The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan

Extract

The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. By Aseema Sinha. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 384p. $64.95 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This excellent study by Aseema Sinha is a pathbreaker in the fields of political economy and comparative politics generally, and an especially welcome addition to India studies. Conventional wisdom has it that low economic growth rates in India until liberalization in the 1990s were the result of centralized control, especially in the area of the issuance of licenses governing investments known as the license raj. On this view, licensing controls and cumbersome bureaucratic implementation procedures—supported by an ideology that sought to prevent concentration of economic power in the hands of a small group of private entrepreneurs at the expense of the wider social good—have been a drag on the Indian economy. Far better, the argument goes, would have been to let the market function to determine investment patterns. In essence, the debate about Indian growth has been framed around two alternatives—the classical free market and the dirigiste state.