    Kristian Stokke (Professor of Human Geography) & Olle Törnquist (Professor of Political Science and Development) (Professor of Human Geography) &  (Professor of Political Science and Development)

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© 2013 John Harriss

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Harriss, J. (2013). Transformative Democratic Politics in Liberalizing India?. In: Stokke, K., Törnquist, O. (eds) Democratization in the Global South. International Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230370043_8

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