Democratic politics and economic reform in India, by ROB JENKINS (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2000, pp. +250, hbk £45.00, pbk £16.95).

✍ Scribed by Indraneel Dasgupta

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 32 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.771

✦ Synopsis

At the risk of being accused of compromising its profound elements, the argument may be summarized thus. Well-meaning people used to worry that Indian politicians would never dump their permit-licence raj. Yet this happened over the 1990s. Politicians gutted one regulation after another because they ®gured they were better off that way, because they received cuts' from people who were getting rich from deregulation. These people were glad to pay because there was always something that politicians could ®x for them. Some people lost money because of deregulation. These people might have made life dif®cult for regulation-scrapping ministers. They didn't do so because they couldn't act together. Losers couldn't stick together because politicians lied, bullied, cheated, bribed and confused, so that individual losers could never quite ®gure out whether they were going to win or lose. All this is true mainly because the author's native informants (in particular, Deep Throat' in the bureaucracy), who should know about such things, have told him so. In an academic book, one can reasonably expect deeper analysis and veri®able evidence. Politicians everywhere can and usually do perform all of the above-mentioned feats. Ergo, one should not get excessively depressed about the ability of politicians to drag their electorates out of regulatory logjams, even though the latter may have a tendency to snap and snarl along the way. However, other poor countries, not having been blessed with a political class with over 50 years' experience in lying etc., may not be as fortunate as India.

That those who make a living by proffering (usually unsolicited) advice to poor country potentates should often be ignored is a view with which this reviewer is quite in sympathy. European missionaries in many a colony and semi-colony used to be inordinately fond of handing out proselytizing lea¯ets in bazaars and street corners. In both zeal and sophistication, much of the recent literature promoting parliamentary democracy and free markets to elites of these very same countries comes quite close. Facile generalizations notwithstanding, empirical connections between democracy, deregulation, corruption and development remain poorly understood. This is particularly true of India, if only because of the sheer diversity and complexity of its social formation. Rigorous analyses, theoretical or empirical, would have been welcome. Unfortunately, this book provides neither.

That deregulation in India has generated new mechanisms for bribery, political management and patronage dispensation, while many (probably most) of the earlier mechanisms still retain much of their ef®cacy, is a fact known to every reader of Indian newspapers. That, to many politicians, these factors provide a more important reason for continuing with deregulation than, say, articles by Jagdish Bhagwati, is a sensible, but trite, observation. The substantive debate is instead about the speci®c content and consequences of policy changes under these conditions. Implications even for allocative ef®ciency, not to speak of democratic accountability or social justice, appear unclear thus far and require detailed investigation. A large analytical literature on corruption and development has developed over the last two decades. Many of the insights generated by this literature have immediate relevance for the issues that the author seeks to address. Yet his arguments are generally developed in apparent ignorance of the complexities. Views of individuals (often unnamed) are deemed suf®cient evidential basis for extended theorization, without any seeming awareness of other viewpoints, or of the need for hard corroboration. Quantitative evidence, even when such evidence can be easily provided, is conspicuous by its absence.

Major changes took place in the internal composition of the dominant classes in India over the 70s and 80s. Partial dismantling of the regulatory state, to a large extent, constitutes the political articulation of this process, and in turn is contributing to its consolidation. Any substantive Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. contribution to the recent macro political economy of India has to address this phenomenon. Jenkins' loose compilation of examples of games played by politicians ultimately explains little. Overall, this book never quite manages to rise above the level of recycled political gossip.