This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-141, Mar-Apr 2004)
Now that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has received an unexpected drubbing from the voters and lost the right to form the government at the Centre, too many opinion-givers, especially those who position themselves in the left spectrum, have interpreted it to mean a vote against economic reforms, which in turn they see as being quintessentially anti- poor and pro-rich.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The NDA alliance lost this election because its reforms agenda was not far-reaching enough. It did not touch the lives and livelihoods of the vast majority of the Indian people. This point has been consistently highlighted in various issues of MANUSHI, (See, for example, issues 92-93 of 1991 and 116 of 2000.) For the purposes of this essay, we are repringting an extract from my article, “Laws, Liberty and Livelihood” from issue 116.
A great deal of the ire of the anti-reform lobby in India has been focused at the economic regime being institutionalised by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which is seen as yet another First World conspiracy to enslave the economies of poor Third World nations. The phobic propaganda being carried out against the WTO builds cleverly on the memories of colonial subjugation that India experienced when its entire economy was forced to serve the interests of Britain…