6 - United Progressive Alliance: Technocrats and Transformations

Summary

I do not minimize the difficulties that lie ahead on the long and arduous journey on which we have embarked. But as Victor Hugo once said, “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake….

—Manmohan Singh, Budget Speech, 1991

With industrialization and economic growth people had often forgotten old reverences. Men honored only money now. The great investment in development over three or four decades had led to this: To “corruption,” to the “criminalization of polities.” In seeking to rise, India had undone itself.

—V. S. Naipaul, 1990

Social and Economic Development

The ideational lenses through which UPA decision-makers viewed the IAC illustrate a cognitive divergence among market liberal economic reformers, the rights-based social reformers, and Congress Party secular nationalists. On one end of the scale, some state elites felt sympathy for the aims of the IAC, specifically its public action and reformist perspectives; on the other end, some elites who held secular nationalist perspectives were more hostile toward the IAC, viewing the movement as mobilized by right-wing groups and opposition parties. Yet others who held a market liberal perspective wanted as little direct engagement as possible with the movement, as these elites narrated the solution to anti-corruption protests in, and symptomatic of, urgent economic progress and reform. Crucially, these divergent perspectives were rooted in an intellectual lineage exogenous to the IAC crisis. This chapter will consider proxy cases in which UPA decision-makers’ ideas drive political behavior in line with the aforementioned narratives, especially in the face of material pressures, and will consider the mechanism of checks and balances that emerged from the heterogeneity of these ideas interacting with the polycentric policymaking environment within the UPA government to shape response to the IAC.

Decision-makers in the UPA government held various perceptions of the IAC. There existed specific ideational clusters among those decision-makers in authoritative positions of power who composed UPA institutions and committees between 2004 and 2014.