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Preface
In 1971, after nearly a decade of scholarship and teaching economics at Harvard University, I returned to India and published a best-seller Indian Economic Planning—An Alternative Approach. In public platforms thereafter, I began propagating an alternative economic strategy for India that called for adopting a market economy, for restructuring our foreign policy to befriend the US, Israel and China and thus diluting our dependence on USSR. That ideological package was heavily condemned then by the Left-dominated academia. But the unraveling of the USSR and the adoption of pro-market reforms by communist China have now completely undermined the Left intellectual position. My views have, therefore, become mainstream.
Since becoming free of British Imperialist rule in 1947, India’s ideological space had been for five decades circumscribed by a Left-leaning socialist secular framework, with very little room left in the mainstream of thought for any other significantly different ideological perspective. Because of a dominant government controlling the commanding heights of the economy, ruled by a party that became increasingly authoritarian, any serious secular ideological challenge to this established thought was crushed at the nascent stage. Even when the nation faced a grave economic crisis, as in 1991, that required some dismantling of the oppressive regulatory system, it was dressed up as a reform and a natural evolution of the same framework. But the author of this reform who dared to deviate more than necessary, namely, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, was disowned by his party and the Left, and then was pilloried, defamed and criminally prosecuted till his heart gave out. Even in his last rites, he was not honoured. Instead he was made an example of, for others who doubted this Left-leaning socialist secular framework.
In this suffocating atmosphere, only a right wing religious radical formation could find a footing, and which gradually expanded onto the center stage of the national ideological platform. But within six years of being in power and office, that too fizzled out because of the leadership’s inexplicable reluctance to make a clean and clear break with the past failed ideological framework.
to be continued...
(This account is maintained by Har-Anand Publications)